The Martians

Chapter 10 Green Mars

Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system. It is a broad shield volcano, six hundred kilometers in diameter and twenty-seven kilometers high. Its average slope angles only five degrees above the horizontal, but the circumference of the lava shield is a nearly continuous escarpment, a roughly circular cliff that drops six kilometers to the surrounding forests. The tallest and steepest sections of this encircling escarpment stand near South Buttress, a massive prominence which juts out and divides the south and southeast curves of the cliff (on the map, it’s at 15 degrees north, 132 degrees longitude). There, under the east flank of South Buttress, one can stand in the rocky upper edge of the Tharsis forest, and look up at a cliff that is twenty-two thousand feet tall.

Seven times taller than El Capitan, three times as tall as Everest’s southwest face, twice as tall as Dhaulagiri wall: four miles of cliff, blocking out the western sky. Can you imagine it? (It’s hard.)

“I can’t get a sense of the scale!” the Terran Arthur Sternbach shouts, hopping up and down.

Dougal Burke, looking up through binoculars, says, “There’s quite a bit of foreshortening from here.”

“No no. That’s not it.”

The climbing party has arrived in a caravan of seven field cars. Big green bodies, clear bubbles covering the passenger compartments, fat field tires with their exaggerated treads, chewing dust into the wind: The cars’ drivers have parked them in a rough circle, and they sit in the middle of a rocky meadow like a big necklace of paste emeralds.

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 climb it?” Roger asks.

“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 experiments, everywhere you look; the whole planet one big laboratory. Roger sighs. Arthur tries to pick one of each variety of flower, making a bouquet suitable for a state funeral, but after too many falls he gives up, and lets the colorful bundle hang from his hand. Late in the day they reach the bottom of the wall. The whole world is in shadow, while the clear sky overhead is still a bright lavender. Looking up, they cannot see the top of the escarpment anymore; they will not see it again unless their climb succeeds.

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?”

“No.”

“Over there. The head tuft is black. Pretty well camouflaged.”

“You’re kidding. Why there it is!”

“They like these rocks. Blood pheasants, redstarts, accentors—more of them than we ever see.”

Later: “Look there!”

“Where?”

Roger finds himself peering in the direction Hans has pointed.

“On the tall rock, see? The killer rabbit, they call it. A joke.”

“Oh, a joke,” Arthur says. Roger makes a revision in his estimation of the Terran’s subtlety. “A rabbit with fangs?”

“Not exactly. Actually there’s very little hare in it—more lemming and pika, but with some important traits of the lynx added. A very successful creature. Some of Harry Whitebook’s work. He’s very good.”

“So some of your biological designers become famous?”

“Oh yes. Very much so. Whitebook is one of the best of the mammal designers. And we seem to have a special love for mammals, don’t we?”

“I know I do.” Several puffing steps up waist-high blocks. “I just don’t understand how they can survive the cold!”

“Well, it’s not that cold down here, of course. This is the top of the alpine zone, in effect. The adaptations for cold are usually taken directly from arctic and antarctic creatures. Many seals can cut the circulation to their extremities when necessary to preserve heat. And they have a sort of antifreeze in their blood—a glycoprotein that binds to the surface of ice crystals and stops their growth—stops the accumulation of salts. Wonderful stuff. Some of these mammals can freeze limbs and thaw them without damage to the flesh.”

“You’re kidding,” Roger whispers as he hikes.

“You’re kidding!”

“And these adaptations are part of most Martian mammals. Look! There’s a little foxbear. That’s Whitebook again.”

Roger stops following them. No more Mars.

Black night. The six big box tents of Camp One glow like a string of lamps at the foot of the cliff. Roger, out in the rubble relieving himself, looks back at them curiously. It is, he thinks, an odd group. People from all over Mars (and a Terran). Only climbing in common. The lead climbers are funny. Dougal sometimes seems a mute, always watching from a corner, never speaking. A self-enclosed system. Marie speaks for both of them, perhaps. Roger can hear her broad Midlands voice now, hoarse with drink, telling someone how to climb the face. She’s happy to be here.

Inside Eileen’s tent he finds a heated discussion in progress. Marie Whillans says, “Look, Dougal and I have already gone nearly a thousand meters up these so-called blank slabs. There are cracks all over the place.”

“As far as you’ve gone there are,” Eileen says. “But the true slabs are supposed to be above those first cracks. Four hundred meters of smooth rock. We could be stopped outright.”

“So we could, but there’s got to be some cracks. And we can bolt our way up any really blank sections if we have to. That way we’d have a completely new route.”

Hans Boethe shakes his head. “Putting bolts in some of this basalt won’t be any fun.”

“I hate bolts anyway,” Eileen says. “The point is, if we take the Gully up to the first amphitheater, we know we’ve got a good route to the top, and all the upper pitches will be new.”

Stephan nods, Hans nods, Frances nods. Roger sips a cup of tea and watches with interest. Marie says, “The point is, what kind of climb do we want to have?”

“We want to get to the top,” Eileen says, glancing at Stephan, who nods. Stephan has paid for most of this expedition, and so in a sense it’s his choice.

“Wait a second,” Marie says sharply, eyeing each of them in turn. “That’s not what it’s about. We’re not here just to repeat the Gully route, are we?” Her voice is accusing and no one meets her eye. “That wasn’t what I was told, anyway. I was told we were taking a new route, and that’s why I’m here.”

“It will inevitably be a new route,” Eileen says. “You know that, Marie. We trend right at the top of the Gully and we’re on new ground. We only avoid the blank slabs that flank the Gully to the right!”

“I think we should try those slabs,” Marie says, “because Dougal and I have found they’ll go.” She argues for this route, and Eileen listens patiently. Stephan looks worried; Marie is persuasive, and it seems possible that her forceful personality will overwhelm Eileen’s, leading them onto a route rumored to be impossible.

But Eileen says, “Climbing any route on this wall with only eleven people will be doing something. Look, we’re only talking about the first twelve hundred meters of the climb. Above that we’ll trend to the right whenever possible, and be on new ground above those slabs.”

“I don’t believe in the slabs,” Marie says. And after a few more exchanges: “Well, that being the case, I don’t see why you sent Dougal and me up the slabs these last few days.”

“I didn’t send you up,” Eileen says, a bit exasperated. “You two choose the leads, you know that. But this is a fundamental choice, and I think the Gully is the opening pitch we came to make. We do want to make the top, you know. Not just of the wall, but the whole mountain.”

After more discussion Marie shrugs. “Okay. You’re the boss. But it makes me wonder. Why are we making this climb?”

On the way to his tent Roger remembers the question. Breathing the cold air, he looks around. In Camp One the world seems a place creased and folded: horizontal half stretching away into darkness—back down into the dead past; vertical half stretching up to the stars—into the unknown. Only two tents lit from within now, two soft blobs of yellow in the gloom. Roger stops outside his darkened tent to look at them, feeling they say something to him; the eyes of the mountain, looking. Why is he making this climb?

Up the Great Gully they go. Dougal and Marie lead pitch after pitch up the rough unstable rock, hammering in pitons and leaving fixed ropes behind. The ropes tend to stay in close to the right wall of the Gully, to avoid the falling rock that shoots down it all too frequently. The other climbers follow from pitch to pitch in teams of two and three. As they ascend they can see the four Sherpas, tiny animals winding their way down the talus again.

Roger has been teamed with Hans for the day. They clip themselves onto the fixed rope with jumars, metal clasps that will slide up the rope but not down. They are carrying heavy packs up to Camp Two, and even though the slope of the Gully is only fifty degrees here, and its dark rock knobby and easy to climb, they both find the work hard. The sun is hot and their faces are quickly bathed with sweat.

“I’m not in the best of shape for this,” Hans puffs. “It may take me a few days to get my rhythm.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Roger says. “We’re going about as fast as I like.”

“I wonder how far above Camp Two is?”

“Not too far. Too many carries to make, without the power reels.”

“I look forward to the vertical pitches. If we’re going to climb we might as well climb, eh?”

“Especially since the power reels will pull our stuff up.”

“Yes.” Breathless laugh.

Steep, deep ravine. Medium gray andesite, an igneous volcanic rock, speckled with crystals of dark minerals, knobbed with hard protrusions. Pitons hammered into small vertical cracks.

Midday they meet with Eileen, Arthur, and Frances, the team above, who are sitting on a narrow ledge in the wall of the Gully, jamming down a quick lunch. The sun is nearly overhead; in an hour they will lose it. Roger and Hans are happy to sit on the ledge. Lunch is lemonade and several handfuls of the trail mix Frances has made. The others discuss the Gully and the day’s climb, and Roger eats and listens. He becomes aware of Eileen sitting on the ledge beside him. Her feet kick the wall casually, and the quadriceps on the tops of her thighs, big exaggerated muscles, bunch and relax, bunch and relax, stretching the fabric of her climbing pants. She is following Hans’s description of the rock and appears not to notice Roger’s discreet observation. Could she really not remember him? Roger breathes a soundless sigh. It’s been a long life. And all his effort—

“Let’s get up to Camp Two,” Eileen says, looking at him curiously.

Early in the afternoon they find Marie and Dougal on a broad shelf sticking out of the steep slabs to the right of the Great Gully. Here they make Camp Two: four large box tents, made to withstand rockfalls of some severity.

Now the verticality of the escarpment becomes something immediate and tangible. They can only see the wall for a few hundred meters above them; beyond that it is hidden, except up the steep trough in the wall that is the Great Gully, etching the vertical face just next to their shelf. Looking up this giant couloir, they can see more of the endless cliff above them, dark and foreboding against the pink sky.

Roger spends an hour of the cold afternoon sitting at the Gully edge of their shelf, looking up. They have a long way to go; his hands in their thick pile mittens are sore, his shoulders and legs tired, his feet cold. He wishes more than anything that he could shake the depression that fills him; but thinking that only makes it worse.

Eileen Monday sits beside him. “So we were friends once, you say.”

“Yeah.” Roger looks her in the eye. “You don’t remember at all?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Yes. I was twenty-six, you were about twenty-three.”

“You really remember that long ago?”

“Some of it, yes.”

Eileen shakes her head. She has good features, Roger thinks. Fine eyes. “I wish I did. But as I get older my memory gets even worse. Now I think for every year I live I lose at least that much in memories. It’s sad. My whole life before I was seventy or eighty—all gone.” She sighs. “I know most people are like that, though. You’re an exception.”

“Some things seem to be stuck in my mind for good,” says Roger. He can’t believe it isn’t true of everyone! But that’s what they all say. It makes him melancholy. Why live at all? “Have you hit your three hundredth yet?”

“In a few months. But—come on. Tell me about it.”

“Well . . . you were a student. Or just finishing school, I can’t remember.” She smiles. “Anyway, I was guiding groups in hikes through the little canyons north of here, and you were part of a group. We started up a—a little affair, as I recall. And saw each other for a while after we got back. But you were in Burroughs, and I kept guiding tours, and—well, you know. It didn’t last.”

Eileen smiles again. “So I went on to become a mountain guide—which I’ve been for as long as I can remember—while you moved to the city and got into politics!” She laughs and Roger smiles wryly. “Obviously we must have impressed each other!”

“Oh yes, yes.” Roger laughs shortly. “Searching for each other.” He grins lopsidedly, feeling bitter. “Actually I only got into government about forty years ago. Too late, as it turned out.”

Silence for a while. “So that’s what’s got you down,” Eileen says.

“What?”

“The Red Mars party—out of favor.”

“Out of existence, you mean.”

She considers it. “I never could understand the Red point of view—”

“Few could, apparently.”

“—until I read something in Heidegger, where he makes a distinction between earth and world. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Earth is that blank materiality of nature that exists before us and more or less sets the parameters on what we can do. Sartre called it facticity. World then is the human realm, the social and historical dimension that gives earth its meaning.”

Roger nods his understanding.

“So—the Reds, as I understood it, were defending earth. Or planet, in this case. Trying to protect the primacy of planet over world—or at least to hold a balance between them.”

“Yes,” Roger says. “But the world inundated the planet.”

“True. But when you look at it that way, you can see what you were trying to do was hopeless. A political party is inevitably part of the world, and everything it does will be worldly. And we only know the materiality of nature through our human senses—so really it is only world that we know directly.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Roger protests. “I mean, it’s logical, and usually I’m sure it’s true—but sometimes—” He smacks the rock of their shelf with his mittened hand. “You know?”

Eileen touches the mitten. “World.”

Roger lifts his lip, irritated. He pulls the mitten off and hits the cold rock again. “Planet.”

Eileen frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe.”

And there was hope, Roger thought fiercely. We could have lived on this planet the way we found it, and confronted the materiality of earth every day of our lives. We could have.

Eileen is called away to help with the arrangement of the next day’s loads. “We’ll continue this later,” she says, touching Roger lightly on the shoulder.

He is left alone over the Gully. Moss discolors the stone under him, and grows in the cracks in the couloir. Swallows shoot down the Gully like falling stones, hunting for cliff mice or warm-blooded lizards. To the east, beyond the great shadow of the volcano, dark forests mark the sunlit Tharsis Bulge like blobs of lichen. Nowhere can one see Mars, just Mars, the primal Mars. They forgot what it was like to walk out onto the empty face of old Mars.

Once he walked out onto the great northern desert of Vastitas Borealis. All of Mars’s geographical features are immense by Terran scales, and just as the southern hemisphere is marked by huge canyons, basins, volcanoes, and craters, the northern hemisphere is strangely, hugely smooth; it had, in its highest latitudes, surrounding what at that time was the polar ice cap (it is now a small sea), a giant planet-ringing band of empty flat layered sand. Endless desert. And one morning before dawn Roger walked out of his campsite and hiked a few kilometers over the broad wavelike humps of the windswept sand, and sat down on the crest of one of the highest waves. There was no sound but his breath, his blood pounding in his ears, and the slight hiss of the oxygen regulator in his helmet. Light leaked over the horizon to the southeast and began to bring out the sand’s dull ocher, flecked with dark red. When the sun cracked the horizon the light bounced off the short steep faces of the dunes and filled everything. He breathed the gold air, and something in him bloomed, he became a flower in a garden of rock, the sole consciousness of the desert, its focus, its soul. Nothing he had ever felt before came close to matching this exaltation, the awareness of brilliant light, of illimitable expanse, of the glossy, intense presence of material things. He returned to his camp late in the day, feeling that a moment had passed—or an age. He was nineteen years old, and his life was changed.

Just being able to remember that incident, after two hundred and eighty-odd years have passed, makes Roger a freak. Less than one percent of the population share this gift (or curse) of powerful, long-term recollection. These days Roger feels the ability like a weight—as if each year were a stone, so that now he carries the crushing burden of three hundred red stones everywhere he goes. He feels angry that others forget. Perhaps it is envious anger.

Thinking of that walk when he was nineteen reminds Roger of a time years later, when he read Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. The little black cabin boy Pip (and Roger had always identified himself with Pip in Great Expectations), “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” fell overboard while his whaleboat was being pulled by a harpooned whale. The boat flew onward, leaving Pip alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Abandoned on the ocean alone, Pip grew more and more terrified, until “By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little Negro went about the deck an idiot.... The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”

Reading that made Roger feel strange. Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture had driven Pip insane.

It occurred to him, as he stared at the thick book, that perhaps he had gone mad as well. Terror, rapture—these extremities of emotion circumnavigate the spirit and approach each other again, though departing from the origin of perception in opposite directions. Mad with solitude, ecstatic with Being—the two parts of the recognition of self sit oddly together. But Pip’s insanity only shocked Roger into a sharper love for his own experience of the “heartless immensity.” He wanted it; and suddenly all the farthest, most desolate reaches of Mars became his special joy. He woke at night and sat up to watch dawns, a flower in a garden of rock. And wandered days like John in the desert, seeing God in stones and frost and skies that arched like sheets of fire.

Now he sits on a ledge on a cliff on a planet no longer his, looking down on plains and canyons peppered with life, life created by the human mind. It is as if the mind has extruded itself into the landscape: each flower an idea, each lizard a thought.... There is no heartless immensity left, no mirror of the void for the self to see itself in. Only the self, everywhere, in everything, suffocating the planet, cloying all sensation, imprisoning every being.

Perhaps this perception itself was a sort of madness.

The sky itself, after all (he thought) provides a heartless immensity beyond the imagination’s ability to comprehend, night after night.

