of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena massif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the power of the ship’s line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, passing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus— they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sulfuric yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both sides of the canal, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and hedges. The Glass Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a canal cliché from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage through this region were warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the banks, and as clear: a glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.
• • •
As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.
The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko . . . on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been