And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out over the immense open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of its eastern wall in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the sunset’s light. To the noilh was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the south the spectacular buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central giant of the Marineris system. It was Mars’s version of Concordiaplatz, he saw, but much bigger than Earth’s, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic beyond all human scale, as if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or two eons, to a time before the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!

And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond mesa, a caprock island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor. And in the sunset’s hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent town, at the southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the common band on his intercom, then guided him in to the town’s landing pad. The sun was winking out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimp-glider around and descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure of Kokopelli painted as a target on the^landing pad.

Shining mesa had a large top. more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty kilometers long and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a Monument Valley mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the southern point of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached fragment of the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a tremendous vantage point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views through the deep, steep gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to the south.

Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over the years, and the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five kilometers above the datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of removing it. The floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum, was patched with growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on Shining Mesa flew down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize, floating back up to the mesa’s top in the late afternoons. A few of these flying foresters were old underground acquaintances of Nirgal’s, and they were pleased to take him along and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.

The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In Candor, they curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously south into Melas. Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under the western walls where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow ran down in a faint tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided streambeds that ran together into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which collected at a confluence just above the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild foaming rapids to the floor of Melas Chasma, where it pooled against the remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly against its northern flank.

On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were springing up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other very rapidly growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older krummholz. These days it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big sun-reflecting bowl, protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing a great number of plant and animal species to flourish underneath them; Nirgal’s acquaintances said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars. They had to carry sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around, because of bears, snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of the galleries was becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and aspen.

All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate that had been lying in Candor and Ophir canyons — great white bench terraces made of extremely water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now melting over the canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new soils with lots of nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits were being buried under landslides — the water that was dissolving the sodium nitrate was also hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical acceleration of the mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near the foot of the canyon walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as they soared around in their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides everywhere. Several high talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods were one of the many topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the omegandorph got into the blood; in fact there was little they could do. If chunks of a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was going to stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on Shining Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in the pit of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to spot the slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of dust. Fliers in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble with tales of being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day Nirgal was about halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was like a sonic boom that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More loft than was needed, more power… the one he had rented (using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls — up up and up and up, to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an –individual in his own private life.

He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple pain as well — pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.