And I'd been away too damned long.
'C'mon,' I said. 'Let's check out the tourist junk. My great-greatgrandmother'll never forgive me if I don't send her back something seriously tacky.'
Grossart and I went into one of the shops that lined the canyon-side wall of the viewing gallery, pushing past postcard stands flanking the door. The shops were busy, but no one gave us a second glance.
'Christ, look at this,' Grossart said, hefting a paperweight. It was a snow-filled dome with a model of the
Hydra
parked on a red plastic base. There was even a replica of Grossart, a tiny spacesuited figure not much smaller than the lander itself.
'Tasteful,' I said. 'Or, at least, it is compared to this.' I held up a keyring, shaped like a sloth if you were feeling generous.
'No, that's definitely at the quality end of the merchandise. Look.' Grossart picked up an amber stone and read from the label. '"Sloth healing crystal. This gem modifies and focuses the body's natural chromodynamic fields, ensuring mental and physical harmony."'
'You can't prove it doesn't, can you?'
'No, but I think Brad Treichler might have a few interesting things to say to the proprietor.'
I perked up at the mention of the
Hydra
's geologist. 'I'd like to meet Treichler as well. And Manuel D'Oliveira, while we're at it. Is it possible?'
'Of course.'
'I mean here, today.'
'I know what you mean, and - yes - it's possible. They're all here, after all.'
'And you don't mind speaking about them?'
'Not at all.' He put down the stone. 'Those guys kept me alive, Carrie. I'll never forget the debt I owe them.'
'I think we all owe them one, in that case.' As I spoke I rummaged through a rack of what purported to be recordings of sloth compositions, some of which were combined with whale sounds or Eskimo throat music. 'Having said that, seeing this must be depressing beyond words.'
'Why, because I was the first man on Mars?' He shook his head. 'I know how you think I should feel. Like Elvis in Graceland's souvenir shop, inspecting an exquisite plastic dashboard figurine of himself. White jump-suits and hamburgers era, of course.'
I looked at him blankly.
'But I'm not horrified, Carrie. As a matter of fact it actually amuses me.'
I examined a garment displayed prominently on a shelf.
My best friend went to Strata City, Mars, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
, it said on the front.
'I find that pretty hard to believe, Jim.'
'Then you don't really understand me. What did you think I wanted? Reverence? No. I came to Mars to begin the process of human colonisation. That's why others followed me, because I took that first, difficult step. Oh, and it was difficult, believe me - but I made it all the same.'
I nodded. Though seventeen years had passed since I'd written the piece on the landing, I remembered it all: how Jim Grossart had left Earth on a privately funded expedition done the cheap way - done, in fact, more cheaply than anyone else ever thought possible - with only a vague idea of how to get back from Mars afterwards. His sponsors were going to send out supplies, and then more settlers, until there was a self-sustaining colony. Eventually they'd send a bigger ship to take back anyone who wanted to return, but the expectation was that few people would plan on leaving for good. And that, more or less, was how it had happened - but Grossart's crossing had been every bit as difficult as it had been expected to be, and there had been enough crises along the way to push him to the edge of sanity, and - perhaps - slightly beyond.
It all depended, I supposed, on what you meant by sanity.
Grossart continued: 'You know what would worry me more? A planet that took its past too seriously. Because that would mean there was something human we hadn't brought with us.'
'What, the ineffable tendency to produce and consume tasteless tourist crap?'
'Something like that, yes.' And then he held up a crude plastic mask to his face, and suddenly I was looking at the face of the man I had hoped to meet in Sloths, the young Jim Grossart.
'I don't think you need to worry,' I said.
Grossart returned the mask to a tray with a hundred others, just as the manager of the shop started eyeing us unwelcomingly. 'No, I don't think I do. Now . . .' He beamed and rubbed his hands together. 'You know what I'm going to suggest, don't you?'
He was looking out of the shop, back towards the jump-off point.
I suppose the technical term was blackmail. I wanted a story (or at least some idea of why Grossart had contacted me after all these years), and he wanted to take the big dive. More than that, he wanted to do the dive with someone else.
'Look,' I said. 'If it's such a big deal, can't you just do it and I'll see you at the bottom? Or back here?'
'And what if I decided to vanish again? You'd kick yourself, wouldn't you, for letting me out of your sight?'
'Very possibly, but at least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing I hadn't been talked into doing something monumentally stupid.'
We were already in the line for the squirrel-suits. 'Yes,' he said. 'But you'd also have to live with the knowledge that - when you come to write this up, as I know you will - you won't be able to include the sequence in which you took the big dive with Captain Jim Grossart.'
I looked at him coldly. 'Bastard.'
But he was right: personal fear was one thing, compromising a story another.
'Now there's no need for that.'
'Just tell me you know what you're doing, all right?'
'Well, of course I do. Sort of.'
We got our squirrel-suits. The first thing you did was attach the breathing and comms gear. Each suit had only a few minutes of air, but that was all you needed. The suits themselves were lurid skin-tight affairs, padded and marked with glowing logos and slogans. They were so named because they had folds of elastic material sewn between the arms and legs, like the skin of a flying squirrel - enough to double your surface area during a fall. Mine was only moderately stiff across the chest and belly, but Grossart's had a fifteen-centimetre-thick extra layer of frontal armour. We settled on our helmets, locked our visors down and established that we could communicate.
'I'm really not pushing you into this,' Grossart said.
'No, merely playing on the fact that I'm a mercenary bitch who'll do practically anything for a story. Let's just get this over with, shall we?'
