Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [127]
He had never been to this part of the great canyon system; before the completion of the Marineris Transverse Highway it had been extremely hard to get to. It was dramatic, no doubt about it; the Melas cliff dropped a full 3,000 meters from rim to canyon floor, so that the rim had a kind of glider’s view north. The other wall of the canyon was just visible out there, its rim peeking over the horizon; and between the two cliffs lay the spacious expanse of Melas Chasma, the heart of the whole Marineris complex. He could just make out the gaps in distant cliffs that marked the entrances to other canyons: Ius Chasma to the west, Candor to the north, Coprates to the east.
John walked the broken rim for more than an hour, pulling his helmet’s binocular lenses down over his faceplate for long periods of time, taking in as much as he could of the greatest canyon on Mars, feeling the euphoria of red land. He threw rocks over the side and watched them disappear, he talked to himself and sang, he hopped on his toes in a clumsy dance. Then he got back in his rover, refreshed, and drove a short distance along the rim, to the start of the cliff road.
Here the Transverse Highway became a single concrete lane, and switchbacked down the spine of an enormous rock ramp that extended down from the south rim to the canyon floor. This odd feature, called the Geneva Spur, pointed north almost perpendicularly from the cliff, straight toward Candor Chasma; it was so perfectly placed for their purposes that with the road on it, it looked like a ramp that the road-builders had constructed.
It was a steep spur, however, and the road had been forced to switchback all the way down, to keep the grade within reason. It was all visible from above, a thousand switchbacks snaking down the spine, looking like yellow thread stitched down a bump in a stained orange carpet.
Boone drove down this marvel carefully, turning the rover’s steering wheel left then right then left then right, time after time until he actually had to stop to rest his arms, and give himself a chance to look back and up at the southern wall behind him; it was steep indeed, fluted by a fractal pattern of deeply eroded ravines. Then it was off again for another half hour’s drive, hairpins left and right, again and again, until finally the road extended straight down the top of the flattening spur, which eventually spread out and merged into the canyon floor. And down there was a little cluster of vehicles.
It turned out to be the Swiss team that had just finished building the road, and he ended up spending the night with them. They were a group of about eighty: mostly young, mostly married, speaking German and Italian and French and, for his benefit, English in several different accents. They had kids with them, and cats, and a portable greenhouse thick with herbs and garden vegetables. Soon they would be off like gypsies, in a caravan made up mostly of their earthmoving vehicles, traveling up to the west end of the canyon, to thread a road through Noctis Labyrinthus and onto the east flank of Tharsis. After that there would be other roads; perhaps one over the Tharsis Bulge between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons, perhaps one north to Echus Overlook. They weren’t sure yet, and Boone got the impression they didn’t really care; they planned to spend the rest of their lives traveling around building roads, so it didn’t much matter to them where they went next. Road gypsies forever.
They made sure all their kids shook John’s hand, and after dinner he gave a short talk, rambling in his usual way about their new life on Mars. “When I see you people out here it makes me really happy because it’s part of a new pattern