Icehenge (23 page)

    “Ah! don't you see

Since your mind is the prison

You'll live behind bars

Everywhere now—over all of Mars?”

Sometimes I get so tired.

*   *   *

The chaos—collapsed terrain characterized by jumbled arrays of short, block-filled valleys and ridges.

We left New Houston in six big expedition cars and two little field cars, headed north to the Aureum Chaos, the dotted area of the map found in Emma's escape car. Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi rode with me in the lead car, along with a surveyor named Evelyn from the Survey office in Coprates, who navigated for us. We drove over the plain in the gentle morning light of mirror dawn: the four bright chips of the leading mirrors cast a clear light, the sky was white gold, the plain amber, cut with shadows from every pebble and boulder. Over the radio we heard the chattering in the other cars, but in ours it was tranquil. We passed a steel strut, protruding from the plain like a bone of Ozymandias; Evelyn identified it as the remains of a long gone pipeline, and she followed a line of these struts north.

Late that afternoon we came on a road. In the cratered terrain roads are easy to construct; drive a car pulling a V-shaped snowplow, and a lane is cleared of loose ejecta, which form rows of piled rock to each side of the road. “This one will take us most of the way,” Evelyn said. I looked back and saw the other cars following; tall plumes of dust wafted away from our caravan to the east. We drove between craters so old the rims were mere rounded bumps, and occasionally the road led right over one. From these low prominences we saw that the pocked rocky plain extended uniformly to a flat horizon eight or ten kilometers away.

On the road we made good time. We camped by it, and early the next day we left the road and turned east, to skirt the southern edge of Eos Chasma, and the whole bottom end of the Marineris system. Late in the day we came to the rim of Aureum. The plain dropped away in uneven segments, and to the north for as far as we could see was broken land, land that had collapsed from below. Because the Aureum was a sink, slumping two kilometers and more below the surrounding plains, we could see for many kilometers to the north—perhaps forty—and all of it was hacked and tumbled, like the no-man's-land of some giants' war. My heart sank as I gazed out at it; how could I possibly find the rebels' refuge in such topographic insanity?

But the map from Emma's car gave me courage. And as Evelyn directed us down a broad ramp into the edgelands of the chaos, I saw that each short valley was relatively flat-floored, though sometimes the pass from one valley to the next was pinched and steep. But crossing the terrain did not appear impossible.

The other cars followed us down: green metal bodies with clear bubble tops and big wheels at each corner. When the dusk created by shadows turned to real twilight, we stopped in a narrow defile and set the tents. Evelyn said we were on a road again, one that led to an old water station. Still I retired to my cot and unfolded Emma's map. The reality of Aureum made me anxious; I wanted the reassurance of a representation, with its inevitable ordering. Around the southern edge of Aureum were three water stations, set where they best exploited what was left of the ancient aquifer underneath them. All of them had once been little self-sufficient settlements, pumping water upcanyon to the arid highlands of Tharsis. One of the water stations had probably been used as a departure point for the hidden refuge, for building anything very big in the chaos would have required a few trips in and out at least. The station Evelyn was leading us to was the one closest to the red dot at the center of the map.

*   *   *

We reached the water station late the following day. It consisted of two plastic greenhouses, collapsed under sand, and five little blockhouses made of brick. They had had a clever system: the old Johnson stills mixed soil and warm water, to free the oxygen in the soil; to the mud created in this procedure they added a fixative, and made “adobe” blocks with which the compound was built. The whole settlement was set on one of the mesalike blocks that protruded everywhere in the chaos.

We drove up a narrow ramp and got out of the cars to investigate. Another ruin of the Unrest. The brick buildings still looked ordinary enough to make broken windows a surprise. All the doors were open. The interiors were thick with dust and sand. I decided one building could be disturbed, and we entered it. In its kitchen were cupboards full of pots and pans, drawers full of dishware and utensils. No food. It was odd. Back outside I crossed the little yard created by the circle of buildings, and found Xhosa already testing the old pump. The generator still worked. Soon we would see whether the thawing, filtering, and pumping mechanisms underground also remained functional.

