Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [305]
She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?
The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing Jackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.
Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.
1
The northern polar island had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.
Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.
Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau was cut with tributary streams like the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the territory to a great depth.
It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast deserts of red shifting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the best.
He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more