• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 649 0

along the northern rim of Hellas for all the first day, with the ice in view on the basin floor almost continually. They passed a little hillside town called Sebastopol, its stone walls Florentine yellow in the afternoon, and after that came to Hell’s Gate, the town at the bottom end of Dao Vallis. They walked out of the Hell’s Gate train station late in the afternoon, and looked down into a big new tent town, located under an enormous suspension bridge. The bridge supported the train piste, spanning Dao Vallis just up from the canyon’s mouth, so that its towers were over ten kilometers apart. From the canyon rim by the bridge, where the train station was, they could see down the widening mouth of the canyon onto the basin floor, stretching out under a lattice of kinky sun-stained clouds. In the other direction there was a view well up into the steep narrow world of the canyon proper. As they walked down a staired and switchbacked street into the town, the new tenting over the canyon was visible only as a certain red haze to the color of the evening sky, the result of a dusting of fines on the tenting materials. “We’ll go upstream tomorrow by way of the rim road,” Diana said, “and get an overview. Then come back down on the canyon floor, so you can see what it’s like down there.”

They descended the street, which had 700 numbered steps. In Hell’s Gate’s downtown they walked around and had dinner, and then climbed back up to the Deep Waters office, which was on the valley wall just under the bridge. They stayed in rooms there, and next morning went to a garage by the train station and borrowed a small company rover.

Diana took the wheel and drove them northeast, paralleling the canyon rim on a road that ran next to the massive concrete foundation for the canyon’s tenting. Even though the fabrics were diaphanous to the point of vanishing, the sheer size of the roof made it a heavy weight to anchor. The concrete bulk of the foundation blocked their view down into the canyon itself, so that when they came to the first overlook, Maya had not seen into it since Hell’s Gate. Diana drove into a little parking lot up on the broad foundation itself, and they parked and put on helmets and got out of the car, and walked up a wooden staircase that seemed to ascend freestanding into the sky, although a closer look revealed first the clear aerogel beam supporting the staircase, and then the layers of tenting, stretching away from their beam to others that could not be seen. At the top of the stairs was a small railed viewing platform, with a prospect that gave a view of the canyon for many kilometers both upstream and downstream.

And there was indeed a stream; the floor of Dao Vallis had a river in it. The canyon floor was dotted with green, or to be more precise, a collection of greens. Maya identified tamarisk, cottonwood, aspen, cypress, sycamore, scrub oak, snow bamboo, sage— and then, on the steep talus and boulder slopes footing the canyon walls, many varieties of shrubs and low creepers, and of course sedge, and moss, and lichen. And running through this exquisite arboretum, a river.

It was not a blue stream with white rapids. The water in the slower stretches was opaque, and the color of rust. In the rapids and waterfalls it foamed bright shades of pink. Classic Martian tones, caused, Diana said, by the fines that were suspended in the water like glacial silt— also by the reflected color of the sky, which was today a kind of hazy mauve, going lavender around the veiled sun, as yellow as the iris of a tiger’s eye.

But no matter the color of the water— it was a running river, in an obviously riverine valley, placid in some places, agitated in others, with gravel fords, sandbars, braided sections, crumbling lemniscate islands, there a big deep lazy oxbow, frequent rapids, and far upstream, a couple of small falls. Under the tallest waterfall they could see the pink foam turn almost white, and patches of white were then carried downstream, to catch on boulders and snags sticking out from the bank.

“Dao River,” Diana said. “Also