Perhaps he needed an immensity he could imagine the extent of, to feel the perception of it as ecstasy rather than terror.

Roger sits remembering his life and thinking over these matters, as he tosses granules of rock—little pips—over the ledge into space.

To his surprise, Eileen rejoins him. She sits on her heels, recites quietly,

“Who said that?” Roger asks, startled by the lines.

“Shelley,” she replies. “In ‘Julian and Maddalo.’ ”

“I like it.”

“Me too.” She tosses over a pip herself. “Come join us for dinner?”

“What? Oh sure, sure. I didn’t know it was time.”

That night, the sound of the tent scraping stone, as the wind shifts it and shifts it. The scritching of thought as world scrapes against planet.

Next day they start spreading out. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger take off early up the Gully, around a rib and out of sight, leaving behind a trail of fixed rope. Occasionally those left below can hear their voices, or the ringing of a piton being hammered into the hard rock. Another party descends to Camp One, to begin dismantling it. When they have got everything up to Camp Two, the last group up will bring the fixed ropes up with them. Thus they will set rope above them and pull it out below them, all the way up the wall.

Late the next day Roger climbs up to carry more rope to Marie and Douglas and Hannah and Ginger. Frances goes with him.

The Great Gully is steeper above Camp Two, and after a few hours of slow progress Roger finds his pack growing very heavy. His hands hurt, the footholds grow smaller and smaller, and he finds he must stop after every five or ten steps. “I just don’t have it today,” he says as Frances takes over the lead.

“Me neither,” she says, wheezing for air. “I think we’ll have to start using oxygen during the climbing pretty soon.”

But the lead climbers do not agree. Dougal is working his way up a constriction in the Gully, knocking ice out of a crack with his ice axe, then using his fists for chocks and his twisted shoe soles for a staircase, and stepping up the crack as fast as he can clear it. Marie is belaying him and it is left to Hannah and Ginger to greet Roger and Frances. “Great, we were just about to run out of rope.”

Dougal stops and Marie takes the opportunity to point to the left wall of the Gully. “Look,” she says, disgusted. Roger and Frances see a streak of light blue—a length of xylar climbing rope, hanging free from a rust-pitted piton. “That Terran expedition, I bet,” Marie says. “They left ropes the entire way, I hear.”

From above Dougal laughs.

Marie shakes her head. “I hate seeing stuff like that.”

Frances says, “I think we’d better go onto oxygen pretty soon.”

She gets some surprised stares. “Why?” asks Marie. “We’ve barely started.”

“Well, we’re at about four kilometers above the datum—”

“Exactly,” Marie says. “I live higher than that.”

“Yes, but we’re working pretty hard here, and going up pretty fast. I don’t want anyone to get edema.”

“I don’t feel a thing,” Marie says, and Hannah and Ginger nod.

“I could use a bit of oxygen,” Dougal says from above, grinning down at them briefly.

“You don’t feel edema till you have it,” Frances says stiffly.

“Edema,” says Marie, as if she doesn’t believe in it.

“Marie’s immune,” Dougal calls down. “Her head can’t get more swollen than it already is.”

Hannah and Ginger giggle at Marie’s mock glare, her tug on the rope to Dougal.

“Down you come, boy.”

“On your head.”

“We’ll see how the weather goes,” Frances says. “But either way, if we make normal progress we’ll be needing oxygen soon.”

This is apparently too obvious to require comment. Dougal reaches the top of the crack, and hammers in a piton; the ringing strikes grow higher and higher in pitch as the piton sets home.

That afternoon Roger helps the leads set up a small wall tent. The wall tents are very narrow and have a stiff inflatable floor; they can be hung from a single piton if necessary, so that the inhabitants rest on an air-filled cushion hanging in space, like window washers. But more often they are placed on ledges or indentations in the cliff face, to give the floor some support. Today they have found that above the narrowing of the Great Gully is a flattish indentation protected by an overhang. The cracks above the indentation are poor, but with the addition of a couple of rock bolts the climbers look satisfied. They will be protected from rockfall, and tomorrow they can venture up to find a better spot for Camp Three without delay. As there is just barely room (and food) for two, Roger and Frances begin the descent to Camp Two.

During the descent Roger imagines the cliff face as flat ground, entertained by the new perspective this gives. Ravines cut into that flat land: Vertically these are called gullies, or couloirs, or chimneys, depending on their shape and tilt. Climbing in these gives the climber an easier slope and more protection. Flat land has hills, and ranges of hills: These vertically are knobs, or ridges, or shelves, or buttresses. Depending on their shape and tilt these can either be obstacles, or in the case of some ridges, easy routes up. Then walls become ledges, and creeks become cracks—although cracking takes its own path of least resistance, and seldom resembles water-carved paths.

As Roger belays Frances down one difficult pitch (they can see more clearly why their climb up was so tiring), he looks around at what little he can see: the gray-and-black walls of the Gully, some distance above and below him; the steep wall of the rampart to the left of the Gully. And that’s all. A curious duality; because this topography stands near the vertical, in many ways he will never see it as well as he would an everyday horizontal hillside. But in other ways (looking right into the grain of the rock to see if one nearly detached knob will hold the weight of his entire body for a long step down, for instance) he sees it much more clearly, more intensely than he will ever see the safe world of flatness. This intensity of vision is something the climber treasures.

The next day Roger and Eileen team up, and as they ascend the Gully with another load of rope, a rock the size of a large person falls next to them, chattering over an outcropping and knocking smaller rocks down after it. Roger stops to watch it disappear below. The helmets they are wearing would have been no protection against a rock that size.

“Let’s hope no one is following us up,” Roger says.

“Not supposed to be.”

“I guess getting out of this Gully won’t be such a bad idea, eh?”

“Rockfall is almost as bad on the face. Last year Marie had a party on the face when a rock fell on a traverse rope and cut it. Client making the traverse was killed.”

“A cheerful business.”

“Rockfall is bad. I hate it.”

Surprising emotion in her voice; perhaps some accident has occurred under her leadership as well? Roger looks at her curiously. Odd to be a climbing guide and not be more stoic about such dangers.

Then again, rockfall is the danger beyond expertise.

She looks up: distress. “You know.”

He nods. “No precautions to take.”

“Exactly. Well, there are some. But they aren’t sufficient.”

The lead climbers’ camp is gone without a trace, and a new rope leads up the left wall of the Gully, through a groove in the overhang and out of sight above. They stop to eat and drink, then continue up. The difficulty of the next pitch impresses them; even with the rope it is hard going. They wedge into the moat between a column of ice and the left wall, and inch up painfully. “I wonder how long this lasts,” Roger says, wishing they had their crampons with them. Above him, Eileen doesn’t reply for over a minute. Then she says, “Three hundred more meters,” as if out of the blue. Roger groans theatrically, client to guide.

Actually he is enjoying following Eileen up the difficult pitch. She has a quick rhythm of observation and movement that reminds him of Dougal, but her choice of holds is all her own—and closer to what Roger would choose. Her calm tone as they discuss the belays, her smooth pulls up the rock, the fine proportions of her long legs, reaching for the awkward foothold: a beautiful climber. And every once in a while there is a little jog at Roger’s memory.

Three hundred meters above they find the lead climbers, out of the Gully and on a flat ledge that covers nearly a hectare, on the left side this time. From this vantage they can see parts of the cliff face to the right of the Gully, above them. “Nice campsite,” Eileen remarks. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger are sitting about, resting in the middle of setting up their little wall tents. “Looked like you had a hard day of it down there.”

“Invigorating,” Dougal says, eyebrows raised.

Eileen surveys them. “Looks like a little oxygen might be in order.”

The lead group protests.

“I know, I know. Just a little. A cocktail.”

“It only makes you crave it,” Marie says.

“Maybe so. We can’t use much down here, anyway.”

In the midday radio call to the camps below, Eileen tells the others to pack up the tents from Camp One. “Bring those and the power reels up first. We should be able to use the reels between these camps.”

They all give a small cheer. The sun disappears behind the cliff above, and they all groan. The leads stir themselves and continue setting up the tents. The air chills quickly.

Roger and Eileen descend through the afternoon shadows to Camp Two, as there is not enough equipment to accommodate more than the lead group at Camp Three. Descending is easy on the muscles compared with the ascent, but it requires just as much concentration as going up. By the time they reach Camp Two Roger is very tired, and the cold sunless face has left him depressed again. Up and down; up and down.

That night during the sunset radio conversation Eileen and Marie get into an argument when Eileen orders the leads down to do some portering. “Look, Marie, the rest of us haven’t led a single pitch, have we? And we didn’t come on this climb to ferry up goods for you, did we?” Eileen’s voice has a very sharp, cutting edge to it when she is annoyed. Marie insists the first team is making good time, and is not tired yet. “That’s not the point. Get back down to Camp One tomorrow, and finish bringing it up. The bottom team will move up and reel Camp Two up to Three, and those of us here at Two will carry one load up to Three and have a bash at the lead after that. That’s the way it is, Marie—we leapfrog in my climbs, you know that.”

Sounds behind the static from the radio, of Dougal talking to Marie. Finally Marie says, “Aye, well you’ll need us more when the climbing gets harder anyway. But we can’t afford to slow down much.”

After the radio call Roger leaves the tents and sits on his ledge bench to watch the twilight. Far to the east the land is still sunlit, but as he watches the landscape darkens, turns dim purple under a blackberry sky. Mirror dusk. A few stars sprinkle the high dome above him. The air is cold but still, and he can hear Hans and Frances inside their tent, arguing about glacial polish. Frances is an areologist of some note, and apparently she disagrees with Hans about the origins of the escarpment; she spends some of her climbing time looking for evidence in the rock.

Eileen sits down beside him. “Mind?”

“No.”

She says nothing, and it occurs to him she may be upset. He says, “I’m sorry Marie is being so hard to get along with.”

She waves a mittened hand to dismiss it. “Marie is always like that. It doesn’t mean anything. She just wants to climb.” She laughs. “We go on like this every time we climb together, but I still like her.”

“Hmph.” Roger raises his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

She does not reply. For a long time they sit there. Roger’s thoughts return to the past, and helplessly his spirits plummet again.

“You seem . . . disturbed about something,” Eileen ventures.

“Ehh,” Roger says. “About everything, I suppose.” And winces to be making such a confessional. But she appears to understand.

She says, “So you fought all the terraforming?”

“Most of it, yeah. First as head of a lobbying group. You must be part of it now—Martian Wilderness Explorers.”

“I pay the dues.”

“Then in the Red government. And in the Interior Ministry, after the Greens took over. But none of it did any good. “Because,” he bursts out—stops—starts again; “Because I liked the planet the way it was when we found it. A lot of us did, back then. It was so beautiful... or not just that. It was more overwhelming than beautiful. The size of things, their shapes—the whole planet had been evolving, the landforms themselves I mean, for five billion years, and traces of all of that time were still on the surface to be seen and read, if you knew how to look. It was so wonderful to be out there.”

“And why, again?”

“The sublime isn’t always beautiful.”

“True. It transcended beauty, it really did. One time I walked out onto the polar dunes, you know. . . .” But he doesn’t know how to tell it. “And so, and so it seemed to me that we already had an Earth, you know? That we didn’t need a Terra up here. And everything they did eroded the planet that we came to. They destroyed it! And now we’ve got—whatever. Some kind of park. A laboratory to test out new plants and animals and all. And everything I loved so much about those early years is gone. You can’t find it anywhere anymore.”

In the dark he can just see her nodding. “And so your life’s work . . .”

“Wasted!” He can’t keep the frustration out of his voice. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to, he wants her to understand what he feels; he looks at her in the dark. “A three-hundred-year life, entirely wasted! I mean I might as well have just . . .” He doesn’t know what.

Long pause.

“At least you can remember it,” she says quietly.

“What good is that? I’d rather forget, I tell you.”

“Ah. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“Oh, the past. The God-damned past. It isn’t so great. Just a dead thing.”

She shakes her head. “Our past is never dead. Do you know Sartre’s work?”

“No.”

“A shame. He can be a big help to we who live so long. For instance, in several places he suggests that there are two ways of looking at the past. You can think of it as something dead and fixed forever; it’s part of you, but you can’t change it, and you can’t change what it means. In that case your past limits or even controls what you can be. But Sartre doesn’t agree with that way of looking at it. He says that the past is constantly altered by what we do in the present moment. The meaning of the past is as fluid as our freedom in the present, because every new act that we commit can revalue the entire thing!”

Roger humphs. “Existentialism.”

“Well, whatever you want to call it. It’s part of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, for sure. He says that the only way we can possess our past—whether we can remember it or not, I say—is to add new acts to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this ‘assuming’ our past.”

“But sometimes that may not be possible.”

“Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It’s just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it’s a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.”

“And for you?”

“I’m with him on that. That’s why I’ve been reading him these last several years. It helps me to understand things.”

“Hmph.” He thinks about it. “You were an English major in college, did you know that?”

She ignores the comment. “So—” She nudges him lightly, shoulder to shoulder. “You have to decide how you will assume this past of yours. Now that your Mars is gone.”

He considers it.

She stands. “I have to plunge into the logistics for tomorrow.”

“Okay. See you inside.”

A bit disconcerted, he watches her leave. Dark tall shape against the sky. The woman he remembers was not like this. In the context of what she has just said, the thought almost makes him laugh.

For the next few days all the members of the team are hard at work ferrying equipment up to Camp Three, except for two a day who are sent above to find a route to the next camp. It turns out there is a feasible reeling route directly up the Gully, and most of the gear is reeled up to Camp Three once it is carried to Camp Two. Every evening there is a radio conversation, in which Eileen takes stock and juggles the logistics of the climb, and gives the next day’s orders. From other camps Roger listens to her voice over the radio, interested in the relaxed tone, the method she has of making her decisions right in front of them all, and the easy way she shifts her manner to accommodate whomever she is speaking with. He decides she is very good at her job, and wonders if their conversations are simply a part of that. Somehow he thinks not.

Roger and Stephan are given the lead, and early one mirror dawn they hurry up the fixed ropes above Camp Three, turning on their helmet lamps to aid the mirrors. Roger feels strong in the early going. At the top of the pitch the fixed ropes are attached to a nest of pitons in a large, crumbling crack. The sun rises and suddenly bright light glares onto the face. Roger ropes up, confirms the signals for the belay, starts up the Gully.

The lead at last. Now there is no fixed rope above him determining his way; only the broad flat back and rough walls of the Gully, looking much more vertical than they have up to this point. Roger chooses the right wall and steps up onto a rounded knob. The wall is a crumbling, knobby andesite surface, black and a reddish gray in the harsh morning blast of light; the back wall of the gully is smoother, layered like a very thick-grained slate, and broken occasionally by horizontal cracks. Where the back wall meets the sidewall the cracks widen a bit, sometimes offering perfect footholds. Using them and the many knobs of the wall Roger is able to make his way upward. He pauses several meters above Stephan at a good-looking vertical crack to hammer in a piton. Getting a piton off the belt sling is awkward. When it is hammered in he pulls a rope through and jerks on it. It seems solid. He climbs above it. Now his feet are spread, one in a crack, one on a knob, as his fingers test the rock in a crack above his head; then up, and his feet are both on a knob in the intersection of the walls, his left hand far out on the back wall of the Gully to hold on to a little indentation. Breath rasps in his throat. His fingers get tired and cold. The Gully widens out and grows shallower, and the intersection of back wall and sidewall becomes a steep narrow ramp of its own. Fourth piton in, the ringing of the strikes filling the morning air. New problem: The degraded rock of this ramp offers no good cracks, and Roger has to do a tension traverse over to the middle of the Gully to find a better way up. Now if he falls he will swing back into the sidewall like a pendulum. And he’s in the rockfall zone. Over to the left sidewall, quickly a piton in. Problem solved. He loves the immediacy of problem solving in climbing, though at this moment he is not aware of his pleasure. Quick look down: Stephan a good distance away, and below him! Back to concentrating on the task at hand. A good ledge, wide as his boot, offers a resting place. He stands, catches his breath. A tug on the line from Stephan; he has run out the rope. Good lead, he thinks, looking down the steep Gully at the trail left by the green rope, looping from piton to piton. Perhaps a better way to cross the Gully from right to left? Stephan’s helmeted face calls something up. Roger hammers in three pitons and secures the line. “Come on up!” he cries. His fingers and calves are tired. There is just room to sit on his bootledge: immense world, out there under the bright pink morning sky! He sucks down the air and belays Stephan’s ascent, pulling up the rope and looping it carefully. The next pitch will be Stephan’s; Roger will have quite a bit of time to sit on this ledge and feel the intense solitude of his position in this vertical desolation. “Ah!” he says. Climbing up and out of the world. . . .

