The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson
This battered meadow, with its little stands of bristle-cone pine and noctis juniper, is the traditional base camp for South Buttress climbs. Around the cars are treadmarks, wind-walls made of stacked rock, half-filled latrine trenches, cairn-covered trash dumps, and discarded equipment. As the members of the expedition wander around the camp, stretching and talking, they inspect some of these artifacts. Marie Whillans picks up two ultralight oxygen cylinders stamped with letters that identify them as part of an expedition she climbed with more than a century ago. Grinning, she holds them overhead and shakes them at the cliff, beats them together. “Home again!” Ping! Ping! Ping!
One last field car trundles into the meadow, and the expedition members already in the camp gather around it as it rolls to a halt. Two men get out of the car. They are greeted enthusiastically: “Stephan's here! Roger's here!"
But Roger Clayborne is in a bad mood. It has been a long trip for him. It began in Burroughs six days ago, when he left his offices at Government House for the last time. Twenty-seven years of work as Minister of the Interior came to an end as he walked out the tall doors of Government House, down the broad chert steps and onto the trolley that would take him to his flat. Riding along with his face in the warm wind, Roger looked out at the tree-filled capital city he had rarely left during his stint in the government, and it struck him that it had been twenty-seven years of continuous defeat. Too many opponents, too many compromises, until the last unacceptable compromise arrived, and he found himself riding out of the city with Stephan, into the countryside he had avoided for twenty-seven years, over rolling hills covered by grasses and studded by stands of walnut, aspen, oak, maple, eucalyptus, pine: every leaf and every blade of grass a sign of his defeat. And Stephan wasn't much help; though a conservationist like Roger, he has been a member of the Greens for years. “That's where the real work can be done,” he insisted as he lectured Roger and neglected his driving. Roger, who liked Stephan well enough, pretended his agreement and stared out his window. He would have preferred Stephan's company in smaller doses—say a lunch, or a game of batball. But on they drove along the wide gravel highway, over the windblown steppes of the Tharsis Bulge, past the farms and towns in Noctis Labyrinthus, up into the krummholz forests of east Tharsis, until Roger fell prey to that feeling one gets near the end of a long journey, that all his life had been part of this trip, that the traveling would never end this side of the grave, that he was doomed to wander over the scenes of all his defeats and failures endlessly, and never come to anyplace that did not include them all, right in the rearview mirror. It was a long drive.
For—and this was the worst of it—he remembered everything.
Now he steps from the car door to the rocky soil of base camp. A late addition to the climb (Stephan invited him along when he learned of the resignation), he is introduced to the other climbers, and he musters the cordial persona built over many years in office. “Hans!” he says as he sees the familiar smiling face of the areologist Hans Boethe. “Good to see you. I didn't know you were a climber."
“Not one like you, Roger, but I've done my share in Marineris.”
“So"—Roger gestures west—"are you going to find the explanation for the escarpment?”
“I already know it,” Hans declares, and the others laugh. “But if we find any contributing evidence . . .”
A tall rangy woman with leathery cheeks and light brown eyes appears at the edge of the group. Stephan quickly introduces her. “Roger, this is our expedition leader, Eileen Monday.”
“We've met before,” she says as she shakes his hand. She looks down and smiles an embarrassed smile. “A long time ago, when you were a canyon guide.”
The name, the voice; the past stirs, quick images appear in his mind's eye, and Roger's uncanny memory calls back a hike—(he once guided treks through the fossae to the north)—a romance, yes, with a leggy girl: Eileen Monday, standing now before him. They were lovers for quite some time, he recalls; she a student in Burroughs, a city girl, and he—off into the backcountry. It hadn't lasted. But that was over two hundred years ago! A spark of hope strikes in him—"You remember?” he says.
