Red Mars(66)

Nadia shrugged, irritated. “We’ve been busy.”

“So were we on Phobos, but you should see it! We’ve walled all the galleries in panels of nickel striped with platinum, and scored the panel surfaces with iterated patterns that the robots run at night, Escher reproductions, mirrors offset for infinite regress, scenes from Earth, you should see it! You can put a candle in some of the chambers and it looks like the stars in the sky, or a room on fire. Every room is a work of art, wait till you see it!”

“I look forward to it.” Nadia shook her head, smiling at him.

That evening they had a big communal dinner in the four connected chambers that formed the largest room in the complex. They ate chicken and soyburgers and large salads, and everyone talked at once, so that it was reminiscent of the best months on the Ares, or even of Antarctica. Arkady stood to tell them about the work on Phobos. “I am glad to be in Underhill at last.” They were nearly done doming Stickney, he told them, and under it long galleries had been drilled into the fractured and brecciated rock, following ice veins right through the moon. “If it weren’t for the lack of gravity, it would be a great place,” Arkady concluded. “But that’s one we can’t solve. We spent most of our free time on Nadia’s gravity train, but it’s cramped, and meanwhile all the work is in Stickney or below it. So we spent too much time weightless or exercising, and even so we lost strength. Even Martian g makes me tired now, I’m dizzy right now.”

“You’re always dizzy!”

“So we must rotate crews there, or run it by robot. We are thinking of all coming down for good. We’ve done our part up there, a functioning space station is now available for those who follow. Now we want our reward down here!” He raised his glass.

Frank and Maya frowned. No one would want to go up to Phobos, and yet Houston and Baikonur wanted it manned at all times. Maya had that look on her face familiar from the Ares, the one that said it was all Arkady’s fault; when Arkady saw it he burst out laughing.

The next day Nadia and several others took him on a more detailed tour of Underhill and the surrounding facilities, and he spent the whole time nodding his head with that pop-eyed look of his that made you want to nod back while he said, “Yes, but, yes, but,” and went into one detailed critique after another, until even Nadia began to get annoyed with him. Although it was hard to deny that the Underhill area was battered, thrashed to the horizon in every direction, so that it seemed as if it continued outward over the whole planet.

“It’s easy to color bricks,” Arkady said. “Add manganese oxide from the magnesium smelting and you have pure white bricks. Add carbon left over from the Bosch process for black. You can get any shade of red you want by altering the amount of ferric oxides, including some really stunning scarlets. Sulphur for yellows. And there must be something for greens and blues, I don’t know what but Spencer might, maybe some polymer based on the sulphur, I don’t know. But a bright green would look marvelous in such a red place. It will have a blackish shade to it from the sky, but it will still be green and the eye is pulled to it.

“And then with these colored bricks, you build walls that are all mosaics. It’s beautiful to do it. Everyone can have their own wall or building, whatever they want. All the factories in the Alchemists’ Quarter look like outhouses or discarded sardine tins. Brick around them would help insulate them, so there is a good scientific reason for it, but truthfully it’s just as important that they look good, that it looks like home here. I’ve already lived too long in a country that thought only of utility. We must show that we value more than that here, yes?”

“No matter what we do to the buildings,” Maya pointed out sharply, “the ground around them will still be all ripped up.”

“But not necessarily! Look, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plain. Dust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnot. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that’s not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that’s always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it.”