It is the strongest sort of duality: Facing the rock and climbing, his attention is tightly focused on the rock within a meter or two of his eyes, inspecting its every flaw and irregularity. It is not particularly good climbing rock, but the Gully slopes at about seventy degrees in this section, so the actual technical difficulty is not that great. The important thing is to understand the rock fully enough to find only good holds and good cracks—to recognize suspect holds and avoid them. A lot of weight will follow them up these fixed ropes, and although the ropes will probably be renailed, his piton placements will likely stand. One has to see the rock and the world beneath the rock.

And then he finds a ledge to sit and rest on, and turns around, and there is the great expanse of the Tharsis Bulge. Tharsis is a continent-sized bulge in the Martian surface; at its center it is eleven kilometers above the Martian datum, and the three prince volcanoes lie in a line, northeast to southwest, on the bulge’s highest plateau. Olympus Mons is at the far northwestern edge of the bulge, almost on the great plain of Amazonis Planitia. Now, not even halfway up the great volcano’s escarpment, Roger can just see the three prince volcanoes poking over the horizon to the southeast, demonstrating perfectly the size of the planet itself. He looks around one-eighteenth of Mars.

By midafternoon Roger and Stephan have run out their three hundred meters of rope, and they return to Camp Three pleased with themselves. The next morning they hurry up the fixed ropes in the mirror dawn, and begin again. At the end of Roger’s third pitch in the lead he comes upon a good site for a camp: A sort of pillar bordering the Great Gully on its right side ends abruptly in a flat top that looks very promising. After negotiating a difficult short traverse to get onto the pillar top, they wait for the midday radio conference. Consultation with Eileen confirms that the pillar is about the right distance from Camp Three, and suddenly they are standing in Camp Four.

“The Gully ends pretty near to you anyway,” Eileen says.

So Roger and Stephan have the day free to set up a wall tent and then explore. The climb is going well, Roger thinks: no major technical difficulties, a group that gets along fairly well together . . . perhaps the great South Buttress will not prove to be that difficult after all.

Stephan gets out a little sketchbook. Roger glances at the filled pages as Stephan flips through them. “What’s that?”

“Chir pine, they call it. I saw some growing out of the rocks above Camp One. It’s amazing what you find living on the side of this cliff.”

“Yes,” Roger says.

“Oh I know, I know. You don’t like it. But I’m sure I don’t know why.” He has the blank sheet of the sketchbook up now. “Look in the cracks across the Gully. Lot of ice there, and then patches of moss. That’s moss campion, with the lavender flowers on top of the moss cushion, see?”

He begins sketching and Roger watches, fascinated.

“That’s a wonderful talent to have, drawing.”

“Skill. Look, there’s edelweiss and asters, growing almost together.” He jerks, puts finger to lips, points. “Pika,” he whispers.

Roger looks at the broken niches in the moat of the Gully opposite them. There is a movement and suddenly he sees them—two little gray furballs with bright black eyes—three—the last scampering up the rock fearlessly. They have a hole at the back of one niche for a home. Stephan sketches rapidly, getting the outline of the three creatures, then filling them in. Bright Martian eyes.

And once, in the northern autumn in Burroughs, when the leaves covered the ground and fell through the air, leaves the color of sand, or the tan of antelopes, or the green of green apples, or the white of cream, or the yellow of butter—he walked through the park. The wind blew stiffly from the southwest out of the big funnel of the delta, bringing clouds flying overhead swiftly, scattered and white and sunbroken to the west, massed and dark dusky blue to the east; and the evergreens waved their arms in every shade of dark green, before which the turning leaves of the hardwoods flared; and above the trees to the east a white-walled church, with reddish arched roof tiles and a white bell tower, glowed under the dark clouds. Kids playing on the swings across the park, yellow-red aspens waving over the brick city hall beyond them to the north—and Roger felt—wandering among widely spaced white-trunked trees that thrust their white limbs in every upward direction—he felt—feeling the wind loft the gliding leaves over him—he felt what all the others must have felt when they walked around, that Mars had become a place of exquisite beauty. In such lit air he could see every branch, leaf, and needle waving under the tide of wind, crows flying home, lower clouds lofting puffy and white under the taller black ones, and it all struck him all at once: freshly colored, fully lit, spacious and alive in the wind—what a world! What a world.

And then, back in his offices, he hadn’t been able to tell anyone about it. It wouldn’t have been like him.

Remembering that, and remembering his recent talk with Eileen, Roger feels uncomfortable. His past overwhelmed that day’s walk through the park: What kind of assumption was that?

Roger spends his afternoon free-climbing above Camp Four, looking around a bit and enjoying the exercise of his climbing skills. They’re coming back at last. But the rock is nearly crack-free once out of the Gully, and he decides free-climbing is not a good idea. Besides, he notices a curious thing: About fifty meters above Camp Four, the Great Central Gully is gone. It ends in a set of overhangs like the ribs under the protruding wall of a building. Definitely not the way up. And yet the face to the right of the overhangs is not much better; it too tilts out and out, until it is almost sheer. The few cracks breaking this mass will not be easy to climb. In fact, Roger doubts he could climb them, and wonders if the leads are up to it. Well, sure, he thinks. They can climb anything. But it looks awful. Hans has talked about the volcano’s “hard eon,” when the lava pouring from the caldera was denser and more consistent than in the volcano’s earlier years. The escarpment, being a sort of giant boring of the volcano’s flow history, naturally reflects the changes in lava consistency in its many horizontal bands. So far they have been climbing on softer rock—now they have reached the bottom of a harder band. Back in Camp Four Roger looks up at what he can see of the cliff above, and wonders where they will go.

Another duality: the two halves of the day, forenoon and afternoon. Forenoon is sunny and therefore hot: a morning ice and rock shower in the Gully, and time to dry out sleeping bags and socks. Then noon passes and the sun disappears behind the cliff above. For an hour or so they have the weird half-light of the dusk mirrors; then they too disappear, and suddenly the air is biting, bare hands risk frostnip, and the lighting is indirect and eerie: a world in shadow. Water on the cliff face ices up, and rocks are pushed out—there is another period when rocks fall and go whizzing by. People bless their helmets and hunch their shoulders, and discuss again the possibility of shoulder pads. In the cold the cheery morning is forgotten, and it seems the whole climb takes place in shadow.

When Camp Four is established they try several reconnaissance climbs through what Hans calls the Jasper Band. “It looks like orbicular jasper, see?” He shows them a dull rock and after cutting away at it with a laser saw, shows them a smooth brown surface, speckled with little circles of yellow, green, red, white. “Looks like lichen,” Roger says. “Fossilized lichen.”

“Yes. This is orbicular jasper. For it to be trapped in this basalt implies a metamorphic slush—lava partially melting rock in the throat above the magma chamber, and then throwing it all up.”

So it was the Jasper Band, and it was trouble. Too sheer—close to vertical, really, and without an obvious way up. “At least it’s good hard rock,” Dougal says cheerfully.

Then one day Arthur and Marie return from a long traverse out to the right, and then up. They hurry into camp grinning ear to ear.

“It’s a ledge,” Arthur says. “A perfect ledge. I can’t believe it. It’s about half a meter wide, and extends around this rampart for a couple hundred meters, just like a damn sidewalk! We just walked right around that corner! Completely vertical above and below—talk about a view!”

For once Roger finds Arthur’s enthusiasm fully appropriate. The Thank God Ledge, as Arthur has named it (“There’s one like this on Half Dome in Yosemite”), is a horizontal break in the cliff face, and a flat slab just wide enough to walk on is the result. Roger stops in the middle of the ledge to look around. Straight up: rock and sky. Straight down: the tiny tumble of the talus, appearing directly below them, as Roger is not inclined to lean out too far to see the rock in between. The exposure is astonishing. “You and Marie walked along this ledge without ropes?” Roger says.

“Oh, it’s fairly wide,” Arthur replies. “Don’t you think? I ended up crawling there where it narrows just a bit. But mostly it was fine. Marie walked the whole way.”

“I’m sure she did.” Roger shakes his head, happy to be clipped on to the rope that has been fixed about chest high above the ledge. With its aid he can appreciate the strange ledge—perfect sidewalk in a completely vertical world: the wall hard, knobby, right next to his head—under him the smooth surface of the ledge, and then empty space.

Verticality. Consider it. A balcony high on a tall building will give a meager analogy: Experience it. On the side of this cliff, unlike the side of any building, there is no ground below. The world below is the world of belowness, the rush of air under your feet. The forbidding smooth wall of the cliff, black and upright beside you, halves the sky. Earth, air; the solid here and now, the airy infinite; the wall of basalt, the sea of gases. Another duality: To climb is to live on the most symbolic plane of existence and the most physical plane of existence at the same time. This too the climber treasures.

At the far end of the Thank God Ledge there is a crack system that breaks through the Jasper Band—it is like a narrow, miniature version of the Great Gully, filled with ice. Progress upward is renewed, and the cracks lead up to the base of an ice-filled half funnel that divides the Jasper Band even further. The bottom of the funnel is sloped just enough for Camp Five, which becomes by far the most cramped of the campsites. The Thank God Ledge traverse means that using the power reels is impossible between Camps Four and Five, however. Everyone makes ten or twelve carries between the two camps. Each time Roger walks the sidewalk through space, his amazement at it returns.

While the carries across the ledge are being made, and Camps Two and Three are being dismantled, Arthur and Marie have begun finding the route above. Roger goes up with Stephan to supply them with rope and oxygen. The climbing is “mixed,” half on rock, half on black ice rimed with dirty hard snow. Awkward stuff. There are some pitches that make Roger and Hans gasp with effort, look at each other round-eyed. “Must have been Marie leading.” “I don’t know, that Arthur is pretty damn good.” The rock is covered in many places by layers of black ice, hard and brittle: Years of summer rain followed by frost have caked the exposed surfaces at this height. Roger’s boots slip over the slick ice repeatedly. “Need crampons up here.”

“Except the ice is so thin, you’d be kicking rock.”

“Mixed climbing.”

“Fun, eh?”

Breath rasps over knocking heartbeats. Holes in the ice have been broken with ice axes; the rock below is good rock, lined with vertical fissures. A chunk of ice whizzes by, clatters on the face below.

“I wonder if that’s Arthur and Marie’s work.”

Only the fixed rope makes it possible for Roger to ascend this pitch, it is so hard. Another chunk of ice flies by, and both of them curse.

Feet appear in the top of the open-book crack they are ascending.

“Hey! Watch out up there! You’re dropping ice chunks on us!”

“Oh! Sorry, didn’t know you were there.” Arthur and Marie jumar down the rope to them. “Sorry,” Marie says again. “Didn’t know you’d come up so late. Have you got more rope?”

“Yeah.”

The sun disappears behind the cliff, leaving only the streetlamp light of the dusk mirrors. Arthur peers at them as Marie stuffs their packs with new rope. “Beautiful,” he exclaims. “They have parhelia on Earth too, you know—a natural effect of the light when there’s ice crystals in the atmosphere. It’s usually seen in Antarctica—big halos around the sun, and at two points of the halo these mock suns. But I don’t think we ever had four mock suns per side. Beautiful!”

“Let’s go,” Marie says without looking up. “We’ll see you two down at Camp Five tonight.” And off they go, using the rope and both sides of the open-book crack to quickly lever their way up.

“Strange pair,” Stephan says as they descend to Camp Five.

The next day they take more rope up. In the late afternoon, after a very long climb, they find Arthur and Marie sitting in a cave in the side of the cliff that is big enough to hold their entire base camp. “Can you believe this?” Arthur cries. “It’s a damn hotel!”

The cave’s entrance is a horizontal break in the cliff face, about four meters high and over fifteen from side to side. The floor of the cave is relatively flat, covered near the entrance with a thin sheet of ice, and littered with chunks of the roof, which is bumpy but solid. Roger picks up one of the rocks from the floor and moves it to the side of the cave, where floor and roof come together to form a narrow crack. Marie is trying to get somebody below on the radio, to tell them about the find. Roger goes to the back of the cave, some twenty meters in from the face, and ducks down to inspect the jumble of rocks in the long crack where floor and roof meet. “It’s going to be nice to lie out flat for once,” Stephan says. Looking out the cave’s mouth, Roger sees a wide smile of lavender sky.

When Hans arrives he gets very excited. He bangs about in the gloom hitting things with his ice axe, pointing his flashlight into various nooks and crannies. “It’s tuff, do you see?” he says, holding up a chunk for their inspection. “This is a shield volcano, meaning it ejected very little ash over the years, which is what gave it its flattened shape. But there must have been a few ash eruptions, and when the ash is compressed it becomes tuff—this rock here. Tuff is much softer than basalt and andesite, and over the years this exposed layer has eroded away, leaving us with our wonderful hotel.”

“I love it,” says Arthur.

The rest of the team joins them in the mirror dusk, but the cave is still uncrowded. Although they set up tents to sleep in, they place the lamps on the cave floor, and eat dinner in a large circle, around a collection of glowing little stoves. Eyes gleam with laughter as the climbers consume bowls of stew. There is something marvelous about this secure home, tucked in the face of the escarpment three thousand meters above the plain. It is an unexpected joy to loll about on flat ground, unharnessed. Hans has not stopped prowling the cave with his flashlight. Occasionally he whistles.

“Hans!” Arthur calls when the meal is over and the bowls and pots have been scraped clean. “Get over here, Hans. Have a seat. There you go. Sit down.” Marie is passing around her flask of brandy. “All right, Hans, tell me something. Why is this cave here? And why, for that matter, is this escarpment here? Why is Olympus Mons the only volcano anywhere to have this encircling cliff?”

Frances says, “It’s not the only volcano to have such a feature.”

“Now, Frances,” Hans says. “You know it’s the only big shield volcano with a surrounding escarpment. The analogies from Iceland that you’re referring to are just little vents of larger volcanoes.”

Frances nods. “That’s true. But the analogy may still hold.”

“Perhaps.” Hans explains to Arthur, “You see, there is still not a perfect agreement as to the cause of the scarp. But I think I can say that my theory is generally accepted—wouldn’t you agree, Frances?”

“Yes. . . .”

Hans smiles genially and looks around at the group. “You see, Frances is one of those who believe that the volcano originally grew up through a glacial cap, and that the glacier made in effect a retaining wall, holding in the lava and creating this drop-off after the glacial cap disappeared.”

“There are good analogies in Iceland for this particular shape for a volcano,” Frances says. “And it’s eruption under and through ice that explains it.”

“Be that as it may,” Hans says, “I am among those who feel that the weight of Olympus Mons is the cause of the scarp.”

“You said that once before,” Arthur says, “but I don’t understand how that would work.”

Stephan voices his agreement with this, and Hans sips from the flask with a happy look. He says, “The volcano is extremely old, you understand. Three billion years or so, on this same site, or close to it—very little tectonic drift, unlike on Earth. So magma upwells, lava spills out, over and over and over, and it is deposited over softer material—probably the gardened regolith that resulted from the intensive meteor bombardments of the planet’s earliest years. A tremendous weight is deposited on the surface of the planet, you see, and this weight increases as the volcano grows. As we all know now, it is a very, very big volcano. And eventually the weight is so great that it squishes out the softer material beneath it. We find this material to the northeast, which is the downhill side of the Tharsis Bulge, and is naturally the side that the pressured rock would be pushed out to. Have any of you visited the Olympus Mons aureole?” Several of them nod. “Fascinating region.”

“Okay,” Arthur says, “but why wouldn’t that just sink the whole area? I would think that there would be a depression circling the edge of the volcano, rather than this cliff.”

“Exactly!” Stephan cries.

But Hans is shaking his head, a smile on his face. He gestures for the brandy flask again. “The point is, the lava shield of Olympus Mons is a single unit of rock—layered, admittedly, but essentially one big cap of basalt, placed on a slightly soft surface. Now by far the greatest part of the weight of this cap is near the center—the volcano’s peak, you know, still so far above us. So—the cap is a unit, a single piece of rock—and basalt has a certain flexibility to it, as all rock does. So the cap itself is somewhat flexible. Now the center of it sinks the farthest, being heaviest—and the outside edge of the shield, being part of a single flexible cap, bends upward.”

