The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson
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0:00:00, and stopped. Its stillness accentuated the quietness in the car. Simon was asleep; Ann sat in the driver’s seat, staring out at the scene, her dinner half-eaten. No sound but the whoosh of the ventilator. “I’m glad you got us up here,” Nadia said. “It’s been great.”
“Someone should enjoy it,” Ann said. When she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fact. “It won’t be here long.”
“Are you sure, Ann? It’s five kilometers deep here, isn’t that what you said? Do you really think it will completely disappear just because of black dust on it?”
Ann shrugged. “It’s a question of how warm we make it. And of how much total water there is on the planet, and how much of the water in the regolith will surface when we heat the atmosphere. We won’t know any of those things until they happen. But I suspect that since this cap is the primary exposed body of water, it’ll be the most sensitive to change. It could sublime away almost entirely before any significant part of the permafrost has gotten within fifty degrees of melting.”
“Entirely?”
“Oh, some will be deposited every winter, sure. But there’s not that much water, when you put it in the global perspective. This is a dry world, the atmosphere is super-arid, it makes Antarctica look like a jungle, and remember how that place used to suck us dry? So if temperatures go up high enough, the ice will sublime at a really rapid rate. This whole cap will shift into the atmosphere and blow south, where it’ll frost out at nights. So in effect it’ll be redistributed more or less evenly over the whole planet, as frost about a centimeter thick.” She grimaced. “Less than that, of course, because most of it will stay in the air.”
“But then if it gets hotter still, the frost will melt, and it will rain. Then we’ve got rivers and lakes, right?”
“If the atmospheric pressure is high enough. Liquid surface water depends on air pressure as well as temperature. If both rise, we could be walking around on sand here in a matter of decades.”
“It’d be quite a meteorite collection,” Nadia said, trying to lighten Ann’s mood.
It didn’t work. Ann pursed her lips, stared out the window, shook her head. Her face could be so bleak; it couldn’t be explained entirely by Mars, there had to be something more to it, something that explained that intense internal spin, that anger. Bessie Smith land. It was hard to watch. When Maya was unhappy it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues, you knew it was a put-on, the exuberance just poured through it. But when Ann was unhappy, it hurt to watch it.
Now she picked up her dish of lasagne, leaned back to stick it in the microwave. Beyond her the white waste gleamed under a black sky, as if the world outside were a photo negative. The clockface suddenly read 0:00:01.
Four days later they were off the ice. As they retraced their route back to Phyllis and George and Edvard, the three travelers rolled over a rise and came to a halt; there was a structure on the horizon. Out on the flat sediment of the chasma floor there stood a classical Greek temple, six Dorian columns of white marble, capped by a round flat roof.
“What the hell?”
When they got closer they saw that the columns were made of ice drums from the miner, stacked on top of each other. The disk that served as roof was rough-hewn.
“George’s idea,” Phyllis said over the radio.
“I noticed the ice cylinders were the same size as the marble drums the Greeks used for their pillars,” George said, still pleased with himself. “After that it was obvious. And the miner is running perfectly, so we had some time to kill.”
“It looks great,” Simon said. And it did: alien monument, dream visitation, it glowed like flesh in the long dusk, as if blood ran under its ice. “A temple to Ares.”
“To Neptune,” corrected George. “We don’t want to invoke Ares too often, I don’t think.”
“Especially given the crowd at base camp,” Ann said.
As they drove south their road of tracks and transponders ran ahead of them, as distinct as any highway of paved concrete. It did not take Ann to point out how much this changed the feel of their travel: they were no longer exploring untouched land, and the nature of the landscape itself was altered, split left and right by the parallel lines of cross-hatched wheel tracks, and by the green canisters slightly dimmed by a rime of dust, all marking for them “the way.” It wasn’t wilderness any more; that was the point of road-building, after all. They could leave the driving to Rover One’s automatic pilot, and often did.
So they were trundling along at 30 kph, with nothing to do but look at the bisected view, or talk, which they did infrequently, except on the morning they got into a heated discussion about Frank Chalmers – Ann maintaining that he was a complete Machiavellian, Phyllis insisting that he was no worse than anyone else in power, and Nadia, remembering her talks with him about Maya, knowing it was more complex than either of those views. But it was Ann’s lack of discretion that appalled her, and as Phyllis went on about how Frank had held them together in the last months of the voyage out, Nadia glared at Ann, trying to convey to her by looks that she was talking in the wrong crowd. Phyllis would use her indiscretions against her later on, that was obvious. But Ann was bad at seeing looks.
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; Ann and Phyllis argued about migration of permafrost, 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,