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“It’s not fooling around!” Ann snapped. “We obtain water to allow us to explore, we don’t explore just to obtain water! You’ve got it backwards! I can’t believe how many people in this colony do that!”
Nadia said, “Let’s see what they say at base. They might want us to help with something there, or they might not be able to send a drop, you never know.”
Ann groaned. “We’ll end up asking permission from the UN, I swear.”
She was right. Frank and Maya didn’t like the idea, John was interested but noncommittal. Arkady supported it when he heard of it, and declared he would send a supply drop from Phobos if necessary, which given its orbit was impractical at best. But at that point Maya called mission control in Houston and Baikonur, and the argument rippled outward. Hastings opposed the plan; but Baikonur, and a lot of the scientific community, liked it.
Finally Ann got on the phone, her voice very curt and arrogant, though she looked scared: “I’m the geological head here, and I say it needs to be done. There won’t be any better opportunity to get onsite data on the original condition of the polar cap. It’s a delicate system, and any change in the atmosphere is going to impact it heavily. And you’ve got plans to do that, right? Sax, are you still working on those windmill heaters?”
Sax had not been part of the discussion and he had to be called to the phone. “Sure,” he said when the question was repeated. He and Hiroko had come up with the idea of manufacturing small windmills, to be dropped from dirigibles all over the planet. The constant westerlies would spin the windmills, and the spin would be converted to heat in coils in the base of the mills, and this heat would simply be released into the atmosphere. Sax had already designed a robotic factory to manufacture the windmills; he hoped to make them by the thousands. Vlad pointed out that the heat gained would come at the price of winds slowed down: you couldn’t get something for nothing. Sax immediately argued that that would be a side benefit, given the severity of the global dust storms the wind sometimes caused. “A little heat for a little wind is a great trade-off.”
“So, a million windmills,” Ann said now. “And that’s just the start. You talked about spreading black dust on the polar caps, didn’t you Sax?”
“It would thicken the atmosphere faster than practically any other action we could take.”
“So if you get your way,” Ann said, “the caps are doomed. They’ll evaporate and then we’re going to say, ‘I wonder what they were like?’ And we won’t know.”
“Do you have enough supplies, enough time?” John asked.
“We’ll drop you supplies,” Arkady said again.
“There’s four more months of summer,” Ann said.
“You just want to go to the pole!” Frank said, echoing Phyllis.
“So?” Ann replied. “You may have come here to play office politics, but I plan to see a bit of this place.”
Nadia grimaced; that ended that line of conversation, and Frank would be angry. Which was never a good idea. Ann, Ann …
The next day the Terran offices weighed in with the opinion that the polar cap ought to be sampled in its aboriginal condition. No objections from base; though Frank did not get back on the line. Simon and Nadia cheered: “North to the Pole!”
Phyllis just shook her head. “I don’t see the point. George and Edvard and I will stay down here as a back-up, and make sure the ice miner is working right.”
So Ann and Nadia and Simon took Rover Three and drove back down Chasma Borealis and around to the west, where one of the glaciers curling away from the cap thinned to a perfect rampway. The mesh of the rover’s big wheels caught like a snowmobile’s driving chain, running well over all the various surfaces of the cap, over patches of exposed granular dust, low hills of hard ice, fields of blinding white CO
frost, and the usual lace of sublimed water ice. Shallow valleys swirled outward in a clockwise pattern from the pole; some of these were very broad. Crossing these they would drive down a bumpy slope that curved away to right and left over both horizons, all of it covered by bright dry ice; this could last for twenty kilometers, until the whole visible world was bright white. Then before them a rising slope of the more familiar dirty red water ice would appear, striated by contour lines. As they crossed the bottom of the trough the world would be divided in two, white behind, dirty pink ahead. Driving up the south-facing slopes, they found the water ice more rotten than elsewhere, but as Ann pointed out, every winter a meter of dry ice sat on the permanent cap to crush the previous summer’s rotten filigree, so the potholes were filled on an annual schedule; and the rover’s big wheels crunched cleanly along.