“Up twenty thousand feet?” Arthur demands. “You’re kidding!”

Hans shrugs. “You must remember that the volcano stands twenty-five kilometers above the surrounding plains. The volume of the volcano is one hundred times the volume of Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, and for three billion years at least it has been pressing down on this spot.”

“But it doesn’t make sense that the scarp would be so symmetrical if that was what happened,” Frances objected.

“On the contrary. In fact that is the really telling aspect of it. The outer edge of the lava shield is lifted up, okay? Higher and higher, until the flexibility of the basalt is exceeded. In other words, the shield is just so flexible and no more. At the point where the stress becomes too much, the rock sheers off, and the inner side of the break continues to rise, while what is beyond the break point subsides. So, the plains down below us are still part of the lava shield of Olympus Mons, but they are beyond the break point. And as the lava was everywhere approximately the same thickness, it gave way everywhere at about the same distance from the peak, giving us the roughly circular escarpment that we now climb!”

Hans waves a hand with an architect’s pride. Frances sniffs. Arthur says, “It’s hard to believe.” He taps the floor. “So the other half of this cave is underneath the talus wash down there?”

“Exactly.” Hans beams. “Though the other half was never a cave. This was probably a small, roughly circular layer of tuff, trapped in much harder basaltic lava. But when the shield broke and the escarpment was formed, the tuff deposit was cut in half, exposing its side to erosion. And a few eons later we have our cozy cave.”

“Hard to believe,” Arthur says again.

Roger sips from the flask and silently agrees with Arthur. It’s remarkable how difficult it is to transfer the areologist’s theories, in which mountains act like plastic or toothpaste, to the vast hard basalt reality underneath and above them. “It’s the amount of time necessary for these transformations that’s difficult to imagine,” he says aloud. “It must take . . .” He waves a hand.

“Billions of years,” Hans says. “We cannot properly imagine that amount of time. But we can see the sure signs of its passing.”

And in three centuries we can destroy those signs, Roger says silently. Or most of them. And make a park instead.

Above the cave the cliff face lies back a bit, and the smoothness of the Jasper Band is replaced by a jumbled, complicated slope of ice gullies, buttresses, and shallow horizontal slits that mimic their cave below. These steps, as they call them, are to be avoided like crevasses on level ground, as the overhanging roof of each is a serious obstacle. The ice gullies provide the best routes up, and it becomes a matter of navigating up what appears to be a vertical delta, like the tracing of a lightning bolt burned into the face and then frozen. Every morning as the sun hits the face there is an hour or so of severe ice and rockfall, and in the afternoons in the hour after the sun leaves the face there is another period of rockfall. There are some close calls and one morning Hannah is hit by a chunk of ice in the chest, bruising her badly. “The trick is to stay in the moat between the ice in the gully and the rock wall,” Marie says to Roger as they retreat down a dead-end couloir.

“Or to be where you want to be by the time the sun comes up,” Dougal adds. And on his advice to Eileen, they begin rising long before dawn to make the exposed parts of the climb. In the frigid dark a wristwatch alarm beeps. Roger twists in his bag, trying to turn it off; but it is his tent mate’s. With a groan he sits up, reaches over and switches on his stove. Soon the metal rings in the top of the cubical stove are glowing a friendly warm orange, heating the tent’s air and giving a little bit of light to see by. Eileen and Stephan are sitting in their bags, beating sleep away. Their hair is tousled, their faces lined, puffy, tired. It is 3:00 A.M. Eileen puts a pot of ice on the stove, dimming their light. She turns on a lamp to its lowest illumination, which is still enough to make Stephan groan. Roger digs in a food pouch for tea and dried milk. Breakfast is wonderfully warming, but suddenly he has to visit the cave’s convenient yet cold latrine. Boots on—the worst part of dressing. Like sticking one’s feet into ice blocks. Then out of the warm tent into the intense cold of the cave’s air. Through the dark to the latrine. The other tents glow dimly—time for another dawn assault on the upper slopes.

By the time Archimedes, the first dawn mirror, appears, they have been on the slopes above the cave for nearly an hour, climbing by the light of their helmet lamps. The mirror dawn is better; there is enough light to see well, and yet the rock and ice have not yet been warmed enough to start falls. Roger climbs the ice gullies using crampons; he enjoys using them, kicking into the plastic ice with the front points of the crampons, and adhering to the slopes as if glued to them. Below him Arthur keeps singing a song in tribute to his crampons: “Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman, Spidermannnnn.” But once above the fixed ropes, there is no extra breath for singing; the lead climbing is extremely difficult. Roger finds himself spread-eagled on one pitch, right foot spiked into the icefall, left foot digging into a niche the size of his toenail; left hand holding the shaft of the ice axe, which is firmly planted in the icefall above, and right hand laboriously turning the handle of an ice screw, which will serve as piton in this little couloir: And for a moment he realizes he is ten meters above the nearest belay, hanging there by three tiny points. And gasping for breath.

At the top of that pitch there is a small outcropping to rest on, and when Eileen pulls herself up the fixed rope she finds Roger and Arthur laid out over the rock in the morning sunlight like fish set out to dry. She surveys them as she catches her wind, gasping herself. “Time for oxygen,” she declares. In the midday radio call she tells the next teams up to bring oxygen bottles along with the tents and other equipment for the next camp.

With three camps established above the cave, which serves as a sort of base camp to return to from time to time, they are making fair progress. Each night only a few of them are in any given camp. They are forced to use oxygen for almost all of the climbing, and most of them sleep with a mask on, the regulator turned to its lowest setting. The work of setting up the high camps, which they try to do without oxygen, becomes exhausting and cold. When the camps are set and the day’s climbing is done, they spend the shadowed afternoons wheezing around the camps, drinking hot fluids and stamping their feet to keep them warm, waiting for the sunset radio call and the next day’s orders. At this point it’s a pleasure to leave the thinking to Eileen.

One afternoon climbing above the highest camp with Eileen, Roger stands facing out as he belays Eileen’s lead up a difficult pitch. Thunderheads like long-stemmed mushrooms march in lines blown to the northeast. Only the tops of the clouds are higher than they. It is late afternoon and the cliff face is a shadow. The cottony trunks of the thunderheads are dark, shadowed gray—then the thunderheads themselves bulge white and gleaming into the sunny sky above, actually casting some light back onto the cliff. Roger pulls the belay rope taut, looks up at Eileen. She is staring up her line of attack, which has become a crack in two walls meeting at ninety degrees. Her oxygen mask covers her mouth and nose. Roger tugs once—she looks down—he points out at the immense array of clouds. She nods, pulls her mask to one side. “Like ships!” she calls down. “Ships of the line!”

Roger pulls his mask over a cheek. “Do you think a storm might come?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been lucky so far.” She replaces her mask and begins a layback, shoving the fingers of both hands in the crack, putting the soles of both boots against the wall just below her hands, and pulling herself out to the side so that she can walk sideways up one of the walls. Roger keeps the belay taut.

Mars’s prevailing westerlies strike Olympus Mons, and the air rises, but does not flow over the peak; the mountain is so tall it protrudes out of much of the atmosphere, and the winds are therefore pushed around each side. Compressed in that way, the air comes swirling off the eastern flank cold and dry, having dumped its moisture on the western flank, where glaciers form. That is the usual pattern, anyway; but when a cyclonic system sweeps out of the southwest, it strikes the volcano a glancing blow from the south, compresses, lashes the southeast quadrant of the shield, and rebounds to the east intensified.

“What’s the barometer say, Hans?”

“Four hundred and ten millibars.”

“You’re kidding!”

“That’s not too far below normal, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It is low, however. I believe we are being overtaken by a low-pressure system.”

The storm begins as katabatic winds: cold air falling over the edge of the escarpment and dropping toward the plain. Sometimes the force of the west wind over the plateau of the shield blows the gusts out beyond the actual cliff face, which will then stand in perfect stillness. But the slight vacuum fills again with a quick downward blast, which makes the tents boom and stretch their frames. Roger grunts as one almost squashes the tent, shakes his head at Eileen. She says, “Get used to it—there are downdrafts hitting the upper face more often than not.” WHAM! “Although this one does seem to be a bit stronger than usual. But it’s not snowing, is it?”

Roger looks out the little tent-door window. “Nope.”

“Good.”

“Awful cold, though.” He turns in his sleeping bag.

“That’s okay. Snow would be a really bad sign.” She gets on the radio and starts calling around. She and Roger are in Camp Eight (the cave is now called Camp Six); Dougal and Frances are in Camp Nine, the highest and most exposed of the new camps; Arthur, Hans, Hannah, and Ivan are in Camp Seven; and the rest are down in the cave. They are a little overextended, as Eileen has been loath to pull the last tents out of the cave. Now Roger begins to see why. “Everyone stay inside tomorrow morning until they hear from me at mirror dawn. We’ll have another conference then.”

The wind rises through the night, and Roger is awakened at 3:00 A.M. by a particularly hard blast to the tent. There is very little sound of the wind against the rock—then a BANG and suddenly the tent is whistling and straining like a tortured thing. It lets off and the rocks hoot softly. Settle down and listen to the airy breathing WHAM, the squealing tent is driven down into the niche they have set it in—then sucked back up. The comforting hiss of an oxygen mask, keeping his nose warm for once—WHAM. Eileen is apparently sleeping, her head buried in her sleeping bag; only her bunting cap and the oxygen hose emerge from the drawn-up opening at the top. Roger can’t believe the gunshot slaps of the wind don’t wake her. He checks his watch, decides it is futile to try falling back to sleep. New frost condensation on the inside of the tent falls on his face like snow, scaring him for a moment. But a flashlight gleam directed out the small clear panel in the tent door reveals there is no snow. By the dimmest light of the lamp Roger sets their pot of ice on the square bulk of the stove and turns it on. He puts his chilled hands back in the sleeping bag and watches the stove heat up. Quickly the rings under the pot are a bright orange, palpably radiating heat.

An hour later it is considerably warmer in the tent. Roger sips hot tea, tries to predict the wind’s hammering. The melted water from the cave’s ice apparently has some silt in it; Roger, along with three or four of the others, has had his digestion upset by the silt, and now he feels a touch of the glacial dysentery coming on. Uncomfortably he quells the urge. Some particularly sharp blows to the tent wake Eileen; she sticks her head out of her bag, looking befuddled.

“Wind’s up,” Roger says. “Want some tea?”

“Mmmph.” She pulls away her oxygen mask. “Yeah.” She takes a full cup and drinks. “Thirsty.”

“Yeah. The masks seem to do that.”

“What time is it?”

“Four.”

“Ah. My alarm must have woken me. Almost time for the call.”

Although it is cloudy to the east, they still get a distinct increase of light when Archimedes rises. Roger pulls on his cold boots and groans. “Gotta go,” he says to Eileen, and unzips the tent just far enough to get out.

“Stay harnessed up!”

Outside, one of the katabatic blasts shoves him hard. It’s very cold, perhaps twenty degrees below Celsius, so that the windchill factor when it is blowing hardest is extreme. Unfortunately, he does have a touch of the runs. Much relieved, and very chilled, he pulls his pants up and steps back into the tent. Eileen is on the radio. People are to stay inside until the winds abate a little, she says. Roger nods vigorously. When she is done she laughs at him. “You know what Dougal would say.”

“Oh, it was very invigorating all right.”

She laughs again.

Time passes. When he warms back up Roger dozes off. It’s actually easier to sleep during the day, when the tent is warmer.

He is rudely awakened late in the morning by a shout from outside. Eileen jerks up in her bag and unzips the tent door. Dougal sticks his head in, pulls his oxygen mask onto his chest, frosts them with hard breathing. “Our tent has been smashed by a rock,” he says, almost apologetically. “Frances has got her arm broken. I need some help getting her down.”

“Down where?” Roger says involuntarily.

“Well, I thought to the cave, anyway. Or at least to here—our tent’s crushed, she’s pretty much out in the open right now—in her bag, you know, but the tent’s not doing much.”

Grimly Eileen and Roger begin to pull their climbing clothes on.

Outside the wind rips at them and Roger wonders if he can climb. They clip on to the rope and jumar up rapidly, moving at emergency speed. Sometimes the blasts of wind from above are so strong that they can only hang in against the rock and wait. During one blast Roger becomes frightened—it seems impossible that flesh and bone, harness, jumar, rope, piton, and rock will all hold under the immense pressure of the downdraft. But all he can do is huddle in the crack the fixed rope follows and hope, getting colder every second.

They enter a long snaking ice gully that protects them from the worst of the wind, and make better progress. Several times rocks or chunks of ice fall by them, dropping like bombs or giant hailstones. Dougal and Eileen are climbing so fast that it is difficult to keep up with them. Roger feels weak and cold; even though he is completely covered, his nose and fingers feel frozen. His intestines twist a little as he crawls over a boulder jammed in the gully, and he groans. Better to have stayed in the tent on this particular day.

Suddenly they are at Camp Nine—one big box tent, flattened at one end. It is flapping like a big flag in a gale, cracking and snapping again and again, nearly drowning out their voices. Frances is glad to see them; under her goggles her eyes are red-rimmed. “I think I can sit up in a sling and rappel down if you can help me,” she says over the tent noise.

“How are you?” asks Eileen.

“The left arm’s broken just above the elbow. I’ve made a bit of a splint for it. I’m awfully cold, but other than that I don’t feel too bad. I’ve taken some painkillers, but not enough to make me sleepy.”

They all crowd into what’s left of the tent and Eileen turns on a stove. Dougal dashes about outside, vainly trying to secure the open end of the tent and end the flapping. They brew tea and sit in sleeping bags to drink it. “What time is it?” “Two.” “We’d better be off then.” “Yeah.”

Getting Frances down to Camp Eight is slow, cold work. The exertion of climbing the fixed ropes at high speed was just enough to keep them warm on the climb up; now they have to hug the rock and hold on, or wait while Frances is belayed down one of the steeper sections. She uses her right arm and steps down everything she can, helping the process as much as possible.

She is stepping over the boulder that gave Roger such distress when a blast of wind hits her like a punch, and over the rock she tumbles, face against it. Roger leaps up from below and grabs her just as she is about to roll helplessly onto her left side. For a moment all he can do is hang there, holding her steady. Dougal and Eileen shout down from above. No room for them. Roger double-sets the jumar on the fixed rope above him, pulls up with one arm, the other around Frances’s back. They eye each other through their goggles—she scrambles blindly for a foothold—finds something and takes some of her weight herself. Still, they are stuck there. Roger shows Frances his hand and points at it, trying to convey his plan. She nods. He unclips from the fixed rope, sets the jumar once again right below Frances, descends to a good foothold, and laces his hands together. He reaches up, guides Frances’s free foot into his hands. She shifts her weight onto that foot and lowers herself until Roger keeps the hold in place. Then the other foot crosses to join Roger’s two feet—a good bit of work by Frances, who is certainly hurting. Mid-move another gust almost wrecks their balance, but they lean into each other and hold. They are below the boulder, and Dougal and Eileen can now climb over it and belay Frances again.

They start down once more. But the exertion has triggered a reaction inside Roger, and suddenly peristalsis attacks him. He curses the cave silt and tries desperately to quell the urge, but it won’t be denied. He signals his need to the others and jumars down the fixed rope away from them, to get out of the way of the descent and obtain a little privacy. Pulling his pants down while the wind drags him around the fixed rope is actually a technical problem, and he curses continuously as he relieves himself; it is without a doubt the coldest shit of his life. By the time the others get to him he is shivering so hard he can barely climb.

They barge into Camp Eight around sunset, and Eileen gets on the radio. The lower camps are informed of the situation and given their instructions. No one questions Eileen when her voice has that edge in it.

The problem is that their camp is low on food and oxygen. “I’ll go down and get a load,” Dougal says.

“But you’ve already been out a long time,” Eileen says.

“No no. A hot meal and I’ll be off again. You should stay here with Frances, and Roger’s chilled down.”

“We can get Arthur or Hans to come up.”

“We don’t want movement up, do we? They’d have to stay up here, and we’re out of room as it is. Besides, I’m the most used to climbing in this wind in the dark.”

Eileen nods. “Okay.”

