For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and nod.
The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town called Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area for ships and goods.
After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: “How do you like the canal?” they asked.
“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps — such dark skin, such white regular teeth — strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants — human scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. Sexy.
She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more relaxed cocktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at the canal and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did not react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It would be lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she didn’t even really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought gave her ideas. Faces were so powerful.
His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of Rhodes. Sansei, from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had helped to found this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its surge was the only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial tail-wagging-the-dog approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now he was running for representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to coordinate the Green campaigns more generally.
“We’ll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?” Maya asked Vendana later.
“Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale.”
Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the young ones turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to continue partying; Maya was forgotten, she wasn’t part of that. She stared after them, then joined Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething. She couldn’t help it, even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes she hated the young. “I hate them,” she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their youth — not just their physical perfection, but simply their age — sheer chronology — the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in anticipation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she had been looking down on Mars from the Ares, after they had aerobraked, and were stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent; and shocked at the abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her that had been the best moment of all, that rush of anticipation as it all lay there below them, anything possible. That was youth.
“Think of them as fellow travelers,” Michel advised now, as he had several times before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. “They’re only going to be young for as long as we were — a snap of the fingers, right? And then they’re old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference doesn’t matter a damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you.”
“Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”
The aerial lens’s burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so when it had blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim on the northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the canal bed elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the canal’s endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a little divided town called Birch’s Trenches, while the southwestern locks’ larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn, and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the un-melted rim of Gale, overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and passengers of passing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars campaign. A big grassy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches of the town.
Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the stage, which gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest of the Free Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they waited for their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others Maya half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could be so revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that Frank used to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and, in a different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on the global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party. MarsFirst was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest terms of the renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she seemed to recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat resembling European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small parties bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds, and the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps, or running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in temporary alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst had become something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the outback, a nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of deal going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie, the way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet on it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.