"Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)Part Eight Shikata Ga NaiWhen the occupants of the elevator car Bangkok Friend learned that Clarke had broken away and the cable was falling, they hurried to the foyer and the locker room and pulled on emergency spacesuits as fast as they could, and for a wonder there was no general panic, it all happened in the heart, on the surface everyone was businesslike and attentive to the small group at the lock door who were trying to determine where exactly they were, and when they should abandon the car. This steadiness amazed Peter Clayborne, whose own blood was hammering through his body in great adrenal shocks; he wasn’t sure he could have spoken if he had to. A man in the group at the front told them in level tones that they were approaching the areosynchronous point and so they all pulled into the lock together until they were jammed in like the suits had been in the storage closet, and then they locked the lock and sucked the air. The outer door slid open and there it was, a big rectangle of starry death black space. It was daunting indeed to launch into it in an untethered spacesuit, it felt to the young man like suicide; but the ones at the front pulled out and the rest followed, like spores from an exploding seed pod. The car and the elevator dwindled eastward and quickly disappeared. The cloud of spacesuits began to disperse. Many of them stabilized with their feet toward Mars, which lay below them like a dirty basketball; when steady, they ignited their main rockets and lofted upward. The group doing the calculations was still on the common band, talking it over as if it were a chess problem. They were near the areosynchronous orbit, but with a downward velocity of several hundred kilometers an hour; burning half their main packs’ fuel would counteract most of that, and then they would be in an orbit much more stable than would be strictly necessary, given their air supplies. In other words they would die later of asphyxiation rather than sooner of reentry heat. But then that had been the whole point of bailing out in the first place. It was possible rescuers might appear in the grace period, one never knew. Clearly most people were willing to give it a try. The young man pulled his rocket control rods out of his wrist consoles and put his fingers and thumbs on the buttons and got the world between his boots, and shot away from it for a while. Some of the others were trying to stay together, but he judged it impossible and a waste of fuel, and let them drift off above him until they were just more stars. He wasn’t as frightened as he had been in the locker, but he was angry and sad: he didn’t want to die. A spasm of grief for his lost future shook through him and he cried aloud, and wept. After a while the physical manifestations went away, even though he felt just as miserable as before. He stared dully at the stars. Occasional gusts of fright or despair shuddered through him, but they became less frequent as the minutes draged on and then the hours. He tried to slow his metabolism but the effort had the opposite effect to that intended, and he decided to forget about it, although first he did call up his pulse rate on his wrist console: 108 beats a minute. Lucky he hadn’t checked when they were suiting up and bailing out. He grimaced and tried identifiying constellations. Time dragged by. He woke up, and when he realized he had fallen asleep he was both appalled and amused, and promptly fell back asleep. Then after a time he was awake again, this time for good. The other refugees from the car were out of sight, though some stars seemed to move against the backdrop, and could have been them. No sign of the elevator, in space or down on the planet’s surface. It was an odd way to go. Something like the night before a date with the firing squad, perhaps, spent in a dream of space. Death would be like space, except without the stars or the thinking. It was a tedious wait in some ways; it made him impatient and he considered turning off his heating system and having done with it. Knowing he could do that made the wait easier, and he figured he would do it when the air supply was about to run out. The thought put his pulse up to 130, and he tried to concentrate on the planet below. Home sweet home. He was still in almost areosynchronous orbit, it had been hours and Tharsis was still below, though a bit further west. He was over Marineris. Hours passed and without intending to, he fell asleep again. When he woke there was a small silver spacecraft hanging before him like a UFO and he shouted with surprise, and started tumbling helplessly. He worked the rockets feverishly to bring himself under control, and when he managed it the craft was still there. There was a woman’s face in a side window port, talking to him and pointing to her ear. He turned on the common band but she wasn’t on it; he couldn’t find her. He rocketed over toward the craft and scared the woman by nearly crashing into it. He managed to arrest and draw back a bit. The woman was gesturing; did he want in? He made a clumsy circle with gloved forefinger and thumb, nodding so vigorously that he started tumbling again. As he spun he saw a bay door open behind the window, on top of the craft. He got the suit stabilized and puffed toward the bay, wondering if it would be real when he got to it. He touched the open doorway and tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked and the teardrop spheres floated into his faceplate as he flattened against the bottom of the bay. He had an hour of air left. When the bay was closed and pumped he unsealed his helmet and lifted it off. The air was thin and oxygen-rich, and cool. The bay lock door opened and he pushed through. Women were laughing. There were two of them aboard, and they were in high spirits. “What were you going to do, land in that?” one asked. “I was on the elevator,” he said, voice cracking. “We had to jump off. Have you picked up anyone else?” “You’re the only one we’ve seen. Want a ride down?” He could only gulp. They laughed at him. “We’re amazed to run into anyone out here, boy! How many gees are you comfortable with?” “I don’t know-three?” They laughed again. “Why, how many can you take?” “A lot more than that,” said the woman who had looked out at him. “A lot more,” he scoffed. “How many more can a person take?” “We’ll find out,” the other woman said, and laughed. The little craft began to accelerate down toward Mars. The youth lay exhausted in a gee chair behind the two women, asking questions and sucking down water and cheddar cheese from a tube. They had been on one of the mirror complexes and had hijacked this emergency descender after sending the mirrors tumbling in a tangle of molecule-thin sheets. They were complicating their descent by shifting into a polar orbit; they were going to land near the south polar cap. Peter absorbed this in silence. Then they were bouncing wildly and the windows went white, then yellow, then a deep angry orange. Gravity forces jammed him back in his chair, his vision blurred and his neck hurt. “What a lightweight,” one of the women said, and he didn’t know if they meant him or the descender. Then the gee forces let off and the window cleared. He looked out; they were dropping toward the planet in a steep dive, and were only a few thousand meters above the surface. He couldn’t believe it. The women kept the craft in its radical stoop until it seemed they were going to spear the sand, and then at the last minute they flattened out and again he was shoved back into his chair. “Sweet,” one of the women commented, and then boom, they were down and running over the layered terrain. Gravity again. Peter clambered out of the descender after the two women, down a walktube and into a big rover, feeling stunned and ready to cry. There were two men in the rover, shouting greetings and hugging the women. “Who’s this?” they cried. “Oh, we picked him up up there, he jumped off the elevator. He’s a bit spaced still. Hey,” she said to him with a smile, “we’re down, it’s okay.” Some mistakesyou can never make good. Ann Clayborne sat in the back of Michel’s rover, sprawled across three seats, feeling the wheels rise and fall over the rocks. Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy. Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever. Inside, the main room was lit by floor-level windows, which gave a snake’s eye view out under the skirt of the rover’s stone roof. Rough gravel road, scattered rockfall in the way. They were on the Noctis Highway, but a lot of rock had fallen on it. Michel wasn’t bothering to drive around the smaller samples; they rolled along at about sixty kmph, and when they hit a big one they all jounced in their seats. “Sorry,” Michel said. “We have to get out of the Chandelier as soon as possible.” “The Chandelier?” “Noctis Labyrinthus.” The original name, Ann knew, given to it by the terran geologists staring at Mariner photos. But she didn’t speak. The will to speech had left her. Michel talked on, his voice low and conversation, reassuring. “There’s several places where if the road were cut it would be impossible to get the cars down. Transverse scarps that run from wall to wall, giant boulder fields, that kind of thing. Once we get into Marineris we’ll be okay, there’s all kinds of cross-country routes there.” “Are these cars supplied for a drive down the whole canyon?” Sax asked. “No. We’ve got caches all over the place, though.” Apparently the great canyons had been some of the principal transport corridors for the hidden colony. When the official Canyon Highway was built it had caused them problems, cutting off a lot of their routes. From her corner Ann listened to Michel as attentively as the rest; she couldn’t help being curious about the hidden colony. Their use of the canyons was ingenious. Rovers designed to stay down in them were disguised to look like one of the millions of boulders that lay in great talus piles sloping out from the cliffs. The roofs of the cars actually were boulders, hollowed out from below. Heavy insulation kept the rock roof of the car from heating up, so there was no IR signal, “especially since there’s still any number of Sax’s windmills scattered around down here, and they confuse the picture.” The rover was insulated on its underside as well, so that it left no snail’s track of heat to reveal its passing. The heat from the hydrazine motor was used to warm the living quarters, and any excess was directed into coils for later use; if they built up too much while moving, the coils were dropped into holes dug under the car, and buried with regolith mixed with liquid oxygen. By the time the ground over the coil warmed up, the rover was long gone. So they left no heat signal, and they never used the radio, and they moved only at night. During the day they sat in place among other boulders, “and even if they compared daily photos and saw we were new in the area, we would just be one in a thousand new boulders that had fallen off the cliffs that night. Mass wasting has really accelerated since you started the terraforming, because it’s freezing and thawing every day. In the mornings and evenings there’s something coming down every few minutes.” “So there’s no way they can see us,” Sax said, sounding surprised. “That’s right. No visual signal, no electronic signal, no heat signal.” “A stealth rover,” Frank said over the intercom from the other car, and laughed his harsh bray. “That’s right. The real danger down here is the very rockfall that’s hiding us.” A red light on the dash went off, and Michel laughed. “We’re going so well we’ll have to stop and bury a coil.” “Won’t it take a while to dig a hole?” Sax said. “There’s one already dug, if we can get to it. Another four kilometers. I think we’ll make it.” “You have quite a system here.” “Well, we’ve been living underground for fourteen years now, fourteen martian years I mean. Thermal disposal engineering is a big thing for us.” “But how do you do it for your permanent habitats, assuming you have any?” “We pipe it down into the deep regolith, and melt ice for our water. Or else we pipe it out to vents disguised as your little windmill heaters. Among other methods.” “Those were a bad idea,” Sax said. From the next car Frank laughed at him. Only thirty years late with that realization, Ann would have said if she were speaking. “But no, an excellent idea!” Michel said. “They must have added millions of kilocalories to the atmosphere by now.” “About an hour from any of the moholes,” Sax said primly. He and Michel began to discuss the terraforming projects. Ann let their voices drift into glossolalia; it was amazingly easy, conversations these days were always right on the edge of meaninglessness for her, she had to exert herself to understand, rather than the reverse. She relaxed away from them, and felt Mars bounce and jumble under her. They stopped briefly to bury a heating coil. The road got smoother when they started again. They were deep in the labyrinth now, and in a normal rover she would have been looking through the skylights at tight steep canyon walls. Rift valleys, enlarged by slumping; there had been ice in this ground, once upon a time, now all migrated down to the Compton aquifer at the bottom of Noctis, presumably. Ann thought of Peter and shuddered helplessly. One couldn’t assume things, but the fear gnawed at her. Simon watched her surreptitiously, the worry plain on his face, and suddenly she hated his doggy loyalty, his doggy love. She didn’t want anyone to care for her like that, it was an unbearable burden, an imposition. At dawn they stopped. The two boulder rovers parked at the edge of a patch of similar boulders. All day they sat in one of the cars together, lingering over small rehydrated or microwaved meals, trying to find TV or radio transmissions. There weren’t any to speak of, only the occasional burst in a number of languages and encryptions. An ether junkyard, adding up to an incoherent mash. Harsh blasts of static seemed to indicate electromagnetic pulses. But the rover’s electronics were hardened, Michel said. He sat in a chair as if meditating. A new calm for Michel Duval, Ann thought. As if he were used to waiting out his days in hiding. His companion, the youth driving the other car, was named Kasei. His voice had a permanent tone of grim disapproval. Well, they deserved it. In the afternoon Michel showed Sax and Frank where they were, on a topo map he clicked onto both cars’ screens. Their route through Noctis was to run a course southwest to northeast, along one of the biggest canyons of the labyrinth; emerging from that it zigzagged eastward, dropping steeply until they were at the big area between Noctis and the heads of Ius and Tithonium Chasms. Michel called this area the Compton Break, and it was chaotic terrain; and until they had crossed it, and gotten down into Ius Chasm, Michel would not feel comfortable. For without their surreptitious road, he said, the area was basically impassable. “And if they figure we went this way out of Cairo, they may bomb the route.” They had traveled nearly five hundred kilometers the previous night, almost the whole length of Noctis; another good night and they would be down into Ius, and beyond their complete reliance on a single route. It was a dark day, the air thick with brown fines, the winds high. Another dust storm, no doubt about it. Temperatures were plummeting. Sax sniffed at a radio voice which claimed the dust storm was going global. Michel, however, was pleased. It meant they could travel during the day as well, cutting their travel time in half. “We’ve got five thousand kilometers to go, and most of it off-road. It will be wonderful to be able to travel by day, I haven’t done that since the Great Storm.” So he and Kasei began driving round the clock, taking shifts of three hours at the wheel. Another day and they were down the Compton Break, and into tight-walled Ius Chasm, and Michel relaxed. Ius was the narrowest of all the canyons in the Marineris system, only twenty-five kilometers wide when it left the Compton Break, dividing Sinai Planum from Tithania Catena. The canyon was a deep slash between these two plateaus, its side cliffs a full three kilometers high; a long, narrow, giant of a rift. But they only saw the walls in glimpses, through bubbles of open air in the blowing dust. They continued to follow a level but rockstrewn route, making good progress through all of a long dim day. It was quiet in the car, the radio turned down to decrease the irritation of the static. The cameras’ views, higher than the windows, were of dust whipping past them so that it seemed they hardly moved. Often it looked as if they were slewing sideways. It was hard driving, and Simon and Sax spelled Michel and Kasei, following their directions. Ann was still not talking, and they did not ask her to drive. Sax drove with one eye on his AI screen, which was giving him atmospheric readouts. She could tell from across the car that the AI was indicating that the impact of Phobos was thickening the atmosphere a great deal, projected to as much a fifty millibar addition, an extraordinary amount. And the newly smashed craters were still outgassing. Sax noted this change with his owlish satisfaction, oblivious to the death and destruction that came with it. He noticed her glare and said, “Like the Noachian Age, I suppose.” He nearly added more, but Simon silenced him with a look, and changed the subject. In the next car Maya and Frank passed the hours by calling over and asking Michel questions about the hidden colony, or discussing with Sax the the physical changes occurring, or speculating about the war. Hashing it all over endlessly, trying to make sense of it, to figure out what had happened. Talking talking talking. On Judgement Day, Ann thought, as all the quick and the dead staggered around together, Maya and Frank would still be talking, trying to figure out what had happened. Where they had gone wrong. Their third night out, the two cars ran down the lower end of Ius, and came to a long lemniscate fin dividing the canyon. They followed the official trans-Marineris Highway down the south fork. In the last hour before dawn, they caught sight of some clouds overhead, and the dawn was much lighter than those of the previous days. It was enough to send them to cover, and they stopped in a fall of boulders stacked against the foot of the canyon’s south wall, and gathered in the lead car to wait out the day. Here they had a view out over the broad expanse of Melas Chasma, the biggest canyon of them all. Ius’s rock