Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [47]
She swiveled and glared at him.
“It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,” she snarled. “So don’t you give me that shit about not being interested in science!”
“True,” Sax said. “It’s true.” He held out both hands. “But now I need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.”
But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had to almost jog. His bones hurt.
“Perhaps we could go out here,” Sax suggested. “It doesn’t matter where we go out.”
“Because the whole planet is wrecked,” she muttered.
“You must still go out for sunsets occasionally,” Sax persisted. “I could join you for that, perhaps.”
“No.”
“Please, Ann.” She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his cheek still hurt. “Please, Ann.”
She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.
Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.
Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not a hunt, a pursuit. Nevertheless: “I huff, I puff, I blow your house down,” he muttered. He blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring hard at him.
• • •
One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the changing room and suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimeters. “I was just going out?” he stammered. “Is that okay with you?”
“It’s a free country,” she said heavily.
And they went out the lock together, into the land. The young women would have been amazed.
• • •
He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there with her to show to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to mention plants, or snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves. This was perhaps true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could only walk over the land, and let it speak for itself.
Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual route, he suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.
It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And Ann stopped often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at those times to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was finding. They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough to have allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO2 filter mask. Thus conversations consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.
So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe Terra was indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of the southern highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the northern plains— a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis Bulge to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossa surrounding them now.
The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-colored in the sunset light.
To see the landscape