Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [239]
“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”
“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much weaker than before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in America, Russia, Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in the next few months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so that the woman could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.
“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had crawled into the exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a drag. Some people said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure to be convinced of their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very definition of exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home. She unplugged her wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that perfect middle way, that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity of Mars.
3
Then it was down the space elevator from Clarke, a trip that took longer than the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.
The little town had grown since its early days as the terraforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen— a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the other— more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underhill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding paradise.
Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars apparatchiks working for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she wanted to fly. So she checked her old Santorini hawksuit out of storage at the gliderport, and went to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the smooth muscly texture of the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the smooth path, trailing her tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural overhang that had been artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked to the edge of this slab and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters down, to the umber floor of Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline she tipped forward and fell off the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind picking up in a swift whoosh over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity, which she recognized by the pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her arms, and felt the suit stiffen and help her muscles to hold the beautiful wings wide, and with a loud crumping smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun, turned her head, arched her back, pointed her toes and set the tail feathers, left right left; and the wind was pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and arms together, turn then in a tight gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor, around and around: flying. Zo the hawk, wild and free. She was laughing happily, and tears streamed this way and that in her goggles, dashed away by the force of the g.
The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding the updraft most fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting down one of the clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and it was possible to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity.