Pirius’s reaction to Mars seemed to disappoint Nilis. Apparently Mars held a sentimental place in earthworm hearts. Mars was a small world, but it had as much land area as Earth, Nilis said. It had canyons and mountains and huge impact craters — in fact the whole of the northern hemisphere appeared to be one immense basin — and its range of elevations, from the depths of the deepest basins to the heights of the highest mountains, was actually greater than anything on Earth, even if you were to strip away that world’s oceans.
Geology was never going to appeal much to a Navy brat. But Pirius was intrigued by Mons Olympus, the tallest mountain in the whole of Sol system — and their destination. For in a grandiose, astonishingly arrogant gesture, the Interim Coalition of Governance had built its Secret Archive into that mightiest of monuments.
The corvette landed at Kahra, the modern capital of Mars. This was a city in the Earth style, a Qax- design Conurbation, a series of domes blown out of the bedrock. But only a few hundred thousand people lived here. In fact there were only a few million on Mars, Pirius learned, less on the whole planet than in a single one of Earth’s great cities.
The Martian citizens seemed about as bland and fat as those Pirius had encountered on Earth, though a little taller, a little longer-limbed, perhaps an adaptation to the one-third gravity here. But the officials who processed their arrival stared at Pirius’s bright red Navy uniform. Even here, it seemed, his unwelcome fame had spread, which was why Nilis had brought him in the first place. Nilis said conspiratorially, “You are my battering ram as I smash through layers of officialdom, complacency, and sheer obtuse bureaucracy.”
They had a day to wait in the city. Pirius spent some time in fitful exploration.
But even Kahra itself turned out to be something of a fake. During the Occupation the Qax had come to Mars only to destroy its human colonies. They had shipped the surviving settlers back to Earth — where they had almost all died, unable to adapt to a more massive planet’s clinging gravity and dense air. Even the exotic-matter factory had required only a handful of indentured humans to oversee its automated operation.
So for humans to throw up a Conurbation here, where none had existed before, was an absurdity. There was no Martian Occupation to memorialize; it was an “empty gesture by earnest Coalition politicos eager for advancement,” as Nilis put it. This Conurbation didn’t even have a number, as did those on Earth; it was known as Kahra, the name of the older city which had been demolished to make way for it, and whose foundations now rested under the dull pink-gray domes.
Kahra, and Mars itself, struck Pirius as an oddly halfhearted place — a Conurbation without a number, a world whose most interesting ruin was alien, a sparse population of unenthusiastic people. The ancient stasis of this world, which had given up on geological processing about the time the first oceans were pooling on Earth, seemed to have sunk into the minds of the settlers. Little controversy from this small dead world trickled up the chain of command to trouble the councils on Earth. There wasn’t much news on Mars.
The next morning Pirius left Kahra without regret.
From Kahra it was a short hop to Olympus.
Their flitter landed on an uninteresting, gently sloping plain, featureless save for a massive hatchway set in the ground. Nothing else showed of the Secret Archive above the surface of Mars.
But this was, after all, the highest mountain in Sol system. So Pirius asked permission to spend a few minutes out on the surface. He pulled on his skinsuit, inflated the flitter’s blister airlock, and dropped a couple of meters to the Martian ground.
He landed in dust. He broke through a crust of darker, loosely bound material, and sank into thicker material beneath that compacted under his weight. Perhaps that crust was an irradiated mantle, like Port Sol. When he took a step he found the going wasn’t so difficult, but soon his legs and back were stained by the dust, which was fine and clinging. He remembered Torec’s complaints about Moon dust, and how hard that had been to clean off.
The slope was featureless save for a gully a few meters away, cut into the ground. The sky was reddish, too, and the sun was a shrunken yellow-brown circle, still rising on this Martian morning. The light of the more remote sun was diluted, and the shadows it cast, though sharp, were not deep. The only motion was near the horizon, where a narrow pillar, tracking across the ground, seemed to be shorting between ground and sky. Perhaps it was a dust devil. It was rarefied, feeble compared to the mighty meteorological features he had glimpsed on Earth.
All he could see of the works of mankind were the flitter and the white-painted Archive hatch, set in the ground. And he could see no mountain, no mighty summit or precipitous cliffs.
The air shimmered; a Virtual coalesced. It was Luru Parz, appropriately dressed in a skinsuit of her own.
Pirius felt his heart hammering. He had been unable to come to terms with Luru Parz’s revelation that she was effectively immortal, millennia old; it defied his imagination. Standing on this inhuman planet, the most alien thing in his universe was the patient, silent woman before him.
From the flitter the Commissary called, “Luru Parz. I wasn’t expecting you to accompany us.”
“I’m not. Gramm has bent a little, but he won’t allow me anywhere near the planet, let alone into the Archive. He won’t even let me send a Virtual in there. Isn’t that petty?” She winked at Pirius, with a kind of gruesome flirtatiousness. “Still, I thought I should come see you off. What do you think of Mars, Ensign?”
“Dusty.”
Luru barked laughter.
Nilis sighed. “I suppose that sums it up. On Mars there is dust everywhere. It piles up in the craters; it covers these great Tharsis mountains. Even the air is full of it — scattering the light, whipping itself into murky storms…”
Luru Parz said, “And Mars is old. The oldest landscapes on Earth would be among the youngest on Mars. But of course even the old can hide a few surprises.” She was still staring at Pirius.
Pirius dropped his gaze, his cheeks hot. But he wasn’t much interested in comparative planetology; born in a tube and raised in a box, he had no preconceptions about how planets were supposed to work. “So where’s the big mountain?”
Nilis said, “Ensign, you’re standing on it. Olympus is a shield volcano, seven hundred kilometers across at its base, rising some twenty-five kilometers above the mean level. Its caldera juts out of the atmosphere! But the whole thing’s so vast it dwarfs human perspectives.”
Luru was watching him again. “Disappointed, Ensign? Everything about Mars seems to disappoint. But before spaceflight, Mars was the only world whose surface was visible from Earth, save for the unchanging Moon. And it was the repository of a million dreams — wasn’t it, Commissary? We even dreamed of making Mars like Earth. Of course, it’s technically possible. Can you see why it was never done?”
Pirius glanced around at the worn landscape, the dust-choked sky. “Why bother? If you want to make an Earth there are better candidates.”
“Yes,” Nilis said sadly. “By the time we had the capability to terraform, we had already found other Earths. Nobody could be bothered with Mars. What an irony! And so Mars was bypassed. This is very ancient stuff, Pirius. But I sometimes wonder if something of those lost dreams still lingers in the thin air of Mars, an ineradicable whiff of disappointment that makes Martians as dull as they are today.”
“We aren’t here to dream of the past,” Pirius said.
Luru Parz laughed. “Well spoken, young soldier! All this talk of pre-Coalition fantasies is of course non-Doctrinal. Let’s get on with it.” With a flourish she gestured at the Archive hatch.