We filtered through the airlock that led to the jumping-off stage. Strata City reached away on either side for several hundred metres; buildings crammed as close as the wall's topology would allow. Pressurised walkways snaked between the larger structures, while elevator tubes and staircases connected the city's levels. Not far above, perched on the canyon's lip, a series of large hotel complexes thrust their neon signs against the early dusk sky: Hilton, Holiday Inn, Best Martian.
Then - realising as I did so that it was probably going to be a bad idea - I looked down. The city continued below us for several kilometres, before thinning out into an expanse of sheer, smooth canyon wall that dropped away even more sickeningly. The Valles Marineris was the deepest canyon on Mars, and now that its deepest parts were in shadow, all I could see at the bottom was a concentrated sprinkling of very tiny, distant-looking lights.
'I hope to God you know what you're doing, Jim.'
At the end of the platform an attendant coupled us together, me riding Grossart. With my legs bound together and my arms anchored uncomfortably against my sides, I was little more than a large deadweight on his back.
Another attendant unplugged our air lines from the platform's outlets, so that we were breathing from the suits. Then we shuffled forwards and waited our turn.
I wondered what I was doing. I'd met a man in a bar who had given me some plausible answers about the first landing, but I didn't have a shred of evidence that I was really dealing with Jim Grossart. Perhaps when they peeled me off the bottom of the canyon they'd find that the man was just a local nutcase who'd done his homework.
'Miss?' he said, when we had shuffled closer to the edge.
'What is it?'
'Something you should probably know at this point. I'm not Jim Grossart.'
'No?'
'No. I'm Commander Manuel D'Oliveira. And is there anyone else who you'd rather have for the big dive?'
I thought about what lay ahead - my stomach butterflies doing an aerobatics display by now - and decided he was probably right. D'Oliveira was the
Hydra
's pilot, the one who had brought the tiny lander down even though half her aerobrake shielding had been ripped off by a mid-flight explosion. It had not been a textbook landing, but given that the alternative consisted of becoming an interesting new smear on the Argyre Planitia, D'Oliveira had not done too badly.
'You'll do nicely, Commander.'
'Manuel, please.' He spoke almost flawless American English, but with the tiniest trace of a Latin accent. 'Tell me - how did you get on with Jim?'
'Oh, fine. I liked him. Apart from the fact that he kept going on about some dead person called Elvis, of course.'
'Yes. You have to humour him in that respect. But he's not too bad, all things considered. We could have had a worse captain, I think. He glued us together. Now then. It seems to be our turn. Are you ready for this, Miss . . . ?'
'Carrie Clay.' It was strange introducing myself again, but it seemed rude not to. 'Yes, I'm ready.'
We shuffled forwards and jumped, falling through the middle of the ring-shaped platform. I looked up - although I was attached to D'Oliveira, I could still move my head - and saw the ring-shaped platform dwindling into the vertical distance. After only a couple of heartbeats we flashed past the level of Sloths, and then we were falling still faster. The feeling of weightlessness was not totally new to me, of course, but the sensation of mounting speed and proximity to the rushing wall of the city more than compensated.
'There's a trick to this, of course,' D'Oliveira said. He had positioned us into a belly-down configuration, with his arms and legs spread out. 'A lot of people haven't got the nerve to keep this close to the side of the city.'
'No shit.'
'But it's a big mistake not to,' D'Oliveira said. 'If you know the city well, you can keep in nice and close like this. The fatal error is moving too far out.'
'Really.'
'Oh, yes. Major mistake.' He paused. 'Hmm. Notice anything? We're not accelerating. You've got your weight back.'
'Silly me. Didn't . . . notice.'
'Terminal velocity after forty-five seconds. Already dropped four kilometres - but you wouldn't guess it, would you?'
Now we were falling down a narrow, vertical canyon with buildings on either side of us and rock on the third face. D'Oliveira started giving me a lecture on terminal velocities that might well have been fascinating at any other time; how the refineries had ramped up the air pressure on Mars to around five per cent of Earth normal, which - while neither thick nor warm enough to breathe - was enough to stop a human in a squirrel-suit from dropping like a stone, even if terminal velocity was still a hair-raising one-sixth of a kilometre per second.
It was about as welcome as a lecture on human neck anatomy to someone on the guillotine.
I looked down again and saw that we were beginning to reach the city's lower-level outskirts. But the canyon wall itself seemed as high as ever; the lights at the bottom just as far away.
'You know how this city came about, don't you?' D'Oliveira said.
'No . . . but I'm . . . damn sure you're . . . going to . . . tell me.'
'It all began with geologists, not long after the turmoil.' He flipped us around and altered our angle of attack, so that we were slightly head-down. 'They were looking for traces of ancient fossil life, buried in rock layers. Eight vertical kilometres wasn't good enough for them, so they dug out the canyon's base for two or three more, then covered a whole vertical strip in scaffolding. They built labs and living modules on the scaffolding, to save going back up to the top all the time.' A chunk of building zipped past close enough to touch - it looked that close, anyway - and then we were falling past rough rock face with only the very occasional structure perched on a ledge. 'But then somewhere else on Mars they uncovered the first sloth relics. The geologists didn't want to miss the action, so they cleared out like shit on wheels, leaving all their things behind.' D'Oliveira steered us around a finger-like rock protrusion that would have speared us otherwise. 'By the time they got back, the scaffolding had been taken over by squatters. Kids, mostly - climbers and base jumpers looking for new thrills. Then someone opened a bar, and before you knew it the place had gone
mainstream
.' He spoke the last word with exquisite distaste. 'But I guess it's not so bad for the tourists.'