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The base was set out in the middle of the desolate white expanse that was the North Polar Cap of Mars. Winds blew the fine white crystals of ice in sinuous streaks across the frozen ground. Sitting back in his module, Mao thought that his lot was not too bad.

            His journey had taken him from his home settlement just shy of the equator, not to far from Pavonis Mons, to the polar cap, via every settlement on the way, the rover ride had been agonizingly slow, the dust storms that had ravaged the planet in recent months severely slowed the traffic on the porly marked roads.

            He thought to himself about those bleak nights on the rover, no scenery to look at, because of the dust, nothing accept the systems and controls of his rover to look at. He remembered the few settlements he had passed through on the way, most were newly built, still in that survivalist stage, somewhere between outpost and fully fledged community.

He remembered that by the end he had slept in the rover rather than the outposts, the people had just come to mars, only a few were hardy mars veterans, and they were on the construction team. Those new colonists were always keen to tell him about their revelations coming to Mars, telling him again and again about all the little lessons you pick up in the first few months when you were on the planet. He tried his best to mask his boredom, but there was something oh so persistent about their enthusiasm. He wondered whether the people chosen to go to Mars were malevolently selected for this characteristic, or whether his own cynicism had got the better of him.

The last stage of his journey had been by aircraft, one of the new ones being developed on Mars. That was the only part of the journey he enjoyed, true it was the first time he had some decent scenery, although the dust abated with the increasing latitude, most of the northern hemisphere of Mars is a frightfully dull waste of dust and sand. He remembered when the ice wall of the caps first appeared other the horizon, he remembered as he flew above looking at the swirls of ice and snow, and the wind carved valleys below.

Then he landed here, 90N, Polaris station. The function of this little scientific community was to look into terraforming, in particular rendering down the caps into their molecules, which would be essential for the terraforming plans.

The base was little more than a few prefab buildings linked by aerial walkways, but there was a sense of community here. He was not directly involved with any of the research, his job here was to observe, and to gather information to present his findings, he left the science to his passenger and good friend. He reminded himself about the fun she had about coming here, her endless enthusiasm as bad the fervor of the colonists he met on the way. Here she was in her element, talking all the time to the scientists, he felt rather left out, he used to think he could keep up with scientific language, but these hardened scientists had positively devised a whole new local dialect.

He rather felt like a mere figurehead, every now and then, a scientific team would reluctantly take him out on one of their adapted rovers to show him something or another, they would point, he would nod, and that was about it, meanwhile she would talk endlessly, or wander around with the scientists, her sharp crampons biting through the pitted ice.

He had to admit though it was hard to get bored, every day he saw scenery he had never encountered before, great sculptures carved by the winds in the ancient ice.