Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
Then suddenly the rover braked and slowed to a stop. No one had been watching, and they all jumped to the front window.
There before them was a flat white sheet, covering their road for nearly a hundred meters. “What is it?” George cried.
“Our permafrost pump,” Nadia said, pointing. “It must have broken.”
“Or worked too well!” Simon said. “That’s water ice!”
They switched the rover to manual, drove nearer. The spill covered the road like a wash of white lava. They struggled into their walkers and got out of the module, walked over to the edge of the spill.
“Our own ice rink,” Nadia said, and went to the pump. She unhooked the insulation pad and had a look inside. “Ah ha— a gap in the insulation— water froze right here, and jammed the stopcock in the open position. A good head of pressure, I’d say. Ran till it froze thick enough to stop it. A tap from a hammer might get us our own little geyser.”
She went to her tool cabinet in the underside of the module, took out a pick. “Watch out!” She struck a single blow at the white mass of ice, where the pump joined the tank feeder pipe. A thick bolt of water squirted a meter into the air. “Wow!” It splashed down onto the white sheet of ice, steaming even though it froze within seconds, making a white lobate leaf on top of the ice already there. “Look at that!” The hole too froze over, and the stream of water stopped, and the steam blew away.
“Look how fast it froze!”
“Looks just like those splosh craters,” Nadia remarked, grinning. It had been a beautiful sight, water spilling out and steaming like mad as it froze.
Nadia chipped away at the ice around the stopvalve while Ann and Phyllis argued about migration of permafrost and quantities of water at this latitude, etc. etc. One would think they’d get sick of it. But they really did dislike each other, and so they were helpless to stop. It would be the last trip they ever took together, no doubt about it. Nadia herself would be disinclined to travel with Phyllis and George and Edvard anymore, they were too complacent, too much a little in-group of their own. But Ann was alienated from quite a few other people as well; if she didn’t watch out, she’d be without anyone at all to accompany her on trips. Frank, for instance— that comment to him the other night, and then telling Phyllis of all people how horrible he was— incredible.
And if she alienated everyone but Simon, she would be hurting for conversation, for Simon Frazier was the quietest man in the whole hundred. He had hardly said twenty sentences the entire length of the trip, it was uncanny, like traveling with a deaf-mute. Except maybe he talked to Ann when they were alone, who knew?
Nadia worked the valve into its stop position, then shut the whole pump down. “We’ll have to use thicker insulation this far north,” she said to no one in particular as she took her tools back to the rover. She was tired of all the sniping, anxious to get back to base camp and her work. She wanted to talk with Arkady; he would make her laugh. And without trying, or even knowing exactly how, she would make him laugh too.
They put a few chunks of the ice spill in among the rest of the samples, and set out four transponders to guide robot pilots around the spill. “Although it may sublime away, right?” Nadia said.
Ann, lost in thought, didn’t hear the question. “There’s a lot of water up here,” she muttered to herself, sounding worried.
“You’re damned right there is,” Phyllis exclaimed. “Now why don’t we have a look at those deposits we’ve spotted at the north end of Mareotis?”
As they got closer to base Ann became more closemouthed and solitary, her face held tight as a mask. “What’s the matter?” Nadia asked one evening, when they were out together near sunset, fixing a defective transponder.
“I don’t want to go back,” Ann said. She was kneeling by an isolated rock, chipping at it. “I don’t want this trip to end. I’d like to keep traveling all the time, down into the canyons, up to the volcano rims, into the chaos and the mountains around Hellas. I don’t ever want to stop.”
She sighed. “But . . . I’m part of the team. So I have to climb back into the hovel with everyone else.”
“Is it really that bad?” Nadia said, thinking of her beautiful barrel vaults, of the steaming whirlpool bath and a glass of icy vodka.
“You know it is! Twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day, underground in those little rooms, with Maya and Frank running their political schemes, and Arkady and Phyllis fighting over everything, which I understand now, believe me— and George complaining and John floating in a fog and Hiroko obsessed by her little empire— Vlad too, Sax too. . . . I mean, what a crowd!”
