The Martians

Chapter 24 What Matters

For a long time Peter Clayborne worked in hydrology. His co-op was called Noachian Aquifer Redistribution, or NAR. He joined because he got interested as an ecologist in the work, and because he was deeply involved at the time with a woman who had been in the co-op since her teens. Her seniority was one of the things that led to problems in their relationship later, though clearly that was only a symptom rather than a cause. Seniority in their co-op created some of the usual advantages in “pay, say, and time away,” but the interests of everyone in the organization were substantially the same. Potential members were chosen for invitation by selection committees, and sometimes had to join a waiting list if the co-op was stable in size. Peter had waited for four years before resignations, retirements, and a few accidental deaths opened up a spot. After that he was a member and, like everyone else, working twenty hours a week, voting on all membership policy issues, and receiving an income share and insurances. The pay scale ran the full legal magnitude, based on work time, contributions to efficiency and productivity, and seniority. He started at twenty percent max, like everyone, and found his needs were satisfied. Some years he sank to the minimum recompense, which supported him both while working and in his time off, which was six months every m-year. It was a good life.

But he and his partner slowly drifted apart, and then broke up. It wasn’t Peter’s idea. After that he took a series of sabbaticals and did various things on them, all away from Argyre and the membership of NAR. He staffed for the duma in Mangala; he lived on a township in the northern sea; he planted orchards on Lunae Planitia. Everywhere he was haunted by the memory of his partner from NAR.

Eventually time passed and had its way with him; not so much a matter of forgetting as of bleaching, or numbing. We look at the past through the wrong end of the telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us.

It was a cold northern spring, orchards budding and blossoming all around him for as far as the eye could see, and all of a sudden he felt free of his past, launched on a new life. He decided to take a tour he had long been contemplating along the south rims of the great Marineris canyons—Ius, Melas, Coprates, and Eos. This famous long walk was to be a mark for him, a celebration of his transition to a new existence. When he finished it he would return to Argyre and NAR, and decide then whether he could continue living and working there or not.

Near the end of this trek which turned out to be a hard slog through many deep drifts of snow, though the views down into the canyons were superb, of course—he came on a Swiss alpine hut, set right on the rim overlooking Coprates Chasma, at the Dover Gate. Like most Swiss huts it was actually a very extensive stone hotel and restaurant, with a rimside terrace that would seat hundreds, but located all by itself in the wilderness, away from any roads or pistes. Nevertheless on that evening there were a lot of people there—walkers, climbers, fliers—and the terrace café tables were full.

Peter passed through the crowd and went directly to the rail of the flagged terrace, to have a look down. Directly below the hut great canyon narrowed, and the scar of the old flood marked the whole floor of it, from wall to wall. A gray remnant glacier still lay in the lowest trough of the canyon, all covered with gravel and pocked with potholes and meltponds and fallen seracs. The cliff of the canyon’s opposing wall stood massive and stratified, and the stupendous gulf of empty air shimmered and glittered insubstantially in the late-afternoon light, with the hut standing over it isolate and small. Perched on the edge of a world.

In the hut’s restaurant it was even more crowded than the terrace, and so Peter went back outside. He was content to wait; the late sun was illuminating clouds passing just over their heads, turning them to swirling masses of pink spun glass. No one noticed or cared about a solitary observer standing at the rail; indeed there were others along it doing the same thing.

Near sunset it began to get cold, but the hikers who passed by there were used to cold, and dressed for it, and all the tables on the terrace remained full. Finally Peter went to the headwaiter to get on a waiting list, and the waiter pointed to one of the two-person tables right on the railing, down near the end of the terrace, occupied by a single man. “Shall I see if he’ll share?”

“Sure,” Peter said. “If he doesn’t mind.”

The waiter went and asked the man, then waved Peter over.

“Thanks,” Peter said as he approached, and the man nodded as he sat across from him.

“No problem.” He appeared to be nursing a beer. Then his meal came, and he gestured at it.