was rough and blackish in comparison to the smooth red floor of Melas; it seemed to Ann possible that the two canyons were made of rock from ancient tectonic plates, once moving past each other, now juxtaposed forever. They sat through a long day, talked out, tense, exhausted, their hair oily and uncombed, their faces grimy with the ubiquitous red fines of a dust storm. Sometimes there were clouds, sometimes haze, sometimes sudden pockets of clarity. In mid-afternoon, without any warning at all, the rover rocked on its shock absorbers. Startled to attention, they jerked up to look at the TVs. The rover’s rear camera was pointed back up Ius, and suddenly Sax tapped the screen displaying its view. “Frost,” he said. “I wonder…” The camera showed the frost steam thickening, moving downcanyon toward them. The highway was up on a bench above the main floor of Ius’s south fork; and this was lucky, because with a roar that shook the rover, that main floor disappeared, overwhelmed by a low wall of black water and dirty white mush. It was a juggernaut of ice chunks, tumbling rocks, foam, mud and water, a slurry throwing itself down the middle of the canyon. The roar was like thunder, even inside the car; it was too loud to talk, and the car trembled under them. Below their bench, the canyon floor proper was perhaps fifteen kilometers across. The flood filled this whole expanse in a matter of minutes, and promptly began to rise against a long talus slope that ran out from the cliff downcanyon from them. The surface of the flood settled as it pooled against this dam, and froze solid as they watched: a lumpy discolored chaos of ice, strangely stilled. Now they could hear themselves shout over the cracks and booms and omnipresent roaring, but there was nothing to say; they only stared out the low windows or at the TVs, stunned. The frost steam coming off the flood’s surface lessened to a light fog. But no more than fifteen minutes later the ice lake burst at its lower end, rupturing in a surge of black steaming water that tore the talus dam away, with an explosive roar of avalanching rock. The flood poured downcayon again, its leading edge beyond their view, down the great slope from Ius into Melas Chasma. Now there was a river running down Valles Marineris, a broad, steaming, ice-choked deluge. Ann had seen videotape of the outbreaks in the north, but she hadn’t been able to get to one, to see it in person. Here in the flesh, she found it almost impossible to grasp. The landscape itself was now speaking a kind of glossolalia. The inchoate roar smashed at the air, and quivered their stomachs like some bass tearing of the world’s fabric; and it was visual chaos as well, a meaningless jumble that she couldn’t seem to focus on, to distinguish near from far, or vertical from horizontal, or moving from still, or light from dark. She was losing the ability to read meaning from her senses. Only with great difficulty could she understand her companions in the car. She wasn’t sure if it was her hearing or not. She couldn’t stand to look at Sax, but then Sax she at least understood. He was trying to hide it from her, but it was clear he was excited by what was happening. That calm dead exterior had always been a mask over a passionate nature, and she had always known it. Now he was high-colored as if he had a fever, and he never met her eye; he knew that she knew what he felt. She despised his shirking inability to confront her, even if it did arise from some kind of consideration for her. And the way he stayed always busy at his screen. She had never seen him get down and actually look out the low floor windows of the rover, to see the flood with his own eyes. The cameras have a better view, he would say mildly when Michel urged him to have a look. And after only a half hour of watching the first arrival of the flood on the TVs, he had gone to his AI screen to work out what it might mean to his project. Water rushing down Ius, freezing, breaking up and rushing down again; certainly into Melas; whether there would be enough water to make it into Coprates, and then down into Capri and Eos, and then down into the Aureum chaos… it seemed unlikely on the face of it, but the Compton Aquifer had been big, one of the biggest ever found. Marineris very likely owed its existence to outbreaks from earlier incarnations of the same aquifer, and the Tharsis bulge had never stopped outgassing… She found she was lying on the floor of the rover, watching the flood, trying to comprehend it. She tried to calculate its flow in her head, just as a way to focus better on what she saw, to bring it back out of the meaninglessness that threatened to overwhelm her. Despite herself she felt the fascination of the calculation, and of the view, and even of the flood itself; this had happened on Mars before, billions of years ago, and probably just like this. There were signs of catastrophic floods all over, beach terraces, lemniscate islands, channel beds, scablands… And the old broken aquifers had refilled, from the Tharsis upwelling and all the heat and outgassing that that engendered. It would have been slow, but give it two billion years… She forced herself to focus, to see. The near edge of the flood was about a kilometer away, and two hundred meters below them. The foot of the northern wall of Ius was about fifteen kilometers away, and the flood stretched right to it. The flood was perhaps ten meters deep, judging by the giant boulders that rolled downstream like Big Man’s bowling balls, smashing ice to shards and leaving steaming black polnyaps in their wake. The water in the open patches seemed to be moving at perhaps thirty kilometers an hour. So (punching figures into her wristpad) perhaps four and a half million cubic meters per hour. That was about a hundred Amazons out there, but running irregularly, freezing and bursting in a perpetual series of ice dams building and failing, whole steaming lakes leaping downhill over whatever channel or slope they found themselves on, stripping the land down to bedrock and then tearing the bedrock away… Lying on the floor of the rover, Ann could feel that assault in her cheekbones, vibrating the ground in a rapid pounding. Such tremors hadn’t been felt on Mars in millions of years, which explained something else that she had seen but not been able to comprehend; the northern wall of Ius was moving. The rock of the cliffs was flaking off and falling into the canyon, which shook the ground, and triggered more collapses, and giant waves that washed out into the flood, water pouring back upstream over the ice, the rock bursting apart in explosions of hydration, the frost steam pouring so thickly into the dust-choked air that she could see the northern wall only in snatches. And without a doubt the southern wall would be collapsing in a similar way, although their view of this wall, which loomed over their road to the right, was foreshortened and cut off. But it had to be falling. And if it flaked off above them, then they were dead for sure. It was quite possible-very possible. Judging by her glimpses of the north wall, the chances might be as high as fifty percent. But then it was probably worse over there; the northern wall appeared to be undercut by the flood, while the south wall was removed from it by the bench they were driving over. So the southern cliffs should be a bit more stable- But then something drew her eye forward, downstream from them. Up there the south wall was indeed collapsing, falling in great sheets of rock. The base of the cliff exploded in a cloud of dust that bloomed over the talus, and the upper sections of the cliff slid down into this new cloud of dust and disappeared. After a second the whole mass reappeared flying horizontally out of the cloud, a strange sight. The noise was painfully loud, even inside the car; then it was just a long, slow landslide, down into the flood, the rocks crushing the ice and blocking the flow beneath. An instant dam, cutting off much of the flow downcanyon; and so the banks of the flood began to rise. Ann watched the icy sheet of the shoreline below her rupture, and then it was chunks of ice, jostling in a sea of black smoking fizzing water, rising swiftly toward the rover. It would engulf them if the landslide dam lasted long enough. Ann peered at the long black spill of rock ahead of them; only a strip of it was still visible above the flood. But the slush beneath her continued to rise. It was a race of sorts. Big Man’s bathtub, draining while he poured new bucketfulls in. The speed of the lake’s ascent caused Ann to raise her estimate of the flow rate. She felt paralyzed, disconnected, in some curious sense serene; it was a matter of indifference to her whether or not the dam broke before the flood reached them. And in the overwhelming roar she felt no need to communicate with the others about this; it was impossible. She found that in a way she was cheering the flood on. It would serve them all right. But then the landslide dam disappeared under the discolored slurry, and it all rolled off downstream in a stately collapse, the short-lived lake dropping as she watched, ice blocks on its surface clattering together, shrieking and booming as they collided and jumbled around and shot high into the air, all fantastically loud, every audible pitch roaring