“They’re no worse than any other. No worse and no better. You have to get along. You couldn’t be here all by yourself.”
“No. But it feels like I’m not here anyway, when I’m at the base. Might as well be back on the ship!”
“No, no,” Nadia said. “You’re forgetting.” She kicked the rock Ann was working on, and Ann looked up in surprise. “You can kick rocks, see? We’re here, Ann. Here on Mars, standing on it. And every day you can go out and run around. And you’ll be taking as many trips as anyone, with your position.”
Ann looked away. “It just doesn’t seem like enough, sometimes.”
Nadia stared at her. “Well. Ann. It’s radiation keeping us underground more than anything. What you’re saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go away. Which means thickening the atmosphere, which means terraforming.”
“I know.” Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten. “Don’t you think I
know
?” She stood and waved the hammer. “But it isn’t right! I mean I look at this land and, and I
love
it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it— I destroy what it is, what I love in it. This road we made, it hurts me to see it! And base camp is like an open pit mine, in the middle of a desert never touched since time began. So ugly, so… I don’t want to do that to all of Mars, Nadia, I don’t. I’d rather die. Let the planet be, leave it wilderness and let radiation do what it will. It’s only a statistical matter anyway, I mean if it raises my chance of cancer to one in ten, then nine times out of ten I’m all right!”
“Fine for you,” Nadia said. “Or for any individual. But for the group, for all the living things here— the genetic damage, you know. Over time it would cripple us. So, you know, you can’t just think of yourself.”
“Part of a team,” Ann said dully.
“Well, you are.”
“I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”
Their tracks from the trip out, half-filled by dust, led them back toward the smoke: through the freight-landing zone, across ground crisscrossed with treadmarks, across ground trampled to light red sand, past ditches and mounds, pits and piles, and finally to the great raw mound of the permanent habitat, a square earthen redoubt now topped by a silvery network of magnesium beams. That sight piqued Nadia’s interest, but as they rolled on in she could not help noticing the litter of frames, crates, tractors, cranes, spare-part dumps, garbage dumps, windmills, solar panels, water towers, concrete roads leading east, west and south, air miners, the low buildings of the alchemists’ quarter, their smokestacks emitting the plumes they had seen; the stacks of glass, the round cones of gray gravel, the big mounds of raw regolith next to the cement factory, the small mounds of regolith scattered everywhere else. It had the disordered, functional, ugly look of Chelyabinsk-65 or any of the rest of the other Stalinist heavy-industry cities in the Urals, or the oil camps of Yakut. They rolled through a good five kilometers of this devastation, and as they did Nadia did not dare to look at Ann, who sat silently beside her, emanating disgust and loathing. Nadia too was shocked, and surprised at the change in herself; this had all seemed perfectly normal before the trip, indeed had pleased her very much. Now she was slightly nauseated, and afraid Ann might do something violent, especially if Phyllis said anything more. But Phyllis kept her mouth shut, and they rolled into the tractor lot outside the northern garage and stopped. The expedition was over.
One by one they plugged the rovers into the wall of the garage and crawled through the doors. Familiar faces crowded around, Maya and Frank and Michel and Sax and John and Ursula and Spencer and Hiroko and all the rest, like brothers and sisters really, but so many of them that Nadia was overwhelmed, she shriveled like a touched anemone, and had trouble talking. She wanted to grasp something she could feel escaping her, she looked around for Ann and Simon, but they were trapped by another group and seemed stunned, Ann stoical, a mask of herself.
Phyllis told their story for them. “It was nice, really spectacular, the sun shone all the time, and the ice is really there, we’ve got access to a lot of water, it’s like the Arctic when you’re up on that polar cap. . . .”