“Please go ahead,” Peter said, looking at the day’s menu. Stew, bread, salad; he nodded at the passing waiter, pointing at the menu, and ordered also a glass of wine, the local zinfandel.

The man had not been reading anything, and now Peter wasn’t either. They looked at clouds tumbling by, the canyon below, and the great shattered wall opposite them, shadows stretching long to the east, emphasizing the depth of every little embayment, the sharpness of every spur.

“What textures,” Peter ventured. He had not made conversation for a long time.

“You can see how deep the Brighton Gully really is from here,” the man agreed. “That’s rare from any other angle.”

“Have you climbed it?”

The man nodded. “It’s mostly a hike, though. All of it, now, if you take the ladder trail, which most people do.”

“I’ll bet that’s fun.”

A squint. “It is if you’re with a fun group.”

“You’ve done it often then?”

Swallow. “Guide.” Another swallow. “I guide groups in the canyonlands. Treks, climbs, boating.”

“Oh I see. How nice.”

“It is. And you?”

“Noachian Aquatic Redistribution. A co-op in Argyre. On leave now, but going back.”

The man nodded and stuck out a hand, mouth full. Peter took it and shook. “Peter Clayborne.”

The man’s eyes rounded, and he swallowed. “Roger Clayborne.”

“Hey. Nice name. Nice to meet you.”

“You too. I don’t often meet other Claybornes.”

“Me neither.”

“Are you related to Ann Clayborne?”

“She’s my mom.”

“Oh! I didn’t know she had kids.”

“Just me. Do you know her?”

“No no. Just stories, you know. Not related, I don’t think. My folks came on the second wave, from England.”

“Oh I see. Well—cousins, no doubt, somewhere back there.”

“Sure. From the first Clayborne.”

“Some kind of potter.”

“Maybe so. Do you spell yours with an i or a y?”

“Y.”

“Oh yeah. Me too. I have a friend spells his with an i.”

“Not a cousin then.”

“Or a French cousin.”

“Yeah sure.”

“E on the end?”

“Yeah sure.”

“Me too.”

The waiter dropped off Peter’s meal. Peter ate, and as Roger had finished, and was nursing a grappa, Peter asked him about himself.

“I’m a guide,” he said with a shrug.

He had gotten into it in his youth, he said, when the planet was raw, and had stayed with it ever since. “I liked showing people my favorite places. Showing them how beautiful it was.” That had gotten him into various red groups, though he did not seem to mind the terraforming in the way Peter’s mom did. He shrugged when Peter asked. “It makes it safer, having an atmosphere. And water around. Safer in some ways, anyway. Cliffs fall on people. I’ve tried to keep the canyons free of reservoirs, because they saturate the sidewalls and cause collapses. We had some successes early on. The dam down there at Ganges, keeping the north sea out of the canyons, that was our doing. And the removal of the Noctis Dam.”

“I didn’t know it was gone.”

“Yeah. Anyway that’s about all I’ve done for the red cause. I thought about getting more into it, but . . . I never did. You?”

Peter pushed his stew bowl away, drank some water. “I guess I’m what you’d call a green.”

Roger’s eyebrows went up, but he made no comment.

“Ann doesn’t approve, of course. It’s caused problems between us. But I spent my whole childhood indoors. I’ll never be outdoors enough.”

“The suits didn’t suit you.”

“No they didn’t. Could you stand them?”

Roger shrugged. “I was willing to put up with them. I felt like I was still out there. Although now that I can get my face in the wind, I like that quite a bit. But the primal landscape—it had a quality. . . .” He shook his head to show he was unable to express it. “That’s gone now.”

“Really? I find it just as wild as ever.” Gesturing over the side of the railing, where they could now see sheets of sunlit snow falling from the bottom of one dark cloud.

“Well, wild. It’s a tricky word. When I was first guiding, that’s when I would have said things were wild. But ever since the air came, and the great lakes, it doesn’t seem so wild to me. It’s a park. That’s what the Burroughs Protocol means, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You know—the big land-use thing.”