at once. It had to be well over a hundred decibels. She had her fingers in her ears, but couldn’t remember for how long. The car was bouncing up and down. She could see more landslides from the cliffs farther downstream, no doubt undercut by the sudden surge of the flood; and the tremors they caused were triggering further collapses, until it looked like the whole canyon would fill. It seemed impossible in all the noise and vibration that their little cars would survive. The travelers clutched their chair arms or lay there on the floor like Ann, isolated by the roar, their veins pumping with an awful mix of ice and adrenalin; even Ann, who did not care, found her breath short, her muscles tensed against the kinetic assault. When they could hear each other’s shouts again, they asked Ann what had happened. Dully she stared out the window, ignoring them. Apparently they were going to survive, for the moment at least. The flood surface was now the most shattered chaotic terrain she had ever seen, the ice pulverized to a plain of wicked shards. The high point of the lake had climbed their bench until it had been only a hundred meters downslope from them; the re-exposed wet ground down there had turned from rusty black to dirty white in less than twenty seconds. Freezing time on Mars. Sax had stayed in his seat through all that, absorbed by flickering on his screen. A lot of water would evaporate, or rather freeze and sublime, he muttered to no one as he worked. It was a heavily carbonated saline brine, but it would end up as dust-filled snow, falling somewhere else. The atmosphere might get hydrated enough so that it would snow several times, or even on a regular basis, in cycles of precipitation and sublimation. Thus the floodwater would get distributed pretty evenly planetwide, except perhaps at the highest altitudes. Albedo would rise dramatically. They would have to lower it, presumably by encouraging the snow algae that the Acheron group had created. (But there was no more Acheron, Ann said to him in her mind.) Black ice would melt by day, then freeze at night. Sublimate and precipitate. And thus they would have a waterscape: streams collecting, pooling, running downstream, freezing and expanding in cracks in the rock, subliming and snowing and melting and running again. A glaciated or muddy world, most of the time. But a waterscape nevertheless. And every single feature of the primal Mars would melt away. Red Mars was gone. Ann lay there on the floor by the window. Her tears poured out of her to join the flood; over the dam of her nose, downstream until her right cheek and ear and the whole side of her face was wet. “This will complicate the process of getting downcanyon,” Michel said with a little Gallic smile, and from the next car Frank laughed. In fact it looked as if it would be impossible for them to proceed even five kilometers. Directly before them the canyon highway was buried under the great landslide, completely gone. The new spill of rock was shattered and unstable, sapped from below by the flood, pounded from above by subsequent mass wasting of the new slope. For a long time the others debated even making a try. They had to speak loudly to be heard over the jet engine roar of the flood, which still swept past with no sign of a let-up. Nadia considered the slope suicidal, but Michel and Kasei were pretty sure they could find a way, and after a long day’s reconaissance on foot they managed to convince Nadia to agree to try it, and the rest were willing if Nadia was. And so the day after that, protected from surveillance by the general dust storm and the flood’s steam, they divided into the two cars and drove slowly out onto the slide. It was a rough mass of gravel and sand, liberally sprinkled with boulders. There was, however, a zone corresponding to the bench below it, which was relatively level. This zone was the only thing that made passage possible; it was a matter of finding an unobstructed way over a surface like poorly mixed cement, around boulders and past the occasional gaping hole. Michel drove the lead car boldly, with a stubborness verging on the reckless. “Desperate measures,” he declared cheerily. “Can you imagine getting on this kind of ground in the normal course of things? It would be insane.” “It’s insane now,” Nadia said sourly. “Well, what can we do? We can’t go back, and we can’t give up. These are the times that try men’s souls.” “Women, however, do fine.” “I was quoting. You know what I mean. There’s simply no possibility of going back. The head of Ius will be flooded wall to wall. I suppose it’s this that makes me somehow happy. Have we ever been so free of choices? The past is wiped out, all that matters is now. The present and the future. And the future is this field of stones, and here we are. And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there’s no way back, no way to go but onward.” And so onward they went. But Michel’s sanguinity was sharply reduced when the second car collapsed into a hole that had been concealed by a kind of trapdoor arrangement of boulders. With some work they were able to open the front lock and pull out Kasei, Maya, Frank and Nadia. But there was no chance whatsoever of freeing the second car, they didn’t have the lift or the leverage. So they transferred all the supplies out of it, until the lead car was absolutely stuffed. And they moved on, eight of them and their supplies, all now in a single car. Beyond the landslide, however, it got easier. They followed the canyon highway down into Melas Chasma, and found that the road had been built close to the south wall, and as Melas was so broad canyon, the flood had had room to spread out, and had bowed off some ways to the north. It still sounded like air miners were running at full capacity right outside their lock, but the road was well above and to the south of the flood, which was releasing veils of frost steam that filled the chasm, and obscured any views farther north. So they proceeded without difficulty for a couple of nights, until they came to the Geneva Spur, which stuck out from the gigantic south wall nearly to the edge of the flood. Here the official road had swung out into what was now the course of the deluge, and they had to find a higher route. The rocky traverses they made around the lower slopes of the Spur were really difficult for the rover. Once they were nearly hung up on an obtruding rounded rock, and Maya shouted at Michel, accusing him of recklessness. She took over the driving while Michel and Kasei and Nadia went out in walkers. They jacked them off the rock, and then walked ahead to reconnoiter the route of the traverse. Frank and Simon helped Maya look for obstructions as she drove. Sax continued to spend all his time at his screen. From time to time Frank would turn on the TV and run a search for signals, trying to piece together news from the occasional staticky voices the radio found in the jamming. On the very spine of the Geneva Spur, as they were crossing the absurdly thin concrete thread of the Transcanyon Highway, they were far enough out from the south wall to briefly get some transmissions; something about it not becoming a global dust storm after all. And indeed the days were sometimes only hazy, rather than clotted with the dust. Sax claimed this as proof of the relative success of the dust-fixing strategies pursued since the Great Storm. No one responded to this. The haze that was in the air, Frank observed, seemed actually to help clarify weak radio signals. That was stochastic resonance, Sax said. The phenomenon was counter-intuitive, and Frank questioned Sax closely for an explanation of it. When he understood, the room rang with his mirthless bray: “Maybe all the emigration was stochastic resonance, enhancing the weak signal of the revolution.” “I don’t think it helps to make analogies between the physical and social worlds,” Sax said primly. “Shut up, Sax. Go back to your virtual reality.” Frank was still angry, still filled with bitter bile; it sublimed from him like the frost steam off the flood. He snapped questions at Michel about the hidden colony, his curiosity bursting out two or three times a day. Ann was happy to think she would not be Hiroko when Frank first met her. Michel answered these accusing questions calmly, ignoring the sarcasm and the furious gleam in Frank’s eye. Maya’s attempts to cool Frank only increased his rage, but she kept at it; Ann was impressed at how persistent she was, how insensitive to Frank’s brusque rejections. It was a side of Maya that Ann had never seen before; Maya was usually the most volatile person around. But not now, not when the pressure was really on. Eventually they rounded the Geneva Spur, and got back on the bench under the southern escarpment. The way east was often interrupted by landslides, but they always had room to veer left around them. Progress was good. But then they came to the eastern end of Melas. Here the greatest chasm of them all narrowed, and dropped several hundred meters down into the two parallel canyons of Coprates, which were separated by a long narrow plateau. South Coprates dead-ended in a cliffy headwall some two hundred and fifty kilometers away; North Coprates connected with the lower canyons farther east, and therefore was the one they wanted to take. North