We set tents in the yard, and in the next couple of days while the others investigated the site, I hiked into the maze of valleys and blocks to the north. At first I found nothing. With the growing atmosphere tire tracks that before the transformation would have lasted a million years now would be buried. I explored in a fan pattern, checking avenues to the west and north, returning to the station to re-orient myself, trying again farther east. I left green marker balls to show where I had been, and came back upon them more than once.

But I found no sign of a road until the fourth day, when I tried a long sloping canyon that started two valleys east of the one leading to the station, and split the terrain to the northeast. I had stopped to inspect some Tibetan figwort growing between two rocks. I had seen a lot of lichen and alpine moss, but the figwort drew my attention. These sinks held a lot of air and water, to support such life. When I looked up from the cushion-shaped plant I saw that the little canyon floor was lined by two parallel depressions, like ruts almost filled in. I took out my little whisk broom and dusted away a few centimeters of fine sand, revealing a clear tire track. Our cars left tracks very like it. I followed the two ruts down the canyon and over a pass into a V-shaped valley that wound between ridges for as far as I could see; then, running short of light, I returned to the station.

That night I failed completely to hide my agitation. I forked my food as if stabbing ants. When the meal was finished I said, “I'm going to take one of the field cars for a few days and explore to the north.”

Xhosa and Bill looked at each other. Hana frowned.

“It's possible some of the occupants of this place went north when it was abandoned. It's a bit of a long shot, and I don't want to disturb the main work here, but I'd like to follow some tracks I've found. I won't be long.”

“It would be safer to go in a group,” Xhosa suggested. “We can spare the people.”

“I'm going to do it alone.” And I began to feel how power could corrupt. It made things so easy. On the other hand, even though I had the authority, they had the force to be able to disobey, and stop me. Authority must be backed by force to be true authority. So I added, “Don't worry. I drove field cars for the Survey for more years than you all have lived.”

Bill said, “We only have so much air.”

“Get the Johnson still going again, then,” I said roughly, with a wave of dismissal. “I won't take much.”

“Easy to get lost out there,” Xhosa said. “Safer if I came along.”

“I'll be all right.”

Speechlessly Hana was asking me a question. I said again, to her, “I'll be all right. I want to take a look up there, just for myself.”

She nodded reluctantly. Xhosa looked worried; Bill frowned as if weighing his permission. Annoyed, I said, “Help me get a car ready.”

*   *   *

Xhosa helped me fill a compartment of the car with green marker balls. “Set a lot of these,” he said. “We'll listen for you on the radio.”

It was the mirror dawn, and in the dimness I could not read his face. Plumes of frost fell from our breath. Hana and Bill emerged from a tent, and Hana approached me. “You shouldn't do this,” she said. “It isn't safe. We should stop him from going—” This to Xhosa.

“You'll do what I say,” I cried; and then, embarrassed at my outburst, I had to make the rest of my preparations mumbling and avoiding Hana's gaze. I climbed into the little field car without acknowledging their farewells, feeling foolish, and drove down the ramp.

Maneuvering the car over the two low ridges to my canyon was easy enough, and then I followed the faint road. My car's wheels almost fit the tracks. Turning off my radio I felt my spirit blossom inside me, inspiring an exultant shout. I was off in search of Emma and the rebels! I swore that if I found them I would join them and never go back.

The tracks were easy to follow, and it took less than an hour to retrace all my previous day's hike. Beyond the point where I had turned back the V-shaped valley stretched for four or five kilometers, and the faint parallel ruts continued right down its middle. A little creekbed, born since the tracks were made, ran between them and sometimes over them; sometimes the bed was filled with jade ice, mostly it was dry. But the ruts were visible until I came on a box canyon ending the valley. There the ruts disappeared. I put the car in reverse and retreated, and at the first pass over the side ridge of the valley, I saw the two ruts again, cutting deeply over the pass. I cursed my inattention, but mildly, since it had caused no harm, and left a green marker at the turn before driving on.