“I'm afraid not.” Wrinkles fan away under her eyes as she squints, smiles the embarrassed smile. “But when Stephan told me you'd be joining us—well—you're known to have a complete memory, and I felt I should check. Maybe that means I did remember something. Because I went through my old journals and found references to you. I only started writing the journals in my eighties, so the references aren't very clear. But I know we met, even if I can't say I remember it.” She looks up, shrugs.
It is a common enough situation for Roger. His “total recall” (it is nothing of the sort, of course) encompasses most of his three hundred years, and he is constantly meeting and remembering people who do not recall him. Most find it interesting, some unnerving; this Eileen's sun-chapped cheeks are a bit flushed; she seems both embarrassed and perhaps a bit amused. “You'll have to tell me about it,” she says with a laugh.
Roger isn't in the mood to amuse people. “We were about twenty-five.”
Her mouth forms a whistle. “You really do remember everything.”
Roger shakes his head; the chill in the shadowed air fills him, the momentary thrill of recognition and recall dissipates. It's been a very long trip.
“And we were . . . ?” she prods.
“We were friends,” Roger says, with just the twist on friends to leave her wondering. It is disheartening, this tendency of people to forget; his unusual facility makes him a bit of a freak, a voice from another time. Perhaps his conservation efforts grow out of this retention of the past; he still knows what the planet was like, back there in the beginning. When he's feeling low he tends to blame his generation's forgetfulness on their lack of vigilance, and he is often, as he is now, a bit lonely.
Eileen has her head crooked, wondering what he means.
“Come on, Mr. Memory,” Stephan cries to him. “Let's eat! I'm starving, and it's freezing out here.”
“It'll get colder up there,” Roger says. He shrugs at Eileen, follows Stephan.
In the bright lamplight of the largest base-camp tent the chattering faces gleam. Roger sips at a bowl of hot stew. Quickly the remaining introductions are made. Stephan, Hans, and Eileen are familiar to him, as is Dr. Frances Fitzhugh. The lead climbers are Dougal Burke and Marie Whillans, current stars of New Scotland's climbing school; he's heard of both of them. They are surrounded in their corner by four younger colleagues of Eileen's, climbing guides hired by Stephan to be their porters: “We're the Sherpas,” Ivan Vivanov says to Roger cheerfully, and introduces Ginger, Sheila, and Hannah. The young guides appear not to mind their supporting role in the expedition; in a party of this size there will be plenty of climbing for all. The group is rounded off by Arthur Sternbach, an American climber visiting Hans Boethe. When the introductions are done they all circle the room like people at any cocktail party anywhere. Roger works on his stew and regrets his decision to join the climb. He forgot (sort of) how intensely social big climbs must be. Too many years of solo bouldering, in the rock valleys north of Burroughs. That was what he had been looking for, he realizes: an endless solo rock climb, up and out of the world.
Stephan asks Eileen about the climb and she carefully includes Roger in her audience. “We're going to start up the Great Gully, which is the standard route for the first thousand meters of the face. Then, where the first ascent followed the Nansen Ridge up to the left of the Gully, we're planning to go right. Dougal and Marie have seen a line in the aerial photos that they think will go, and that will give us something new to try. So we'll have a new route most of the way. And we'll be the smallest party ever to climb the scarp in the South Buttress area.”
“You're kidding!” Arthur Sternbach cries.
Eileen smiles briefly. “Because of the party size, we'll be carrying as little oxygen as possible, for use in the last few thousand meters.”
“And if we cl
“There's a cache for us when we top out—we'll change equipment there and stroll on up to the caldera rim. That part will be easy.”
“I don't see why we even bother with that part,” Marie interjects.
“It's the easiest way down. Besides, some of us want to see the top of Olympus Mons,” Eileen replies mildly.
“It's just a big hill,” says Marie.
Later Roger leaves the tent with Arthur and Hans, Dougal and Marie. Everyone will spend one last night of comfort in the cars. Roger trails the others, staring up at the escarpment. The sky above it is still a rich twilight purple. The huge bulk of the wall is scarred by the black line of the Great Gully, a deep vertical crack just visible in the gloomy air. Above it, a blank face. Trees rustle in the wind; the dark meadow looks wild.