Coprates was the longest single segment of the Marineris system; Michel called it La Manche, and it, like the English Channel, narrowed as it progressed eastward, until at around 60° longitude it narrowed and reared into a gigantic gorge: sheer cliffs four kilometers high, facing each other across a gap only twenty-five kilometers across. Michel called this gorge the Dover Gate; apparently the cliff walls in this gap were whitish, or had been. So they made their way down North Coprates, and the cliffs closed in on them more every day. The flood filled almost the whole width of the canyon floor, and its flow was so rapid that the ice on its surface had broken into small bergs, which flew off the lips of standing waves and crashed back into the cascade: a furious whitewater rapid with the flow of a hundred Amazons, topped by icebergs. The canyon floor was being ripped away, torn free of its bed and rushing down in red jolts of water like massive pulses of rusty blood, as if the planet were bleeding to death. The noise was incredible, a roar so continuous and pervasive that it dulled thought, and made talk almost impossible; they had to shout everything at the top of their lungs, which quickly reduced them to communicating only the basic necessities. But then there was a very basic necessity to shout about, for when they came to the Dover Gate they found that the canyon floor was almost completely covered by the flood; their bench below the southern wall of the gorge was no more than two kilometers wide, and dimishing every minute. It seemed possible the whole bench might be torn away in a flash. Maya cried that it was too dangerous to go on, and argued for a retreat. If they circled around and drove up to the dead end of south Coprates, she shouted, and managed to climb to the plateau above, then they could drive past the pits of Coprates Catena, and proceed onward to Aureum. Michel shouted his insistence that they press forward, and get through the Gate on the bench. “If we hurry we can make it! We must try!” And when Maya continued to protest, he added forcefully: “The head of south Coprates is steep! The car would never get up it, it’s a cliff like these! And we don’t have the supplies to add so many extra days to our trip! We can’t go back!” The insane roar of the flood was his only answer. They sat in the car, in their separate thoughts, separated by the roar as if by many kilometers of space. Ann found herself wishing the bench would slide from under them, or a piece of the south wall fall onto them, and put an end to their indecision, and to the awful, maddening noise. They drove on. Frank and Maya and Simon and Nadia stood behind Michel and Kasei, watching them drive; Sax sat at his screen, stretching like a cat, staring myopically at the little picture of the deluge. The surface calmed for a moment, and froze over, and the explosive noise reduced to a violent low rumble. “It’s like the Grand Canyon on a kind of super-Himalayan scale,” Sax said, apparently to himself, although only Ann would be able to hear him. “The Kala Gandaki Gorge is like three kilometers deep, isn’t it? And Dhalagiri and Annapurna only forty or fifty kilometers apart, I think. Fill that with a flood like… “ He failed to recall any comparable flood. “I wonder what all that water was doing so high on the Tharsis bulge.” Cracks like gunshots announced another surge. The white surface of the flood blew apart and tumbled downstream. White noise suddenly enveloped them, battening everything they said or thought, as if the universe were vibrating. A bass tuning fork… “Outgassing,” Ann said. “Outgassing.” Her mouth was stiff, she could feel in her face how long it had been since she had last spoken. “Tharsis rests on an upwelling of magma. Rock alone couldn’t sustain the weight; the bulge would have subsided if it weren’t being supported by an upwelling current in the mantle.” “I thought there was no mantle.” She could just hear him through the noise. “No no.” She didn’t care if he could hear her or not. “It’s just slowed down. But currents are still there. And since the last great floods, they have refilled the high aquifers on Tharsis. And kept aquifers like Compton warm enough to stay liquid. Eventually the hydrostatic pressures were extreme. But with less vulcanism, and fewer big meteor strikes, nothing set it off. It might have been full for a billion years.” “Do you think Phobos broke it open?” “Maybe. More likely a reactor meltdown.” “Did you know Compton was this big?” Sax asked. “Yes.” “I never heard of it.” “No.” Ann stared at him. Had he heard her say that? He had. Concealing data: he was shocked, she could tell. He couldn’t imagine any reason good enough to conceal data. Perhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each other. Value systems based on entirely different assumptions. Completely different kinds of science. He cleared his throat. “Did you know it was liquid?” “I thought so. But now we know.” Sax twitched, and called up on his screen the image from the left side camera. Black fizzing water, gray debris, shattered ice, boulders like great tumbling dice; standing waves freezing in place, collapsing and sweeping away in clouds of frost steam… the noise had risen back to its crackling jet howl. “I wouldn’t have done it this way!” Sax exclaimed. Ann stared at him. He steadfastly regarded the TV. “I know,” she said. And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood. They drove as quickly as they could through the Dover Gate, following the Calais Ramp as Michel called their bench. Progress was nerve-rackingly slow, it was a bitter struggle to get the rover over the rockfall covering this narrow terrace; boulders were scattered everywhere, and the flood ate away at the land to their left, narrowing the bench at a perceptible rate. Landslides from the cliff walls fell ahead and behind them, and more than once individual rocks crashed into the car’s roof, making them all jump. It was perfectly possible that a bigger rock would hit them and smash them like bugs, without a single bit of warning. That possibility subdued them all, which was fine by Ann. Even Simon left her alone, throwing himself into the navigational effort and going out on scouting trips with Nadia or Frank or Kasei, happy, she thought, to have some excuse to get away from her. And why not? They bumped along at a couple kilometers per hour. They traveled through a night and then the following day, even though the haze had diminished to the point where it was possible they were visible from satellites. There was no other choice. And then finally they were through the Dover Gate, and Coprates opened up again, giving them some leeway. The flood veered a few kilometers to the north. At dusk they stopped the car. They had been driving for some forty hours straight. They stood up and stretched, shuffled around, and then sat back down and ate a microwaved meal together. Maya, Simon, Michel and Kasei were in good spirits, cheerful to have gotten through the Gate; Sax was the same as always; Nadia and Frank a bit less grim than usual. The surface of the flood was frozen over for the moment, and it was possible to speak without hurting one’s throat, and still be heard. And so they ate, concentrating on the small portions of food, talking in a desultory manner. Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together-while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other’s company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment. And so, in this moment of the storm, Ann Clayborne exerted herself. She stood up, she went to the table. She picked up Sax’s plate, Sax who had first drawn her out; and then Nadia’s and Simon’s. She carried the plates over to their little magnesium sink. And as she cleaned the dishes, she felt her stiff throat move; she croaked out her part of the conversation, and helped, with her little strand, to weave the human illusion. “A stormy night!” Michel said to her as he stood beside her drying plates, smiling. “A stormy night indeed!” The next morning she woke before the rest, and looked at the faces of her sleeping companions, now revealed in the daylight to be utterly disheveled-grimy, puffy, black with frostnip, open-mouthed in the total sleep of exhaustion. They looked dead. And she had been no help to them-on the contrary! She had been a drag on the group; every time they had come back in the car they had had to step by the madwoman on the floor, lying there refusing to speak, often crying, clearly in the throes of severe depression. Just what they had needed! Ashamed, she got up and quietly finished cleaning up the main room and the drivers’ area. And later that day she took her turn driving the rover, doing a six hour shift, and ending up exhausted. But she got them well east of the Dover Gate. Their troubles, however, were not over. Coprates had opened up a bit, yes, and the south wall had for the most part held; but in this area there was a long ridge, now an island, running down the middle of the canyon, dividing it into north and south channels; and unfortunately the southern channel was lower than the northern one, so that the bulk of the flood was running down it, and crowding them tight against the southern wall. Happily the bench terrace gave them some five kilometers between the