Red Mars(62)
“But then if it gets hotter still, the frost will melt, and it will rain. Then we’ve got rivers and lakes, right?”
“If the atmospheric pressure is high enough. Liquid surface water depends on air pressure as well as temperature. If both rise, we could be walking around on sand here in a matter of decades.”
“It’d be quite a meteorite collection,” Nadia said, trying to lighten Ann’s mood.
It didn’t work. Ann pursed her lips, stared out the window, shook her head. Her face could be so bleak; it couldn’t be explained entirely by Mars, there had to be something more to it, something that explained that intense internal spin, that anger. Bessie Smith land. It was hard to watch. When Maya was unhappy it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues, you knew it was a put-on, the exuberance just poured through it. But when Ann was unhappy, it hurt to watch it.
Now she picked up her dish of lasagna, leaned back to stick it in the microwave. Beyond her the white waste gleamed under a black sky, as if the world outside were a photo negative. The clockface suddenly read 0:00:01.
• • •
Four days later they were off the ice. As they retraced their route back to Phyllis and George and Edvard, the three travelers rolled over a rise and came to a halt. There was a structure on the horizon. Out on the flat sediment of the chasma floor there stood a classical Greek temple, six Dorian columns of white marble, capped by a round flat roof.
“What the hell?”
When they got closer they saw that the columns were made of ice drums from the miner, stacked on top of each other. The disk that served as roof was rough hewn.
“George’s idea,” Phyllis said over the radio.
“I noticed the ice cylinders were the same size as the marble drums the Greeks used for their pillars,” George said, still pleased with himself. “After that it was obvious. And the miner is running perfectly, so we had some time to kill.”
“It looks great,” Simon said. And it did: alien monument, dream visitation, it glowed like flesh in the long dusk, as if blood ran under its ice. “A temple to Ares.”
“To Neptune,” corrected George. “We don’t want to invoke Ares too often, I don’t think.”
“Especially given the crowd at base camp,” Ann said.
• • •
As they drove south their road of tracks and transponders ran ahead of them, as distinct as any highway of paved concrete. It did not take Ann to point out how much this changed the feel of their travel; they were no longer exploring untouched land, and the nature of the landscape itself was altered, split left and right by the parallel lines of crosshatched wheel tracks, and by the green canisters slightly dimmed by a rime of dust, all marking “the way.” It wasn’t wilderness anymore; that was the point of road-building, after all. They could leave the driving to Rover Three automatic pilot, and often did.
So they were trundling along at thirty kph, with nothing to do but look at the bisected view, or talk, which they did infrequently, except on the morning they got into a heated discussion about Frank Chalmers— Ann maintaining that he was a complete Machiavellian, Phyllis insisting that he was no worse than anyone else in power, and Nadia, remembering her talks with him about Maya, knowing it was more complex than either of those views. But it was Ann’s lack of discretion that appalled her, and as Phyllis went on about how Frank had held them together in the last months of the voyage out, Nadia glared at Ann, trying to convey to her by looks that she was talking in the wrong crowd. Phyllis would use her indiscretions against her later on, that was obvious. But Ann was bad at seeing looks.
Then suddenly the rover braked and slowed to a stop. No one had been watching, and they all jumped to the front window.
There before them was a flat white sheet, covering their road for nearly a hundred meters. “What is it?” George cried.
“Our permafrost pump,” Nadia said, pointing. “It must have broken.”
“Or worked too well!” Simon said. “That’s water ice!”
They switched the rover to manual, drove nearer. The spill covered the road like a wash of white lava. They struggled into their walkers and got out of the module, walked over to the edge of the spill.
“Our own ice rink,” Nadia said, and went to the pump. She unhooked the insulation pad and had a look inside. “Ah ha— a gap in the insulation— water froze right here, and jammed the stopcock in the open position. A good head of pressure, I’d say. Ran till it froze thick enough to stop it. A tap from a hammer might get us our own little geyser.”
She went to her tool cabinet in the underside of the module, took out a pick. “Watch out!” She struck a single blow at the white mass of ice, where the pump joined the tank feeder pipe. A thick bolt of water squirted a meter into the air. “Wow!” It splashed down onto the white sheet of ice, steaming even though it froze within seconds, making a white lobate leaf on top of the ice already there. “Look at that!” The hole too froze over, and the stream of water stopped, and the steam blew away.