Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [286]
“And I love you,” he said with an easy laugh, looking a bit surprised. “But look, I don’t want to get involved in a political campaign. No, listen— I agree that it’s important, and I agree we should keep Mars open, and help Earth out through the population surge. That’s what I’ve always said, that’s what I told them when we were there. But I won’t get into the political institutions. I can’t. I’ll make my contribution the way I did before, do you understand? I cover a lot of ground, I see a lot of people. I’ll talk to them. I’ll start giving talks to meetings again. I’ll do what I can at that level.”
Maya nodded. “That would be great, Nirgal. That’s the level we need to reach anyway.”
Sax cleared his throat. “Nirgal, have you ever met the mathematician Bao?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ah.”
Sax slumped back into his reverie. Maya talked for a while about the problems she and Michel had discussed that day— how immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present. “That was John’s worry too, and now it’s happening.”
Nirgal nodded. “We have to have faith in the areophany. And in the constitution. They have to live by it once they’re here, the government should insist on that.”
“Yes. But the people, the natives I mean. . . .”
“Some kind of assimilationist ethic. We need to draw everyone in.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Maya. I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled at her; then suddenly he was falling asleep, right before their eyes. “Maybe we can pull it off one more time, eh?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve got to get flat. Good night. I love you.”
• • •
They sailed northwest from Minus One, and the island slipped under the horizon like a dream of ancient Greece, and they were on the open sea again, with its high broad sloppy groundswell. Hard trade winds poured out of the northeast for every hour of their passage, tearing off whitecaps that made the dark purple water look even darker. Wind and water made a continuous roar; it was hard to hear, everything had to be shouted. The crew gave up speech entirely, and worked on setting the maximum amount of sail possible, forcing the ship’s AI to deal with their enthusiasm; the mast sails stretched or tightened with each gust like bird’s wings, so that the wind had a visual component to match the invisible kinetics of Maya’s buffeted skin, and she stood in the bow looking up and back, taking it all in.
On the third day the wind blew even harder, and the boat got up to its hydroplaning speed, the hull lifting up onto a flat section at the stern and then skipping over the waves, knocking up far more spray than was comfortable for anyone on deck; Maya retreated to the first cabin, where she could look out the bow windows and witness the spectacle. Such speed! Occasionally crew members would come in sopping, to catch their breath and suck down some java. One of them told Maya that they were adjusting their course to take account of the Hellas current; “this sea’s the biggest example ever of the Coriolis force on a bathtub drain, it being round, and in the latitudes where trade winds push it the same way as the Coriolis force, so it’s swirling clockwise around Minus One Island like a great big whirlpool. We have to adjust for it big time or we’ll make landfall halfway to Hell’s Gate.”
The strong winds held, and flying along like they were, hydroplaning for most of the day, it took them only four days to sail across their radius of the Hellas Sea. On the fourth afternoon the mast sails feathered in, and the hull fell back into the water, rolling in the whitecaps. To the north land appeared over all the horizon at once: the rim of the great basin, like a mountain range without any peaks: a giant berm of a slope, looking like the inner wall of a crater, which of course it was, but so much bigger than any normal crater that one could only barely see the arcing of the circle— exactly that big— which struck Maya as beautiful, somehow. And as they closed on the land, and then coasted