3
She had spent many of the early years working in the Hellas Basin, convinced as she had been that its low elevation was going to make it an obvious site for settlement. Now the land just above the—1-kilometer contour was being settled in places all around the basin, places she had been among the first to explore. She had her old notes on them in her AI, and now, as Ludmilla Novosibirskaya, she got to put them to use.
Her job was in the administration of the hydrological company that was flooding the basin. The team was part of a conglomerate of organizations developing the basin, among them the Black Sea Economic Group’s oil companies, the Russian company that had tried to resuscitate the Caspian and Aral seas, and her company, Deep Waters, which was Praxis-owned. Maya’s job involved coordinating the many hydrological operations in the region, so again she got to see the heart of the Hellas project, just as in the old days when she had been the driving force behind the entire thing. This was satisfying in various ways, some of them strange— for instance her town Low Point (a mistaken siting, she had to admit) was out there getting drowned deeper every day. That was fine: drown the past, drown the past, drown the past. . . .
So she had her work, and her apartment, which she filled with used furniture and hanging kitchen implements and potted plants. And Odessa proved to be a pleasant town. It was built principally of yellow stone and brown tile, and placed on a part of the slope of the basin rim that curved inward more than usual, so that every part of town looked down on the center of the dry waterfront, and every part had a great view over the basin to the south. The lower districts were devoted to shops and business and parks, the higher ones to residential neighborhoods and garden strips. The town lay just above 30° latitude in the south, and so she had gone from autumn to spring, with the big hot sun shining down the stepped streets of the upper town, and melting away the winter’s snow from the ice mass’s edge, and the peaks of the Hellespontus Mountains on their western horizon. A handsome little town.
And about a month after her arrival, Michel came down from Sabishii, and took over the apartment right next door to hers. At her suggestion he installed a connecting door between their two living rooms, and after that they wandered between the two apartments as if in one, living their lives in a conjugal domesticity which Maya had never experienced before, a normality that she found very restful. She did not love Michel passionately, but he was a good friend, a good lover, and a good therapist, and having him around was like having an anchor inside her, keeping her from flying away into exhilarations of hydrology or revolutionary fervor, also from sinking too deep into terrible abysses of political despair or personal repugnance. Cycling up and down the sine wave of her moods was a helpless oscillation that she hated, and anything Michel did in the way of amplitude modulation she appreciated. They kept no mirrors in the apartments, which along with clomipramine helped to dampen the cycle. But the bottoms of pots, and the windows at night, gave her the bad news if she cared to have it. As often enough she did.
With Spencer down the hall, the building had just the slightest feeling of Underhill to it, reinforced occasionally by visitors from out of town, using their apartment in its capacity as safe house. When others of the First Hundred came through, they would go out and walk the waterless waterfront, looking at the ice horizon and exchanging the news like old folks anywhere. Marsfirst, led by Kasei and Dao, was becoming more and more radical. Peter was working on the elevator, drawn like a moth back to its moon. Sax had stopped his mad ecotage campaign for the time being, thank God, and was concentrating on his industrial effort in Vishniac mohole, building surface-to-space missiles and the like. Maya shook her head at this news. It was not military might that would do it for them; on that issue she sided with Nadia and Nirgal and Art. They would need something else, something she could not yet visualize. And this gap in her thinking was one of the things that would start her downward in the sine wave of her moods, one of the things that made her mad.
• • •
Her work coordinating the various aspects of the flooding project began to get interesting. She trammed or walked down to the offices in the center of town, and there worked hard to process all the reports sent in by the many dowsing crews and drilling operations— all full of glowing estimates of the amounts of water they might put into the basin, and all accompanied by requests for more equipment and personnel, until altogether they added up to much more than Deep Waters could supply. Judging the competing claims was difficult from the office, and her technical staff usually just rolled their eyes and shrugged. “It’s like judging a liars’ contest,” one said.
And then also reports were coming in from all around the basin of the new settlements under construction, and by no means all of the people building these settlements came from the Black Sea Group, or the metanats involved with them. A lot of them were simply unidentified— one of her dowsing crews would note the presence of a tent town which had no official existence, and leave it at that. And the two big canyon projects, in Dao Vallis and the Dao-Reull system, were clearly populated by many more people than could be accounted for in the official documentation— people who must therefore be living under assumed identities, like her, or else living out of the net entirely. Which was very interesting indeed.
A circumHellas piste had just been completed the year before, a difficult piece of engineering as the rim of the basin was riven by cracks and ridges, and cratered by a heavy dose of ejecta reentry. But now the piste was in place, and Maya decided to satisfy her curiosity by taking a trip out to inspect all the Deep Waters projects in person, and look into some of the new settlements.
