Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [17]
Mars South Polar Region
• • •
It was Ls 4, 2 March the 22nd, M-year 32, and the southern days were getting shorter. Coyote drove their car hard every night, over intricate and invisible paths, through terrain that got more and more rugged the farther they got from the polar cap. They stopped to rest during the daylight, and drove the rest of the time. Nirgal tried to stay awake, but inevitably slept through part of every drive, and through part of every day’s stop as well, until he became thoroughly confused in both time and space.
But when he was awake he was almost always looking out the window, at the ever-changing surface of Mars. He couldn’t get enough of it. In the layered terrain there was an infinite array of patterns, the stratified stacks of sand fluted by the wind until each dune was cut like a bird’s wing. When the layered terrain finally ran out onto exposed bedrock, the laminate dunes became individual sand islands, scattered over a jumbled plain of outcroppings and clusters of rock. It was redrock everywhere he looked, rock sized from gravel to immense boulders that sat like buildings on the land. The sand islands were tucked into every dip and hollow in this rockscape, and they also clustered around the feet of big knots of boulders, and on the lee sides of low scarps, and in the interiors of craters.
And there were craters everywhere. They first appeared as two bumps rolling over the skysill, which quickly proved to be the connected outer points of a low ridge. They passed scores of these flat-topped hills, some steep and sharp, others low and nearly buried, still others with their rims broken by smaller later impacts, so that one could see right in to the sand drifts filling them.
One night just before dawn Coyote stopped the car.
“Something wrong?”
“No. We’ve reached Ray’s Lookout, and I want you to see it. Sun’ll be up in an hour.”
So they sat in the pilots’ seats and watched the dawn.
“How old are you, boy?”
“Seven.”
“What’s that, thirteen Earth years? Fourteen?”
“I guess.”
“Wow. You’re already taller than me.”
“Uh huh.” Nirgal refrained from pointing out that this did not imply any great height. “How old are you?”
“One hundred and nine. Ah ha ha! You best shut your eyes or they’ll pop out of your head. Don’t you look at me like that. I was old the day I was born and I’ll be young the day I die.”
They drowsed as the sky on the eastern skyline turned a deep purply blue. Coyote hummed a little tune to himself, sounding as if he had eaten a tab of omegendorph, as he often did in the evenings at Zygote. Gradually it became clear that the skysill was very far away, and also very high; Nirgal had never seen land so far away, and it seemed to curve around them as well, a black curving wall that lay an immense distance off, over a black rocky plain. “Hey, Coyote!” he exclaimed. “What is this?”
“Ha!” Coyote said, sounding deeply satisfied.
The sky lightened and the sun suddenly cracked the upper edge of the distant wall, blasting Nirgal’s vision for a while. But as the sun rose the shadows on the huge semicircular cliff gave way in wedges of light that revealed sharp ragged embayments, scalloping the larger curve of the wall, which was so big that Nirgal simply gasped, his nose pressed right against the windshield— it was almost frightening, it was so big! “Coyote, what is it?”
Coyote let out one of his alarming laughs, the animal cackle filling the car. “So you see it isn’t such a small world after all, eh, boy? This is the floor of Promethei Basin. It’s an impact basin, one of the biggest on Mars, almost as big as Argyre, but it hit down here near the South Pole, so about half of its rim has since been buried under the polar cap and the layered terrain. The other half is this curved escarpment here.” He waved a hand expansively. “Kind of like a super-big caldera, but only half there, so