“I’ll remember a lot of things.”
Hana and Bill and Heidi and Xhosa were all at the physical plant, and they greeted me and showed me around the cleaned-up walls. The whole plant was ready for the plaques. “Well, it’s something,” I said. “I had hoped you would get more done.” Later Bill and Hana took me up to the rim to see the work they had done on the dome explosions. It wasn’t bad work, though one of them would have been enough for it.
“We’re going to get married,” Bill said.
“Yes?” I tried to hide my surprise. “I didn’t know people did that anymore. Congratulations.”
“We figured you would be back soon,” said Hana, “so we delayed it a bit hoping you could make it. It’ll be in the camp here on Saturday.”
“Thanks for waiting,” I said. “Tell me, have you gotten this work published?”
They gave each other a look.
“I know I’m supposed to be keeping tabs on your work, but I’ve been busy in Alexandria and I thought you might have gone ahead with it.”
“We’ve got it ready for your review,” Hana said slowly. “We had thought you would be co-author—”
“Oh no, no, dispense with that. Your paper. I wasn’t even here while you did it.” They looked odd, and Bill glanced at Hana. I said, “Ha — a little wedding present, so to speak.” Only then did it occur to me that they might want my name on the paper, to get it attention. “Again, congratulations. I’ll make a point to be there.”
Marriage. What idealism. On Saturday afternoon we all gathered in the main tent, which was decorated with stained screens and strings of flowers. It was a fine day, the air still and clear, the sky a deep violet.
The ceremony was short. The Kleserts were matron of honor and best man; Xhosa, who was a Unitarian minister, performed the service. Bill and Hana exchanged the usual impossible vows, and the party began. Several cases of the finest Utopian champagne had been shipped in, and I did my share in downing them, going at it with a will. After seven glasses I moved to a corner to make room for dancing. Our whole community was there, nearly sixty people, and most danced to the complex crossed rhythms of Eve Morris tunes. I looked through their gyrations to the crater rim above our tent. How many weddings had taken place in New Houston? Had any of them miraculously survived? Not likely — but perhaps — out there in the chaos-
Petrini came and stood by me, glass in hand. “It must be nice to see your students get along so well.”
“Is that what you call it?”
He laughed. “Something like that.”
I saw he was a bit drunk himself. Alcohol is a strange drug. “We’ve got a lot of work to do at the Survey,” I said, and downed my glass. “We’ll be starting digs at all the proscribed sites, and farming out grants to the university where we have to. I might be able to send some money your way, if you want to start investigating what really happened in the revolution.” I nodded seriously. “Maybe you could look into those green natives, eh?”
He was still struggling to form a response when Hana came and asked me to dance. She had tactfully chosen one of the slower numbers, and once on the floor we were able to circle sedately among the other couples, in a roar of music and voices. “You look beautiful,” I said. She was wearing a white skirt and a blue blouse. I leaned to kiss her on the cheek and lost my step, kissing her too hard.
“Thank you.”
“But I don’t understand this marriage,” I complained. “It’s an archaic ceremony, it makes no sense in this day and age. I’d have thought you’d know better. You’re twice as smart as Bill—”
She pulled away from me, and I saw the pained expression on her face and realized what I had done. Desperately I pulled her back into the dance and said, “Oh wait, Hana, please excuse me, that was a stupid thing to say, I’m very sorry. I’m — I’m upset. I’ve had too much champagne.” She nodded once, looking down. “It’s just that you’re the best of them, Hana. The only one who never went along with Satarwal and his lies. And I worry about you. They can take anything you do and turn it bad, you know. Your victories are sucked in and used just as efficiently as your defeats. Everything can be used. You have to watch out. Don’t let them suck you in, Hana — you’re too good for that, too young, too smart.”
“No, Dr. Nederland. I won’t. But thanks for the warning—”
“Only right! That’s part of my job, being your teacher. You’re the best of them, and I’ve got to teach you what I’ve learned.” I tried to give her another kiss and she held herself rigidly for it. Of course. Drunk advisor, coming on at the wedding reception itself. Disgusting. I saw that and stepped back, appalled. Hana stopped dancing and gave me a brief pitying look. To my relief McNeil cut in — he couldn’t dance either, and had to take advantage of the slow song. I walked dizzily to the drinks table.
I drained a few more glasses and went outside. My mood plummeted and I pulled my hood off; the cold brought me to my senses, but I still felt black. I stared up at the bronze sun and its squadron of mirrors. When I ran away from Alexandria I had hoped I would escape this feeling; New Houston had seemed my home, my real life, my real work. But things were the same no matter where I went; here my work was just as useless, my life just as empty. No matter where I ran it would be the same. I recalled the end of Cavary’s poem “The City”—
“Ah! don’t you see Since your mind is the prison You’ll live behind bars Everywhere now — over all of Mars?”
Sometimes I get so tired.
The chaos — collapsed terrain characterized by jumbled arrays of short, block-filled valleys and ridges.
We left New Houston in six big expedition cars and two little field cars, headed north to the Aureum Chaos, the dotted area of the map found in Emma’s escape car. Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi rode with me in the lead car, along with a surveyor named Evelyn from the Survey office in Coprates, who navigated for us. We drove over the plain in the gentle morning light of mirror dawn: the four bright chips of the leading mirrors cast a clear light, the sky was white gold, the plain amber, cut with shadows from every pebble and boulder. Over the radio we heard the chattering in the other cars, but in ours it was tranquil. We passed a steel strut, protruding from the plain like a bone of Ozymandias; Evelyn identified it as the remains of a long gone pipeline, and she followed a line of these struts north.
Late that afternoon we came on a road. In the cratered terrain roads are easy to construct; drive a car pulling a V-shaped snowplow, and a lane is cleared of loose ejecta, which form rows of piled rock to each side of the road, “This one will take us most of the way,” Evelyn said. I looked back and saw the other cars following; tall plumes of dust wafted away from our caravan to the east. We drove between craters so old the rims were mere rounded bumps, and occasionally the road led right over one. From these low prominences we saw that the pocked rocky plain extended uniformly to a flat horizon eight or ten kilometers away.
On the road we made good time. We camped by it, and early the next day we left the road and turned east, to skirt the southern edge of Eos Chasma, and the whole bottom end of the Marineris system. Late in the day we came to the rim of Aureum. The plain dropped away in uneven segments, and to the north for as far as we could see was broken land, land that had collapsed from below. Because the Aureum was a sink, slumping two kilometers and more below the surrounding plains, we could see for many kilometers to the north — perhaps forty — and all of it was hacked and tumbled, like the no-man’s-land of some giants’ war. My heart sank as I gazed out at it; how could I possibly find the rebels’ refuge in such topographic insanity?