– a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis bulge to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossae surrounding them now.
The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-coloured in the sunset light.
To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it. Something to behold, really – something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or treasure – a love beyond science, or something into the realm of Michel’s mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s, really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an odd concept – abiologic life – but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned, moving through the universe in its great systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one might say. Sunset somehow made it easier to see that.
Trying to see things Ann’s way. Glancing furtively at his wristpad, behind her back. Stone, from Old English stdn, cognates everywhere, back to proto-Indo-Eurdpean sti, a pebble. Rock, from medieval Latin rocca, origin unknown; a mass of stone. Sax abandoned the wristpad and fell away into a kind of rock reverie, open and blank. Tabula rasa, to the point where apparently he did not hear what Ann herself was saying to him; for she snorted and walked on. Abashed, he followed, and steeled himself to ignore her displeasure, and ask more questions.
There seemed to be a lot of displeasure in Ann. In a way this was reassuring; lack of affect would have been a very bad sign; but she still seemed quite emotional. At least most of the time. Sometimes she focused on the rock so intently it was almost like watching her obsessed enthusiasm of old, and he was encouraged; other times it seemed she was just going through the motions, doing areology in a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment; stave off history; or despair; or all of that. In those moments she was aimless, and did not stop to look at obviously interesting features they passed, and did not answer his questions about same. The little Sax had read about depression alarmed him; not much could be done, one needed drugs to combat it, and even then nothing was sure. But to suggest anti-depressants was more or less the same as suggesting the treatment itself; and so he could not speak of it. And besides, was despair the same as depression?
Happily, in this context, plants were pitifully few. Tempe was not like Tyrrhena, or even the banks of the Arena Glacier. Without active gardening, this was what one got. The world was still mostly rock.
On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the ice ocean just a few kilometres to the north and west. And various Johnny Appleseed flights had passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new sea-part of Biotique’s efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in Burroughs. So there was some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small patches of fellfield. And a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these plants were in trouble in this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the lichen of course. There was a fair bit of miniaturized fall colour already, there in the tiny leaves of the ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup, and icegrass, and, yes, arctic saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind of camouflage in the ambient redrock; often Sax didn’t see plants until he was about to step on them. And of course he wasn’t drawing attention to them anyway, so when he did stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative glance and walked on.
They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the refuge, and there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late light. It filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth horizon, from southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck out of the ice like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of Tempe was going to be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the lower ends of some fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one coastal crater was right at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making it a perfect round bay some fifteen kilometres wide, with an entry channel about two kilometres across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of the Great Escarpment would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many of the islands visible from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic coastline. As one could see already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset ice.
But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the ice, the jagged bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed by some process Sax wasn’t aware of, though he was curious – but it could not be discussed. One could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a cemetery.
Embarrassed, Sax kneeled to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he had almost stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.
Ann was looking over his shoulder. ‘Is it dead?’
‘No.’ He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the floret, showed her the brighter ones beneath. ‘It’s hardening for the winter already. Fooled by the drop in light.’ Then Sax went on, as if to himself: ‘A lot of the plants will die, though. The thermal overturn,’ which was when air temperatures turned colder than the ground temperatures, ‘came more or less overnight. There won’t be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill. Plants are better at handling it than animals would have been. And insects are surprisingly good, considering they’re little containers of liquid. They have supercooling cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.’
Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. It’s alive, he wanted to say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each other for existence, it is part of your body. How can you hate it?
But then again, she wasn’t taking the treatment.
The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was setting, they would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black silhouette, silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred metres away, then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the world. He did not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her thoughts. But how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say Ann, Ann, what are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.
The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.
* * *
But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer. Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants were scarcely visible any more. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping in, low over the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface; mostly it was rock alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.
Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a faint. On the way down