deluge and the wall proper; but with the flood so close on their left, and the steep cliffs on their right, they never lost the sense of danger. And they had to raise their voices to talk at least half the time; and the crackling roar of the surges seemed to invade their heads, making it harder than ever to concentrate, or to pay attention, or indeed to think at all. One day Maya crashed her fist against the table and cried, “Couldn’t we wait for the island ridge to get torn away?” After an awkward pause Kasei said, “It’s a hundred kilometers long.” “Well, shit-couldn’t we just wait until this flood “A few months,” Ann said. “Can’t we wait that long?” “We’re running low on food,” Michel explained. “We have to keep going,” Frank snapped at Maya. “Don’t be stupid.” She glared at him and turned away, clearly furious. The rover suddenly seemed much too small, as if a bunch of tigers and lions had been thrown together in a dog’s kennel. Simon and Kasei, oppressed by the tension, suited up and went out to scout what lay ahead. Beyond what they called Island Ridge, Coprates opened up like a funnel, with deep troughs under the diverging canyon walls. The northern trough was Capri Chasma, the southern trough was Eos Chasma, which ran on as a continuation of Coprates; because of the flood they had no choice but to follow Eos, but Michel said it was the way they would have wanted anyway. Here the southern cliff finally lowered a bit, and was cut with deep embayments, and shattered by a couple of good-sized meteor craters. Capri Chasma curved out of their sight to the northeast; between the two trough canyons was a low triangular mesa, now a peninsula dividing the course of the flood in two. Unfortunately the great bulk of the water ran into the somewhat lower Eos, so that even though they were out of the tight constriction of Coprates, they were still pressed against a cliff, and moving slowly, off any road or trail, and with diminishing supplies of food and gases. The cupboards were nearly bare. And they were tired, very tired. It had been twenty-three days since they had escaped from Cairo, now 2500 kilometers upcanyon; and all that time they had been sleeping in shifts, and driving almost constantly, and living in the aural assault of the flood, the roar of a world falling down in pieces on their heads. They were too old for this, as Maya said more than once, and nerves were frayed; they were fudging things, making little mistakes, falling into little microbursts of sleep. The bench that was their road between cliff and flood became an immense boulder field, the boulders mostly ejecta from nearby craters, or detritus from really extensive mass wasting. It looked to Ann like the big fluted and scalloped embayments in the southern cliff were sappings that would initiate tributary subsidence canyons; but she didn’t have the time to look very closely. Often it seemed that they were going to have their way blocked entirely by boulders, that after all these days and kilometers, after negotiating most of Marineris in the midst of a most violent cataclysm, they were going to be halted just short of the tremendous washes leading out of its lower end. But then they found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and so on, for day after day after day. They went to half rations. Ann drove more than anyone else, as she seemed to be fresher than the rest, and was the best driver there anyway with the possible exception of Michel. And she felt she owed it to them after her shameful collapse during the greater part of their journey. She wanted to do everything she could, and when she wasn’t driving, she went out to scout the way. It was still numbingly loud outside, and the ground trembled underfoot. It was impossible to get used to that, though she did her best to ignore it. Sunlight burned through the mist and haze in broad lurid splashes, and in the sunset hour icebows and sundogs appeared in the sky, along with rings of light around the dulled sun; often the whole sky seemed afire, a Turner vision of the apocalypse. Soon enough Ann too wore down, and the work became exhausting. She understood now why her companions had been so tired, why they had been so short with her and with each other. Michel had been unable to locate the last three caches they had passed; buried or drowned, it didn’t matter. The half rations were 1200 calories a day, much less than they were expending. Lack of food, lack of sleep: and then, for Ann at least, the same old depression, persistent as death, rising in her like a flood, like a black slurry of mud, steam, ice, shit. Doggedly she kept at the work, but her attention kept blinking out and the glossolalia kept returning, washing everything away in the white noise of despair. The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer. The following day they seemed completely stopped, the boulders arrayed across the bench like tankstoppers in Big Man’s Maginot Line. It was a perfect fractal plane, Sax remarked, of about 2.7 dimensions. No one bothered to answer him. Kasei, wandering on foot, found a passage right down on the bank of the flood. For the moment the whole visible expanse of the deluge was frozen, as it had been for the last couple of days. It stretched out to the horizon, a jumbled surface like Earth’s Arctic Sea, only much dirtier, a great mix of black and red and white lumps. The ice just offshore was flat, however, and in many places clear. They could look down into it, and see that it appeared to be only a couple meters deep, and frozen right down to the bottom. So they drove down to this icy shore and ran along it, and when rocks in the way forced her to, Ann put the left wheels of the rover out onto the ice, and then the entire car; and it held like any other surface. Nadia and Maya snorted at the others’ nervousness about this course: “We spent all winter driving on the rivers in Siberia,” Nadia said. “They were the best roads we had.” So for an entire day Ann drove along the ragged edge of the flood, and out onto its surface, and they made a hundred and sixty kilometers, their best day in two weeks. Near sunset it began to snow. The west wind poured out of Coprates, driving big gritty clumps of snow past them as if they weren’t moving at all. They came to a fresh slide zone, which spilled right out onto the ice of the flood. Big boulders scattered over the ice gave it the air of an abandoned neighborhood, old houses half demolished. The light was dusky gray. They needed a foot guide through this maze, and in an exhausted conference Frank volunteered, and went out to do the job. At this point he was the only one of them with any strength left, more even than the younger Kasei; still burning with the force of his anger, a breeder fuel that would never give out. Slowly he walked ahead of the car, testing routes and returning, either shaking his head or waving Ann on. Around them thin veils of frost steam lofted into the falling snow, the two mixing and gusting off together on the powerful evening wind, off into the murk. Watching the dark spectacle of one hard gust, Ann misread the configuration of the ice’s meeting with the ground, which was hard to see in any case; and the rover ran up onto a round rock right at the frozen shoreline, lifting the left rear wheel off the ground. Ann gunned the front wheels to roll them over the rock, but they dug into a patch of sand and snow, and suddenly both rear wheels were barely touching the ground, while the front two merely spun in the holes they had dug. She had run the rover aground. It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky. “What the fuck are you doing?” Frank shouted over the intercom. Ann jumped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank’s biting vehemence. “Get going!” he shouted. “I ran it onto a rock,” she said. “Damn you! Why don’t you watch where you’re going! Here, stop the wheels, stop them! I’m gonna put the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There’s another surge coming!” “Frank!” Maya cried. “Get inside!” “Soon as I get the fucking pads down! Be ready to go!” The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into sand, and then pegged out ahead so that the wheels had something to grip. An ancient desert method, and Frank ran around the front of the rover cursing under his breath and snapping directions to Ann, who obeyed with her teeth clenched and her stomach knotted. “Okay go!” Frank shouted. “Go!” “Get in first!” Ann cried. “There’s no time, go it’s almost here! I’ll hang on the side, go, damn it, So Ann gently accelerated the front wheels, and felt them catch on the grips and scrape the car forward over the rock, until the rear wheels touched down again and they scraped off and were free. But the roar of the flood suddenly doubled and redoubled behind them, and then there were chunks of ice bounding past the car, bursting along with a hideous cracking, and then the ice was overwhelmed by a dark wave of steaming bubbling slurry, a surge that washed up over the windows of the car; Ann floored the accelerator and held the wheel with a death grip as it bounced in her hands. Mixed with the crashing of the surge wave she heard Frank’s voice shouting “Go, idiot, go!” and then they were hit hard and the car slewed off to the left, out of control. Ann hung onto the