Green mars (60 page)

Zeyk and Nazik nodded, and Nazik helped her get her helmet on. “Don’t be long,” she said.

The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.

Maya walked slowly toward an outcropping perhaps a kilometer away. There was something growing in the cracks underfoot, lichen or piggyback moss, its greens all black. She stepped on rocks where she could. Plants had it hard enough on Mars without being stepped on as well. All living things. The chill of the twilight seeped into her, until she could feel the X of the heating filaments in her pants against her knees as she walked. She stumbled and blinked to clear her vision. The sky was full of blurry stars. Somewhere north, in the Aureum Chaos, the body of Frank Chalmers lay in a wash of ice and sediments, his walker for a coffin. Killed while saving the rest of them from being swept away. Though he would have scorned such a description with all his heart. An accident of timing, he would insist, nothing more. The result of having more energy than anyone else, energy fueled by his anger—at her, at John, at UNOMA and all the powers of Earth. At his wife. At his father. At his mother, and himself. At everything. The angry man; the angriest man who had ever lived. And her lover. And the murderer of her other lover, the great love of her life, John Boone, who might have saved them all. Who would have been her partner forever.

And she had set them on each other.

Now the sky was starry black, with no more than a dark purple band left on the western skyline. Her tears were gone, along with her feelings; nothing left but the black world and a slash of purple bitterness, like a wound bleeding into the night.

Some things you must forget.
Shikata ga nai.

Back in Odessa Maya did the only thing she could with what she had learned, and forgot it, throwing herself into the work of the Hellas project, spending long hours at the office poring over reports, and assigning crews to the various drilling and construction sites. With the discovery of the Western Aquifer the dowsing expeditions lost their urgency, and more emphasis was placed on tapping and pumping the aquifers already found, and constructing the infrastructure of the rim settlements. So drillers followed dowsers, and pipeline crews went out after the drillers, and tent teams were out all around the piste, and up the Reull canyon above Har-makhis, helping the Sufis deal with a badly fretted canyon wall. New emigrants were arriving at a spaceport built between Dao and Harmakhis, and moving into upper Dao, and helping to transform Harmakhis-Reull, and also settling the other new tent towns around the rim. It was a massive exercise in logistics, and in almost every respect it conformed to Maya’s old dream of development for Hellas. But now that it was actually happening, she felt extremely jangly and odd; she was no longer sure what she wanted for Hellas, or for Mars, or herself. Often she felt at the mercy of her mood swings, and in the months after the visit to Zeyk and Nazik (though she did not make this correlation) they were especially violent, an irregular oscillation from elation to despair, with the equinox time in the middle wrecked by the knowledge that she was either on her way up or down.

She was often hard on Michel in these months, often annoyed by his composure, by the way he seemed so at peace with himself, humming along through his life as if his years with Hiroko had answered all his questions. “It’s your fault,” she told him, pushing to get a reaction. “When I needed you, you were gone. You weren’t doing your job.”

Michel would ignore that, would soothe and soothe until it made her angry. He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn’t make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one’s lover was also one’s therapist—how that objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job—it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control. That had to be disproved. And so (forgetting to forget): “I killed them both! I snared them and played them against each other, to increase my own power. I did it on purpose and you were no help at all! It was your fault too!”

He muttered something, beginning to get worried, as he could see what was coming, like one of the frequent storms that blew over the Hellespontus into the basin, and she laughed and slapped him hard in the face, punching him as he retreated, shouting “Come on, you coward, stand up for yourself!” until he ran out onto the balcony and held the door shut with the heel of his foot, staring over the trees of the park and cursing out loud in French while she battered the door. Once she even broke one of the panes and showered glass over his back, and he yanked the door open, still cursing in French as he shoved by her and out the door, out of the building.

But usually he just waited until she collapsed and started to cry, and then he came back in and spoke in English, which marked the return of his composure. And with only a slightly disgusted air he would return to the intolerable therapy again. “Look,” he would say, “we were all under great pressure then, whether we could tell it or not. It was an extremely artificial situation, and dangerous as well—if we had failed in any number of different ways, we all could have died. We had to succeed. Some of us dealt with the pressure better than others. I did not do so well, and neither did you. But here we are now. And the pressures are still there, some different, some the same. But we are doing better at dealing with them, if you ask me. Most of the time.”

