Blue Mars (85 page)

“Ah.”

Terrible silence, despite all the noise.

“Can I come with you?”

Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement;
very odd. But he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”

And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering.
Sipping Maya’s tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well
into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or
hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park,
where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.

Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses.
Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya
was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one
had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering
around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers
filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now
gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the
depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into
sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds—and that too
was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in
a bath of one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work
of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully
into the moment, and dream.

They sailed out of the Florentine
on a windy cloudless day, Ann at the
rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure
the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so
much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail
looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great
quantity of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question
whether or not this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted
for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows
more generally—

“Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to
sail.”

“So I am.”

Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most
general command; he could say for instance “Go to Rhodes,” and there would be
nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the
feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to
another time, and made his way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between
the two narrow hulls.

“Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”

“So it is.”

The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci
Island still visible over the water, though they weren’t more than twenty
kilometers away. There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very
fast; it hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls
had underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike
shapes, which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts
kept the windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from
driving too far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their
unfurled mast sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it
like an iceboat over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the
wind itself. Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage
of the hulls were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder
and the outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight.
He saw the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated
horizon no more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was
clutching the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their
wake. Sax said, “Have you been at sea before?” meaning, entirely out of the
sight of land.

“No.”

“Ah.”

They sailed on north, out into Chryse Gulf. Copernicus Island
appeared over the water to their right, then Galileo Island behind it. Then
both receded under the blue horizon again. The swells on the horizon were
individually distinct, so that the horizon was not a straight blue line against
the sky, but rather a shifting array of swell tops, one after another in swift
succession. The groundswell was coming out of the north, almost directly ahead
of them, so that looking to port or starboard the horizon line was particularly
jagged, a wavy line of blue water against the blue sky, in a too-small circle
surrounding the ship—as if the proper Terran distance to the horizon were
stubbornly embedded in the brain’s optics, so that when they saw things clearly
here, they would always appear to stand on a planet too small for them.
Certainly there was a look of the most extreme discomfort on Ann’s face; she
glared at the waves, groundswell after groundswell lifting the bow and then the
stern. There was a cross chop nearly at right angles to the groundswell, pushed
by the west wind and ruffling the bigger broader swells. Wavetank physics; one
could see it all laid out; it reminded Sax of the physics lab on the second
story of the northeasternmost building in his high school, where hours had
passed like minutes, the flat little wavetank full of marvels. Here the
groundswell originated in the North Sea’s perpetual eastward motion around the
globe; the swell was greater or smaller depending on whether local winds
reinforced it or interfered with it. The light gravity made for big broad
waves, quickly generated by strong winds; if today’s wind got very much
stronger, for instance, then the wind-chop from the west would quickly grow
bigger than the groundswell from the north, and obscure it completely. Waves on
the North Sea were notorious for their size and mutability, their recombinant
surprises, though it was also true that they moved fairly slowly through the
water; big slow hills, like the giant dunes of Vastitas far underneath them,
migrating around the planet. Sometimes they could get very big indeed; in the
aftermath of the typhoons that blew over the North Sea, waves seventy meters
high had been reported.

This lively cross chop seemed enough for Ann, who was looking a
bit distressed. Sax could not think what to say to her. He doubted that his
thoughts on wave mechanics would be appropriate, though it was very interesting
of course, and would be to anyone interested in the physical sciences. As Ann
was. But perhaps not now. Now the sheer sensory array of water, wind, sky—it
looked like it was enough for her. Perhaps silence was in order.

Whitecaps began to roll down the faces of some of the cross-chop
waves, and Sax immediately checked into the ship’s weather system to see what
the wind speed was. The ship had it at thirty-two kilometers per hour. So this
was about the speed at which the crests of waves were first knocked over. A
simple matter of surface tension against wind speed, calculable, in fact...
yes, the appropriate equation in fluid dynamics suggested they should start to
collapse at a wind speed cr thirty-five kilometers per hour, and here they
were: whitecaps, startlingly white against the water, which was a dark blue,
Prussian blue Sax thought it might be. The sky today was almost sky blue,
slightly empurpled at the zenith, and somewhat whitened around the sun, with a
metallic sheen between sun and the horizon under it.

“What are you doing?” Ann said, sounding annoyed.

