Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [121]
He aimed into the sun’s smeary yellow blaze. Wind keened over the wings. The land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the horizon. The southern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw primordial lunar look that saturation cratering always had. John loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land below. It was precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinking a thing. He was sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or “M-year 10” as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.
After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his new task. It was important not to get caught up in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flew. He called up Sax and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connection. After some investigation Sax got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to fly. An hour and many craters later, Pauline’s red light blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw data. John asked the AI to run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screen. Patterns of movement were confusing, but he hoped that when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turn up. Of course there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projects? Still, it was worth a look.
The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahead. Mars had never had much tectonic movement, and so mountain ranges were rare. Those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely rugged. Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis. Debate raged over that question, and Ann, John’s final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.
The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum Montes. Boone adjusted his course southward, and in the early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the Argyre Basin. After the wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amazing sight. Flying over thousands of Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale. A quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in Argyre’s rim! A whole world must have crashed in here! Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.
Inside the southeast curve of the rim, on the basin floor against the foothills of the Charitum, he spotted the thin white line of a landing strip. Easy to spot human constructs in such desolation, their regularity stood out like a beacon. Thermals were rising hard off the sun-warmed hills, and he turned down into one, dropping with a vibratory humm, the craft’s wings bouncing visibly as it stooped. Dropping like a rock, like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up