“Did you find any phosphorus?” Hiroko asked. Wonderful to see Hiroko’s face, worried about the shortage of phosphorus for her plants. Ann told her that she had found drifts of sulphates in the light material around the craters in Acidalia, so they went off together to look at the samples. Nadia followed the others down the concrete-walled underground passageway to the permanent habitat, thinking about a real shower and fresh vegetables, half-listening to Maya give her the latest news. She was home.
Back to work; and as before, it was unrelenting and many-faceted, an endless list of things to do, and never enough time, because even though some tasks took much less human time than Nadia had expected, being robot-adequate, everything else took much more. And none of it gave her the same joy as building the barrel-vault chambers had, even if it was interesting in the technical sense.
If they wanted the central square under the dome to be of any use, they had to lay a foundation that from bottom to top was composed of gravel, concrete, gravel, fiberglass, regolith, and finally treated soil. The dome itself would be made of double panes of thick treated glass, to hold the pressure and to cut down on UV rays, and a certain percentage of cosmic radiation. When all of it was done, they would have a central garden atrium of 10,000 square meters, really quite an elegant and satisfying plan. But as Nadia worked on the various aspects of the structure she found her mind wandering, her stomach tense. Maya and Frank were no longer speaking to one another in their official capacities, which indicated that their private relationship was going poorly indeed; and Frank did not seem to want to talk to John either, which was a shame. The broken affair between Sasha and Yeli had turned into a kind of civil war between their friends, and Hiroko’s band, Iwao and Paul and Ellen and Rya and Gene and Evgenia and the rest, perhaps in reaction to all this, spent every day out in the atrium or in the greenhouses, living together out there, more withdrawn than ever. Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the medical team were absorbed in research almost to the exclusion of clinical work with the colonists, which made Frank furious, and the genetic engineers spent all their time out in the converted trailer park, in the labs.
And yet Michel was behaving as if nothing were abnormal, as if he were not the psychological officer for the colony. He spent a lot of time watching French TV. When Nadia asked him about Frank and John, he only looked blankly at her.
They had been on Mars for 420 days, and the first seconds of their universe were past. They no longer gathered to plot the next days’ work, or discuss what they were doing. “Too busy,” people said to Nadia when she asked. “Well, it’s too involved to describe, you know, it’d put you to sleep. It does me.” And so on.
And then at odd moments she would see in her mind’s eye the black dunes, the white ice, the silhouetted figures against a sunset sky. She would shiver and come to with a sigh. Ann had already arranged another trip and was gone, this time south to the northernmost arms of great Valles Marineris, to see more unimaginable marvels. But Nadia was needed at base camp, whether she wanted to be out with Ann in the canyons or not. Maya complained about how much Ann was away. “It’s clear she and Simon have started something and are just out there having a honeymoon while we slave away in here.” That was Maya’s way of looking at things, that would be what it would take to make Maya as happy as Ann sounded in her calls. But Ann was in the canyons, and that was all that was needed to make her sound that way. If she and Simon had started something it would only be a natural extension of that, and Nadia hoped it was true, she knew that Simon loved Ann, and she had felt the presence of an immense solitude in Ann, something that needed a human contact. If only she could join them again!
But she had to work. So she worked, she bossed people around the construction sites, she stalked the building sites and snapped at her friends’ sloppy work. Her injured hand had regained some strength during the trip, so she was able to drive tractors and bulldozers again; she spent long days doing that, but it just wasn’t the same anymore.
At Ls = 208° Arkady came down to Mars for the first time. Nadia went out to the new spaceport and stood on the edge of the broad expanse of dusty cement to watch the arrival, hopping from foot to foot. The burnt sienna cement was already marked by the yellow and black stains of earlier landings. Arkady’s pod appeared in the pink sky, a white dot and then a yellow flame like an inverted gas burnoff stack. Eventually it resolved into a geodesic hemisphere with rockets and legs below, drifting down on a column of fire, and landing with unearthly delicacy right on the centerpoint dot. Arkady had been working on the descent program, apparently with good results.