“This is a stupendous act!” Maya told them sharply. “This is magnitudes bigger than anything people have been able to do before! This sea is going to be the size of the Caribbean! There’s never been any project anything like this on Earth—no project! Not even close!”
A pleasant oval-faced woman with beautiful skin laughed. “I don’t give a damn about Earth,” she said.
• • •
The new piste curved around the southern rim, crossing transversely some steep ridges and ravines which were called the Axius Valles. These corrugations ran from the rim’s rough hills down into the basin, forcing the piste viaduct to alternate between great arching bridges and deep cuts, or tunnels. The train they had boarded after the Zea Dorsa was a short private one belonging to the Odessa office, so Maya got it to stop at most of the small stations along this stretch, and she got out to meet and talk with the dowsing and construction crews. At one stop they were all Earthborn emigrants, and to Maya much more comprehensible than the blithe natives— normal-sized people, staggering around amazed and enthusiastic, or dismayed and complaining, in any case aware of how strange their enterprise was. They took Maya down a tunnel in a ridge, and it turned out that the ridge was a lava tunnel running down from Amphitrites Patera, its cylindrical cavity much the same size as Dorsa Brevia’s, but tilted at a sharp angle. The engineers were pumping the Amphitrites aquifer’s water into it, and using it as their pipeline to the basin floor. So now, as the grinning Earthborn hydrologists showed her as she stepped into an observation gallery cut into the side of the lava tube, black water was racing down the bottom of the huge tunnel, barely covering its bottom even at 200 cubic meters a second, the roar of its splashing echoing in the empty cylinder of basalt. “Isn’t it great?” the emigrants demanded, and Maya nodded, happy to be with people whose reactions she could understand. “Just like a damn big storm drain, isn’t it?”
But back at the train, the young natives nodded at Maya’s exclamations— lava tube pipeline, of course— very big, yes, it would be wouldn’t it— saved her some pipe for the less fortunate operations, yes? And then they went back to discussing some people they knew that Maya had never heard of.
• • •
As the train continued they rounded the southwest arc of the basin, and the piste led them north. They rode over four or five more big pipelines, snaking out of high canyons in the Hellespontus Montes to their left, canyons between bare serrated ridges of rock, like something out of Nevada or Afghanistan, the peaks whitened with snow. Out the windows to the right, down on the basin floor, there were more spreading patches of dirty broken ice, often marked by the flat white patches of newer spills. They were building on the hilltops by the piste, little tent towns like places out of the Tuscan Renaissance. “These foothills will be a popular place to live,” Maya said to Diana. “They’ll be between the mountains and the sea, and some of these canyon mouths should end up as little harbors.”
Diana nodded. “Nice sailing.”
As they came around the last curve of their circumnavigation, the piste had to cross the Niesten Glacier, the frozen remainder of the massive outburst that had drowned Low Point in ‘61. There was no easy way to make this crossing, as the glacier was thirty-five kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and no one had yet marshaled the time and equipment to build a suspension bridge over it. Instead several support pylons had been rammed through the ice and secured in the rock below. These pylons had prows like icebreakers on their upstream side, and on their downstream side there was attached a kind of pontoon bridge, which rode over the passing ice of the glacier using cushioned smart pads that expanded or contracted to compensate for drops and rises in the ice.
The train slowed for the crossing of this pontoon, and as they glided over it Maya looked upstream. She could see where the glacier fell out of the gap between two fanglike peaks, very near Niesten Crater. Never-identified rebels had broken open the Niesten aquifer with a thermonuclear explosion, and released one of the five or six largest outbursts of ‘61, almost as big as the one that had harrowed the Marineris canyons. The ice under them was still a bit radioactive. But now it lay under the bridge frozen and still, the aftermath of that terrible flood nothing more than an astonishingly broken field of ice blocks. Beside her Diana said something about climbers who liked to ascend the icefalls on the glacier for the fun of it. Maya shuddered with disgust. People were so crazy. She thought of Frank, carried away by the Marineris flood, and cursed out loud.