To accompany her on this trip she requested the company of one of their areologists, a young woman named Diana, whose reports had been coming in from the east basin. Her reports were terse and unremarkable, but Maya had learned from Michel that she was the child of Esther’s son, Paul. Esther had had Paul very soon after leaving Zygote, and as far as Maya knew, she had never told anyone who Paul’s father was. So it could have been Esther’s husband Kasei, in which case Diana was Jackie’s niece, and John and Hiroko’s great-granddaughter— or else it could have been Peter, as many supposed, in which case she was Jackie’s half-niece, and Ann and Simon’s great-granddaughter. Either way Maya found it intriguing, and in any case the young woman was one of the yonsei, a fourth-generation Martian, and as such interesting to Maya no matter what her ancestry.
Interesting also in her own right, as it turned out when Maya met her in the Odessa offices a few days before their trip. With her great size (over two meters tall, and yet very rounded and muscular) and her fluid grace, and her high-cheekboned Asiatic features, she seemed a member of a new race, there to keep Maya company in this new corner of the world.
• • •
It turned out that Diana was completely obsessed with the Hellas Basin and its hidden water, and she talked about it for hours, at such length and in such detail that Maya became convinced that the mystery of parentage was solved— such a marsmaniac must be related to Ann Clayborne, and so it followed that Paul had been fathered by Peter. Maya sat in the train seat beside the big young woman, watching her or looking out the window at the steep northern slope of the basin, asking questions, observing as Diana shifted her knees against the seat back in front of her. They did not make train seats big enough for the natives.
One thing that fascinated Diana was that the Hellas Basin had proved to be ringed by much more underground water than had been predicted by the areological models. This discovery, made in the field over the last decade, had inspired the current Hellas project, turning the hypothetical sea from a nice idea into a tangible possibility. It had also forced the areologists to reconsider their theoretical models of early Martian history, and caused people to start looking around the rims of the other big impact basins on the planet; reconnaissance expeditions were under way in the Charitum and Nereidum Montes encircling Argyre, and in the hills ringing south Isidis.
Around Hellas itself they were near to completing the inventory, and they had found perhaps thirty million cubic meters all told, though some dowsers argued they were by no means finished. “Is there a way to know when they’re finished?” Maya asked Diana, thinking about all the requests for resources flooding her office.
Diana shrugged. “After a while you’ve just looked everywhere.”
“What about the basin floor itself? Might the flooding be destroying our ability to get to some aquifers out there?”
“No.” Almost no water, she told Maya, was located under the basin floor itself. The floor had been desiccated by the original impact, and now it consisted of about a kilometer’s depth of eolian sediment, underlain by a hard cake of brecciated rock, formed during the brief but stupendous pressures of the impact. These same pressures had also caused deep fracturing all around the rim of the basin, and it was this fracturing that had allowed unusually large amounts of outgassing from the interior of the planet. Volatiles from below had seeped up and cooled, and the water portion of the volatiles had pooled in liquid aquifers, and in many zones of highly saturated permafrost.
“Quite an impact,” Maya observed.
“It was big all right.” As a general rule, Diana said, impactors were about one-tenth the size of the crater or basin they made (like historical figures, Maya thought); so the impacting planetesimal in this case had been a body about two hundred kilometers in diameter, coming down on ancient cratered highland terrain. Signature traces of it indicated it had probably been an ordinary asteroid, carbonaceous chondrite for the most part, with lots of water and some nickel-iron in it. It had had a speed on arrival of about 72,000 kilometers per hour, and had hit at a slightly eastward angle, which explained the huge devastated region east of Hellas, as well as the high, relatively well-organized concentric ridges of the Hellespontus Montes to the west.
Then Diana described another rule of thumb which caused Maya to free-associate analogies to human history: the bigger an impactor, the less of it survived the impact. Thus almost every bit of this one had vaporized in the cataclysmic strike— though there was a small gravitational bolide under Gledhill Crater, which some areologists claimed was almost certainly the buried remainder of the planetesimal, perhaps one ten-thousandth of the original or less, which they claimed would supply all the iron and nickel that they would ever need if they cared to go digging for it.
“Is that feasible?” Maya asked.
“Not really. Cheaper just to mine the asteroids.”
Which they were doing, Maya thought darkly. That was what a prison sentence meant now, under the latest UNTA regime— years in the asteroid belt, operating the very strictly circumscribed mining ships and robots. Efficient, the Transitional Authority said. Prisons that were both remote and profitable.