“You warm enough?” Dougal asks Roger.

Roger can only shiver. They help him into his bag and dose him with tea, but it is hard to drink. Long after Dougal has left he is still shivering.

“A good sign he’s shivering,” Frances says to Eileen. “But he’s awfully cold. Maybe too hypothermic to warm up. I’m cold myself.”

Eileen keeps the stove on high till there is a fug of warm air in the tent. She gets into Frances’s bag with her, carefully avoiding her injured side. In the ruddy stove light their faces are pinched with discomfort.

“I’m okay,” Frances mutters after a while. “Good’n warm. Get him now.”

Roger is barely conscious as Eileen pushes into his bag with him. He is resentful that he must move. “Get your outers off,” Eileen orders. They struggle around, half in the bag, to get Roger’s climbing gear off. Lying together in their thermal underwear, Roger slowly warms up. “Man, you are cold,” Eileen says.

“’Preciate it,” Roger mutters wearily. “Don’t know what happened.”

“We didn’t work you hard enough on the descent. Plus you had to bare your butt to a windchill factor I wouldn’t want to guess.”

Body warmth, seeping into him. Long hard body pressed against him. She won’t let him sleep. “Not yet. Turn around. Here. Drink this.” Frances holds his eyelids up to check him. “Drink this!” He drinks. Finally they let him sleep.

Dougal wakes them, barging in with a full pack. He and the pack are crusted with snow. “Pretty desperate,” he says with a peculiar smile. He hurries into a sleeping bag and drinks tea. Roger checks his watch—midnight. Dougal has been at it for almost twenty-four hours, and after wolfing down a pot of stew he puts on his mask, rolls to a corner of the tent, and falls into a deep sleep.

Next morning the storm is still battering the tent. The four of them get ready awkwardly—the tent is better for three, and they must be careful of Frances’s arm. Eileen gets on the radio and orders those below to clear Camp Seven and retreat to the cave. Once climbing they find that Frances’s whole side has stiffened up. Getting her down means they have to hammer in new pitons, set up rappelling ropes for her, lower her with one of them jumaring down the fixed rope beside her, while occasionally hunkering down to avoid hard gusts of wind. They stop in Camp Seven for an hour to rest and eat, then drop to the cave. It is dusk by the time they enter the dark refuge.

So they are all back in the cave. The wind swirls in it, and the others have spent the previous day piling rocks into the south side of the cave mouth, to build a protective wall. It helps a bit.

As the fourth day of the storm passes in the whistle and flat of wind, and an occasional flurry of snow, all the members of the climb crowd into one of the large box tents, sitting upright and bumping arms so they will all fit.

“Look, I don’t want to go down just because one of us has a busted arm,” Marie says.

“I can’t climb,” says Frances. It seems to Roger that she is holding up very well; her face is white and her eyes look drugged, but she is quite coherent and very calm.

“I know that,” Marie says. “But we could split up. It’ll only take a few people to get you back down to the cars. The rest of us can take the rest of the gear and carry on. If we get to the cache at the top of the scarp, we won’t have to worry about supplies. If we don’t, we’ll just follow you down. But I don’t fancy us giving up now—that’s not what we came for, eh? Going down when we don’t have to?”

Eileen looks at Ivan. “It’d be up to you to get Frances down.”

Ivan grimaces, nods. “That’s what Sherpas are for,” he says gamely.

“Do you think four will be enough for it?”

“More would probably just get in the way.”

There is a quick discussion of their supply situation. Hans is of the opinion that they are short enough on supplies to make splitting up dangerous. “It seems to me that our primary responsibility is to get Frances to the ground safely. The climb can be finished another time.”

Marie argues with him, but Hans is supported by Stephan, and it seems neither side will convince the other. After an apprehensive silence, Eileen clears her throat.

“Marie’s plan sounds good to me,” she says. “We’ve got the supplies to go both ways, and the Sherpas can get Frances down by themselves.”

“Neither group will have much margin for error,” Hans says.

“We can leave the water for the group going down,” Marie says. “There’ll be ice and snow the rest of the way up.”

“We’ll have to be a bit more sparing with the oxygen,” Hans says. “Frances should have enough to take her all the way down.”

“Yes,” Eileen says. “We’ll have to get going again in the next day or two, no matter what the weather’s like.”

“Well?” says Marie. “We’ve proved we can get up and down the fixed ropes in any weather. We should get up and fix Camp Nine as soon as we can. Tomorrow, say.”

“If there’s a bit of a break.”

“We’ve got to stock the higher camps—”

“Yeah. We’ll do what we can, Marie. Don’t fret.”

While the storm continues they make preparations to split up. Roger, who wants to stay clear of all that, helps Arthur to build the wall at the cave’s entrance. They have started at the southern end, filling up the initial crack of the cave completely. After that they must be satisfied with a two-meter-high wall, which they extend across the entrance until the boulders on the floor of the cave are used up. Then they sit against the wall and watch the division of the goods. Wind still whistles through the cave, but sitting at the bottom of the wall they can feel that they did some good.

The division of equipment is causing some problems. Marie is very possessive about the oxygen bottles. “Well, you’ll be going down, right?” she demands of Ivan. “You don’t need oxygen at all once you get a couple camps down.”

“Frances will need it a lot longer than that,” Ivan says. “And we can’t be sure how long it’ll take to get her down.”

“Hell, you can reel her down once you get past the Thank God Ledge. Shouldn’t take you any time at all—”

“Marie, get out of this,” Eileen snaps. “We’ll divide the supplies. There’s no reason for you to bother with this.”

Marie glares, stomps off to her tent.

Arthur and Roger give each other the eye. The division goes on. Rope will be the biggest problem, it appears. But everything will be tight.

At the first break in the winds the rescue party—Frances and the four Sherpas—take off. Roger descends with them to help them cross the Thank God Ledge, and to recover the fixed rope there. The wind still gusts, but with less violence. In the middle of the ledge crossing Frances loses her balance and swings around; Roger reaches her (not noticing he ran) and holds her in. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Frances says, voice muffled by her mask.

When they reach the Great Gully, Roger says his goodbyes. The Sherpas are cheery enough, but Frances is white-faced and quiet. She has said hardly a word in the last couple of days, and Roger cannot tell what she is thinking. “Bad luck,” he tells her. “You’ll get another chance, though.”

“Thanks for grabbing me during the drop from Camp Nine,” she says just as he is about to leave. She looks upset. “You’re awfully quick. That would have hurt like hell if I had rolled onto my left side.”

“I’m glad I could help,” Roger says. Then, as he leaves, “I like how tough you’ve been.”

A grimace from Frances.

On the way back Roger must free the fixed rope to recover it for the climb above, so on the Thank God Ledge he is always belayed only to the piton ahead. If he were to fall he would drop—sometimes up to twenty-five meters—and swing like a pendulum over the rough basalt. The ledge becomes new again; he finds that the smooth surface of the sidewalk is indeed wide enough to walk on, but still—the wind pushes at his back—he is alone—the sky is low and dark, and threatens to snow—and all of a sudden the hair on his neck rises, the oxygen whistles in his mask as he sucks it down, the pitted rock face seems to glow with an internal light of its own, and all the world expands, expands ever outward, growing more immense with every pulse of his blood; and his lungs fill, and fill, and fill.

Back in the cave Roger says nothing about the eerie moment on the ledge. Only Eileen and Hans are still in the cave—the others have gone up to supply the higher camps, and Dougal and Marie have gone all the way up to Camp Nine. Eileen, Hans, and Roger load up their packs—very heavy loads, they find when they duck out the cave—and start up the fixed ropes. Jumaring up the somewhat icy rope is difficult, in places dangerous. The wind strikes from the left now rather than from above. By the time they reach Camp Seven it is nearly dark, and Stephan and Arthur already occupy the single tent. In the mirror dusk and the strong side wind, erecting another tent is no easy task. There is not another level spot to set it on either—they must place it on a slope, and tie it to pitons hammered into the cliff. By the time Eileen and Roger and Hans get into the new tent, Roger is freezing and starving and intensely thirsty. “Pretty bloody desperate,” he says wearily, mimicking Marie and the Sherpas. They melt snow and cook up a pot of stew from their sleeping bags, and when they are done eating, Roger puts on his oxygen mask, sets the flow for sleep, and slumps off.

The moment on the Thank God Ledge jumps to mind and wakes him momentarily. Wind whips the taut walls of the tent, and Eileen, penciling logistic notes for the next day, slides down the slope under the tent until their two sleeping bags are one clumped mass. Roger looks at her: brief smile from that tired, puffy, frost-burned face. Great deltas of wrinkles under her eyes. His feet begin to warm up and he falls asleep to the popping of the tent, the hiss of oxygen, the scratching of a pencil.

That night the storm begins to pick up again.

The next morning they take down the tent in a strong wind—hard work—and start portering loads up to Camp Eight. Halfway between camps it begins to snow. Roger watches his feet through swirls of hard, dry granules. His gloved fingers twist around the frigid jumar, sliding it up the frosted rope, clicking it home, pulling himself up. It is a struggle to see footholds in the spindrift, which moves horizontally across the cliff face, from left to right as he looks at it. The whole face appears to be whitely streaming to the side, like a wave. He finds he must focus his attention entirely on his hands and feet. His fingers, nose, and toes are very cold. He rubs his nose through the mask, feels nothing. The wind pushes him hard, like a giant trying to make him fall. In the narrow gullies the wind is less strong, but they find themselves climbing up through waves of avalanching snow, drift after drift of it piling up between their bodies and the slope, burying them, sliding between their legs and away. One gully seems to last forever. Intermittently Roger is concerned about his nose, but mostly he worries about the immediate situation: moving up the rope, keeping a foothold. Visibility is down to about twenty meters—they are in a little white bubble flying to the left through white snow, or so it appears.

At one point Roger must wait for Eileen and Hans to get over the boulder that Frances had such trouble with. His mind wanders and it occurs to him that their chances of success have shifted radically—and with them, the nature of the climb. Low on supplies, facing an unknown route in deteriorating weather—Roger wonders how Eileen will handle it. She has led expeditions before, but this kind only comes about by accident.

She passes him going strong, beats ice from the rope, sweeps spindrift from the top of the boulder. Pulls up and over it in one smooth motion. The wind cuts through Roger as he watches Hans repeat the operation: cuts through the laminated outer suit, the thick bunting inner suit, his skin. . . . He brushes spindrift from his goggles with a frigid hand and heaves up after them.

Though it is spring, the winterlike low-pressure system over Olympus Mons is in place, drawing the wet winds up from the south, creating stable storm conditions on the south and east arcs of the escarpment. The snow is irregular, the wind constant. For the better part of a week the seven climbers left on the face struggle in the miserable conditions. One night at sunset radio hour they hear from Frances and the Sherpas, down at base camp. There is a lot of sand in Martian snow, and their voices are garbled by static, but the message is clear: They are down, they are safe, they are leaving for Alexandria to get Frances’s arm set. Roger catches on Eileen’s averted face an expression of pure relief, and realizes that her silence in the past few days has been a manifestation of worry. Now, looking pleased, she gives the remaining climbers their instructions for the next day in a fresh determined tone.

Into camp at night, cold and almost too tired to walk. Big loaded packs onto the various ledges and niches that serve for this particular camp. Hands shaking with hunger. The camp—Thirteen, Roger believes—is on a saddle between two ridges overlooking a deep, twisted chimney. “Just like the Devil’s Kitchen on Ben Nevis,” Arthur remarks when they get inside the tent. He eats with gusto. Roger shivers and puts his hands two centimeters above the glowing stove ring. Transferring from climbing mode to tent mode is a tricky business, and tonight Roger hasn’t done so well. At this altitude and in these winds, cold has become their most serious opponent. Overmitts off, and everything must be done immediately to get lightly gloved hands protected again as quickly as possible. Even if the rest of one’s body is warmed by exertion, the fingertips will freeze if they have enough contact with cold things. And yet so many camp operations can be done more easily with hands out of mitts. Frostnip is the frequent result, leaving the fingers tender, so that pulling up a rock face, or even buttoning or zipping one’s clothes, becomes a painful task. Frostnip blisters kill the skin, creating black patches that take a week or more to peel away. Now when they sit in the tents around the ruddy light of the stove, observing solemnly the progress of the cooking meal, they see across the pot faces splotched on cheek or nose: black skin peeling away to reveal bright pink new skin beneath.

They climb onto a band of rotten rock, a tuff-and-lava composite that sometimes breaks right off in their hands. It takes Marie and Dougal two full days to find decent belay points for the 150 meters of the band, and every morning the rockfall is frequent and frightening. “It’s a bit like swimming up the thing, isn’t it?” Dougal comments. When they make it to the hard rock above, Eileen orders Dougal and Marie to the bottom of their “ladder” to get some rest. Marie makes no complaint now; each day in the lead is an exhausting exercise, and Marie and Dougal are beat.

Every night Eileen works out plans for the following day, revising them as conditions and the climbers’ strength and health change. The logistics are complicated, and each day the seven climbers shift partners and positions in the climb. Eileen scribbles in her notebook and jabbers on the radio every dusk, altering the schedules and changing her orders with almost every new bit of information she receives from the higher camps. Her method appears chaotic. Marie dubs her the “Mad Mahdi,” and scoffs at the constant changes in plans; but she obeys them, and they work: Every night they are scattered in two or three camps up and down the cliff, with everything that they need to survive the night and get them higher the next day; and every new day they leapfrog up, pulling out the lowest camp, finding a place to establish a new high camp. The bitter winds continue. Everything is difficult. They lose track of camp numbers, and name them only high, middle, and low.

Naturally, three-quarters of everyone’s work is portering. Roger begins to feel that he is surviving the rigors of the weather and altitude better than most of the rest; he can carry more faster, and even though most days end in that state where each step up is ten breaths’ agony, he finds he can take on more the next day. His digestion returns to normal, which is a blessing—a great physical pleasure, in fact. Perhaps improvement in this area masks the effects of altitude, or perhaps the altitude isn’t bothering Roger yet; it is certainly true that high altitude affects people differently, for reasons unconnected with basic strength—in fact, for reasons not yet fully understood.

So Roger becomes the chief porter; Dougal calls him Roger Sherpa, and Arthur calls him Tenzing. The day’s challenge becomes to do all one’s myriad activities as efficiently as possible, without frostnip, excessive discomfort, hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. He hums to himself little snatches of music. His favorite is the eight-note phrase repeated by the basses near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth: six notes down, two notes up, over and over and over. And each evening in the sleeping bag, warm, well fed, and prone, is a little victory.

One night he wakes up to darkness and silence, fully awake in an instant, heart pounding. Confused, he thinks he may have dreamed of the Thank God Ledge. But then he notices the silence again and realizes his oxygen bottle has run out. It happens every week or so. He uncouples the bottle from the regulator, finds another bottle in the dark, and clips it into place. When he tells Arthur about it next morning, Arthur laughs. “That happened to me a couple of nights ago. I don’t think anybody could sleep through their oxygen bottle running out—I mean you wake up very awake, don’t you?”

In the hard rock band Roger porters up a pitch that leaves him whistling into his mask: The gullies have disappeared, above is a nearly vertical black wall, and breaking it is one lightning-bolt crack, now marked by a fixed rope with slings attached, making it a sort of rope ladder. Fine for him, but the lead climb! “Must have been Dougal at it again.”

And the next day he is out in the lead himself with Arthur, on a continuation of the same face. Leading is very unlike portering. Suddenly the dogged, repetitious, almost mindless work of carrying loads is replaced by the anxious attentiveness of the lead. Arthur takes the first pitch and finishes it bubbling over with enthusiasm. Only his oxygen mask keeps him from carrying on a long conversation as Roger takes over the lead. Then Roger is up there himself, above the last belay on empty rock, looking for the best way. The lure of the lead returns, the pleasure of the problem solved fills him with energy. Fully back in lead mode, he collaborates with Arthur—who turns out to be an ingenious and resourceful technical climber—on the best storm day yet: five hundred meters of fixed rope, their entire supply, nailed up in one day. They hurry back down to camp and find Eileen and Marie still there, dumping food for the next few days.

“By God we are a team!” Arthur cries as they describe the day’s work. “Eileen, you should put us together more often. Don’t you agree, Roger?”

Roger grins, nods at Eileen. “That was fun.”