wheel as it threw her from side to side. Her left ear throbbed with pain, she had hit something with it. She held on to the wheel and kept her foot jamming the accelerator to the floor. The wheels caught on something and the rover ground through water, they were rolling through water, it poured from right to left and there was a dull banging against the side of the car. “Go!” She kept the accelerator floored and turned uphill, bouncing wildly in the driver’s seat, all the windows and TV screens liquid madness. Then the water ran under the rover, and the windows were clear. The rover’s headlights showed rocky ground, falling snow, and ahead a bare flat area. Ann kept it floored and jounced wildly toward it, the flood still roaring behind them. When she reached the flat rise she had to pull her leg and foot away from the accelerator with her hands. The car stopped. They were above the flood, on a narrow bench terrace. It looked like the surge was already receding. But Frank Chalmers was gone. Maya insisted that they return and look for him, and as it was likely that the initial surge would be the largest one they did so, but it was futile. In the twilight the headlights cut fifty meters into the snowfall, and in the two intersecting yellow cones, and the dark gray world outside them, they saw only the ragged surface of the flood, a pouring sea of flotsam and jetsam without the slightest hint of any regular shape; in fact it looked like a world in which such shapes were impossible. No one could survive in such madness. Frank was gone, either knocked off the car in its jouncing, or swept off it in its brief and nearly fatal encounter with the wave. His final curses still seemed to bubble out of the static on the intercom, out of the roar of the flood. His final imprecation rang in Ann’s ears like the judgement they were: Go, idiot, go! It had been her fault, all her fault- Maya was weeping, choking on sobs, doubling over her stomach as if cramping, “No!” she cried. “Frank, Frank! We have to look for him!” Then she was crying too hard to speak. Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. “Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?” And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, “No!” she screamed, “they’re She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs. Sax stood over her, blinking, face twisted with a stricken look; Ann found herself cut to the quick by that look, “Please,” she said. “Please, please.” She got up from the driver’s seat, went back to them and held Sax briefly by the arm. She crouched to help Nadia and Simon pick Maya up off the floor, and get her to her bed. Already Maya was quieter, withdrawing from them, her eyes red and her nose running, off in her own grief, one hand clenched in a death grip over Nadia’s wrist. Nadia looked down at her with a doctor’s detached expression, withdrawn in her own way, murmuring in Russian. “Maya, I’m sorry,” Ann said. Her throat was cramped, it hurt to talk. “It was my fault. I’m sorry.” Maya shook her head. “It was accident.” Ann couldn’t bring herself to say aloud that she had stopped paying attention. The words stuck in her throat, and another spasm of sobs racked Maya, and the chance to speak was gone. Michel and Kasei took over the drivers’ seats, and started the rover along the bench again. Not far east of that, the southern canyon wall finally sank down into the surrounding plain, and they were free to move away from the flood, which was in any case following Eos Chasma in a swing to the north, off to a distant reunion with Capri Chasma. Michel ran across the hidden colony’s trail, but lost it again, as the trail ducks were often buried in snow. He tried throughout all one day to locate a cache he thought was nearby, but failed. Rather than waste more time they decided to drive on at full speed, a bit north of east, toward the refuge they had been trying to reach, which Michel said was in the broken terrain just south of Aureum Chaos. “It’s not our main colony anymore,” he explained to the others. “It’s where we went first, after we left Underhill. But Hiroko wanted to leave for the south, and after a few years we did. She said she didn’t like this first shelter because Aureum is a sink, and she thought it might become a lake someday. I thought that was crazy, but I see now that she was right. It looks like Aureum may even be the final drainage for this flood, I don’t know. But the refuge is at a higher elevation than we are now, so it will be okay. It may be empty, but it will be stocked with supplies. And any port in a storm, yes?” No one had the spirit to reply. On the second day of hard driving the flood disappeared over the horizon to the north. The roar of it went away soon after. The ground, covered with a meter of dirty snow, no longer trembled underfoot; the world seemed dead, strangely silent and still, shrouded in white. When it wasn’t snowing the sky was still hazy, but it seemed clear enough for them to be spotted from above, so they stopped traveling by day. They moved at night without headlights, across a snowscape that glowed faintly under the stars. Ann drove through these nights. She never told anyone about her moment of inattention at the wheel. And she never even came close to doing it again; she stayed focused with a desperate concentration, biting the inside of her mouth till it bled, oblivious to everything but what lay in the cones of light before her. She usually drove all night, forgetting to wake the next watch’s driver, or deciding not to. Frank Chalmers was dead, and it was her fault; desperately she wished she could reach back and change things, but it was hopeless. Some mistakes you can never make good. The white landscape was marred by an infinity of stones, each capped with its own cake of snow, and the salt-and-pepper landscape was such a patchwork that it was hard at night for the eye to make sense of it; sometimes they seemed to be plowing underground, or floating five meters over it. A white world. Some nights she understood she was driving a hearse, across the body of the deceased. The widows Nadia and Maya in back. And now she knew that Peter was dead too. Twice she heard Frank calling out to her over the intercom, once asking for her to turn back and help him; the other crying Go, idiot, go! Maya was bearing up well. She was tough, somehow, despite all her moods. Nadia, whom Ann used to think of as the tough one, was silent most of the time. Sax stared at his screen and worked. Michel tried to talk to his old friends, and gave up unhappily when it was clear no one wanted to talk back. Simon watched Ann anxiously as always, with unbearable concern; she couldn’t stand it, and avoided his gaze. Poor Kasei must have felt like he was trapped in an asylum for the aged insane, it was almost funny to think of it, except that his spirit seemed to be somehow broken, she did not know why, perhaps the waste, perhaps the increasing likelihood that they would not survive; perhaps simple hunger, there was no way of telling. The young were odd. But he reminded her of Peter, and so she didn’t look at him either. The snow made each night glow and pulse. All of it would melt eventually, carve new streambeds and carry her Mars away. Mars was gone. Michel sat beside her through the second shifts of the night, looking for signs of the way. “Are we lost?” Maya asked him once, just before dawn. “No, not at all. It’s just… we’re leaving tracks in the snow. I don’t know how long they’ll last, or how visible they are, but if… well, just in case they do last, I want to leave the car, and walk the last part of the way. So I want to be precisely sure of where we are before we do that. We’ve got some standing stones and dolmens erected that will tell us for sure, but I have to find one of those first. They’ll show on the horizon, you know. Boulders a bit taller than usual, or columns.” “It will be easier to see those by day,” Simon said. “True. We’ll have a look around tomorrow, and that should do it-we’ll be in an area of them. They were designed to help people lost like us. We’ll be okay.” Except that their friends were dead. Her only child was dead. And their world was gone for good. Lying down by the windows at dawn, Ann tried to imagine life in the hidden shelter. Underground for years and years. She couldn’t do it. Go, idiot, go! Damn you! At dawn Kasei hooted with hoarse triumph: out there on the northern horizon was a trio of standing stones. A lintel bridging two pillars, as if a single fragment of Stonehenge had flown here. Home was that way, said Kasei. But first they would wait through the day. Michel was becoming extremely cautious about being seen from satellites, and wanted to continue on by night. They settled down to get some sleep. Ann couldn’t sleep, she found herself energized by a new resolve. When the rest were out cold, Michel snoring happily, all of them asleep for the first time in about fifty hours, she tugged into her walker and tiptoed into the lock. She looked back and surveyed them; a hungry, ragged lot. Nadia’s crippled hand stuck out from her side. Getting out the lock made some unavoidable noise, but everyone was used to sleeping through noise, and the whirrs and clicks of the life support system partially covered her exit. She got out without waking anyone. The planet’s