• • •
The weather observations piqued Frank’s interest in climatology like none of the scientists’ talk ever had. The weather on the escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of gritty hail. Currently the atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80 percent carbon dioxide and 10 percent oxygen, the remainder mostly nitrogen from the new nitrite conversion plants. It wasn’t clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO2 with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of a scab. And in the hardest gales the gusts could knock you down quite easily. Frank timed one katabatic gust at 600 kilometers an hour; luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.
• • •
The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the Great Escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.
While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose, so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.
• • •
All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside. When they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.
The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to the north. In his days of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by: silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itself. Days would pass, and the shadows wheel. The winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afternoons. Clouds stacked the sky, from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud 20,000 meters high.
Occasionally he would turn on the TV and watch the Arabic news channel. Sometimes in the silence of the mornings he would talk back to the TV. There was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of the media, and of the events they packaged. The stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle. Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mob. Back there the Terran past still lived on in enormous regions, where village life was plodding on as it always had. Maybe that was wisdom, held to by old wives and shamans. Maybe. But it was hard to believe, because look what happened when they gathered in cities. Idiots on video, history in the making. “One can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great boon.” These things made him laugh. “Haven’t you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!”