Marie and Eileen leave for the camp below, and Arthur and Roger cook a big pot of stew and trade climbing stories, scores of them: And every one ends, “but that was nothing compared to today.”

Heavy snow returns and traps them in their tents, and it’s all they can do to keep the high camp supplied. “Bloody desperate out!” Marie complains, as if she can’t believe how bad it is. After one bad afternoon Stephan and Arthur are in the high camp, Eileen and Roger in the middle camp, and Hans, Marie, and Dougal in the low camp with all the supplies. The storm strikes Roger and Eileen’s tent so hard they are considering bringing in some rocks to weight it down more. A buzz sounds from their radio and Eileen picks it up.

“Eileen, this is Arthur. I’m afraid Stephan has come up too fast.”

Eileen scowls fearfully, swears under her breath. Stephan has gone from low camp to high in two days’ hard climbing.

“He’s very short of breath, and he’s spitting up bloody spit. And talking like a madman.”

“I’m okay!” Stephan shouts through the static. “I’m fine!”

“Shut up! You’re not fine! Eileen, did you hear that? I’m afraid he’s got edema.”

“Yeah,” Eileen says. “Has he got a headache?”

“No. It’s just his lungs right now, I think. Shut up! I can hear his chest bubbling, you know.”

“Yeah. Pulse up?”

“Pulse weak and rapid, yeah.”

“Damn.” Eileen looks at Roger. “Put him on max oxygen.”

“I already have. Still . . .”

“I know. We’ve got to get him down.”

“I’m okay!”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “He needs to come down, at least to your camp, maybe lower.”

“Damn it,” Eileen exclaims when off the radio. “I moved him up too fast.”

An hour later—calls made below, the whole camp in action—Roger and Eileen are out in the storm again, in the dark, their helmet headlights showing them only a portion of the snowfall. They cannot afford to wait until morning—pulmonary edema can be quickly fatal, and the best treatment by far is to get the victim lower, where his lungs can clear out the excess water. Even a small drop in altitude can make a dramatic difference. So off they go; Roger takes the lead and bashes ice from the rope, jumars up, scrabbles over the rock blindly with his crampon tips to get a purchase in the snow and ice. It is bitterly cold. They reach the bottom of the blank wall pitch that so impressed Roger, and the going is treacherous. He wonders how they will get Stephan down it. The fixed rope is the only thing making the ascent possible, but it does less and less to aid them as ice coats it and the rock face. Wind hammers them, and Roger has a sudden very acute sensation of the empty space behind them. The headlamps’ beams reveal only swirling snow. Fear adds its own kind of chill to the mix.

By the time they reach high camp Stephan is quite ill. No more protests from him. “I don’t know how we’ll get him down,” Arthur says anxiously. “I gave him a small shot of morphine to get the peripheral veins to start dilating.”

“Good. We’ll just have to truss him into a harness and lower him.”

“Easier said than done, in this stuff.”

Stephan is barely conscious, coughing and hacking with every breath. Pulmonary edema fills the lungs with water; unless the process is reversed, he will drown. Just getting him into the sling (another function of the little wall tents) is hard work. Then outside again—struck by the wind—and to the fixed ropes. Roger descends first, Eileen and Arthur lower Stephan using a power reel, and Roger collects him like a large bundle of laundry. After standing him upright and knocking the frozen spittle from the bottom of his mask, Roger waits for the other two, and when they arrive he starts down again. The descent seems endless, and everyone gets dangerously cold. Windblown snow, the rock face, omnipresent cold: nothing else in the world. At the end of one drop Roger cannot undo the knot at the end of his belay line, to send it back up for Stephan. For fifteen minutes he struggles with the frozen knot, which resembles a wet iron pretzel. Nothing to cut it off with either. For a while it seems they will all freeze to death because he can’t untie a knot. Finally he takes his climbing gloves off and pulls at the thing with his bare fingers until it comes loose.

Eventually they arrive at the lower camp, where Hans and Dougal are waiting with a medical kit. Stephan is zipped into a sleeping bag, and given a diuretic and some more morphine. Rest and the drop in altitude should see him back to health, although at the moment his skin is blue and his breathing ragged: no guarantees. He could die—a man who might live a thousand years—and suddenly their whole enterprise seems crazy. His coughs sound weak behind the oxygen mask, which hisses madly on maximum flow.

“He should be okay,” Hans pronounces. “Won’t know for sure for several hours.”

But there they are—seven people in two wall tents. “We’ll go back up,” Eileen says, looking to Roger. He nods.

And they go back out again. The swirl of white snow in their headlights, the cold, the buffets of wind. . .they are tired, and progress is slow. Roger slips once and the jumars don’t catch on the icy rope for about three meters, where they suddenly grab hold and test his harness, and the piton above. A fall! The spurt of fear gives him a second wind. Stubbornly he decides that much of his difficulty is mental. It’s dark and windy, but really the only difference between this and his daytime climbs during the last week is the cold, and the fact that he can’t see much. But the helmet lamps do allow him to see—he is at the center of a shifting white sphere, and the rock he must work on is revealed. It is covered with a sheet of ice and impacted snow, and where the ice is clear it gleams in the light like glass laid over the black rock beneath. Crampons are great in this—the sharp front points stick in the snow and ice firmly, and the only problem is the brittle black glass that will break away from the points in big jagged sheets. Even black ice can be distinguished in the bright bluish gleam of the lights, so the work is quite possible. Look at it as just another climb, he urges himself, meanwhile kicking like a maniac with his left foot to spike clear a crack where he can nail in another piton to replace a bad hold. The dizzying freeness of a pull over an outcropping; the long reach up for a solid knob: He becomes aware of the work as a sort of game, a set of problems to be solved despite cold or thirst or fatigue (his hands are beginning to tire from the long night’s hauling, so that each hold hurts). Seen that way, it all changes. Now the wind is an opponent to be beaten, but also to be respected. The same of course is true of the rock, his principal opponent—and it is a daunting one, an opponent to challenge him to his utmost performance. He kicks into a slope of hard snow and ascends rapidly.

He looks down as Eileen kicks up the slope: quick reminder of the stakes of this game. The light on the top of her helmet makes her look like a deep-sea fish. She reaches him quickly; one long-gloved hand over the wall’s top, and she joins him with a smooth contraction of the biceps. Strong woman, Roger thinks, but decides to take another lead anyway. He is in a mood now where he doubts anyone but Dougal could lead as fast.

Up through the murk they climb.

An odd point is that the two climbers can scarcely communicate. Roger “hears” Eileen through varieties of tugging on the rope linking them. If he takes too long to study a difficult spot above, he feels a mild interrogatory tug on the rope. Two tugs when Roger is belaying means she’s on her way up. Very taut belaying betrays her belief that he is in a difficult section. So communication by rope can be fairly complex and subtle. But aside from it, and the infrequent shout with the mask pulled up to one side (which includes the punishment of a face full of spindrift) they are isolated. Mute partners. The exchange of lead goes well—one passes the other with a wave—the belay is ready. Up Eileen goes. Roger watches and holds the belay taut. Little time for contemplating their situation, thankfully; but while taking a rest on crampon points in steps chopped out with his ice axe, Roger feels acutely the thereness of his position, cut off from past or future, irrevocably in this moment, on this cliff face that drops away bottomlessly, extends up forever. Unless he climbs well, there will never be any other reality.

Then they reach a pitch where the fixed rope has been cut in the middle. Falling rock or ice has shaved it off. A bad sign. Now Roger must climb a ropeless pitch, hammering in pitons on his way to protect himself. Every meter above the last belay is a two-meter fall. . .

Roger never expected so hard a climb, and adrenaline banishes his exhaustion. He studies the first small section of a pitch that he knows is ten or twelve meters long, invisible in the dark snow flurries above. Probably Marie or Dougal climbed this crack the first time. He discovers that the crack just gives him room for his hands. Almost a vertical crack for a while, with steps cut into the ice. Up he creeps, crablike and surefooted. Now the crack widens and the ice is too far back in it to be of use—but the cramponed boots can be stuck in the crack and turned sideways, to stick tenuously into the thin ice coating the crack’s interior. One creates one’s own staircase, mostly using the tension of the twisted crampons. Now the crack abruptly closes and he has to look around, ah, there, a horizontal crack holding the empty piton. Very good—he hooks into it and is protected thus far. Perhaps the next piton is up the rampway to the right? Clawing to find the slight indentations that pass for handholds, crouching to lean up the ramp in a tricky walk—he wonders about the crampons here . . . ah. The next piton, right at eye level. Perfect. And then an area lined with horizontal strata about a meter in thickness, making a steep—a very steep—ladder.

And at the top of that pitch they find that the high-camp tent has been crushed under a load of snow. Avalanche. One corner of the tent flaps miserably.

Eileen comes up and surveys the damage in the double glare of their two headlamps. She points at the snow, makes a digging motion. The snow is so cold that it can’t bind together—moving it is like kicking coarse sand. They get to work, having no other choice. Eventually the tent is free, and as an added benefit they are warmed as well, although Roger feels he can barely move. The tent’s poles have been bent and some broken, and splints must be tied on before the tent can be redeployed. Roger kicks snow and ice chunks around the perimeter of the tent, until it is “certifiably bombproof,” as the leads would say. Except if another avalanche hits it, something they can’t afford to think about, as they can’t move the camp anywhere else. They simply have to risk it. Inside, they drop their packs and start the stove and put a pot of ice on. Then crampons off, and into sleeping bags. With the bags around them up to the waist, they can start sorting out the mess. There is spindrift on everything, but unless it gets right next to the stove it will not melt. Digging in the jumbled piles of gear for a packet of stew, Roger feels again how tired his body is. Oxygen masks off, so they can drink. “That was quite an excursion.” Raging thirst. They laugh with relief. He brushes an unused pot with his bare hand, guaranteeing a frostnip blister. Eileen calculates the chance of another avalanche without visible trepidation: “. . . so if the wind stays high enough we should be okay.” They discuss Stephan, and sniff like hunting dogs at the first scent of the stew. Eileen digs out the radio and calls down to the low camp. Stephan is sleeping, apparently without discomfort. “Morphine will do that,” Eileen says. They wolf down their meal in a few minutes.

The snow under the tent is torn up by boot prints, and Roger’s sleeping surface is unbelievably lumpy. He rolls over until he is wedged against the length of Eileen’s bag, coveting the warmth and hoping for a flatter surface. It is just as lumpy there. Eileen snuggles back into him and he can feel the potential for warmth; he can tell he will warm up. He wonders if getting into one bag would be worth the effort.

“Amazing what some people will do for fun,” Eileen comments drowsily.

Short laugh. “This isn’t the fun part.”

“Isn’t it? That climb . . .”

Big yawn. “That was some climb,” he agrees. No denying it.

“That was a great climb.”

“Especially since we didn’t get killed.”

“Yeah.” She yawns too, and Roger can feel a big wave of sleep about to break over him and sweep him away. “I hope Stephan gets better. Otherwise, we’ll have to take him down.”

In the next few days everyone has to go out several times in the storm, to keep the high camp supplied and to keep the fixed ropes free of ice. The work is miserable when they can do it, and sometimes they can’t: The wind on some days shuts down everything, and they can only huddle inside and hope the tents hold to the face. One dim day Roger is sitting with Stephan and Arthur in low camp. Stephan has recovered from the edema, and is anxious to climb again. “No hurry,” Roger says. “No one’s going anywhere anyway, and water in the lungs is serious business. You’ll have to take it slow—”

The tent door is unzipped and a plume of snow enters, followed by Dougal. He grins hello. The silence seems to call for some comment. “Pretty invigorating out there,” he says to fill it, and looks after a pot of tea. The shy moment having passed he chats cheerfully with Arthur about the weather. Tea done, he is off again; he is in a hurry to get a load up to the high camp. A quick grin and he is out the tent and gone. And it occurs to Roger that there are two types of climbers on their expedition (another duality): those who endure the bad weather and accidents and all the various difficulties of the face that are making this climb so uncomfortable, and those who, in some important peculiar way, enjoy all the trouble. In the former group are Eileen, who has the overriding responsibility for the climb—Marie, who is in such a hurry for the top—and Hans and Stephan, who are less experienced and would be just as happy to climb under sunny skies and with few serious difficulties. Each of these is steady and resolute, without a doubt; but they endure.

Dougal, on the other hand, Dougal and Arthur: Those two are quite clearly enjoying themselves, and the worse things get the more fun they seem to have. It is, Roger thinks, perverse. The reticent, solitary Dougal, seizing with quiet glee every possible chance to get out into the gale and climb. . . . “He certainly seems to be enjoying himself,” Roger says out loud, and Arthur laughs.

“That Dougal!” he cries. “What a Brit he is. You know climbers are the same everywhere. I come all the way to Mars and find just the people you’d expect to find on Ben Nevis. ’Course it stands to reason, doesn’t it? That New Scotland school and all.”

It is true; from the very start of the colonization, British climbers have been coming to Mars in search of new climbs, and many of them have stayed.

“And I’ll tell you,” Arthur continues, “those guys are never happier than when it’s blowing force ten and dumping snow by the dump truck. Or not snow, actually. More like sleet, that’s what they want. One degree rain, or wet snow. Perfect. And you know why they want it? So they can come back in at the end of the day and say, ‘Bloody desperate out today, eh mate?’ They’re all dying to be able to say that. ‘Bluidy dasperate, mite.’ Ha! Do you know what I mean? It’s like giving themselves a medal or something, I don’t know.”

Roger and Stephan, smiling, nod. “Very macho,” Stephan says.

“But Dougal!” Arthur cries. “Dougal! He’s too cool for that. He goes out there in the nastiest conditions he can possibly find—I mean look at him just now—he couldn’t wait to get back out there! Didn’t want to waste such a fine opportunity! And he climbs the hardest pitches he can find too. Have you seen him? You’ve seen the routes he leaves behind. Man, that guy could climb buttered glass in a hurricane. And what does he say about it? Does he say that was pretty bloody desperate? No! He says,” and Roger and Stephan join in, like a chorus: “How invigorating!”

“Yeah.” Stephan laughs. “Pretty invigorating out there all right.”

“The Scots,” Arthur says, giggling away. “Martian Scots, no less. I can’t believe it.”

“It’s not just the Scots are strange,” Roger points out. “What about you, Arthur? I notice you getting quite a giggle out of all this yourself, eh?”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Arthur says. “I’m having a good time. Aren’t you? I’ll tell you, once we got on the oxygen I started feeling great. Before that it wasn’t so easy. The air seemed really thin, I mean really thin. Elevations here don’t mean anything to me, I mean you haven’t got a proper sea level so what does elevation really mean, right? But your air is like nothing, man. So when we got on the bottle I could really feel the difference. A lifesaver. And then there’s the gravity! Now that’s wonderful. What is it, two-fifths of a gee? Practically nothing! You might as well be on the moon! As soon as I learned to balance properly, I really started to have a good time. Felt like Superman. On this planet it just isn’t that hard to go uphill, that’s all.” He laughs, toasts the other two with tea, “On Mars, I’m Superman.”

High-altitude pulmonary edema works fast, and one either succumbs or recovers very quickly. When Stephan’s lungs are completely clear Hans orders him to keep on maximum oxygen intake, and he is given a light load and ordered to take it slow and only move up from one low camp to the next. At this point, Roger thinks, it would be more difficult to get him back down the cliff than keep on going to the top—a common enough climbing situation, but one that no one talks about. Stephan complains about his reduced role, but agrees to go along with it. For his first few days back out Roger teams with him and keeps a sharp eye on him. But Stephan climbs fairly rapidly, and only complains about Roger’s solicitousness, and at the cold winds. Roger concludes he is all right.

Back to portering. Hans and Arthur are out in the lead, having a terrible time with a broad, steep rampart that they are trying to force directly. For a couple of days they are all stalled as the camps are stocked, and the lead party cannot make more than fifty or seventy-five meters a day. One evening on the radio while Hans describes a difficult overhang, Marie gets on the horn and starts in. “Well, I don’t know what’s going on up there, but with Stephan sucking down the oxygen and you all making centimeters a day we’re going to end up stuck on this damn cliff for good! What? I don’t give a fuck what your troubles are, mate—if you can’t make the lead you should bloody well get down and let somebody on there who can!”

“This is a big tuff band,” Arthur says defensively. “Once we get above this it’s more or less a straight shot to the top—”

“If you’ve got any bloody oxygen it is! Look what is this, a co-op? I didn’t join a fucking co-op!”