But Diana was still thinking about the basin’s awesome birth. The impact had occurred about three and a half billion years before the present, when the planet’s lithosphere had been thinner, and its interior hotter. Energies released by the impact were hard to imagine: the total energy created by humanity through all history was as nothing to it. And so the resulting volcanic activity had been considerable. Surrounding Hellas were a number of ancient volcanoes, which just postdated the impact, including Australis Tholus to the southwest, Amphitrites Patera to the south, and Hadriaca Patera and Tyrrhena Patera to the northeast. All of these volcanic regions had been found to have liquid water aquifers near them.
Two of these aquifers had burst onto the surface in ancient times, leaving on the eastern slope of the basin two characteristic sinuous water-carved valleys: Dao Vallis, originating on the corrugated slopes of Hadriaca Patera; and farther south, a linked pair of valleys known as the Harmakhis-Reull system, which extended for a full thousand kilometers. The aquifers at the heads of these valleys had refilled over the eons since their outbreaks, and now big construction crews had tented Dao and were working on Harmakhis-Reull, and were letting the water from the aquifers run down the long enclosed canyons, to outlets on the basin floor. Maya was extremely interested in these big new additions to the habitable surface, and Diana, who knew them well, was going to take her to visit some friends in Dao.
Their train glided along the northern rim of Hellas for all the first day, with the ice in view on the basin floor almost continually. They passed a little hillside town called Sebastopol, its stone walls Florentine yellow in the afternoon, and after that came to Hell’s Gate, the town at the bottom end of Dao Vallis. They walked out of the Hell’s Gate train station late in the afternoon, and looked down into a big new tent town, located under an enormous suspension bridge. The bridge supported the train piste, spanning Dao Vallis just up from the canyon’s mouth, so that its towers were over ten kilometers apart. From the canyon rim by the bridge, where the train station was, they could see down the widening mouth of the canyon onto the basin floor, stretching out under a lattice of kinky sun-stained clouds. In the other direction there was a view well up into the steep narrow world of the canyon proper. As they walked down a staired and switchbacked street into the town, the new tenting over the canyon was visible only as a certain red haze to the color of the evening sky, the result of a dusting of fines on the tenting materials. “We’ll go upstream tomorrow by way of the rim road,” Diana said, “and get an overview. Then come back down on the canyon floor, so you can see what it’s like down there.”
They descended the street, which had 700 numbered steps. In Hell’s Gate’s downtown they walked around and had dinner, and then climbed back up to the Deep Waters office, which was on the valley wall just under the bridge. They stayed in rooms there, and next morning went to a garage by the train station and borrowed a small company rover.
Diana took the wheel and drove them northeast, paralleling the canyon rim on a road that ran next to the massive concrete foundation for the canyon’s tenting. Even though the fabrics were diaphanous to the point of vanishing, the sheer size of the roof made it a heavy weight to anchor. The concrete bulk of the foundation blocked their view down into the canyon itself, so that when they came to the first overlook, Maya had not seen into it since Hell’s Gate. Diana drove into a little parking lot up on the broad foundation itself, and they parked and put on helmets and got out of the car, and walked up a wooden staircase that seemed to ascend freestanding into the sky, although a closer look revealed first the clear aerogel beam supporting the staircase, and then the layers of tenting, stretching away from their beam to others that could not be seen. At the top of the stairs was a small railed viewing platform, with a prospect that gave a view of the canyon for many kilometers both upstream and downstream.
And there was indeed a stream; the floor of Dao Vallis had a river in it. The canyon floor was dotted with green, or to be more precise, a collection of greens. Maya identified tamarisk, cottonwood, aspen, cypress, sycamore, scrub oak, snow bamboo, sage— and then, on the steep talus and boulder slopes footing the canyon walls, many varieties of shrubs and low creepers, and of course sedge, and moss, and lichen. And running through this exquisite arboretum, a river.
It was not a blue stream with white rapids. The water in the slower stretches was opaque, and the color of rust. In the rapids and waterfalls it foamed bright shades of pink. Classic Martian tones, caused, Diana said, by the fines that were suspended in the water like glacial silt— also by the reflected color of the sky, which was today a kind of hazy mauve, going lavender around the veiled sun, as yellow as the iris of a tiger’s eye.
But no matter the color of the water— it was a running river, in an obviously riverine valley, placid in some places, agitated in others, with gravel fords, sandbars, braided sections, crumbling lemniscate islands, there a big deep lazy oxbow, frequent rapids, and far upstream, a couple of small falls. Under the tallest waterfall they could see the pink foam turn almost white, and patches of white were then carried downstream, to catch on boulders and snags sticking out from the bank.