basal chill. She shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover’s tracks so she couldn’t be followed. The sun was cutting through the mist. Snow was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow. It got colder fast. The sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint pink. Snow fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate. She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head ringing. A suited figure banged its faceplate into hers, hard. Then hands with a vise’s grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. “Hey,” she cried weakly. She was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her back. Her assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held high. She couldn’t fall without breaking her arm. She could feel the diamond pattern of her suit’s heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their pattern into her. Every few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet. The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which astonished her. She was shoved into the lock, and the figure tumbled in after her, and closed and pumped the chamber, and tore off her helmet, and then his, and to her utter amazement it was her Simon, purple-faced and shouting at her, striking her still, his face soaking wet with tears-this her Simon, the quiet one, now yelling at her “Why? Why? Damn you, you He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shook her. She had never noticed how powerful his hands were. “Be Snow fell. Though it was early morning, it was dim. Wind whipped across the chaos, swirling the spindrift over the shattered land. Boulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks-also many peculiar spikes, and towers, and balancing rocks, held in place by kami alone. All the steep or vertical stone in this chaotic terrain was still black, while flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by. Then the snow stopped. The wind died. The black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a definition it didn’t usually have. In the overcast there were no shadows, and the landscape glowed as if light were pouring up through the snow onto the bottoms of the dusky low clouds. Everything was sharp-edged and distinct, as if captured in glass. Over the horizon appeared moving figures. One by one they appeared, until there were seven of them, in a ragged line. They moved slowly, their shoulders slumped, their helmets bent forward. They moved as if they had no destination. The two in front looked up from time to time, but they never paused, or pointed the way. The eastern clouds gleamed like mother of pearl, the only sign on that dull day that the sun had risen. The figures walked up a long ridge that emerged from the blasted landscape. From the upper slopes of the ridge one could see a long way in every direction. It took a long time for the figures to climb the ridge. Finally they approached a peak, a bouldery knob where the ridge began to descend again. At the summit of the knob was a curious thing: a big flat-bottomed boulder standing high in the air, balanced on six slender stone pillars. The seven figures approached this megalith. They stopped and regarded it for a time, under the dark bruised clouds. Then they stepped between the pillars, and under the boulder. It stood well over them, a massive roof. The circular floor beneath it was flat, made of cut polished stone. One of the figures walked to a far column, and touched it with a finger. The others looked out at the motionless snowy chaos. A trapdoor slid open in the floor. The figures went to it, and one by one stepped down into the ridge. When they were gone the six slender columns began to sink into the floor, and the great dolmen that they held aloft descended on them, until the columns disappeared and the great rock rested on the ridge, returned to its ancient existence as an impressive peak boulder. Beyond the clouds the sun had set, and the light leaked out of the empty land. It was Maya who kept them going, Maya who drove them into heading south. The refuge under the dolmen was just that, a sequence of small caves in the ridge, stocked with emergency rations and gas supplies, but otherwise empty. After a few days to rest and catch up on sleep and food, Maya began to complain. It was no way to live, she said, it was no more than a kind of death-in-life; where were all the others? Where was Hiroko? Michel and Kasei explained again that the hidden colony was in the south, that they had moved down there long ago. All right, Maya said, then we will go south too. There were other boulder cars in the refuge’s garage, they could caravan down by night, she said, and out of the canyons they would be safe. The refuge was no longer self-sustaining in any case, its supplies were large but limited, so they would have to go sooner or later. Best to go while the dust storm would still provide some cover for the trip. Best to go. So she drove the tired little group to action. They loaded two cars, and took off again, south across the great rumpled plains of Margarifiter Sinus. Free from the restrictions of Marineris, they made hundreds of kilometers per night, and slept through the days, and in a nearly speechless journey of several days they passed between Argyre and Hellas, through the endless craterland of the southern highlands. It began to seem that they had never done anything but drive onward in their little cars, that the journey would last forever. But then one night they drove onto the layered terrain of the polar region, and near dawn the horizon ahead gleamed, and then became a dim white bar, which thickened and thickened as they proceeded, until it was a white cliff standing before them. The southern polar cap, evidently. Michel and Kasei took over the two drivers’ seats, and conferred over the intercom in low voices. They drove on until they reached the white cliff, and they continued to drive straight at it, until they were on frozen crusted sand that was under the bulk of the ice. The cliff was an enormous overhang, like a wave stopped in the moment it was about to crash onto a beach. There was a tunnel cut into the ice at the bottom of the cliff, and a figure in a walker appeared, and directed the two rovers into it. The tunnel led them straight into the ice for what must have been a kilometer at least. The tunnel was wide enough for two or three rovers, and had a low ceiling; the ice around them was a pure white, dry ice only lightly streaked by stratification. They passed through two locks filling the tunnel; and in the third lock Michel and Kasei stopped the rovers, and opened the locks, and climbed down. Maya, Nadia, Sax, Simon and Ann followed them out of the cars. They walked down the tunnel in silence. Then the tunnel opened up and they all stopped, stilled by the sight that met them. They had just walked out under the edge of an enormous dome of gleaming white ice. They stood under it as if under a giant overturned bowl. The dome was several kilometers in diameter, and at least a kilometer high, maybe more; it rose swiftly from the perimeters, and then bowled gently across the center. The light was diffuse but fairly strong, as if on a cloudy day, and it seemed to come from the white dome itself, which gleamed. The ground under the dome was gently rolling reddish sand, grassy in the hollows, with frequent stands of tall bamboo and gnarled pine. There were some small hillocks to the right, and clustered in these hills was a little village, one and two-story houses painted white and blue, interspersed with large trees which had bamboo rooms and staircases set in their thick branches. Michel and Kasei were walking toward this village, and the woman who had guided their cars into the tunnel lock was running ahead, shouting “They’re here, they’re here!” Under the other side of the dome there was a lake of faintly steaming open water, its surface a white sheen lined by waves that broke on the near shore. On the far shore stood the blue bulk of a Rickover, its reflection a smear of blue across the white water. Gusts of cold damp wind nipped at their ears. Michel came back and retrieved his old friends, who were standing like statues. “Come on, it’s cold out,” he said with a smile. “There’s a water ice layer stuck to the dome, so we have to keep the air below freezing all the time.” People were spilling out of the village, calling out. Down by the little lake a young man appeared sprinting toward them, gazelling over the dunes in great leaps. Even after all their years on Mars such a flying run still looked dreamlike to the first hundred, and it took a while before Simon clutched Ann by the arm and cried “That’s Peter! That’s Peter!” “Oh my God,” she said. And then they were in a crush of people, many of them young folk and children, strangers, but with familiar faces everywhere making their way to the fore, Hiroko and Iwao, Raul, Rya, Gene, Peter crashing in to hug Ann and Simon, and there were Vlad and Ursula and Marina and several others from the Acheron group, all clustered around them, reaching to touch them, to embrace them. “What is this place?” Maya cried. “This is home,” Hiroko said. “This is where we start again.” Copyright © 1992 by Kim Stanley Robinson. |
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