And then he would leave and go out to a cafe on the corniche, and nurse a cassis for an hour or two, drawing sketches of faces in his lectern, mordant caricatures that he erased at the moment of completion. She knew this because some nights she would go out and find him, and sit by him in silence with her glass of vodka, apologizing with the set of her shoulders. How to tell him that it helped her to fight now and then, that it started her on the upward curve again—tell him without causing that sardonic little shrug of his, melancholy and oppressed? Besides, he knew. He knew and he forgave. “You loved them both,” he would say, “but in different ways. And there were things you didn’t like about them as well. Besides, whatever you did, you can’t take responsibility for their actions. They chose to do what they did, and you were only one factor.”

It helped her to hear that. And it helped her to fight. It would be all right; she would feel better, for a few weeks or days at least. The past was so shot full of holes anyway, a ragged collection of images—eventually she would forget for real, surely. Although the memories that held the firmest seemed to stick because of a glue made of pain, and remorse. So it might take a while to forget them, even though they were so corrosive, so painful, so useless. Useless! Useless. Better to focus on the present.

Thinking that one afternoon, in the apartment by herself, she ‘
    
stared for a long time at the photo of the young Frank by the sink—thinking that she would take it down, and throw it away. A mur-I derer. Focus on the present. But she too was a murderer. And also the one who had driven him to murder. If one ever drove anyone to anything. In any case he was her companion in that, somehow. ! So after a long time thinking about it, she decided to leave the photo up.

Over the months, however, and the long rhythms of the time-slipped days and the six-month seasons, the photo became little more than part of the decor, like the rack of tongs and wooden paddles, or the hanging row of copper-bottomed pots and pans, or the little sailing-ship salt and pepper shakers. Part of the stage set for this act of the play, as she sometimes thought of it, which however permanent it seemed would be struck at some point— would disappear utterly, as all the previous sets had disappeared, while she passed through to the next reincarnation. Or not.

So the weeks passed and then the months, twenty-four per year. The first of the month would fall on a Monday for so many months in a row that it would seem fixed forever; then a third of a Martian year would have passed, and a new season finally have made its appearance, and a twenty-seven-day month would pass and suddenly the first would be on a Sunday, and after a while that too would begin to seem the eternal norm, for month after month. And this went on and on; the long Martian years made their slow wheel. Out around Hellas, they seemed to have discovered most of the significant aquifers, and the effort shifted entirely to mining and piping. The Swiss had recently developed what they called a walking pipeline, made specifically for the work in Hellas, and up on Vastitas Borealis. These contraptions rolled over the landscape, distributing the groundwater evenly over the land, so that they could cover the basin floor without creating mountains of ice directly outside the ends of fixed pipelines, as they had tended to before.

Maya went out with Diana to look at one of these pipes in action. Seen from a dirigible floating overhead, they looked remarkably like a garden hose lying on the ground, snaking back and forth under the high pressure of the spurting water.

Down on the ground it was more impressive, even bizarre; the pipeline was huge, and it rolled majestically over layers of smooth ice already deposited, held a couple of meters over the ice on squat pylons that ended in big pontoon skis. The pipeline moved at several kilometers an hour, pushed by the pressure of the water spewing out of its nozzle, which pointed at various angles set by computer. When the pipeline had skiied out to the end of its arc, motors would turn the nozzle, and the pipeline would slow down, stop, and reverse direction.

The water shot out of the nozzle in a thick white stream, arcing out and splashing onto the surface in a spray of red dust and white frost steam. Then the water flowed over the ground, in great muddy lobate spills, slowing down, pooling, settling flat, then whitening, and shifting slowly to ice. This was not pure ice, however; nutrients and several strains of ice bacteria had been added to the water from big bioreservoirs located back at the beachline, and so the new ice had a milky pink cast, and melted quicker than pure ice. Extensive” melt ponds, actually shallow lakes many square kilometers in area, were a daily event in the summer, and on sunny spring and fall days. The hydrologists ,also reported big melt pods under the surface. And as worldwide temperatur.es continued to rise, and the ice deposits in the basin got thicker, the bottom layers were apparently melting under the pressure. So great plates of ice over these melt zones would slip down even the slightest of slopes, piling up in great broken heaps over all the lowest points,on the basin floor, in areas that were fantastic wastelands of pressure ridges, seracs, melt pools that froze every night, and blocks of ice like fallen skyscrapers. These great unstable ice piles shifted and broke as they melted in the day’s heat, with explosive booms like thunder, heard in Odessa and every other rim town. Then the piles froze again every night, booming and cracking, until many places on the basin floor were an inconceivably shattered chaos.

