The cavern stabbed deep into the fissure wall, ending in black obscurity. Its ceiling rose five or six meters above our heads. The fissure’s opposite wall reflected enough afternoon sunlight into the cavern that we could see each other clearly. Charles lifted the torch and handed it to me. “It’s the last gasp,” he said.
“What?” I still hadn’t recovered my wits.
“We’ve gone from alpha to omega.”
I scowled at him for his deliberate mystery, but he wasn’t looking at me.
Gradually, I realized the cavern was not areological. The glass-smooth walls reflected the backwash of light with an oily green sheen. Gossamer, web-like filaments hard as rock stretched across the interior and flashed in my wavering torch beam. Shards of filament littered the floor like lost fairy knives. I stood in the silence, absorbing the obvious: the tunnel had once been part of something alive.
“It’s an aqueduct bridge,” Charles said. “Omega and Mother Ecos.”
This wasn’t a cavern at all, but part of a colossal pipeline, a fossil fragment of Mars’s largest and last living things. I had never heard of an aqueduct bridge surviving intact.
“This section grew into the fissure about half a billion years ago. Loess and flopsand filled the branch because it ran counter to the prevailing winds. Cling and jetsand covered the aqueduct, but didn’t stop it from pumping water to the south. When the Ecos failed and the water stopped, this part died along with all the other pipes, but it was protected. Come on.”
Charles urged me deeper. We stepped around and under the internal supports for the vast organic pipe. Water once carried by this aqueduct had fed billions of hectares of green and purple lands, a natural irrigation system greater than anything humans had ever built.
These had been the true canals of Mars, but they had died long before they could have been seen by Schiaparelli or Percival Lowell.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “It’s beautiful,” I said as we walked deeper. “Is it safe?”
“It’s been here for five hundred million years,” Charles said. “The walls are almost pure silica, built up in layers half a meter thick. I doubt it will fall on us now.”
Light ghosted ahead. Charles paused for me to pick my way through a lattice of thick green-black filaments, then extended his arm for me to go first. My breath sounded harsh in the confines of the helmet.
“It’s easier up ahead. Sandy floor, good walking.”
The pipe opened onto a murky chamber. For a moment, I couldn’t get any clear notion of size, but high above, a hole opened to black sky and I saw stars. The glow that diffused across the chamber came from a patch of golden sunlight gliding clockslow across the rippled sand floor.
“It’s a storage tank,” Charles said. “And a pumping station. Kind of like Trés Haut Médoc.”
“It’s immense,” I said.
“About fifty meters across. Not quite a sphere. The hole probably eroded through a few hundred years ago.”
“Earth years.”
“Right,” he said, grinning.
I looked at the concentric ripples in the sand, imagining the puff and blow of the winds coming through the ceiling breach. I nudged loose dust and flopsand with my boot. This went beyond confidence. Charles had guided me into genuine privilege, vouchsafed to very few. “I can’t believe it.”
“What?” Charles asked expectantly, pleased with himself.
I shrugged, unable to explain.
“I suppose eventually we’ll bring in LitVid, maybe even open it to tourists,” he said. “My father wanted it kept in the family for a few decades, but I don’t think any of my aunts or uncles or the Klein BM managers agreed. They’ve kept it closed all these years in his memory, I suspect, but they think that’s long enough, and there is the resource disclosure treaty to consider.”
“Why did he want it closed?”
“He wanted to bring Klein kids here for a history lesson. Exclusively. Give them a sense of deep time.”
Charles walked to the spot of sun and stood there, arms folded, his suit and helmet dazzling white and gold against the dull blue-green shadows beyond. He looked wonderfully arrogant, at home with eternity.
That sense of deep time Charles’s father had coveted for his BM’s children stole over me and brought on a bright, sparkling shock unlike anything I had ever experienced. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. Delicate traceries lined the glassy walls of the buried bubble. I remembered the paleoscape mural in Sean’s hospital room. The natural cathedrals of Mars. All broken and flat now… except here.
I tried to imagine the godly calm of a planet where an immense, soap-bubble structure like this could remain undisturbed over hundreds of millions of years.
“Have you shown anybody else?” I asked.
“No,” Charles said.
“I’m the first?”
“You’re the first.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d love it,” he said.
“Charles, I don’t have half the experience or the… awareness necessary to appreciate this.”
“I think you do.”
“There must be hundreds of others — ”
“You asked to see my Mars,” Charles said. “No one’s ever asked before.”
I could only shake my head. I was unprepared to understand such a gift, much less appreciate it, but Charles had given it with the sweetest of intentions, and there was no sense resisting. “Thank you,” I said. “You overwhelm me.”
“I love you,” he said, turning his helmet. His face lay in shadow. All I could see were his eyes glittering.
“You can’t,” I answered, shaking my head.
“Look at this,” Charles said, lifting his arms like a priest beneath a cathedral dome. His voice quavered. “I work on my instincts. We don’t have much time to make important decisions. We’re fireflies, a brief glow then gone. I say I love you and I mean it.”
“You don’t give me time to make up my own mind!” I cried.
We fell silent for a moment. “You’re right,” Charles said.
I took a deep breath, sucking back my wash of emotions, clutching my hands to keep them from trembling. “Charles, I never expected any of this. You have to give me room to breathe.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, almost below pickup range for his helmet. “We should go back now.”
I didn’t want to go back. All of my life I would remember this, the sort of romantic moment and scene I had secretly dreamed of, though stretched beyond what I could have possibly imagined; the kind of setting and sweeping, impassioned declarations I had hoped for since such ideas had even glimmered hi me. That it aroused so much conflict baffled me.
Charles was giving me everything he had.
On the way back to the tractor, with ten minutes before we started using reserves, Charles knelt and chipped a square from the Glass Sea bed. He handed it to me. “I know you probably already have some,” he said. “But this is from me.”
Leave it to Charles, I thought, to give me flowers made of stone. I slipped the small slab of rock into my pouch. We climbed into the tractor, pressurized, and helped each other suck dust from our suits with a hose.
Charles seemed almost grim as he took the stick and propelled the tractor forward. We circled and climbed out of the canyon in painful silence.
I made my decision. Charles was passionate and dedicated. He cared about things. We had been through a lot together, and he had proven himself courageous and reliable and sensible. He felt strongly about me.
I would be a fool not to return his feelings. I had already convinced myself that my qualms before had come from cowardice and inexperience. As I looked at him then — he refused to look at me, and his face was flushed — I said, “Thank you, Charles. I’ll treasure this.”
He nodded, intent on dodging a field of boulders.
“In a special place in my heart, I love you, too,” I said. “I really do.”
The stiffness in his face melted then, and I saw how terrified he had been. I laughed and reached out to hug him. “We are so — weird” I said.