“Dao River,” Diana said. “Also called the Ruby River by the people who live down there.”
“How many are there?”
“A few thousand. Most live pretty close to Hell’s Gate. Upstream there are family homesteads and the like. And of course then the aquifer station at the head of the canyon, where a few hundred of them work.”
“It’s one of the biggest aquifers?”
“Yes. About three million cubic meters of water. So we’re pumping it out at a flow rate— well, you see it there. About a hundred thousand cubic meters a year.”
“So in thirty years, no more river?”
“Right. Although they could pump some water back upstream in a pipe, and let it out again. Or who knows, if the atmosphere gets humid enough, the slopes of Hadriaca might collect a snow-pack big enough to serve as a watershed. Then the river would fluctuate with the seasons, but that’s what rivers do, don’t they.”
Maya stared down at the scene, which looked so much like something from her youth, some river . . . the upper Rioni, in Georgia? The Colorado, seen once on a visit to America? She couldn’t recall. So fuzzy, all that life. “It’s beautiful. And so . . .” She shook her head; the sight had a quality she could not recall ever seeing before, as if it were out of time, a prophetic glimpse into a distant future.
“Here, let’s go up the road a bit farther and see Hadriaca.”
Maya nodded, and they returned to the car. Once or twice as they continued uphill, the road rose far enough above the foundation to give them another view down onto the canyon floor, and Maya saw that the little river continued to cut through rocks and vegetation. But Diana did not pause, and Maya saw no sign of settlements.
At the upper end of the tented canyon there was a big concrete block of a physical plant, housing the gas exchange mechanisms, and the pumping station. A forest of windmills stood on the rising slope to the north of this station, the big props all facing west and slowly spinning. Above that array rose the broad low cone of Hadriaca Patera, a volcano whose sides were unusually furrowed by a dense crisscrossing network of lava channels, the later ones cutting over the earlier ones. Now the winter’s snowpack had filled the channels, but not the exposed black rock between them, which had been blown clear by the strong winds accompanying the snowstorms. The result was an enormous black cone sticking into the bruised sky, festooned with hundreds of tangled white ribbons.
“Very handsome,” Maya said. “Can they see it from the canyon floor?”
“No. But a lot of them at this end work up on the rim anyway, at the well or the power station. So they see it every day.”
“These settlers— who are they?”
“Let’s go meet them and see,” Diana said. Maya nodded, enjoying Diana’s style, which still reminded her a bit of Ann. The sansei and yonsei were all strange to Maya, but Diana much less than most— a bit private perhaps, but compared to her more exotic contemporaries, and the Zygote kids, welcomely ordinary.
While Maya observed Diana, thinking this, Diana drove their rover into the canyon, down a steep road laid over a giant ancient talus slope near the head of Dao. This was where the original aquifer outburst had occurred, but there was very little chaotic terrain— just titanic talus slopes, permanently settled at the angle of repose.
The canyon floor itself was basically flat and unbroken. Soon they were driving down it, on a regolith track sprayed with a fixative. The track ran by the stream where it could. After about an hour’s driving they passed a green meadow, tucked into the lazy curve of a fat oxbow. In the center of this meadow, in a knot of piÃplusmn;on pine and aspen, huddled a gathering of low shingled roofs, with faint smoke rising from a solitary chimney.
Maya stared at the settlement (corral and pasture, truck garden, barn, bee boxes), marveling at its beauty, and its archaic wholeness, its seeming detachment from the great redrock desert plateau above the canyon— detachment from everything really, from history, from Time itself. A mesocosm. What did they think in those little buildings of Mars and Earth, and all their troubles? Why should they care?
Diana stopped the car, and a few people came out and crossed the meadow to see who they were. Pressure under the tent was 500 millibars, which helped to support the weight of the tenting, as the atmosphere at large was averaging about 250 millibars now. So Maya popped the lock of the car, and got out without her helmet on, feeling undressed and uncomfortable.
These settlers were all young natives. Most of them had come down in the last few years from Burroughs and Elysium. Some Terrans lived in the valley too, they said— not many, but there was a Praxis program that brought up groups from smaller countries, and here in the valley they had recently welcomed some Swiss, and Greeks, and Navajo. And there was a Russian settlement down near Hell’s Gate. So they heard some different languages in the valley, but English was the lingua franca, and the first tongue of almost all of the natives. They had accents to their English that Maya had not heard before, and made odd mistakes in grammar, at least to her ear; almost every verb after the first one was in present tense, for instance. “We went downstream and see some Swiss are working on the river. Stabilizing the banks in some places, with plants or rocks. They say in a few years the streambed is flushed enough for the water to clear.”