“I can't believe how tall it is!” Arthur is exclaiming for the third time. He laughs out loud. “It's just unbelievable!”
“From this vantage,” Hans says, “the top is over seventy degrees above our real horizon.”
“You're kidding! I can't believe it!” And Arthur falls into a fit of helpless giggling. The Martians following Hans and his friend watch with amused reserve. Arthur is quite a bit shorter than the rest of them, and suddenly to Roger he seems like a child caught after breaking into the liquor cabinet. Roger pauses to allow the others to walk on.
The big tent glows like a dim lamp, luminous yellow in the dark. The cliff face is black and still. From the forest comes a weird yipping yodel. Some sort of mutant wolves, no doubt. Roger shakes his head. Long ago any landscape exhilarated him; he was in love with the planet. Now the immense cliff seems to hang over him like his life, his past, obliterating the sky, blocking off any progress westward. The depression he feels is so crushing that he almost sits on the meadow grass, to plunge his face in his hands; but others will be leaving the tent. Again, that mournful yowling: the planet, crying out Mars is gone! Mars is gone! Ow-ooooooooooo! Homeless, the old man goes to sleep in a car.
But as always, insomnia takes its share of the night. Roger lies in the narrow bed, his body relaxed, his consciousness bouncing helplessly through scenes from his life. Insomnia, memory: Some of his doctors have told him there is a correlation between the two. Certainly for him the hours of insomniac awareness and half sleep are memory's playground, and no matter what he does to fill the time between lying down and falling asleep (like reading to exhaustion, or scratching notes), tyrannical memory will have its hour.
This night he remembers all the nights in Burroughs. All the opponents, all the compromises. The Chairman handing him the order to dam and flood Coprates Chasma, with his little smile and flourish, the touch of hidden sadism. The open dislike from Noyova, that evening years before, after the Chairman's appointments: “The reds are finished, Clayborne. You shouldn't be holding office—you are the leader of a dead party.” Looking at the Chairman's dam-construction bill and thinking of Coprates the way it had been in the previous century, when he had explored it, it occurred to him that ninety percent of what he had done in office, he did to stay in a position to be able to do anything. That was what it meant to work in government. Or was it a higher percentage? What had he really done to preserve the planet? Certain bills balked before they began, certain development projects delayed; all he had done was resist the doings of others. Without much success. And it could even be said that walking out on the Chairman and his “coalition” cabinet was only another gesture, another defeat.
He recalls his first day in office. A morning on the polar plains. A day in Burroughs, in the park. In the Cabinet office, arguing with Noyova. And on it will go, for another hour or more, scene after scene until the memories become fragmented and dreamlike, spliced together surrealistically, stepping outside the realm of memory into sleep.
There are topographies of the spirit, and this is one of them.
Dawn on Mars. First the plum sky, punctuated by a diamond pattern of four dawn mirrors that orbit overhead and direct a little more of Sol's light to the planet. Flocks of black choughs caw sleepily as they flap and glide out over the talus slope to begin the day's hunt for food. Snow pigeons coo in the branches of a grove of tawny birch. Up in the talus, a clatter of rocks; three Dall sheep are looking surprised to see the base-camp meadow occupied. Sparrows flit overhead.
Roger, up early with a headache, observes all the stirring wildlife indifferently. He hikes up into the broken rock of the talus to get clear of it. The upper rim of the escarpment is struck by the light of the rising sun, and now there is a strip of ruddy gold overhead, bathing all the shadowed slope below in reflected sunlight. The dawn mirrors look dim in the clear violet sky. Colors appear in the tufts of flowers scattered through the rock, and the green juniper needles glow. The band of lit cliff quickly grows; even in full light the upper slopes look sheer and blank. But that is the effect of distance and foreshortening. Lower on the face, crack systems look like brown rain stains, and the wall is rough-looking, a good sign. The upper slopes, when they get high enough, will reveal their own irregularities.
