Green Mars(242)

And then, rising with a groan, it was just as hard to imagine that she was waking up to a world in turmoil, with millions of people waiting to see what the day would bring. Looking around at the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving— beating very lightly— a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.





They breakfasted in the barrel vaults, in the large hall where Ann and Sax had once argued the merits of terraforming. Sax had won that argument, but Ann was out there fighting it still, as if it had not been decided long since.Nadia focused on the present, on her AI screen and the flood of news pouring through it this Saturday morning: the top of the screen given over to Maya’s safe house in Burroughs, the bottom to Praxis reports from Earth. Maya was performing heroically as usual, vibrant with apprehension, hectoring everyone in sight to conform to her vision of how things should happen, haggard and yet buzzing with her internal spin. As Nadia listened to her describe the latest developments she chewed breakfast methodically, scarcely noticing Underhill’s delicious bread. It was afternoon already in Burroughs, and the day had been busy. Every town on Mars was in turmoil. On Earth all the coastal areas were now flooded, and the mass dislocations were causing chaos inland. The new UN had condemned the rioters on Mars as heartless opportunists who were taking advantage of a time of unprecedented suffering to advance their own selfish cause. “True enough,” Nadia said to Sax as he walked in the door, fresh from Da Vinci Crater. “They’ll hold that against us later, I bet.”

“Not if we help them out.”

“Hmm.” She offered him bread, regarding him closely. Despite his changed features he was looking more like Sax every day, standing there impassively, blinking as he looked around the old brick chamber. It seemed as though revolution was the last thing on his mind. She said, “Are you ready to fly to Elysium?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“Good. Let me go get my bag.”

While she was throwing her clothes and AI into her old black backpack, her wrist beeped and there was Kasei, his long gray hair wild around his deeply lined face, which was the strangest mix of John and Hiroko— John’s mouth, at the moment stretched into a wide grin; Hiroko’s Oriental eyes, now slitted with delight. “Hello, Kasei,” Nadia said, unable to conceal her surprise. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you on my wrist before.”

“Special circumstances,” he said, unabashed. She was used to thinking of him as a dour man, but the outbreak of the revolution was obviously a great tonic; she understood suddenly by his look that he had been waiting for this all his life. “Look, Coyote and I and a bunch of Reds are up here in Chasma Borealis, and we’ve secured the reactor and the dam; everyone working here has been cooperative—”

“Encouraging!” someone beside him yelled.

“Yes, there’s been a lot of support up here, except for a security team of about a hundred people who are holed up in the reactor. They’re threatening to melt it down unless we give them safe passage to Burroughs.”

“So?” Nadia said.

“So?” Kasei repeated, and laughed. “So Coyote says we should ask you what to do.”

Nadia snorted. “Why do I find that hard to believe.”

“Hey, no one here believes it either! But that’s what Coyote said, and we like to indulge the old bastard when we can.”

“So, well, give them safe passage to Burroughs. That’s a no-brainer if I’ve ever seen one. It won’t matter if Burroughs has an extra hundred cops, and the fewer reactor meltdowns the better, we’re still wading around in the radiation from last time.”

Sax came into the room while Kasei was thinking it over. “Okay!” Kasei said. “If you say so! Hey talk to you later, I have to go, ka.”

Nadia stared at her blank wrist screen, scowling.

Sax said, “What was that about?”

“You’ve got me,” Nadia said, and described the conversation while trying to call Coyote. She got no answer.

Sax said, “Well, you’re the coordinator.”

“Shit.” Nadia pulled her backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”



• • •

They flew in a new 51B, very small and very fast. They took a great circle route, which headed northwest over the Vastitas ice sea, and avoided the metanat strongholds of Ascraeus, and Echus Overlook. Very soon after takeoff they could see the ice filling Chryse to the north, the shattered dirty bergs dotted with pink snow algae and amethyst melt ponds. The old transponder road to Chasma Borealis was of course long gone, that whole system of bringing water south forgotten, a technical footnote for the history books. Looking down at the ice chaos Nadia suddenly remembered what the land had looked like on that first trip, the endless hills and hollows, the funnel-like alases, the great black barchan dunes, the incredible laminated terrain in the last sands before the polar cap . . . all gone now, overwhelmed by ice. And the polar cap itself was a mess, nothing but a collection of great melt zones and ice streams, slush rivers, ice-covered liquid lakes— every manner of slurry, and all of it crashing downslope off the high round plateau that the polar cap rested on, down into the world-wrapping northern sea.