Maya said, “It will still be the color of the cliffs, and the sky.”
“Yeah, of course. But clear water looks better than silty water, somehow.”
“How do you know?” Maya enquired.
They squinted and frowned, thinking about it. “Just from the way it looks in your hand, eh?”
Maya smiled. “It’s wonderful you have so much room. Unbelievable what big spaces they can roof these days, isn’t it?”
They shrugged, as if they hadn’t thought of it that way. One said, “We look forward to the day when we take the tenting off, actually. We miss the rain, and the wind.”
“How do you know?”
But they knew.
She and Diana drove on, passing very small villages. Isolated farms. A pasture of sheep. Vineyards. Orchards. Cultivated fields. Big packed greenhouses, gleaming like labs. Once a coyote ran across the track ahead of their car. Then on a high little lawn under a talus slope Diana spotted a brown bear, and later some Dall sheep. In the little villages people were trading food and tools in open marketplaces, and talking over the day’s events. They did not monitor the news from Earth, and seemed to Maya astonishingly ignorant of it. All but a little community of Russians, who spoke a mongrel Russian which nevertheless brought tears to Maya’s eyes, and who told her that things on Earth were falling apart. As usual. They were happy to be in the canyon.
In one of the small villages there was an outdoor market in full swing, and there in the middle of the crowd was Nirgal, chomping an apple and nodding vigorously as someone spoke to him. He saw Maya and Diana get out of the car and rushed over and hugged her, lifting her off the ground. “Maya, what are you doing here?”
“On a tour from Odessa. This is Diana, Paul’s daughter. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, visiting the valley. They’ve got some soil problems I’m trying to help with.”
“Tell me about it.”
Nirgal was an ecological engineer, and seemed to have inherited some of Hiroko’s talent. The valley mesocosm was relatively new, they were still planting seedlings all up and down it, and though the soil had been prepped, nitrogen and potassium deficiencies were causing many plants not to thrive. As they walked around the marketplace Nirgal discussed this, and pointed out local crops and imported goods, describing the economics of the valley. “So they’re not self-sufficient?” Maya asked.
“No no. Not even close. But they do grow a lot of their own food, and then trade other crops, or give them away.”
He was working on eco-economics as well, it seemed. And he already had a lot of friends here; people kept coming up to hug him, and as he had his arm over Maya’s shoulders, she got pulled into these embraces and then introduced to one young native after another, all of them looking delighted to see Nirgal again. He remembered all their names, asked how they were doing, kept up the questions as they continued to circulate through the market, past tables of bread and vegetables, and bags of barley and fertilizer, and baskets of berries and plums, until there was a whole little crowd of them like a mobile party, which finally settled around long pine tables outside a tavern. Nirgal kept Maya at his side throughout the rest of the afternoon, and she watched all the young faces, relaxed and happy, observing how much Nirgal was like John— how people warmed to him, and then were warm to each other— every occasion like a festival, touched by his grace. They poured each other’s drinks, they fed Maya a big meal “all local, all local,” they talked with each other in their quick Martian English, detailing gossip and explaining their dreams. Oh, he was a special boy all right, as fey as Hiroko and yet utterly normal, at one and the same time. Diana for instance was simply latched to his other side, and a lot of the other young women there looked like they wished they were in her place, or Maya’s. Perhaps had been in the past. Well, there were some advantages to being an ancient babushka. She could mother him shamelessly and he only grinned, and nothing they could do. Yes, there was something charismatic about him: lean jaw, mobile humorous mouth, wide-set, brown, slightly Asiatic eyes, thick eyebrows, unruly black hair, long graceful body, though he was not as tall as most of them. Nothing exceptional. It was mostly his manner, friendly and curious and prone to hilarity.
“What about politics?” she asked him late that night, as they walked together from the village down to the stream. “What do you say to them?”
“I use the Dorsa Brevia document. My notion is that we should enact it immediately, in our daily lives. Most of the people in this valley have left the official network, you see, and are living in the alternative economy.”
“I noticed. That’s one of the things that got me up here.”
“Yeah, well, you see what’s happening. The sansei and yonsei like it. They think of it as a homegrown system.”
“The question is, what does UNTA think of it.”
“But what can they do? I don’t think they care, from what I can see.” He was constantly traveling, and had been now for years, and had seen a lot of Mars— much more than Maya had, she realized. “We’re hard to see, and we don’t appear to be challenging them. So they don’t bother with us. They’re not even aware how widespread we are.”