Roger watches Eileen closely. She is listening carefully to the exchange, her finger on the intercom, a deep furrow between her eyes, as if she is concentrating. He is surprised she has not already intervened. But she lets Marie get off another couple of blasts, and only then does she cut in. “Marie! Marie! Eileen here—”

“I know that.”

“Arthur and Hans are scheduled to come down soon. Meanwhile, shut up.”

And the next day Arthur and Hans put up three hundred meters of fixed rope and top the tuff band. When Hans announces this on the sunset radio call (Roger can just hear Arthur in the background, saying in falsetto, “So there! So there!”), a little smile twitches Eileen’s mouth before she congratulates them and gets on to the orders for the next day. Roger nods thoughtfully.

After they get above Hans and Arthur’s band, the slope lies back a bit and progress is more rapid, even in the continuous winds. The cliff is like a wall of immense irregular bricks which have been shoved back, so that each brick is set a bit behind the one below it. This great jumble of blocks and ledges and ramps makes for easy zigzag climbing, and good campsites. One day, Roger stops for a break and looks around. He is portering a load from middle camp to high camp, and has gotten ahead of Eileen. No one in sight. There is a cloud layer far below them, a gray rumpled blanket covering the whole world. Then there is the vertical realm of the cliff face, a crazed jumble of a block wall, which extends up to a very smooth, almost featureless cloud layer above them. Only the finest ripples, like waves, mar this gray ceiling. Floor and ceiling of cloud, wall of rock: It seems for a moment that this climb will go on eternally; it is a whole world, an infinite wall that they will climb forever. When has it been any different? Sandwiched like this, between cloud and cloud, it is easy not to believe in the past; perhaps the planet is a cliff, endlessly varied, endlessly challenging.

Then in the corner of Roger’s eye, a flash of color. He looks at the deep crack between the ledge he is standing on and the next vertical block. In the twisted ice nestles a patch of moss campion. Cushion of black-green moss, a circle of perhaps a hundred tiny dark pink flowers on it. After three weeks of almost unrelieved black and white, the color seems to burst out of the flowers and explode in his eyes. Such a dark, intense pink! Roger crouches to inspect them. The moss is very finely textured, and appears to be growing directly out of the rock, although no doubt there is some sand back in the crack. A seed or a scrap of moss must have been blown off the shield plateau and down the cliff, to take root here.

Roger stands, looks around again. Eileen has joined him, and she observes him sharply. He pulls his mask to the side. “Look at that,” he says. “You can’t get away from it anywhere.”

She shakes her head. Pulls her mask down. “It’s not the new landscape you hate so much,” she says. “I saw the way you were looking at that plant. And it’s just a plant after all, doing its best to live. No, I think you’ve made a displacement. You use topography as a symbol. It’s not the landscape, it’s the people. It’s the history we’ve made that you dislike. The terraforming is just part of it—the visible sign of a history of exploitation.”

Roger considers it. “We’re just another Terran colony, you mean. Colonialism—”

“Yes. That’s what you hate, see? Not topography, but history. Because the terraforming, so far, is a waste. It’s not being done for any good purpose.”

Uneasily Roger shakes his head. He has not thought of it like that, and isn’t sure he agrees: It’s the land that has suffered the most, after all. Although—

Eileen continues, “There’s some good in that, if you think about it. Because the landscape isn’t going to change back, ever. But history—history must change, by definition.”

And she takes the lead, leaving Roger to stare up after her.

The winds die in the middle of the night. The cessation of tent noise wakes Roger up. It is bitterly cold, even in his bag. It takes him a while to figure out what woke him; his oxygen is still hissing softly in his face. When he figures out what did it, he smiles. Checking his watch, he finds it is almost time for the mirror dawn. He sits up and turns on the stove for tea. Eileen stirs in her sleeping bag, opens one eye. Roger likes watching her wake; even behind the mask, the shift from vulnerable girl to expedition leader is easy to see. It’s like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: Coming to consciousness in the morning recapitulates maturation in life. Now all he needs is the Greek terminology, and he will have a scientific truth. Eileen pulls off her oxygen mask and rolls onto one elbow.

“Want some tea?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be a moment.”

“Hold the stove steady—I’ve got to pee.” She stands in the tent doorway, sticks a plastic urine scoop into the open fly of her pants, urinates out the door. “Wow! Sure is cold out. And clear! I can see stars.”

“Great. The wind’s died too, see?”

Eileen crawls back into her bag. They brew their tea with great seriousness, as if mixing delicate elixirs. Roger watches her drink.

“Do you really not remember us from before?” he asks.

“Nooo. . . .” she says slowly. “We were in our twenties, right? No, the first years I really remember are from my fifties, when I was training up in the caldera. Wall climbs, kind of like this, actually.” She sips. “But tell me about us.”

Roger shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It must be odd. To remember when the rest don’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I was probably awful at that age.”

“No no. You were an English major. You were fine.”

She laughs. “Hard to believe. Unless I’ve gone down-hill since.”

“No, not at all. You sure couldn’t have done all this back then.”

“I believe that. Getting half an expedition strung out all over a cliff, people sick—”

“No no. You’re doing fine.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t pretend this climb has gone well. I remember that much.”

“What hasn’t gone well hasn’t been your fault, as you must admit. In fact, given what has happened, we’re doing very well, I think. And that’s mostly your doing. Not easy with Frances and Stephan, and the storm, and Marie.”

“Marie!”

They laugh. “And this storm,” Roger says. “That night climb we did, getting Stephan down!” He sips his tea.

“That was a wild one,” Eileen agrees.

Roger nods. They have that. He gets up to pee, letting in a blast of intensely cold air. “My God that’s cold! What’s the temperature?”

“Sixty below, outside.”

“Oh. No wonder. I guess that cloud cover was doing us some good.” Outside it is still dark, and the ice-bearded cliff face gleams whitely under the stars.

“I like the way you lead us,” Roger says. “It’s a very light touch, but you still have things under control.” He zips the tent door closed and hustles back into his bag.

“More tea?”

“Definitely.”

“Here—roll back here, you’ll warm up faster, and I could use the insulation myself.”

Roger nods, shivering, and rolls his bag into the back side of hers, so they are both on one elbow, spooned together.

They sip tea and talk. Roger warms up, stops shivering. Pleasure of empty bladder, of contact with her. They finish the tea and doze for a bit in the warmth. Keeping the oxygen masks off prevents them from falling into a deep sleep. “Mirrors’ll be up soon.” “Yeah.” “Here—move over a bit.” Roger remembers when they were lovers, so long ago. Previous lifetime. She was the city dweller then, he the canyon crawler. Now . . . now all the comfort, warmth, and contact have given him an erection. He wonders if she can feel it through the two bags. Probably not. Hmmm. He remembers suddenly—the first time they made love was in a tent. He went to bed, and she came right into his little cubicle of the communal tent and jumped him! Remembering it does nothing to make his erection go away. He wonders if he can get away with a similar sort of act here. They are definitely pressed together hard. All that climbing together: Eileen pairs the climbing teams, so she must have enjoyed it too. And climbing together has that sort of dancelike teamwork—boulder ballet; and the constant kinetic juxtaposition, the felt relationship of the rope, has a certain sensuousness to it. It is a physical partnership, without a doubt. Of course all that can be true and climbing remain a profoundly nonsexual relationship—there are certainly other things to think about. But now . . .

Now she is dozing again. He thinks about her climbing, her leadership. The things she said to him back down in the first camps, when he was so depressed. A sort of teacher, really.

Thoughts of that lead him to memories of his past, of the failed work. For the first time in many days his memory presents him with the usual parade of the past, the theater of ghosts. How can he ever assume such a long and fruitless history? Is it even possible?

Mercifully the tea’s warmth, and the mere fact of lying prone, have their way with him, and he dozes off.

The day dawns. Sky like a sheet of old paper, the sun a big bronze coin below them to the east. The sun! Wonderful to see sunlight, shadows. In the light the cliff face looks sloped back an extra few degrees, and it seems there is an end to it up there. Eileen and Roger are in the middle camp, and after ferrying a load to the high camp they follow the rope’s zigzag course up the narrow ledges. The fine, easy face, the sunlight, the dawn’s talk, the plains of Tharsis so far below: All conspire to please Roger. He is climbing more strongly than ever, hopping up the ledges, enjoying the variety of forms exhibited by the rock. Such a beauty to rough plated angular broken rock.

The face continues to lie back, and at the top of one ledge ramp they find themselves at the bottom of a giant amphitheater filled with snow. And the top of this white half bowl is . . . sky. The top of the escarpment, apparently. Certainly nothing but sky above it. Dougal and Marie are about to start up it, and Roger joins them. Eileen stays behind to collect the others.

The technically difficult sections of the climb are done. The upper edge of the immense cliff has been rounded off by wind erosion, broken into alternating ridges and ravines. There they stand at the bottom of a big bowl broken in half; at bottom the slope is about forty degrees, and it curves up to a final wall that is perhaps sixty degrees. But the bottom of the bowl is filled with deep drifts of light, dry, granular snow, sheeted with a hard layer of windslab. Crossing the stuff is hard work, and they trade the lead often. The leader crashes through the windslab and sinks to his or her knees, or even to the waist, and thereafter has to lift a foot over the windslab above, crash through again, and in that way struggle uphill through the snow. They secure the rope with deadmen—empty oxygen tanks in this case, buried deep in the snow. Roger takes his lead, and quickly begins to sweat under the glare of the sun. Each step is an effort, worse than the step before because of the increasing angle of the slope. After ten minutes he gives the lead back to Marie. Twenty minutes later it is his turn again—the other two can endure it no longer than he can. The steepness of the final wall is actually a relief, as there is less snow.

They stop to strap crampons on their boots. Starting again, they fall into a slow steady rhythm. Kick, step, kick, step, kick, step. Glare of light breaking on snow. The taste of sweat.

When Roger’s tenth turn in the lead comes, he sees that he is within striking distance of the top of the wall, and he resolves not to give up the lead again. The snow is soft under windslab, and he must lean up, dig away a bit with his ice axe, swim up to the new foothold, dig away some more—on and on, gasping into the oxygen mask, sweating profusely in the suddenly overwarm clothing. But he’s getting closer. Dougal is behind him. He finds the pace again and sticks to it. Nothing but the pace. Twenty steps, rest. Again. Again. Again. Sweat trickles down his spine, even his feet might warm up. Sun glaring off the steep snow.

He stumbles onto flatness. It feels like some terrible error, like he might fall over the other side. But he is on the edge of a giant plateau, which swoops up in a broad conical shape, too big to be believed. He sees a flat boulder almost clear of snow and staggers over to it. Dougal is beside him, pulling his oxygen mask to one side of his face: “Looks like we’ve topped the wall!” Dougal says, looking surprised. Gasping, Roger laughs.

As with all cliff climbs, topping out is a strange experience. After a month of vertical reality, the huge flatness seems all wrong—especially this snowy flatness that extends like a broad fan to each side. The snow ends at the broken edge of the cliff behind them, extends high up the gentle slope of the conical immensity before them. It is easy to believe they stand on the flank of the biggest volcano in the solar system.

“I guess the hard part is over,” Dougal says matter-of-factly.

“Just when I was getting in shape,” says Roger, and they both laugh.

A snowy plateau, studded with black rocks, and some big mesas. To the east, empty air: far below, the forests of Tharsis. To the northwest, a hill sloping up forever.

Marie arrives and dances a little jig on the boulder. Dougal hikes back to the wall and drops into the amphitheater again, to carry up another load. Not much left to bring; they are almost out of food. Eileen arrives, and Roger shakes her hand. She drops her pack and gives him a hug. They pull some food from the packs and eat a cold lunch while watching Hans, Arthur, and Stephan start up the bottom of the bowl. Dougal is already almost down to them.

When they all reach the top, in a little string led by Dougal, the celebrating really begins. They drop their packs, they hug, they shout, Arthur whirls in circles to try to see it all at once, until he makes himself dizzy. Roger cannot remember feeling exactly like this before.

“Our cache is a few kilometers south of here,” Eileen says after consulting her maps. “If we get there tonight we can break out the champagne.”

They hike over the snow in a line, trading the lead to break a path. It is a pleasure to walk over flat ground, and spirits are so light that they make good time. Late in the day—a full day’s sunshine, their first since before base camp—they reach their cache, a strange camp full of tarped-down, snowdrifted piles, marked by a lava causeway that ends a kilometer or so above the escarpment.

Among the new equipment is a big mushroom tent. They inflate it and climb in through the lock and up onto the tent floor for the night’s party. Suddenly they are inside a giant transparent mushroom, bouncing over the soft clear raised floor like children on a feather bed; the luxury is excessive, ludicrous, inebriating. Champagne corks pop and fly into the transparent dome of the tent roof, and in the warm air they quickly get drunk, and tell each other how marvelous the climb was, how much they enjoyed it—the discomfort, exhaustion, cold, misery, danger, and fear already dissipating in their minds, already turning into something else.

The next day Marie is not at all enthusiastic about the remainder of their climb. “It’s a walk up a bloody hill! And a long walk at that!”

“How else are you going to get down?” Eileen asks acerbically. “Jump?”

It’s true; the arrangement they have made forces them to climb the cone of the volcano. There is a railway that descends from the north rim of the caldera to Tharsis and civilization; it uses for a rampway one of the great lava spills that erase the escarpment to the north. But first they have to get to the railway, and climbing the cone is probably the fastest, and certainly the most interesting, way to do that.

“You could climb down the cliff alone,” Eileen adds sarcastically. “First solo descent . . .”

Marie, apparently feeling the effects of last night’s champagne, merely snarls and stalks off to snap herself into one of the cart harnesses. Their new collection of equipment fits into a wheeled cart, which they must pull up the slope. For convenience they are already wearing the space suits that they will depend on higher up; during this ascent they will climb right out of most of Mars’s new atmosphere. They look funny in their silvery green suits and clear helmets, Roger thinks; it reminds him of his days as a canyon guide, when such suits were necessary all over Mars. The common band of the helmet radios makes this a more social event than the cliff climb, as does the fact that all seven of them are together, four hauling the cart, three walking freely ahead or behind. From climb to hike: The first day is a bit anticlimactic.

On the snowy southern flank of the volcano, signs of life appear everywhere. Goraks circle them by day, on the lookout for a bit of refuse; at dusk ball owls dip around the tent like bats. On the ground Roger sees marmots on the boulders and volcanic knobs, and in the system of ravines cut into the plateau they find twisted stands of Hokkaido pine, chir pine, and noctis juniper. Arthur chases a pair of Dall sheep with their curved horns, and they see prints in the snow that look like bear tracks. “Yeti,” Dougal says. One mirror dusk they catch sight of a pack of snow wolves, strung out over the slope to the west. Stephan spends his spare time at the edges of the new ravines, sketching and peering through binoculars. “Come on, Roger,” he says. “Let me show you those otterines I saw yesterday.”

“Bunch of mutants,” Roger grumbles, mostly to give Stephan a hard time. But Eileen is watching him to see his response, and dubiously he nods. What can he say? He goes with Stephan to the ravine to look for wildlife. Eileen laughs at him, eyes only, affectionately.

Onward, up the great hill. It’s a six-percent grade, very regular, and smooth except for the ravines and the occasional small crater or lava knob. Below them, where the plateau breaks to become the cliff, the shield is marked by some sizable mesas—features, Hans says, of the stress that broke off the shield. Above them, the conical shape of the huge volcano is clearly visible; the endless hill they climb slopes away to each side equally, and far away and above they see the broad flat peak. They’ve got a long way to go. Wending between the ravines is easy, and the esthetic of the climb, its only point of technical interest, becomes how far they can hike every day. It’s 250 kilometers from the escarpment up to the crater rim; they try for twenty-five a day, and sometimes make thirty. It feels odd to be so warm; after the intense cold of the cliff climb, the space suits and the mushroom tent create a distinct disconnection from the surroundings.

Hiking as a group is also odd. The common band is a continuous conversation, that one can switch on or off at will. Even when not in a mood to talk, Roger finds it entertaining to listen. Hans talks about the areology of the volcano, and he and Stephan discuss the genetic engineering that makes the wildlife around them possible. Arthur points out features that the others might take for granted. Marie complains of boredom. Eileen and Roger laugh and add a comment once in a while. Even Dougal clicks into the band around midafternoon, and displays a quick wit, spurring Arthur toward one amazing discovery after another. “Look at that, Arthur, it’s a yeti.”

