Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that and concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The canal water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.

The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize space in the locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the canals and rivers of classical antiquity. The first towns they passed were quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a canal bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the canal was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.