Maya shook her head dubiously. They stood on the bank of the stream, which in this spot was noisily gurgling over shallows, the night-purple surface scarcely reflecting the starlight. “It’s so silty,” Nirgal said.
“What do you call yourselves?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a kind of political party, Nirgal, or a social movement. You must call it something.”
“Oh. Well, some say we’re Booneans, or a kind of Marsfirst wing. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t name it, myself. Maybe Ka. Or Free Mars. We say that, as a kind of greeting. Verb, noun, whatever. Free Mars.”
“Hmm,” Maya said, feeling the chill humid wind on her cheek, Nirgal’s arm around her waist. An alternative economy, functioning without the rule of law, was intriguing but dangerous; it could turn into a black economy run by gangsters, and there was very little that any idealistic village could do about it. So that as a solution to the Transitional Authority it was somewhat illusory, she judged.
But when she expressed these reservations to Nirgal, he agreed. “I don’t think of this as the final step. But I think it helps. It’s what we can do now. And then, when the time comes . . .”
Maya nodded in the darkness. It was another Creche Crescent, she thought suddenly. They walked back up to the village together, where the party was still going on. There five young women at least began jockeying to be the last one at Nirgal’s side when the party ended, and with a laugh only slightly edged (if she were young they would not have had a chance) Maya left them to it and went to bed.
• • •
After two days’ driving downstream from the market village, still forty kilometers from Hell’s Gate, they came around a bend in the canyon and could see down the length of it, to the towers of the piste’s suspension bridge. Like something out of a different world, Maya thought, with a different technology entirely. The towers were six hundred meters high, and ten kilometers apart— a truly immense bridge, dwarfing the town of Hell’s Gate itself, which did not roll over the horizon for another hour, and then came visible from the rim downward, its buildings spilling down the steep canyon walls like some dramatic seafront village in Spain or Portugal— but all in the shadow of the enormous bridge. Enormous, yes— and yet there were bridges twice as big as it in Chryse, and with the continual improvements in materials, there was no end in sight. The new elevator cable’s carbon nanotube filament had a tensile strength that was overkill even for the elevator’s needs, and using it you could build just about any surface bridge you could possibly imagine; people spoke of bridging Marineris, and there were jokes about running cable car lines between the prince volcanoes on Tharsis, to save people the fifteen-kilometer vertical drops between the three peaks.
Back in Hell’s Gate Maya and Diana returned the car to the garage, and had a big dinner in a restaurant about halfway up the wall of the valley, under the bridge. After that Diana had friends she wanted to see, so Maya excused herself and went to the Deep Waters offices, and her room. But outside the glass doors of her room, above its little balcony, the great span of the bridge arched through the stars, and remembering Dao Canyon and its people, and black Hadriaca ribboned white with its snow-filled channels, she had great difficulty getting to sleep. She went out and sat curled in a blanket, on a chair on her balcony, for a good part of the night, watching the underside of the giant bridge and thinking about Nirgal and the young natives, and what they meant.
• • •
The next morning they were supposed to take the next circumHellas train, but Maya asked Diana to drive her out onto the basin floor instead, to see in person what happened to the water running down the Dao River. Diana was happy to oblige.
At the lower end of the town, the stream poured into a narrow reservoir, dammed by a thick concrete dam and pump, located right at the tent wall. Outside the tent, water was carried off across the basin in a fat insulated pipeline, set on three-meter pylons. The pipeline ran down the broad gentle eastern slope of the basin, and they followed it in another company rover, until the crumbled cliffs of Hell’s Gate disappeared over the low dunes of the horizon behind them. An hour later the towers of the bridge were still visible, poking up over the skyline.
A few kilometers farther on, the pipeline ran out over a reddish plain of cracked ice— a kind of glacier, except that it fanned out right to left over the plain for as far as they could see. It was the current shore of their new sea, in fact, or at least one lobe of it, frozen in its place. The pipeline ran out over the ice, then descended into it, disappearing a couple of kilometers from shore.
A small, nearly submerged crater ring stuck out into the ice like a curving double peninsula, and Diana followed tracks onto one peninsula and drove until they were as far out in the ice as they could get. The visible world before them was completely covered with ice; behind them lay the rising slope of sand. “This lobe extends out a long way now,” Diana said. “Look there—” She pointed at a silver twinkling on the western horizon.