“What! You’re kidding! Where?”

“Over there, behind that rock.”

Behind the rock is Stephan, relieving himself. “Don’t come over here!”

“You liar,” Arthur says.

“It must have slipped off. I think a Weddell fox was chasing it.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Yes.”

Eileen: “Let’s switch to a private band. I can’t hear you over all the rest.”

Roger: “Okay. Band 33.”

“Why that one?”

“Ah—” It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of weird fact his memory will pop up with. “It may be our private band from our first hike together.”

She laughs. They spend the afternoon behind the others, talking.

One morning Roger wakes early, just after mirror dawn. The dull horizontal rays of the quartet of parhelia light their tent. Roger turns his head, looks past his pillow, through the tent’s clear floor. Thin soil over rock, a couple of meters below. He sits up; the floor gives a little, like a gel bed. He walks over the soft plastic slowly so that he will not bounce any of the others, who are sleeping out where the cap of the roof meets the gills of the floor. The tent really does resemble a big clear mushroom; Roger descends clear steps in the side of the stalk to get to the lavatory, located down in what would be the mushroom’s volva. Emerging he finds a sleepy Eileen sponging down in the little bath next to the air compressor and regulator. “Good morning,” she says. “Here, will you get my back?”

She hands him the sponge, turns around. Vigorously he rubs down the hard muscles of her back, feeling a thrill of sensual interest. That slope, where back becomes bottom: beautiful.

She looks over her shoulder: “I think I’m probably clean now.”

“Ah.” He grins. “Maybe so.” He gives her the sponge. “I’m going for a walk before breakfast.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Roger dresses, goes through the lock, walks over to the head of the meadow they are camped by: a surarctic meadow, covered with moss and lichen, and dotted with mutated edelweiss and saxifrage. A light frost coats everything in a sparkling blanket of white, and Roger feels his boots crunch as he walks.

Movement catches his eye and he stops to observe a white-furred mouse hare, dragging a loose root back to its hole. There is a flash and flutter, and a snow finch lands in the hole’s entrance. The tiny hare looks up from its work, chatters at the finch, nudges past it with its load. The finch does its bird thing, head shifting instantaneously from one position to the next and then freezing in place. It follows the hare into the hole. Roger has heard of this, but he has never seen it. The hare scampers out, looking for more food. The finch appears, its head snaps from one position to the next. An instant swivel and it is staring at Roger. It flies over to the scampering hare, dive-bombs it, flies off. The hare has disappeared down another hole.

Roger crosses the ice stream in the meadow, crunches up the bank. There beside a waist-high rock is an odd pure white mass, with a white sphere at the center of it. He leans over to inspect it. Slides a gloved finger over it. Some kind of ice, apparently. Unusual-looking.

The sun rises and a flood of yellow light washes over the land. The yellowish white half globe of ice at his feet looks slick. It quivers; Roger steps back. The ice is shaking free of the rock wall. The middle of the bulge cracks. A beak stabs out of the globe, breaks it open. Busy little head in there. Blue feathers, long crooked black beak, beady little black eyes. “An egg?” Roger says. But the pieces are definitely ice—he can make them melt between his gloved fingers, and feel their coldness. The bird (though its legs and breast seem to be furred, and its wings stubby, and its beak sort of fanged) staggers out of the white bubble and shakes itself like a dog throwing off water, although it looks dry. Apparently the ice is some sort of insulation—a home for the night, or no—for the winter, no doubt. Yes. Formed of spittle or something, walling off the mouth of a shallow cave. Roger has never heard of such a thing, and he watches openmouthed as the bird-thing takes a few running steps and glides away.

A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

That afternoon they hike out of the realm even of the surarctic meadow. No more ground cover, no more flowers, no more small animals. Nothing now but cracks filled with struggling moss, and great mats of otoo lichen. Sometimes it is as if they walk on a thin carpet of yellow, green, red, black—splotches of color like those seen in the orbicular jasper, spread out as far as they can see in every direction, a carpet crunchy with frost in the mornings, a bit damp in the midday sun, a carpet crazed and parti-colored. “Amazing stuff,” Hans mutters, poking at it with a finger. “Half our oxygen is being made by this wonderful symbiosis. . .”

Late that afternoon, after they have stopped and set up the tent and tied it down to several rocks, Hans leaps through the lock waving his atmosphere kit and hopping up and down. “Listen,” he says, “I just radioed the summit station for confirmation of this. There’s a high-pressure system over us right now. We’re at fourteen thousand meters above the datum, but the barometric pressure is up to three hundred fifty millibars because there’s a big cell of air moving over the flank of the volcano this week.” The others stare. Hans says, “Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” exclaim three voices at once.

“High-pressure zone,” Roger says unhelpfully.

“Well,” Hans says, standing at attention, “it’s enough to breathe! Just enough, but enough, I say. And of course no one’s ever done it before—done it this high before, I mean. Breathed free Martian air.”

“You’re kidding!”

“So we can establish the height record right here and now! I propose to do it, and I invite whoever wants to to join me.”

“Now wait a minute,” Eileen says.

But everyone wants to do it.

“Wait a minute,” Eileen says. “I don’t want everyone taking off their helmets and keeling over dead up here, for God’s sake. They’ll revoke my license. We have to do this in an orderly fashion. And you—” She points at Stephan. “You can’t do this. I forbid it.”

Stephan protests loudly and for a long time, but Eileen is adamant, and Hans agrees. “The shock could start your edema again, for sure. None of us should do it for long. But for a few minutes, it will go. Just breathe through the mesh face masks, to warm the air.”

“You can watch and save us if we keel over,” Roger tells Stephan.

“Shit,” Stephan says. “All right. Do it.”

They gather just out from under the cap of the tent, where Stephan can, theoretically, drag them back through the lock if he has to. Hans checks his barometer one last time, nods at them. They stand in a rough circle, facing in. Everyone begins to unclip helmet latches.

Roger gets his unclipped first—the years as canyon guide have left their mark on him, in little ways like this—and he lifts the helmet up. As he places it on the ground the cold strikes his head and makes it throb. He sucks down a breath: dry ice. He refuses the urge to hyperventilate, fearful he will chill his lungs too fast and damage them. Regular breathing, he thinks, in and out. In and out. Though Dougal’s mouth is covered by a mesh mask, Roger can tell he is grinning widely. Funny how the upper face reveals that. Roger’s eyes sting, his chest is frozen inside, he sucks down the frigid air and every sense quickens, breath by breath. The edges of pebbles a kilometer away are sharp and clear. Thousands of edges. “Like breathing nitrous oxide!” Arthur cries in a lilting high voice. He whoops like a little kid and the sound is odd, distant. Roger walks in a circle, on a quilt of rust lava and gaily colored patches of lichen. Intense awareness of the process of breathing seems to connect his consciousness to everything he can see; he feels like a strangely shaped lichen, struggling for air like all the rest. Jumble of rock, gleaming in the sunlight. “Let’s build a cairn,” he says to Dougal, and can hear his voice is wrong somehow. Slowly they step from rock to rock, picking them up and putting them in a pile. The interior of his chest is perfectly defined by each intoxicating breath. Others watch bright-eyed, sniffing, involved in their own perceptions. Roger sees his hands blur through space, sees the flesh of Dougal’s face pulsing pinkly, like the flowers of moss campion. Each rock is a piece of Mars, he seems to float as he walks, the size of the volcano gets bigger, bigger, bigger; finally he is seeing it at true size. Stephan strides among them grinning through his helmet, holding up both hands. It’s been ten minutes. The cairn is not yet done, but they can finish it tomorrow. “I’ll make a messenger canister for it tonight!” Dougal wheezes happily. “We can all sign it.” Stephan begins to round them all up. “Incredibly cold!” Roger says, still looking around as if he has never seen any of it before—any of anything.

Dougal and he are the last two into the lock; they shake hands. “Invigorating, eh?” Roger nods. “Very fine air.”

But the air is just part of all the rest of it—part of the world, not of the planet. Right? “That’s right,” Roger says, staring through the tent wall down the endless slope of the mountain.

That night they celebrate with champagne again, and the party gets wild as they become sillier and sillier. Marie tries to climb the inner wall of the tent by grabbing the soft material in her hands, and falls to the floor repeatedly; Dougal juggles boots; Arthur challenges all comers to arm wrestle, and wins so quickly they decide he is using “a trick,” and disallow his victories; Roger tells government jokes (“How many ministers does it take to pour a cup of coffee?”), and institutes a long and lively game of spoons. He and Eileen play next to each other and in the dive for spoons they land on each other. Afterward, sitting around the heater singing songs, she sits at his side and their legs and shoulders press together. Kid stuff, familiar and comfortable, even to those who can’t remember their own childhoods.

So that, that night, after everyone has gone out to the little sleeping nooks at the perimeter of the tent’s circular floor, Roger’s mind is full of Eileen. He remembers sponging her down that morning. Her playfulness this evening. Climbing in the storm. The long nights together in wall tents. And once again the distant past returns—his stupid, uncontrollable memory provides images from a time so far gone that it shouldn’t matter anymore . . . but it does. It was near the end of that trip too. She sneaked into his little cubicle and jumped him! Even though the thin panels they used to create sleeping rooms were actually much less private than what they have here; this tent is big, the air regulator is loud, the seven beds are well spaced and separated from each other by ribbing—clear ribbing, it is true, but now the tent is dark. The cushioned floor under him (so comfortable that Marie calls it uncomfortable) gives as he moves, without even trembling a few feet away, and it never makes a sound. In short, he could crawl silently over to her bed, and join her as she once joined him, and it would be entirely discreet. Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it? Even three hundred years later? There isn’t much time left on this climb, and as they say, fortune favors the bold. . . .

He is about to move when suddenly Eileen is at his side, shaking his arm. In his ear she says, “I have an idea.”

And afterward, teasing: “Maybe I do remember you.”

They trek higher still, into the zone of rock. No animals, plants, insects; no lichen; no snow. They are above it all, so high on the volcano’s cone that it is getting difficult to see where their escarpment drops to the forests; two hundred kilometers away and fifteen kilometers below, the scarp’s edge can only be distinguished because that’s where the broad ring of snow ends. They wake up one morning and find a cloud layer a few k’s downslope, obscuring the planet below. They stand on the side of an immense conical island in an even greater sea of cloud: the clouds a white wave-furrowed ocean, the volcano a great rust rock, the sky a low dark violet dome, all on a scale the mind can barely encompass. To the east, poking out of the cloud sea, three broad peaks—an archipelago—the three Tharsis volcanoes in their well-spaced line, princes to the king Olympus. Those volcanoes, fifteen hundred kilometers away, give them a little understanding of the vastness visible. . .

The rock up here is smoothly marbled, like a plain of petrified muscles. Individual pebbles and boulders take on an eerie presence, as if they are debris scattered by Olympian gods. Hans’s progress is greatly slowed by his inspection of these rocks. One day, they find a mound that snakes up the mountain like an esker or a Roman road; Hans explains it was a river of lava harder than the surrounding basalt, which has eroded away to reveal it. They use it as an elevated road and hike on it for all of one long day.

Roger picks up his pace, leaves the cart and the others behind. In a suit and helmet, on the lifeless face of Mars: Centuries of memory flood him, he finds his breathing clotted and uneven. This is my country, he thinks. This is the transcendent landscape of my youth. It’s still here. It can’t be destroyed. It will always be here. He finds that he has almost forgotten, not what it looks like, but what it feels like to be in such wilderness. That thought is the thorn in the exhilaration that mounts with every step. Stephan and Eileen, the other two out of harness this day, are following him up. Roger notices them and frowns. I don’t want to talk about it, he thinks. I want to be alone in it.

But Stephan hikes right by him, looking overwhelmed by the desolate rock expanse, the world of rock and sky. Roger can’t help but grin.

And Eileen is content just to walk with him.

Next day, however, in the harness of the cart, Stephan plods beside him and says, “Okay, Roger, I can see why you love this. It is sublime, truly. And in just the way we want the sublime—it’s a pure landscape, a pure place. But. . .” He plods on several more steps, and Roger and Eileen wait for him to continue, pulling in step together. “But there is life on Mars. And it seems to me that you don’t need the whole planet this way. This will always be here. The atmosphere will never rise this high, so you’ll always have this. And the world down below, with all that life growing everywhere—it’s beautiful.” The beautiful and the sublime, Roger thinks. Another duality. “And maybe we need the beautiful more than the sublime?”

They haul on. Eileen looks at the mute Roger. He cannot think what to say. She smiles. “If Mars can change, so can you.”

“The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”

That night Roger seeks out Eileen, and makes love to her with a peculiar urgency; and when they are done he finds himself crying a bit, he doesn’t know why; and she holds his head against her breast, until he shifts, and turns, and falls asleep.

And the following afternoon, after climbing all day up a hill that grows ever gentler, that always looks as if it will peak out just over the horizon above them, they reach flattened ground. An hour’s hike, and they reach the caldera wall. They have climbed Olympus Mons.

They look down into the caldera. It is a gigantic brown plain, ringed by the round cliffs of the caldera wall. Smaller ringed cliffs inside the caldera drop to collapse craters, then terrace the round plain with round depressions, which overlap each other. The sky overhead is almost black; they can see stars, and Jupiter. Perhaps the high evening star is Earth. The thick blue rind of the atmosphere actually starts below them, so that they stand on a broad island in the middle of a round blue band, capped by a dome of black sky. Sky, caldera, ringed stone desolation. A million shades of brown, tan, red, rust. The planet Mars.

Along the rim a short distance stands the ruins of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery. When Roger sees it his jaw drops. It is brown, and the main structure appears to have been a squarish boulder the size of a large house, carved and excavated until it is more air than stone. While it was occupied it must have been hermetically sealed, with airlocks in the doorways and windows fixed in place; now the windows are gone, and side buildings leaning against the main structure are broken-walled, roofless, open to the black sky. A chest-high wall of stone extends away from the outbuildings and along the rim; colored prayer wheels and prayer flags stick up from it on thin poles. Under the light touch of the stratosphere the wheels spin slowly, the flags flap limply.

“No.”

“The caldera is as big as Luxembourg.”

“You’re kidding.”

Finally even Marie is impressed. She walks to the prayer wall, touches a prayer wheel with one hand; looks out at the caldera, and from time to time spins the wheel, absently.

“Invigorating view, eh?”

It will take a few days to hike around the caldera to the railway station, so they set up camp next to the abandoned lamasery, and the heap of brown stone is joined by a big mushroom of clear plastic, filled with colorful gear.

The climbers wander in the later afternoon, chatting quietly over rocks, or the view into the shadowed caldera. Several sections of the ringed inner cliffs look like good climbing.

The sun is about to descend behind the rim to the west, and great shafts of light spear the indigo sky below them, giving the mountaintop an eerie indirect illumination. The voices on the common band are rapt and quiet, fading away to silence.

Roger gives Eileen a squeeze of the hand and wanders off by himself. The ground is black, the rock cracked in a million pieces, as if the gods have been sledgehammering it for eons. Nothing but rock. He clicks off the common band. It is nearly sunset. Great lavender shafts of light spear the purple murk to the sides, and overhead, stars shine in the blackness. All the shadows stretch off to infinity. The bright bronze coin of the sun grows big and oblate, slows in its descent. Roger circles the lamasery. Its western walls catch the last of the sun and cast a warm orange glaze over the ground and the ruined outbuildings. Roger kicks around the low prayer wall, replaces a fallen stone. The prayer wheels still spin—some sort of light wood, he thinks, cylinders carved with big black eyes and cursive lettering, and white paint, red paint, yellow paint, all chipped away. Roger stares into a pair of stoic Asian eyes, gives the wheel a slow spin, feels a little bit of vertigo. World everywhere. Even here. The flattened sun lands on the rim, across the caldera to the west. A faint gust of wind lofts a long banner out, ripples it slowly in dark orange air—“All right!” Roger says aloud, and gives the wheel a final hard spin and steps away, circles dizzily, tries to take in everything at once. “All right! All right. I give in. I accept.”

He wipes red dust from the glass of his faceplate and recalls the little bird-thing, pecking free of clouded ice. A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.