Peter shook his head. “Must have been a while ago.”

Roger shook his. “Not so long.”

“But Burroughs was flooded, back when . . .”

“Sure. Every spring, like clockwork. But I worry how it’s been starting later, and running harder. I think there’s something we’re not catching that’s causing these long cold winters.”

“I thought this winter was pretty warm, myself.”

Then the members of a band crowded by their table, carrying their instruments and equipment. While they set up their amps and music stands on a little platform at the terrace’s railing right by the two Claybornes, a great number of masked people poured onto the terrace, as if the band had led in some kind of parade. Roger stopped their waiter as he rushed by. “What’s this?”

“Oh it’s Fassnacht, didn’t you know? It’ll start getting crowded now that the train is in. Everyone will be here tonight, you’re lucky you got here early.” From one of his vest pockets he pulled two small white domino masks out of a nestled stack and tossed them onto their table. “Enjoy.”

Peter pulled the masks apart, gave one to Roger. They put them on and grinned at the odd look that resulted. As the waiter had predicted, the terrace and the whole complex—hotel, restaurant, outbuildings, co-op quarters—were all quickly filling with people. Most of the masks people had on were much more elaborate than Roger’s and Peter’s. Apparently their wearers were locals of the region, mostly Swiss in the mountaineering and tourist trade; also a lot of Arabs from Nectaris Fossae, and from roving caravans rolling in for the night. The equinoctial sunset poured light directly up the great gorge of the canyon, illuminating everything horizontally; indeed it appeared that the sun was well below them, the light shining upward. Their terrace the edge of the world; the sky dark, and filled now with twirling flakes of snow, like bits of mica.

The band started to play. Trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, bass, drums. They were loud. From Munchen, down to the south in Protva Vallis. Clearly favorites of the local Swiss—a privilege to have them there, you could tell by the enthusiastic response. Hot jazz blaring in the cold dusk.

Peter and Roger ordered a pitcher of dark beer and cheered them on with the rest of the crowd. Some maskers danced, many sat, some stood and wandered from table to table, chatting with seated people or each other. Some groups had their waiters take rounds of grappa up to the band between songs, and happily the band members downed them, until they were saturated, at which point they passed the drinks out to people in the front row; two or three times these medicinal toasts came to Roger and Peter, who drained them in tandem. Without intending to they got a bit drunk. In the frequent “kleines pauses” they continued talking, but the noise of the crowd obscured their hearing, and they often found themselves misunderstanding each other.

Eventually, after a rousing final number (“King of the Zulus,” with spectacular trumpeting by “our star, Dieter Lauterbaun!”), the band ended their first set. The two men ordered another round of grappa, which at that point had actually begun to taste good to them, even to become the one true ambrosia. The dusky evening was still chill, but the terrace remained crowded with the chattering crowd of masked celebrants; these were not the kind of people to be driven indoors by a few flakes of snow drifting onto their tabletops. The slight breeze both Claybornes recognized as the feel of basically still air, falling under its own weight over the cliff into the black canyon below.

“I love this.”

“Yeah.”

“It must be nice, taking people out into these kinds of nights.”

“Yeah. If they’re nice.”

“I suppose that’s variable.”

“Oh yeah.”

“But when they’re really nice—you know?”

“Ah yeah. Fun.”

“So sometimes you . . .”

“Well, you know. Sometimes.”

“Sure.”

“It’s not like teacher and student, or lawyer and client.”

“Not a power relationship.”

“No. Shouldn’t be. I guide them—they can take it or leave it. They hire me. A matter of equals. If something else happens . . .”

“Sure.”

“But . . .”

“But what?”

“I have to admit it’s not happening as much lately, now I think of it. I don’t know why.”

They laughed.

“Just chance.”

“Or age!”

More laughter at this horrible possibility.

“Yeah—the tourists are getting too old.”

“Ah ha ha. Exactly. But . . .”

“But what?”

“Well, the thing is, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Ah yeah. Getting them to go back home.”