Maya took a pair of binoculars from the dash. On the horizon she could make out what appeared to be the northern edge of the lobe of ice, where it gave way again to rising sand dunes. As she watched, a mass of ice at this border toppled, looking like a Greenland glacier caving into the sea, except that when it hit the sand it shattered into hundreds of white pieces. Then there was a spill of water, running as dark as the Ruby River out over the sand. Dust dashed up and away from this stream, and blew south on the wind. The edges of the new flow began to whiten, but Maya saw that it was nothing like the frightening speed with which the flood in Marineris had frozen in ‘61. It stayed liquid, with hardly any frost steam, for minute after minute, right out there in the open air! Oh the world was warmer, all right, and the atmosphere thicker; up to 260 millibars sometimes down here in the basin, and the temperature outside at the moment was 271°K. A very pleasant day! She surveyed the surface of the ice lobe through the binoculars, and saw that it was liberally dotted by the bright white sheens of meltwater ponds that had refrozen clean and flat.
“Things are changing,” Maya said, although not to Diana; and Diana did not reply.
Eventually the flood of new dark water whitened all over its surface, and stopped moving. “It’s coming out somewhere else now,” Diana said. “It works like sedimentation in a river delta. The main channel for this lobe is actually well to the south of here.”
“I’m glad I saw this. Let’s get back.”
They drove back to Hell’s Gate, and that night had supper together again, on the same restaurant terrace under the great bridge. Maya asked Diana a great number of questions about Paul and Esther and Kasei and Nirgal and Rachel and Emily and Reull and the rest of Hiroko’s brood, and their children and their children’s children. What were they doing now? What were they going to do? Did Nirgal have lots of followers?
“Oh yes, of course. You saw how it is. He travels all the time, and there’s a whole network of natives in the northern cities who take care of him. Friends, and friends of friends, and so on.”
“And you think these people will support a . . .”
“Another revolution?”
“I was going to say independence movement.”
“Whatever you call it, they’ll support it. They’ll support Nirgal. Earth looks like a nightmare to them, a nightmare trying to drag us down into it. They don’t want that.”
“They?” Maya said, smiling.
“Oh me too.” Diana smiled back. “Us.”
• • •
As they continued clockwise around Hellas, Maya had cause to remember that conversation. A consortium from Elysium, without any metanat or UNTA connections that Maya could discover, had just finished roofing over the Harmakhis-Reull valleys, using the same method that had been used to roof Dao. Now there were hundreds of people in those two linked canyons, outfitting the aerators and working up soils, and seeding and planting the nascent biosphere of the canyons’ mesocosm. Their on-site greenhouses and manufacturing plants were producing much of what they needed for this work, and metals and gases were being mined out of the badlands of Hesperia to the east, and brought into the town at the mouth of Harmakhis Vallis called Sukhumi. These people had the starter programs and the seeds, and they did not appear to put much stock in the Transitional Authority; they had not asked permission from it to engage in their project, and they actively disliked the official crews from the Black Sea Group, who were usually Terran metanat representatives.
They were hungry for manpower, however, and were happy to get more technicians or generalists from Deep Waters, and any equipment they could cadge from its headquarters. Practically every group Maya met in the Harmakhis-Reull region made a pitch for aid, and most of them were young natives, who seemed to think they had just as much chance at the equipment as anyone else, even though they were not affiliated with Deep Waters or any other company.
And everywhere south of Harmakhis-Reull, in the ragged ejecta hills behind the rim of the basin, there were dowsing crews, out looking for aquifers. As in the roofed canyons, most of these crews had been born on Mars, and a lot of them had been born on Mars since ‘61. And they were different, profoundly different, sharing interests and enthusiasms perfectly incommunicable to any other generation, as if genetic drift or disruptive selection had produced a bimodal distribution, so that members of the old Homo sapiens were now coinhabiting the planet with a new Homo ares, creatures tall and slender and graceful and utterly at home, chattering to each other in a profound self-absorption as they did the work that would make Hellas Basin into a sea.
And this gigantic project was perfectly natural work to them. At one stop on the piste Maya and Diana got out and drove with some friends of Diana’s out onto one of the ridges of the Zea Dorsa, which ran out onto the southeast quarter of the basin floor. Now most of these dorsa were peninsulas running out under another ice lobe, and Maya looked down at the crevasse-riven glaciers to each side and tried to imagine a time when the surface of the sea would in fact lie hundreds of meters overhead, so that these craggy old basalt ridges would be nothing but blips on some ship’s sonar, home to starfish and shrimp and krill and extensive varieties of engineered bacteria. That time was not far off, amazing though it was to realize it. But Diana and her friends, these in particular of Greek ancestry, or was it Turkish— these young Martian dowsers were not awed by this imminent future, nor by their project’s vastness. It was their work, their life— to them it was human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren’t even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer— they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing.
“This is a stupendous act!” Maya told them sharply. “This is magnitudes bigger than anything people have been able to do before! This sea is going to be the size of the Caribbean! There’s never been any project anything like this on Earth—no project! Not even close!”
A pleasant oval-faced woman with beautiful skin laughed. “I don’t give a damn about Earth,” she said.
• • •
The new piste curved around the southern rim, crossing transversely some steep ridges and ravines which were called the Axius Valles. These corrugations ran from the rim’s rough hills down into the basin, forcing the piste viaduct to alternate between great arching bridges and deep cuts, or tunnels. The train they had boarded after the Zea Dorsa was a short private one belonging to the Odessa office, so Maya got it to stop at most of the small stations along this stretch, and she got out to meet and talk with the dowsing and construction crews. At one stop they were all Earthborn emigrants, and to Maya much more comprehensible than the blithe natives— normal-sized people, staggering around amazed and enthusiastic, or dismayed and complaining, in any case aware of how strange their enterprise was. They took Maya down a tunnel in a ridge, and it turned out that the ridge was a lava tunnel running down from Amphitrites Patera, its cylindrical cavity much the same size as Dorsa Brevia’s, but tilted at a sharp angle. The engineers were pumping the Amphitrites aquifer’s water into it, and using it as their pipeline to the basin floor. So now, as the grinning Earthborn hydrologists showed her as she stepped into an observation gallery cut into the side of the lava tube, black water was racing down the bottom of the huge tunnel, barely covering its bottom even at 200 cubic meters a second, the roar of its splashing echoing in the empty cylinder of basalt. “Isn’t it great?” the emigrants demanded, and Maya nodded, happy to be with people whose reactions she could understand. “Just like a damn big storm drain, isn’t it?”
But back at the train, the young natives nodded at Maya’s exclamations— lava tube pipeline, of course— very big, yes, it would be wouldn’t it— saved her some pipe for the less fortunate operations, yes? And then they went back to discussing some people they knew that Maya had never heard of.
• • •
As the train continued they rounded the southwest arc of the basin, and the piste led them north. They rode over four or five more big pipelines, snaking out of high canyons in the Hellespontus Montes to their left, canyons between bare serrated ridges of rock, like something out of Nevada or Afghanistan, the peaks whitened with snow. Out the windows to the right, down on the basin floor, there were more spreading patches of dirty broken ice, often marked by the flat white patches of newer spills. They were building on the hilltops by the piste, little tent towns like places out of the Tuscan Renaissance. “These foothills will be a popular place to live,” Maya said to Diana. “They’ll be between the mountains and the sea, and some of these canyon mouths should end up as little harbors.”
Diana nodded. “Nice sailing.”
As they came around the last curve of their circumnavigation, the piste had to cross the Niesten Glacier, the frozen remainder of the massive outburst that had drowned Low Point in ‘61. There was no easy way to make this crossing, as the glacier was thirty-five kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and no one had yet marshaled the time and equipment to build a suspension bridge over it. Instead several support pylons had been rammed through the ice and secured in the rock below. These pylons had prows like icebreakers on their upstream side, and on their downstream side there was attached a kind of pontoon bridge, which rode over the passing ice of the glacier using cushioned smart pads that expanded or contracted to compensate for drops and rises in the ice.
The train slowed for the crossing of this pontoon, and as they glided over it Maya looked upstream. She could see where the glacier fell out of the gap between two fanglike peaks, very near Niesten Crater. Never-identified rebels had broken open the Niesten aquifer with a thermonuclear explosion, and released one of the five or six largest outbursts of ‘61, almost as big as the one that had harrowed the Marineris canyons. The ice under them was still a bit radioactive. But now it lay under the bridge frozen and still, the aftermath of that terrible flood nothing more than an astonishingly broken field of ice blocks. Beside her Diana said something about climbers who liked to ascend the icefalls on the glacier for the fun of it. Maya shuddered with disgust. People were so crazy. She thought of Frank, carried away by the Marineris flood, and cursed out loud.
“You don’t approve?” Diana asked.
She cursed again.
An insulated pipeline ran down the midline of the ice, under the pontoon and down toward Low Point. They were still draining the bottom of the broken aquifer. Maya had overseen the building of Low Point, she had lived there for years and years, with an engineer whose name she could not now recall— and now they were pumping up what was left at the bottom of Niesten aquifer, to add to the water over that drowned city. The great outburst of ‘61 was now reduced to a slender pipeline’s worth of water, channelized and regulated.
Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen . . . ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer— drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.