Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
“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. By the time the ground over the coil warmed up, the rover was long gone. So they left no heat signal, never used the radio, and 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. Kasei’s 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 Chasmas. Michel called this area the Compton Break. It was chaotic terrain, and until they had crossed it, and gotten down into Ius Chasma, Michel would not feel comfortable. For without their rough 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 500 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 followed by a half hour off. Another day and they were down the Compton Break, and into tight-walled Ius Chasma, 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 rock-strewn 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 as 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 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 Judgment 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 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 down-canyon 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 down-canyon 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 down-canyon 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 masked 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— he never actually looked 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 Corprates, 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 200 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 polynyaps 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.