“Yeah, sure. Or not getting to go home with them! I mean, either way. . . .”

“Well, that way’s worse, clearly.”

“Yes it is. I remember the first time it happened. I was young, she was young. . . .”

“It was love.”

“It was! I mean really. But what were we supposed to do? She was a student, I was a guide. I couldn’t just quit, even if I wanted to. And I didn’t. I couldn’t leave the land. And she couldn’t leave her work either. So . . .”

“That’s tough. You hear about that kind of thing a lot. People’s work taking them in different directions, what they do—”

“What they are!”

“Right. Keeping them apart even when they, when the feeling between them . . .”

“It’s hard.” Big sigh. “It was hard. That time it—I don’t know. It was hard. Nothing since has really ever felt the same.”

Long silence.

“You never saw her again?”

“I did, actually. We ran into each other, and then after that we’ve stayed in touch, sort of. I see her every few years. It’s always the same. She’s great, she really is. She even got into canyon guiding herself, for a while there. And I can still see why I felt that way about her, so long ago. And she even seems to feel sort of the same. But, you know. . . .”

“No?”

“Well, one or the other of us is always partnered with someone else! It never fails. She’s been single when I’ve been partnered, and vice versa.” A shake of the head. “It keeps happening.”

“I know that story.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A long time ago. Like yours, sort of, though . . .”

“Someone you met?”

“Someone I grew up with, sort of. In Zygote. You know Jackie Boone?”

“Not really.”

“Well, when she was a kid, she thought I was—well, I was it for her.” A shrug. “But she was just a kid. Even when she had grown up a bit, I thought she was just a kid. Then one time years later I ran into her when I was—when I had been alone a long time.”

Deep nod.

“And she was—grown-up. She’d been living in Sabishii and Dorsa Brevia. She had become one of the great ones. A power. And still interested. So finally I was ready, you know, and we got together, and it was incredible. I was . . . I was in love, sure. But the thing was, she wasn’t really interested anymore. Not in the same way. It had just been settling old business. Like doing a climb just to show you can, but without the feeling you had when you couldn’t do it.”

“People do that.”

“All the time. So, well, I got over it. She’s become, I don’t know, kind of strange these days anyway. But I think that if we had ever been in the same place, you know, in the same frame of mind, at the same time. . . .”

“Sure. That’s just it with me and Eileen. I think we might have . . .”

“Yeah.”

The sodden, somber silence of the what-might-have-been.

“Lost chances.”

“Right. The fate of chance.”

“Some fate is character.”

“Sure. But most fate is fate. It’s what picks you up and carries you off. Who you meet by accident, what happens—what you feel inside, no matter what you think. And it affects everything. Everything! Every thing. People argue about politics, and when people write history books they talk about politics, and policy, the reasons why people did this or that—but it’s always the personal stuff that mattered.”

“It’s always the stuff they don’t write about. The stuff they can’t write about. The look in someone’s eye.”

“Right, the way something catches you. . . .”

“The way it carries you away.”

“Like falling in love. Whatever the hell that means.”

“That’s it, sure. Falling in love, being loved back—”

“Or not.”

“Right, or not! And everything changes.”

“Everything.”

“And no one knows why! And later on, or from anywhere on the outside, they look at your story and they say that story makes no sense.”

“When if you only knew—”

“Then it would make sense.”

“Yes. Perfect sense.”

“It would be the story of the heart, every time.”

“A history of the emotions. If you could do it.”

“It would be the heart’s story.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Which means . . . when you’re trying to decide what to do—in the here and now, you know. . . .”

“Yes.”

Another long thoughtful silence. The band came back for its second set, and the two men watched them play, both lost in their own thoughts. Eventually they got up to go into the men’s room, and afterward they went back out and wandered the milling crowd, and got separated and did not run into each other again. The band finished its second set, then played a third, and it was nearly sunrise before the crowd finally dispersed, the two men among them. And one of them left determined to act. And the other one didn’t.