Green Mars(238)

“It’s lifted off the bedrock. There’s a volcano erupting. It’s being broken up by ocean currents.”

The video image he was sending cut to Punta Arena, a Chilean harbor town with its docks gone and its streets awash; then it cut again to Port Elizabeth in Azania, where the situation was much the same.

“How fast is it?” Nadia said. “Is it a tidal wave?”

“No. More like a very high tide. That will never go away.”

“So enough time to evacuate,” Nadia said, “but not enough time to build anything. And you say six meters!”

“But only over the next few . . . no one is sure how long. I’ve seen estimates that as much as a quarter of the Terran population will be— affected.”

“I believe it. Oh, Sax . . .”

A worldwide stampede to higher ground. Nadia stared at the screen, feeling stunned as the scale of the catastrophe became clearer to her. Coastal cities would be awash. Six meters! She found it very hard to imagine that any possible ice mass could be so large as to raise the sea level of all Earth’s oceans by even as much as one meter— but six! It was shocking proof, if one needed it, that the Earth was not so big after all. Or else that the West Antarctic ice sheet was huge. Well, it had covered about a third of a continent, and was, the reports said, some three kilometers thick. That was a lot of ice. Sax was saying something about the East Antarctic ice sheet, which apparently was not threatened. She shook her head to clear it of this nattering, concentrated on the news. Bangladesh would have to be entirely evacuated; that was three hundred million people, not to mention the other coastal cities of India, like Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. Then London, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, Rio, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Djakarta, Tokyo . . . and those were only the big ones. A lot of people lived on the coast, in a world already severely stressed by overpopulation and declining resources. And now all kinds of basic necessities were being drowned by salt water.

“Sax,” she said, “we should be helping them. Not just . . .”

“There is not that much we can do. And we can do that best if we’re free. First one, then the other.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” he said, looking surprised. “I mean— I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s what I’m asking.” She thought it over. “You’ve got everything ready at your end?”

“Yes. We want to start with missile strikes against all surveillance and weapons satellites.”

“What about Kasei Vallis?”

“I’m dealing with it.”

“When do you want to start?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow!”

“I have to deal with Kasei very soon. Conditions are good right now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Let’s try to launch tomorrow. No sense wasting time.”

“My God,” Nadia said, thinking hard. “We’re about to go behind the sun?”

“Yes.”

This position vis-à-vis Earth was mostly a symbolic matter these days, as communications were assured by a great number of asteroid relays; but it did mean that it would take months for even the fastest shuttles to get from Earth to Mars.

Nadia took a deep breath, let it out. She said, “Let’s go, then.”

“I was hoping you would say that. I’ll call them in Burroughs and give them the word.”

“We’ll meet in Underhill?” This was their current rendezvous point in case of emergency; Sax was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater where a lot of his missile silos were located, so both of them could get to Underhill in a day.

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And he was gone.

And so she had started a revolution.

She found a news program running the satellite photo of Antarctic, and watched it in a kind of daze. Little voices on the screen chattered at speed, one claiming that the disaster was an act of ecotage perpetrated by ecoteurs from Praxis, who supposedly had drilled holes in the ice sheet and set hydrogen bombs down on the Antarctic bedrock. “Still at it!” she cried, disgusted. No other news shows made this assertion, or refuted it— it was just part of the chaos, no doubt, swept away by all the other accounts of the flood. But the metanatricide was still on. And they were part of it.

All existence immediately reduced itself to that, in a way sharply reminiscent of ‘61. She felt her stomach knotting as of old, tightening past any usual levels of tension, into an iron walnut at the center of her being, painful and constricting. She had been taking medicine recently to reduce stomach acids, but it was woefully inadequate against this kind of assault. Come on, she told herself. Be calm. This is the moment. You’ve expected it, you’ve worked on it. You’ve laid the groundwork for it. Now came the chaos. At the heart of any phase change there was a zone of cascading recombinant chaos. But there were methods to read it, to deal with it.