Over the pass were scalloped ridges like dunes, offering no obvious way north; slowly I followed the tracks over this broken land, and then they dropped into an area of massive blocks divided by narrow canyons or defiles that offered a path through the blocks, sometimes. Apparently the first long canyon and the valley after it had been features of border terrain, and now I was in the chaos proper. I could seldom see more than a kilometer in any direction, and often less than that. It was as if I drove through the rubble-filled streets of a city of jasper or chert, which had been struck to shambles by a cataclysmic earthquake. At less than my walking pace I drove over faint traces of tire track, and it seemed that the only reason I kept finding it was that it was the only route through the maze. But in every kilometer's progress there were three or four choices to be made, and at each fork I stopped, looked at the two or three possibilities, and concluded I had lost the trail; then a line of rocks, or a smooth depression, or two parallel lines in the distance made by shifts in the soil that could not be perceived when near to them, would become evident, and with a hum of the car's electric motor I was off again. At each fork or crossroads I guided the robot arm out and stabbed a green marker ball into the hard sand. Looking back I could almost always see one.

As I proceeded north the height of the giant blocks diminished—or the defiles between them rose—and a few kilometers farther on the canyons ascended to the height of the blocks. I drove over a fractured plain, a sort of crazed plateau surrounded by jagged hills not much higher than it. It was the inversion of the maze: low ridges crossed each other everywhere on this plateau, dividing it into frozen ponds and drifts of sand. Passage over this ground was difficult, and the tracks skirted it to the west, leading me to another plateau, one split by fissures or crevasses so that to continue north the track had to wind in big S's. Here I ran into difficulty. The land was exposed to the wind, and in the fissures and etch pits were frozen ponds, surrounded by icy Syrtis grass, cushions of sandwort and rock jasmine, stiff leaf sedge, and boulders dotted with lichen of several colors. In this weird Arctic meadow the tracks were impossible to trace. I drove back to the last point I had been sure of seeing them—on one of the eskerlike ridges dividing the depressed plain—but once there, my own car's tracks marred the landscape ahead, and I saw no others. No other direction seemed feasible; to veer right was to return to the ridged plain, to turn left was to drop back into the maze that the old tracks had worked out of. It seemed most likely that the road had crossed the crevassed plateau I had driven onto, and that in the last century the tracks had been destroyed by erosion and deposition.

So I was on my own. But I was loath to believe that. I got out of the car and ranged forward on foot, inspecting each route between fissures for sign of the road. Nothing. The rough jumble of peaks to the north might protect a canyon section of the road enough for it to reappear—or so I hoped—and in the last hour of daylight I drove north across the plateau, zigging and zagging to avoid fissures. When blocks began to dot the plateau like immense erratics on a dusky morraine, I slowed the car and kept close watch. I saw only a pebbly broken plain, which became canyon mouths as the blocks became more frequent and continuous. I drove up one anxiously; then for no reason I looked up at the left wall of the new canyon, and there, dug into the rock like three cracks, was an arrow, like so:
. I laughed aloud. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I was wondering about that.” I drove on, but immediately I saw that the shadows of late afternoon would obscure any sign of the trail. I backed out of the canyon onto the plain to have a view for the evening, and stopped for camp beside one of the frozen ponds. The evening mirrors were pinpricks in a burgundy sky. I heated some beef soup, dipped crackers in it. After eating I sipped a cup of brandy, and located my position on the map. The fissured plain was clearly marked, an island in rougher terrain. The red dot was still a good distance to the north. The sky darkened to blackberry, the mirrors winked out over a horizon like a row of black teeth. The stars glowed yellow, making the clear dome of the car a planisphere. Sleep was difficult. Late in the night I jerked awake and knew I had been speaking with Emma, in a long conversation, a crucial one. What can you offer, she said. I tried to remember it; the starlit chaos, a vast jumble of black and gray, disoriented me, and even Emma's last words fled. The whole dream forgotten. And so much of our waking lives are lost in the same way. I felt a pang of grief for the way we live, for all that we go through, and can never return to.