Sax explained, and she listened in stony silence. He didn’t know
what she might be thinking. That the world was somewhat explicable—he always
found that a comfort. But Ann .. . well, it could be as simple as seasickness.
Or something from her past, distracting her; Sax had found in the weeks since
the experiment at Underhill that he was often distracted by some past incident,
rising unbidden from a great bulk of them in his mind. Involuntary memory. And
for Ann, that might include negative incidents of one kind or another; Michel
had said she had been mistreated as a child. It still seemed to Sax too
shocking to believe. On Earth men had abused women; on Mars, never. Was that
true? Sax did not know for sure, but he felt it was true. This was what it
meant to live in a just and rational society, this was one of the main reasons
it was a good thing, a value. Possibly Ann would know more about the reality of
the situation these days. But he did not feel comfortable asking her. It was
clearly contraindicated.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

“Enjoying the view,” he said quickly. Perhaps he had better talk
about wave mechanics after all. He explained the groundswell, the cross chop,
the negative and positive interference patterns that could result. But then he
said, “Did you remember much about Earth, during the Underhill experiment?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

This was probably some kind of repression, and exactly the
opposite of the psychotherapeutic method that Michel would probably have
recommended. But they were not steam engines. And some things were no doubt
better forgotten. He would have to work on once again forgetting John’s death,
for instance; also on remembering better those parts of his life when he had been
most social, as during the years of work for Biotique in Burroughs. So that
across the cockpit from him sat Counter-Ann, or that third woman she had
mentioned—while he was, at least in part, Stephen Lindholm. Strangers, despite
that startling encounter at Underhill. Or because of it. Hello; nice to meet
you.

*
     
*
       
*

Once they got out from among the fjords and islands at the bottom
of Chryse Gulf, Sax turned the tiller and the boat swooped northeast, rushing
across the wind and the whitecaps. Then the wind was behind them, and with a •
following wind the mast sail bloomed into its own splayed-wing version of a
spinnaker, and the hulls surfed on the mushy crests of the waves before losing
to their superior speed. The eastern shore of the Chryse Gulf appeared before
them; it was less spectacular than the western shore, but in many ways
prettier. Buildings, towers, bridges: it was a well-populated coast, as were
most of them these days. Coming off Olympus all the towns must be a bit of a
shock.

After they passed the broad mouth of the Ares Fjord, Soo-chow
Point emerged over the horizon, and then beyond it the Oxia Islands, one by
one. Before the water’s arrival these had been the Oxia Colles, an array of
round hills that stood at just the height to become an archipelago. Sax sailed
into the narrow waterways between these islands, each a low round brown hump,
standing forty or fifty meters out of the sea. By far the larger percentage of
them were uninhabited, except perhaps by goats, but on the largest ones, especially
kidney-shaped ones with bays, the stones covering the hills had been gathered
up into walls, which split the slopes into fields and pastures; these islands
were irrigated, green with orchards laden with fruit, or pastures dotted with
white sheep or miniature cows. The ship’s maritime chart named these
islands—Kipini, Wahoo, Wabash, Nau-kan, Libertad—and reading the map Ann
snorted. “These are the names of the craters out in the middle of the gulf,
underwater.”

“Ah.”

Still, they were pretty islands. The fishing villages on the bays
were whitewashed, with blue shutters and doors: the Aegean model again. Indeed,
on one high point bluff there stood a little Doric temple, square and proud.
The boats down below in the bays were small sloops, or simply row-boats and
dories. As they sailed past Sax pointed out a hilltop windmill here, a pasture
of llamas there. “It seems a nice life.”

They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden
tension. About Zo; about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer
city-shopper lifestyle; about the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like
migrant laborers who owned the farms; about the cross-fertilization of all
these styles; about the new Terran settlements elbowing into the landscape;
about the increasing number of harbor towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they
spotted one of the new big townships, a floating island of a seacraft, with a
population in the thousands; it was too big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and
looked to be headed across the gulf to Ni-lokeras, or down to the southern
fjords. As the land all over Mars was becoming more crowded, and the
possibility of settling on it more and more restricted by the courts, more and
more people were moving onto the North Sea, making townships like these their
permanent home.

“Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can
certainly catch it.”

He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward
the township, pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In
less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two
kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a
section against the township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when
they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they
got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the
township.

The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a
farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other
side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circumference of the
deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides
that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and
windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led
inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A
floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance,
except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one
might say. A small group of the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza
overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were
thrilled—they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided
them on a walk around the perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to
go, it’s a good fair walk.”

This was a small township, they were told. Population, five
thousand. Since its launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. “We
grow most of our food, and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with
other townships about overfishing certain species. We’re doing perennial
polycul-ture, growing new strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so
on, all intermixed and harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking
work. We’ve finally got the technology to go home to gathering, that’s what it
comes down to. There are a lot of onboard cottage industries. We’ve got wineries,
see the vineyards out there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That
we do by hand. Also special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop.”