“There is a chance,” the aye-aye replies.
“Quantify.”
“Six per cent.”
They travel in silence until they reach the end of the dirt track from the base. Halliday realises that he has always thought of it as a winding driveway, as if the base is a country house on Earth. They should sculpt a row of trees to line the edges of the road, do the job properly. The trundler slows to a halt.
“Where is our destination?” the aye-aye says.
“I don’t know yet.” Halliday fishes the screen from the pocket of his suit and unrolls it on his lap. It displays a map, preprogrammed by Aitchison in logistics. The base is marked in green and their own position is a throbbing orange dart. At a point five times the distance they have travelled hangs a parallelogram outlined in black. Its edges shift constantly. “Somewhere between F4 and F7, west of Tharsis Fuchsia. Get close and we’ll take it from there.”
The ground is rougher here. Halliday lurches to one side, pushing against Ai407’s slick shoulder to right himself.
“You’re not from the chapel, right?” he says.
“No. Ai406 and below service the chapel.”
Halliday nods. A decade ago most colonists would have been horrified at the thought of religion thriving on Mars. When the Foxglove council had displayed the blueprints for the chapel sculpture, the reaction back home had been one of polite disgust.
He looks outside as they push through the first of the half-pipes that lead to the plains. Its sculpted walls are perfectly smooth. Only the upper edges are frayed, where the regolith has been scooped and shifted by the wind.
He glances at the moving shape on the screen. “Hey, aren’t you all on the same network? All of you aye-ayes, and the sculptors?”
“Yes, we share bandwidth.”
“Aitchison says there are three missing. They left last week to begin sculpting the new storehouse, west of here. Can you hear them?” He slides a finger along one of the blades at the edge of the map to reveal Aitchison’s brief. “They’re models SC33 to 35.”
Ai407 turns its head as if straining to listen. “They’re out on the periphery. I can barely feel them.”
“They’ve been out there for days. What are they doing?”
Ai407’s smooth lips move before speaking, as if rehearsing a response. “Sculpting.”
Once they have crossed the sculpted bridge that connects Foxglove to the other regions, they emerge onto the plains proper. The sunlight, though filtered through the cloud of red dust and the tinted windscreen, stings Halliday’s eyes. He feels a sense of freedom at seeing the bare rocks that litter the desert to either side. They are unsculpted, unchanged, unchanging. Tharsis Foxglove will never extend this far and yet they are still close enough that no new base will be constructed here either. This space will remain preserved, an area of natural beauty, or perhaps natural ugliness.
The trundler finds a smooth route. The jolting lessens.
“Stop here.” Halliday pushes his way out of the vehicle and kneels, one gloved palm on the ground. The regolith is hard and compacted. It must have been pressed flat by the sculptors.
Back in the passenger seat he says, “Keep to the same route they took. Should prevent us from hitting any dead ends.”
They reach a rise. From here Halliday can see the smoothed route winding west around the boulders. It is less direct than seems optimum. He remembers Sunday outings on his father’s motorbike, to Ullswater and beyond. His father would say, “Never take the direct road when there’s a scenic route in the offing”.
The trundler gathers speed as it sweeps downhill. The parallelogram on the screen shrinks.
“We’re closing in on their location.” Halliday watches as the shape dwindles to a point. Soon, it is replaced by three faint blue specks in a cluster.
“Hey, stop. We’ve overshot them somehow.” He looks out of the rear window. The desert is vast and light. None of the boulders are large enough to hide a sculptor.
He jabs at blades onscreen, pulling up the brief and then the nav calibration. He swings open the door and clambers up onto the roof of the vehicle. From here he can see that the terrain ahead is not as blank as the desert behind them. A dark ripple crosses the horizon. A canyon. The sculptors must be somewhere below them.
“How close are we to Ius Chasma?” he says.
“The nearest tributary canyon is one kilometre from here, directly ahead.”
“Keep driving. Follow the road.” Halliday has never ventured as far as the Valles Marineris, despite the proximity of Foxglove to some of the canyons. He looks down. Without being conscious of it, he has buckled his restraining seatbelt.
At the mouth of Ius Chasma the smoothed route takes a dogleg turn. The trundler stops at the summit and Halliday stares into the depths of the canyon. The rock walls are more orange than red.
“The road continues downwards,” the aye-aye says.
“Take it,” Halliday says.
The descent is giddying. The sculptors have only flattened an area wide enough to allow themselves to return without obstacle. The right caterpillar tread of the trundler runs on rougher ground, close enough to the edge to make Halliday grit his teeth.
“They’re scheduled to be way east of here,” he says, trying to distract himself. “Equidistant between Foxglove and Fuchsia, that was the council brief for the storehouse. And they haven’t even started building. What the hell are they doing down here?”
The aye-aye pauses before answering. “Sculpting.”
They reach the floor of Ius Chasma. Halliday wipes his forehead with the arm of his suit. The trundler lurches from side to side. The smooth road now winds in tighter turns than before.
“Forget the road,” Halliday says, “Just follow its general direction.”
The right wall of the canyon is a steep hill of rubble. It must be the result of landslides. Sunlight plays on the wall to the left of the trundler but the floor is in shade. Halliday glances down at the screen. The three dots are to the east, close. He sees the Foxglove bridge arc above. They have backtracked to arrive beneath their earlier route. These canyons criss-cross more than he realised.
“We are entering Tithonium Chasma,” the aye-aye says.
Until now the walls have appeared fractured and rough. Here, their surfaces look as smooth as the sculpted road. A light swirl of ash dances ahead of them. Red-hued light blooms from a semi-circular passage.
