Kim Robinson - The Martians

Six times under for me, and then I saw that I might make it over or through the next wave just before it broke, so I sprinted hard, kicking my long fins and feeling the backwash sucking me out as well, and flew up the face of the next wave and smashed through the clear upper section, then fell down the back of it and swam on to get free of the turbulence. Outside!

And the next wave was just a lift into the air, giving me a brief view around. I was floating just down the line from the point break, and I could see Irishka and Freya already out there ahead of me. Irishka swam out to a wave, then turned and was swimming backstroke hard when the wave picked her up—a big mass of water, a mound swelling into a wall as if by magic, carrying Irishka higher and higher on it.

Then she spun onto her chest and fell down the face of the wave. She extended her webbed gloves down and before her, making a little planing surface, then twisted and made a sharp bottom turn, throwing a white wing of water out away from her cut. Wetsuits these days are much like birdsuits, in that they stiffen in reaction to the stress on them, and the knees will lock together, allowing Irishka to hydroplane over the water’s surface, touching it only with her hands, lower legs, and fins.

She skidded like that out onto the broad shoulder of the wave, which was breaking left at a steady majestic pace, not fast except in occasional bowl sections, which she fired across; but usually she had time enough to carve lines up and down the face, slipping up near the crest and then shooting down and dangerously far out in front of the break, where in effect she had to catch the wave all over again, but with much more momentum this time, so she could rise back up the steepening face toward the waterfall that was pitching out over the flat water below. A tube, yes! There was a fast section mid-beach, it appeared, where the wave went tubular for long stretches, so that Irishka disappeared from my sight for seconds, then shot out of the tube high onto the shoulder, cutting down again to stay in the wave.

Yow! I cried, and swam hard for the point break. Freya took off on one just as I arrived, and disappeared past me with a whoop. Now I had the break entirely to myself, and the very next wave looked just as good as all the previous ones, even a bit better. I swam for the steepest part of it, and saw I had gotten to its takeoff zone in time, and so turned and swam hard for shore. The wave picked me up and I began falling down its face, and knew I had caught it. After a big turn at the bottom I barreled out onto the shoulder of the wave, studying the wave rising up under me to my left, but aware also of the river-mouth canyon standing to my right, and the sky. I was riding the wave as if it were a toboggan ride, down a shifting hill perpetually swinging up into reality before me.

The experience of riding a wave is so strange it is hard to describe. During the ride time changes, or I should say consciousness of time changes—if these are not the same statement. The moment balloons. You seem to notice ten or a hundred times as many things as you could in any ordinary second. Yet at the same time, or in a paradoxical oscillation, everything seems to rush by in a moment. Each ride seems to be a timeless little eternity, jammed into a few seconds. Often the rides really are only a few seconds long, but they feel that way at their ends even if they have lasted a minute or more. Maybe it’s just that at the end you always feel it wasn’t long enough!

However one experiences these knots in time, afterward one can scarcely remember the details of what has been a day of perpetual activity, on the part of both you and the world. Something impedes the memory; there aren’t the words for it, perhaps. One ride merges with the next, and at the end of the day, back on the beach in ordinary reality, if you struggle to remember, only certain peak moments come to mind, moments of vision where an image or a movement branded itself in the brain for good, to come back in unexpected moments and unremembered dreams.

So of any particular ride that day I can say little, although the first of the day (like most firsts) stuck better than most. It was a long and eventful ride, like all the rest that followed. I planed across the shoulder, roller-coastering up and down as the wave bulged beneath me, feeling the way my body was both still and moving rapidly, shifting my angles to stay in the right spot. I saw the fast section coming, and stalled back into a tube that lasted for some time; then I saw the tube was collapsing, and shot out of its last little oval gate, skidding back out high on the shoulder and almost off the back side of the swell, so that I did a 360 spinner to fall back into the wave, and nailed a bottom turn to fly on again. The ride went on like that for the whole length of the beach, lasting almost two minutes.

And all the rides were like that. When they ended we found it easier to roll like grunion onto the shore, spent, and walk back down the beach and swim out at the point, than it would have been to swim out and back south the length of the beach. So we all three got rides and then walked back together, kicking the shallows into fans of spray ahead of us, exclaiming over the rides, and looking around at the sun-drenched day. Then back out for another strenuous fight to get outside, and another wild ride.

The waves got bigger as morning gave way to afternoon, and a wind finally disturbed the glassy surface of the water. It was an offshore wind, however, the surfer’s friend; it held the waves up for us by swooshing down-canyon into the afternoon sun, stalling the breaks and whipping spray off their tops, spray that fell like heavy rain onto the back side of the waves. Looking down the line as we bobbed over the crests, we saw some of those brief rainbows in the blown spray that the Hawaiians call ehukai . And late in the day I took off and saw Irishka dropping in ahead of me on the shoulder of the same wave, and after a timeless time I was streaking along deep in the tube behind her, both of us as still as statues and yet flying through a great rolling tube of water swirling up on our left and out over our heads. And I saw the tube close-out begin ahead of Irishka, and both of us turned up and burst back out into the air at the same time, inside the spray flung back by the wind, and I looked over and saw her suspended in the ehukai with her arms out-stretched, like a mermaid trying to fly up a rainbow.

“A Possible Indigenous Nano-organism Found in the Ceraunius Tholus Region.” Vol. 56, 2 November m61. By Forbes, G. N., and Taneev, V. L. et al., Department of Microbiology, Acheron Institute for Areological Studies.

SNC Crater, at the foot of the north flank of Ceraunius Tholus, is well supported as the source of the SNC meteorites found on Earth (cf. Clayborne and Frazier, m4d). Drillings were made to a depth of 1 km under the north flank of Ceraunius Tholus, in locations where the ground was 10–50 microkelvins warmer than the flank median. Most drill sites were within 4 kms of the prominent lava channel running from the Ceraunius caldera down into SNC Crater. Five drill shafts on the west side of the laval channel (see map 1) encountered the collapsed remains of a thermal spring, which contained ice and pockets of liquid water in the ml. range. The walls of these fractures exhibited ovoid forms, all under 20 nanometers long, resembling the structures found in SNC meteorite ALH 84001. No metabolic activity was detected in the Ceraunius forms, but electron microscopy reveals what appear to be cell walls, and RNA protein fragments within the forms. PCR was preformed on the samples using primers specific for ribosomal RNA, and the products were sequenced, revealing a magnetotactic sequence similar to Terran marine methanogens. Some silicates in the collapsed thermal vent near the recovered material also exhibit stratified spongiform structures highly stromatolitic in appearance, the strata two magnitudes finer than that observed in Terran samples. It is suggested that these are stromatolites, and that the ovoid forms are archaea or nanobacteria, either dormant or slowed metabolically in response to a long-failing environment.