Free Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Sax westward through the
mess, and they came quickly to the caldera rim, where the human clutter was put
into a new and larger context, a logarithmic shift that left the pharaonic
collection of artifacts suddenly looking like a patch of bacterial growth.
    At the very edge of the rim, the blackish speckled basalt cracked
down in several concentric ledges, each lower than the last. A set of
staircases led down these terraces, and the lowest was railed. Michel led Sax
down to this terrace, where they could look over the side into the caldera.
Straight down for five kilometers. The caldera’s large diameter made it seem
less deep than that; still it was an entire round country down there, far far
below. And when Sax remembered how small the caldera was proportional to the
volcano entire, Pavonis itself seemed to bulk under them like a conical
continent, rearing right up out of the planet’s atmosphere into low space.
Indeed the sky was only purple around the horizon, and blackish overhead, with
the sun a hard gold coin in the west, casting clean slantwise shadows. They
could see it all. The fines thrown up by the explosions were gone, everything
returned to its normal telescopic clarity. Stone and sky and nothing
more—except for the thread of buildings cast around the rim. Stone and sky and
sun. Ann’s Mars. Except for the buildings. And on Ascraeus and Arsia and Elysium,
and even on Olympus, the buildings would not be there.
    “We could easily declare everything above about eight kilometers a
primal wilderness zone,” Sax said. “Keep it like this forever.”
    “Bacteria?” Michel asked. “Lichen?”
    “Probably. But do they matter?”
    “To Ann they do.”
    “But why, Michel? Why is she like that?”
    Michel shrugged.
    After a long pause he said, “No doubt it is complex. But I think
it is a denial of life. A turning to rock as something she could trust. She was
mistreated as a girl, did you know that?”
    Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.
    Michel said, “Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather
when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when
she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment
consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse,
she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.”
    “I believe that.”
    Michel waggled a gloved hand. “We remember more than we think we
do. More than we want to, sometimes.”
    They stood there looking into the caldera.
    “It’s hard to believe,” Sax said.
    Michel looked glum. “Is it? There were fifty women in the First
Hundred. Odds are more than one of them were abused by men in their lives. More
like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated,
struck, mistreated ... that’s just the way it was.”
    “It’s hard to believe.”
    “Yes.”
    Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless
with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had
needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.
    “Everyone has their reasons,” Michel said, startling him. “Or so
they think.” He tried to explain—tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it
something other than plain evil. “At the base of human culture,” he said as he
looked down into the country of the caldera, “is a neurotic response to
people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist
in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then
sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate
individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from
which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used
to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the
mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father—this strategy often lasts
forever, and the people of that