Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 3 by Paul Preuss

Author:Paul Preuss [Preuss, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780330310864
Publisher: TOR
Published: 1991-01-01T03:20:21+00:00

ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

The truck raced along the lonely road, following the shifting ruts in the sand but guided by satellite. The ruts were an immediate but untrustworthy trace; the road was there even when they blew away, for in reality the road was only a line on a map, and the map was in computer memory. One copy of the map was in the marstruck’s own inertial guidance system; another copy was in computers on Mars Station, which tracked everything that moved on the planet’s surface through its net of sensors–as long as the lines of communication were open.

In that sense this lonely road was not so lonely. It was in intimate contact with thousands of machines and people, on the planet and in orbit around it. A nice thought–which the unfolding landscape subtly denied.

Soon after leaving the environs of Labyrinth City the road began its descent and crossing of the western provinces of the Valles Marineris, and Blake faced that ragged planetary scar for the first time.

To those who have not seen it the Valles Marineris cannot be described. Earthbound analogies are too feeble, but Blake struggled to relate what he saw to what he had experienced before, to images from his youthful summer on the Mogollon Rim and from those other summers touring the North American west–

climbing down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or the slopes of Denali in summer, crossing the Salt River or the Scablands, coming into Zion from the east, dropping into Panamint Valley from the west, rolling down the Phantom Canyon behind Pikes Peak, winding down Grapevine Canyon into Death Valley . . . there was no easy comparison, no real comparison.

There is a path on Earth–it cannot be called a road–known as the Golden Stair, which descends into the Maze of the western Canyonlands of Utah, near the confluence of the Colorado and the Green rivers; desert aficionados call it the Golden Slide. Built as a mining road, hacked from the ringing rock of stark perpendicular mesas and the slick sides of wind-carved grabens, the sheer slippery slide has claimed many an ATV and even the lives of a few walkers.

The highway into the Valles Marineris was worse. Seconds after Lydia unhesitatingly pushed the speeding marstruck over the edge of the cliff, Blake looked upon the deepest canyon he had ever seen.

In the depths of it the distant banded cliffs were lost in blue haze. He could not see ground over the dashboard, and in that instant he was convinced that Lydia was committing suicide and taking him with her, driving straight into thin Martian air.

When a moment later his heart started again, he found that there was still rock beneath the treads and he could even see the road by leaning his forehead toward the glass of the bubble. What he saw was almost as bad as what he had imagined.

The angle of attack was twice what it would have been on Earth, the angle of a playground slide rather than that of even the steepest roadgrade.

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