But when she expressed these reservations to Nirgal, he agreed. “I don’t think of this as the final step. But I think it helps. It’s what we can do now. And then, when the time comes . . .”
Maya nodded in the darkness. It was another Creche Crescent, she thought suddenly. They walked back up to the village together, where the party was still going on. There five young women at least began jockeying to be the last one at Nirgal’s side when the party ended, and with a laugh only slightly edged (if she were young they would not have had a chance) Maya left them to it and went to bed.
• • •
After two days’ driving downstream from the market village, still forty kilometers from Hell’s Gate, they came around a bend in the canyon and could see down the length of it, to the towers of the piste’s suspension bridge. Like something out of a different world, Maya thought, with a different technology entirely. The towers were six hundred meters high, and ten kilometers apart— a truly immense bridge, dwarfing the town of Hell’s Gate itself, which did not roll over the horizon for another hour, and then came visible from the rim downward, its buildings spilling down the steep canyon walls like some dramatic seafront village in Spain or Portugal— but all in the shadow of the enormous bridge. Enormous, yes— and yet there were bridges twice as big as it in Chryse, and with the continual improvements in materials, there was no end in sight. The new elevator cable’s carbon nanotube filament had a tensile strength that was overkill even for the elevator’s needs, and using it you could build just about any surface bridge you could possibly imagine; people spoke of bridging Marineris, and there were jokes about running cable car lines between the prince volcanoes on Tharsis, to save people the fifteen-kilometer vertical drops between the three peaks.
Back in Hell’s Gate Maya and Diana returned the car to the garage, and had a big dinner in a restaurant about halfway up the wall of the valley, under the bridge. After that Diana had friends she wanted to see, so Maya excused herself and went to the Deep Waters offices, and her room. But outside the glass doors of her room, above its little balcony, the great span of the bridge arched through the stars, and remembering Dao Canyon and its people, and black Hadriaca ribboned white with its snow-filled channels, she had great difficulty getting to sleep. She went out and sat curled in a blanket, on a chair on her balcony, for a good part of the night, watching the underside of the giant bridge and thinking about Nirgal and the young natives, and what they meant.
• • •
The next morning they were supposed to take the next circumHellas train, but Maya asked Diana to drive her out onto the basin floor instead, to see in person what happened to the water running down the Dao River. Diana was happy to oblige.
At the lower end of the town, the stream poured into a narrow reservoir, dammed by a thick concrete dam and pump, located right at the tent wall. Outside the tent, water was carried off across the basin in a fat insulated pipeline, set on three-meter pylons. The pipeline ran down the broad gentle eastern slope of the basin, and they followed it in another company rover, until the crumbled cliffs of Hell’s Gate disappeared over the low dunes of the horizon behind them. An hour later the towers of the bridge were still visible, poking up over the skyline.
A few kilometers farther on, the pipeline ran out over a reddish plain of cracked ice— a kind of glacier, except that it fanned out right to left over the plain for as far as they could see. It was the current shore of their new sea, in fact, or at least one lobe of it, frozen in its place. The pipeline ran out over the ice, then descended into it, disappearing a couple of kilometers from shore.
A small, nearly submerged crater ring stuck out into the ice like a curving double peninsula, and Diana followed tracks onto one peninsula and drove until they were as far out in the ice as they could get. The visible world before them was completely covered with ice; behind them lay the rising slope of sand. “This lobe extends out a long way now,” Diana said. “Look there—” She pointed at a silver twinkling on the western horizon.
Maya took a pair of binoculars from the dash. On the horizon she could make out what appeared to be the northern edge of the lobe of ice, where it gave way again to rising sand dunes. As she watched, a mass of ice at this border toppled, looking like a Greenland glacier caving into the sea, except that when it hit the sand it shattered into hundreds of white pieces. Then there was a spill of water, running as dark as the Ruby River out over the sand. Dust dashed up and away from this stream, and blew south on the wind. The edges of the new flow began to whiten, but Maya saw that it was nothing like the frightening speed with which the flood in Marineris had frozen in ‘61. It stayed liquid, with hardly any frost steam, for minute after minute, right out there in the open air! Oh the world was warmer, all right, and the atmosphere thicker; up to 260 millibars sometimes down here in the basin, and the temperature outside at the moment was 271°K. A very pleasant day! She surveyed the surface of the ice lobe through the binoculars, and saw that it was liberally dotted by the bright white sheens of meltwater ponds that had refrozen clean and flat.