bus, with rows of plastic seats, might have come from any airport on Earth.
As the bus rolled off Paula chattered about the landscape. She seemed proud of it, engaging in her enthusiasm. Were actually on the floor of a canyon called the Ares Vallis. This is an outflow canyon, shaped by catastrophic flooding in the deep past, draining from the southern uplands.
That ancient calamity had lasted just ten or twenty days, it was thought, a few weeks billions of years past when a river a thousand times as mighty as the Mississippi had battered its way through the ancient rocks. This sort of event had, it seemed, occurred all around the great latitudinal frontier where Marss south met its north; the whole of the northern hemisphere was depressed below the mean surface level, like one enormous crater imposed on half the planet.
You can see why the Aurora crew were sent here for the first human explorationand in fact why
NASA sent its Pathfinder unmanned probe to the same area in the 1990s...
Bisesa, peering out, tuned out the words. This dusty plain, littered with slablike boulders, was Earthlike, and yet immediately not Earthlike. How strange it was that she could never touch those dusty rocks, or taste that thin iron air.
As they neared the domes of Lowell they passed cylinders mounted vertically on tripods. To Bisesa they looked like the power lasers of a space elevator. The Martians didnt have their beanstalk yet, it seemed, but they had the power sources in place.
And the bus rolled past flags that fluttered limply over markers of Martian glass. Bisesa supposed Paulas mother was here, with those others of Bob Paxtons crew who had not survived their stranding on Mars. If Aress geology was forever shaped by that tremendous flood in the deep past, so its human history would surely always be shaped by the heroism of the Aurora crew.
The bus drove them up to the largest of the domes and docked smoothly.
They passed through a connecting tunnel and emerged in a warren of internal partitions, lit by big fluorescent tubes suspended from a silvered roof. Bisesa felt very self-conscious as she walked into the dome, practicing her Mars lope. The noise levels were high, echoing.
People bustled by, many dressed in green jumpsuits like Paulas. They all seemed busy, and few of them glanced at Bisesa and her party. Bisesa guessed that to these locals she would be about as welcome as tourists at a South Pole base on Earth.
Alexei felt moved to apologize. Dont mind this. Just remember, every breath you take has to be paid for out of somebodys taxes...
Bisesa did notice that very few of the Martians wore ident tattoos on their cheeks.
They dumped their luggage in rooms provided for them in a cramped, shacklike hotel, and Paula offered to fill their few hours at Lowell with a tour. So they went exploring, following Paula, working their way from dome to half-inhabited dome through tunnels that were sometimes so low they had to crouch.
They bought their own lunch at an automated galley. Their Earth credit was good, but the bowls of sticky soup and bitter coffee they bought were expensive.
As they ate, a gang of schoolkids ran by, laughing. They were skinny, gangly, all at least as tall as Bisesa, though with their slim bodies and fresh faces it was hard to tell how old they were. They ran with great bounds.
Alexei murmured, First-generation Martians. Grown from conception under low gravity. The next generation, their children, will be very interesting...
Bisesa was sorry when they had passed out of sight, taking their splash of human warmth with them.
One big translucent dome enclosed a farm. They walked between beds of lettuces and cabbages, all proud and healthy, and shallow ponds that served as rice paddies, and trestle tables bearing pans of some turgid fluid from which grew beans and peas and soya. There were even fruit trees, oranges and apples and pears growing in pots, obviously precious and lovingly tended. In here they were at last exposed to pink Martian daylight, but the light of the remote sun was supplemented by banks of hot white lamps.
But they walked on quickly. Under a faint scent of some industrial perfume was the cloying stench of
sewage.
They reached the domes translucent wall, and Bisesa saw rows of plants marching away, set into the soil beyond the dome. She noticed how they glinted, oddly glassy, and the green of their oddly shaped leaves was a deeper shade than the