No travel was possible across such surfaces, and the only way to observe the process over the majority of the basin was from the air. One week in the fall of M-48, Maya decided to join Diana and Rachel and some others taking a trip out to the little settlement on the rise in the center of the basin. This was already called Minus One Island, although it was not yet quite an island, as the Zea Dorsa were not yet covered. But the last of the Zea Dorsa was going to be inundated in a matter of days, and Diana, along with several other hydrologists at the office, thought it would be a good idea to go out and see the historic occasion.

Just before they were scheduled to leave, Sax showed up at their apartment, by himself. He was on his way from Sabishii down to Vishniac, and had dropped in to see Michel. Maya was glad to think that she would be off soon, and so not be around during his stay, which would surely be brief. She still found it unpleasant to be around him, and it was clear that the feeling was mutual; he continued to avoid her eye, and did his talking with Michel and Spencer. Never one word for her! Of course he and Michel had spent hundreds of hours talking during Sax’s rehabilitation, but still, it made her furious.

Thus when he heard about her impending trip to Minus One, and asked if he could come along, she was very unpleasantly surprised. But Michel gave her a beseeching glance, quick as a. lightning bolt, and Spencer quickly asked if he could come along too, no doubt to keep her from pushing Sax out of the dirigible. And so she agreed, very grumpily.

Thus when they took off a couple of mornings later they had “Stephen Lindholm” and “George Jackson” along with them, two old men whom Maya did not bother to explain to the others, seeing that Diana and Rachel and Frantz all knew who they were. The youngsters were all a bit more subdued as they climbed the steps into the dirigible’s long gondola, which made Maya purse her lips irritably. It was not going to be the same trip it would have been without Sax.

The flight from Odessa out to Minus One Island took about twenty-four hours. The dirigible was smaller than the old arrowhead-shaped behemoths of the early years; this one was a cigar-shaped craft called the Three Diamonds, and the gondola that formed the bag’s keel was long and capacious. Though its ultralight props were powerful enough to drive it at some speed, and directly into fairly strong winds, it still felt to Maya like a barely controlled drift, the hum of the motors scarcely audible under the whoosh of the west wind. She went to one window and looked down, her back to Sax.

The view out the windows was a marvel from the very moment of the first ascent, for Odessa was a handsome banked leaf-and-tile vision in its tent on the north slope. And after a couple of hours of plowing through the air to the southeast, the basin’s ice plain covered the entire visible surface of the world, as if they flew over an Arctic Ocean, or an ice world.

They sailed at an altitude of some thousand meters, at about fifty kilometers an hour. Through the afternoon of the first day the shattered icescape beneath them was everywhere a dirty white, liberally dotted with sky-purple melt pools, occasionally blazing silver as they mirrored the sun. For a while they could see a pattern of spiral polynyas to the west, the long black streaks of open water marking the location of the drowned mohole at Low Point.

At sunset the ice became a jumble of opaque pinks and oranges and ivories, streaked by long black shadows. Then they flew through the night, under the stars, over a luminous crackled whiteness. Maya slept uneasily on one of the long benches under the windows, and woke before dawn, which was another wonder of coloration, the purples of the sky appearing much darker than the pink ice below, an inversion that made everything look surreal.

Around midmorning of that day they caught sight of land again; over the horizon floated an oval of sienna hills rising out of the ice, about a hundred kilometers long and fifty wide. This rise was Hel-las’s equivalent of the central knob found on the floor of medium-sized craters, and it was high enough to remain well above the planned water level, giving the future sea a fairly substantial central island.