“Things are changing,” Maya said, although not to Diana; and Diana did not reply.
Eventually the flood of new dark water whitened all over its surface, and stopped moving. “It’s coming out somewhere else now,” Diana said. “It works like sedimentation in a river delta. The main channel for this lobe is actually well to the south of here.”
“I’m glad I saw this. Let’s get back.”
They drove back to Hell’s Gate, and that night had supper together again, on the same restaurant terrace under the great bridge. Maya asked Diana a great number of questions about Paul and Esther and Kasei and Nirgal and Rachel and Emily and Reull and the rest of Hiroko’s brood, and their children and their children’s children. What were they doing now? What were they going to do? Did Nirgal have lots of followers?
“Oh yes, of course. You saw how it is. He travels all the time, and there’s a whole network of natives in the northern cities who take care of him. Friends, and friends of friends, and so on.”
“And you think these people will support a . . .”
“Another revolution?”
“I was going to say independence movement.”
“Whatever you call it, they’ll support it. They’ll support Nirgal. Earth looks like a nightmare to them, a nightmare trying to drag us down into it. They don’t want that.”
“They?” Maya said, smiling.
“Oh me too.” Diana smiled back. “Us.”
• • •
As they continued clockwise around Hellas, Maya had cause to remember that conversation. A consortium from Elysium, without any metanat or UNTA connections that Maya could discover, had just finished roofing over the Harmakhis-Reull valleys, using the same method that had been used to roof Dao. Now there were hundreds of people in those two linked canyons, outfitting the aerators and working up soils, and seeding and planting the nascent biosphere of the canyons’ mesocosm. Their on-site greenhouses and manufacturing plants were producing much of what they needed for this work, and metals and gases were being mined out of the badlands of Hesperia to the east, and brought into the town at the mouth of Harmakhis Vallis called Sukhumi. These people had the starter programs and the seeds, and they did not appear to put much stock in the Transitional Authority; they had not asked permission from it to engage in their project, and they actively disliked the official crews from the Black Sea Group, who were usually Terran metanat representatives.
They were hungry for manpower, however, and were happy to get more technicians or generalists from Deep Waters, and any equipment they could cadge from its headquarters. Practically every group Maya met in the Harmakhis-Reull region made a pitch for aid, and most of them were young natives, who seemed to think they had just as much chance at the equipment as anyone else, even though they were not affiliated with Deep Waters or any other company.
And everywhere south of Harmakhis-Reull, in the ragged ejecta hills behind the rim of the basin, there were dowsing crews, out looking for aquifers. As in the roofed canyons, most of these crews had been born on Mars, and a lot of them had been born on Mars since ‘61. And they were different, profoundly different, sharing interests and enthusiasms perfectly incommunicable to any other generation, as if genetic drift or disruptive selection had produced a bimodal distribution, so that members of the old Homo sapiens were now coinhabiting the planet with a new Homo ares, creatures tall and slender and graceful and utterly at home, chattering to each other in a profound self-absorption as they did the work that would make Hellas Basin into a sea.
And this gigantic project was perfectly natural work to them. At one stop on the piste Maya and Diana got out and drove with some friends of Diana’s out onto one of the ridges of the Zea Dorsa, which ran out onto the southeast quarter of the basin floor. Now most of these dorsa were peninsulas running out under another ice lobe, and Maya looked down at the crevasse-riven glaciers to each side and tried to imagine a time when the surface of the sea would in fact lie hundreds of meters overhead, so that these craggy old basalt ridges would be nothing but blips on some ship’s sonar, home to starfish and shrimp and krill and extensive varieties of engineered bacteria. That time was not far off, amazing though it was to realize it. But Diana and her friends, these in particular of Greek ancestry, or was it Turkish— these young Martian dowsers were not awed by this imminent future, nor by their project’s vastness. It was their work, their life— to them it was human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren’t even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer— they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing.