Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [268]
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So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit of dull white material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of passenger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circumnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird’s wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful winds.
On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the Elysium massif came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink against the hyacinth sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well, as if to stretch up and see the great massif across the bay: bluffs alternated with marshes, and then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea cliff. The horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of black and ivory, and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and grasses, and streaked with white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the bottom of these cliffs and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the oncoming swells in quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing: long glides down the swells, the wind an offshore powerhouse, especially in the afternoons— the spray, the salt tang in the air— for the North Sea was becoming salty— the wind in her hair, the white V tapestry of the ship’s wake, luminous over the indigo sea: beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to sail around the world and then around again, to never land and never change . . . there were people doing that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships utterly self-sufficient, sailing the great ocean in their own thalassacracy. . . .
But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from DuMartheray was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day— each so full, and oh so lovely— and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind. . . . Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue water, all untouched by human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor café next to the water in the long twilight, and that day’s glorious sail would never come again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: “Ah, I’m alive again,” she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel and his tricks— one would think that by now she would have become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to bear. But— well— better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation— and she could endure it— she could even enjoy it, somehow, in snatches— a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous— the big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and star-board. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing light, across