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By Root 2235 0

but they seemed to like it anyway. Of course they’re anti-Swiss Swiss, so it makes a kind of sense. Whoa, pothole country here, the rover is bouncing around. Might try that bench there, it looks smoother than here. Yep, there we go, just like a road. Oh— it is the road. I guess I got off it a bit, I’m driving manually for the fun of it, but it’s hard to keep an eye out for the transponders when there’s so much else to look at. The transponders are made more for automatic pilot than the human eye. Hey, there’s the break into Ophir Chasma, what a gap! That wall must be, I don’t know— twenty thousand feet tall. My Lord. Since the last one was called Candor Gap, this one should be called Ophir Gap, right? Ophir Gate would be nicer. Let’s check the map. Hmm, the promontory on the west side of the gap is called Candor Labes, that’s lips, isn’t it? Candor Throat. Or, hmm. I don’t think so. It’s one hell of an opening though. Steep cliffs on both sides, and twenty thousand feet tall. That’s about six or seven times as tall as the cliffs in Yosemite. Sheeee-it. They don’t look that much taller, to tell the truth. Foreshortening no doubt. They look about twice as tall, or— who knows. I can’t remember what Yosemite really looked like, in terms of size anyway. This is the most amazing canyon you could ever even imagine. Ah, there’s Candor Mensa, on my left. This is the first time I could see that it isn’t part of the Candor Labes wall. I’ll bet that mesa top has one hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up there, sure. I wish I could get up there and see it! This would be a fun place to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see dust devils every now and then, vicious little things, real tight and dark. There’s a shaft of sunlight there hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar of butter hanging in the air. Ah, God, what a beautiful world!”

Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man’s voice, and surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just these recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch John Boone negotiate Mars’s wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that role, among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy voice. And that did not solve his problem.

• • •

Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs and restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views, over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they did not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was distracted to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall into reveries and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in the steamy streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the torrential monsoon. How often he found himself there again; everything that had happened since was so pale by comparison!

But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice say “Hiroko.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope.”

It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge of who he was.

“You saw her yourself?” he said sharply.

“Yes. She’s not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier.”

“I don’t know,” an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather. Voice hoarse: “I heard she was down in the chaos where the first hidden colony used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay.”

Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen there, had been confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had