Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [215]
It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every other perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or west around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and drink and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive, and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the race in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding ability rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell runners to be in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive extravagance, and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him with the plan of passing him at the end. But each year he took a different route, and often he made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers gave up and took off in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the pace over the two hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000 kilometers— it required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to sustain it as a way of life. Running every day.
Nirgal liked it. He wanted to win the next Round-the-Worlder, to have won a majority of the first ten. He was out researching the route, checking new trails. Many new paths were being built every year, there had been a craze recently to inlay staircase trails in the sides of the canyon cliffs and dorsa and escarpments that everywhere seamed the outback. The trail he was on now had been constructed since he had last been in this area; it dropped down the steep cliff wall of a sink in the Aromatum Chaos, and there was a matching trail on the opposite wall of the sink. Going straight through Aromatum would add a fair bit of verticality to a run, but all flatter routes had to swing far to north or south, and Nirgal thought that if all the trails were as good as this one, the cost in elevation might turn out to be worth it.
The new trail occupied angled cracks in the blocky cliff wall, the steps fitted like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and very regular, so that it was like running down a staircase in the ruined wall of some giant’s castle. Cliffside trailmaking was an art, a lovely form of work that Nirgal had joined from time to time, helping to move cut rocks with a crane, to wedge them into position on top of the step below— hours in a belay harness, pulling on the thin green lines with gloved hands, guiding big polygons of basalt into place. The first trail builder Nirgal had met had been a woman constructing a trail along the finback of the Geryon Montes, the long ridge on the floor of Ius Chasma. He had helped her all of one summer, down most of the ridge. She was still in Marineris somewhere, constructing trails with her hand tools and high-powered rock saws, and pulley systems with superstrong line, and glue bolts stronger than the rock itself— painstakingly assembling a sidewalk or staircase from the surrounding rock, some trails like miraculously helpful natural features, others like Roman roads, others still with a pharaonic or Incan massiveness, huge blocks fitted with hairline precision across boulder slopes or large-grained chaos.
Down three hundred steps, counting, then across the sink floor in the hour before sunset, the strip of sky a velvet violet glowing over dark cliff walls. No trail here on the shadowed sand of the sink floor, and he focused on the rocks and plants scattered over it, running between things, his glance caught by light-colored flowers on top of round-barreled cacti, glowing like the sky. His body was also glowing, with the end of the day’s run, and the prospect of dinner, his hunger a gnawing