The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of oppression or fear — but it seemed it had been there — since 2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always there — a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of things. “Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of fear on the wall!”
Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the wind-etched tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the cracks, gleaming aquatically in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was driving down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to continue this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and everybody else just as free as that!
It was quite a feeling.
Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would. Everywhere in fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was the sociology that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had cooperated despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now — with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation; and creation was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.
But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a — a civilization. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast indeed, and that knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could scarcely be comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers they were, understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it was not necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue — they were powers in the material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might allow — it looked to Sax as if these powers could — if rightly applied — make a decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying. And why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years, they could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance, from the Big Bang to the eskaton — all this was possible, it was technically achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of suffering to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies that Sax was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by friends, death, bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could continue the work of making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was amazing, really. They had reached that moment in history when one could say it was possible. Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique. The odds were against that, it suggested that it was an artifact of perspective, one had to assume that things were more or less constant and that one lived in average times — the so-called principle of mediocrity. Never a particularly attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps it only meant that justice had always been achievable; in any case, there it was, an extraordinary moment, right there outside his four windows, burnished under the light touch of the natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and powerful.
It was too much to grasp. It kept slipping out of his mind, then reoccurring to him, and surprised by joy he would exclaim, “Ha! Ha!” The taste of tomato soup and bread; “Ha!”
The dusky purple of the twilight sky; “Ha!” The spectacle of the dashboard instrumentation, glowing faintly, reflected in the black windows; “Ha! Ha! Ha! My-oh-my.” He could drive anywhere he wanted to. No one told them what to do. He said that aloud to his darkened AI screen: “No one tells us what to do!” It was almost frightening. Vertiginous. Ka, the yonsei would say. Ka, supposedly the little red people’s name for Mars, from the Japanese ka, meaning fire. The same word existed in several other early languages as well, including proto-Indo-European; or so the linguists said.
Carefully he got in the big bed at the back of the compartment, in the hum of the rover’s heating and electrical system, and he lay humming to himself under the thick coverlet that caught up his body’s heat so fast, and put his head on the pillow and looked out at the stars.
The next morning a high-pressure system came in from the northwest, and the temperature rose to 262 K. He had driven down to five kilometers above the datum, and the exterior air pressure was 230 millibars. Not quite enough to breathe freely, so he pulled on one of the heated surface suits, then slipped a small air tank over his shoulders, and put its mask over his nose and mouth, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.
Even so, when he climbed out of the outer-lock door and down the steps to the sand, the intense cold caused him to sniffle and tear up, to the point of impeding his vision. The whistle of the wind was loud, though his ears were inside the hood of his suit. The suit’s heater was up to the task, however, and with the rest of him warm, his face slowly got used to it.
He tightened the hood’s drawstring and walked over the land. He stepped from flat stone to flat stone; here they were everywhere. He crouched often to inspect cracks, finding lichen and widely scattered specimens of other life: mosses, little tufts of sedge, grass. It was very windy. Exceptionally hard gusts slapped him four or five times a minute, with a steady gale between. This was a windy place much of the time, no doubt, with the atmosphere sliding south around the bulk of Tharsis in massed quantities. High-pressure cells would dump a lot of their moisture at the start of this rise, on the western side; indeed at this moment the horizon to the west was obscured by a flat sea of cloud, merging with the land in the far distance, out there two or three kilometers lower in elevation, and perhaps sixty kilometers away.
Underfoot there were only bits of snow, filling some of the shaded crack systems and hollows. These snowbanks were so hard that he could jump up and down on them without leaving a mark. Windslab, partially melted and then refrozen. One scalloped slab cracked under his boots, and he found it was several centimeters thick. Under that it was powder, or granules. His fingers were cold, despite his heated gloves.
He stood again and wandered, mapless over the rock. Some of the deeper hollows contained ice pools. Around midday he descended into one of these and ate his lunch by the ice pool, lifting the air mask to take bites out of a grain-and-honey bar. Elevation 4.5 kilometers above the datum; air pressure 267 millibars. A high-pressure system indeed. The sun was low in the northern sky, a bright dot surrounded by pewter.
The ice of the pool was clear in places, like little windows giving him a view of the black bottom. Elsewhere it was bubbled or cracked, or white with rime. The bank he sat on was a curve of gravel, with patches of brown soil and black dead vegetation lying on it in a miniature berm — the high-water mark of the pond, apparently, a soil shore above the gravel one. The whole beach was no more than four meters long, one wide. The fine gravel was an umber color, piebald umber or… He would have to consult a color chart. But not now.