Dougal hikes out of the rock field, ending some dawn trek of his own. He nods to Roger. “Not started yet, are we?” His English is accented with a distinctly Scottish intonation.
In fact they are. Eileen and Marie and Ivan have gotten the first packs out of the cars, and when Roger and Dougal return they are distributing them. The meadow becomes noisier as the long equipment sorting ends and they get ready to take off. The packs are heavy, and the Sherpas groan and joke when they lift theirs. Arthur can't help laughing at the sight of them. “On Earth you couldn't even move a pack that size,” he exclaims, nudging one of the oversized bags with a foot. “How do you balance with one of these on?”
“You'll find out,” Hans tells him cheerfully.
Arthur finds that balancing the mass of his pack in Martian gravity is difficult. The pack is almost perfectly cylindrical, a big green tube that extends from the bottom of his butt to just over his head; with it on his back he looks like a tall green snail. He exclaims at its lightness relative to its size, but as they hike through the talus its mass swings him around much more than he is prepared for. “Whoah! Look out there! Sorry!” Roger nods and wipes sweat from his eyes. He sees that the first day is one long lesson in balance for Arthur, as they wind their way up the irregular slope through the forest of house-sized boulders.
Previous parties have left a trail with rock ducks and blazes chopped onto boulder faces, and they follow it wherever they can find it. The ascent is tedious; although this is one of the smaller fans of broken rock at the bottom of the escarpment (in some areas mass wasting has collapsed the entire cliff), it will take them all of a very long day to wind their way through the giant rockpile to the bottom of the wall proper, some seven hundred meters above base camp.
At first Roger approves of the hike through the jumbled field of house-sized boulders. “The Khumbu Rockfall,” Ivan calls out, getting into his Sherpa persona as they pass under a big stone serac. But unlike the Khumbu Ice-fall below the fabled Everest, this chaotic terrain is relatively stable; the overhangs won't fall on them, and there are few hidden crevasses to fall into. No, it is just a rock field, and Roger likes it. Still, on the way they pass little pockets of chir pine and juniper, and Hans apparently feels obliged to identify every flower to Arthur. “There's aconite, and those are anemones, and that's a kind of iris, and those are gentians, and those are primulas. . . .” Arthur stops to point. “What the hell is that!”
Staring down at them from a flat-topped boulder is a small furry mammal. “It's a dune dog,” Hans says proudly. “They've clipped some marmot and Weddell seal genes onto what is basically a wolverine.”
“You're kidding! It looks like a miniature polar bear.”
Behind them Roger shakes his head, kicks idly at a stand of tundra cactus. It is flowering; the six-month Martian northern spring is beginning. Syrtis grass tufting in every wet sandy flat. Little biology exper
Camp One is a broad flat circle of sand, surrounded by boulders that were once part of the face, and set under a slight overhang formed by the sheer rampart of basalt that stands to the right side of the Great Gully. Protected from rockfall, roomy and comfortable to lie on, Camp One is perfect for a big lower camp, and it has been used before; between the rocks they find pitons, oxygen cylinders, buried latrines overgrown with bright green moss.
The next day they wind their way back down through the talus to base camp—all but Dougal and Marie, who take the day to look at the routes leading out of Camp One. For the rest of them, it's off before dawn, and down through the talus at nearly a running pace; a quick reloading; and back up in a race to reach Camp One again before nightfall. Every one of the next four days will be spent in the same way, and the Sherpas will continue for three more days after that, threading the same trail through the boulders, until all the equipment has been lugged up to Camp One.
In the same way that a tongue will go to a sore tooth over and over, Roger finds himself following Hans and Arthur to hear the areologist's explanations. He has realized, to his chagrin, that he is nearly as ignorant about what lives on Mars as Arthur is.
“See the blood pheasant?”