Beyond the swirl valleys they found themselves on a smooth white plain, extending to the horizon in every direction. Behind the polarized and tinted glass of the rover’s windows the whiteness was unmarred and pure. Once they passed a low ring hill, the mark of some relatively recent meteor impact, filled in by subsequent ice deposition. They stopped to take borings, of course. Nadia had to restrict Ann and Simon to four borings a day, to save time and keep the rover’s trunks from being overloaded. And it wasn’t just borings; often they would pass black isolated rocks, resting on the ice like Magritte sculptures: meteorites. They collected the smallest of these, and took samples from the larger ones; and once passed one that was as big as the rover. They were nickel-iron for the most part, or stony chondrites. Chipping away at one of these, Ann said to Nadia, “You know they’ve found meteorites on Earth that came from Mars. The reverse happens too, although much less often. It takes a really big impact to jack rocks out of Earth’s gravitational field fast enough to get them out here – delta V of fifteen kilometers per second, at least – I’ve heard it said that about two percent of the material ejected out of Earth’s field would end up on Mars. But only from the biggest impacts, like the KT boundary impact. It would be strange to find a chunk of the Yucatan here, wouldn’t it?”
“But that was sixty million years ago,” Nadia said. “It would be buried under the ice.”
“True.” Later, walking back to the rover, she said, “Well, if they melt these caps then we’ll find some. We’ll have a whole museum of meteorites, sitting around on the sand.”
They crossed more swirl valleys, falling again into the up-and-down pattern of a boat over waves, this time the largest waves yet, forty kilometers from crest to crest. They used the clocks to keep on a schedule, and parked from ten p.m. to five a.m. on hillocks or buried crater rims, to give themselves a view during their stops; and they blacked the windows with double polarization to help them to get some sleep at night.
Then one morning as they crunched along, Ann turned on the radio and began to run checks with the areosynchronous satellites. “It’s not easy to find the pole,” she said as she worked. “The early Terran explorers had a hell of a time in the north: they were always up there in summertime and couldn’t see the stars, and they had no satellite checks.”
“So how did they do it?” Nadia asked, suddenly curious.
Ann thought about it and smiled. “I don’t know. Not very well, I suspect. Probably dead reckoning.”
Nadia became intrigued by the problem, and started working on it on a sketchpad. Geometry had never been her strong point, but presumably at the north pole on midsummer’s day, the sun would inscribe a perfect circle around the horizon, never getting higher or lower. If you were near the Pole, then, and it was near Midsummer’s Day, you might be able to use a sextant to make timed checks on the sun’s height above the horizon … was that right?
“This is it,” Ann said.
“What?”
They stopped the rover, looked around. The white plain undulated to the nearby horizon, featureless except for a couple of broad red contour lines; the lines did not form bull’s eyes circles around them, and it didn’t look like they were at the top of anything.
“Where, exactly?” Nadia asked.
“Well, somewhere just north of here.” Ann smiled again. “Within a kilometer or so. Maybe that way.” She pointed off to the right. “We’ll have to go over there a ways and check with the satellite again. A little bit of triangulation and we should be able to hit it on the nose. Plus or minus a hundred meters, anyway.”
“If we just took the time, we could make it plus or minus a meter!” Simon said enthusiastically. “Let’s pin it down!”
So they drove for a minute, consulted the radio, turned to right angles and drove again, made another consultation. Finally Ann declared they were there, or close enough. Simon programmed the computer to keep working on it, and they suited up and went out and wandered around a bit, to make sure they had stepped on it. Ann and Simon drilled a boring. Nadia kept walking, in a spiral that expanded away from the cars. A reddish white plain, the horizon some four kilometers away; too close; it came to her in a rush, as during the black dune sunset, that this was alien – a sharp awareness of the tight horizon, the dreamy gravity, a world just so big and no bigger … and now she was standing right on its north pole. It was Ls = 92, about as near midsummer as you could ask; so if she stood facing the sun, and didn’t move, the sun would stay right in front of her face for all the rest of the day, or the rest of the week for that matter! It was strange. She was spinning like a top. If she stood still long enough, would she feel it?
Her polarized faceplate reduced the sun’s glare on the ice to an arc of crystalline rainbow points. It wasn’t very cold. She could just feel a breeze against her upraised palm. A graceful red streak of depositional laminae ran over the horizon like a longitude line. She laughed at the thought. There was a very faint ice-ring around the sun, big enough that its lower arc just touched the horizon. Ice was subliming off the polar cap and gleaming in the air above, providing the crystals in the ring. Grinning, she stomped her boot prints into the North Pole of Mars.
That evening they aligned the polarizers so that a very dimmed-down image of the white desert stood around them in the module windows. Nadia sat back with an empty food tray in her lap, sipping a cup of coffee. The digital clock flicked from 11:59:59 to 0:00:00, and stopped. Its stillness accentuated the quietness in the car. Simon was asleep; Ann sat in the driver’s seat, staring out at the scene, her dinner half-eaten. No sound but the whoosh of the ventilator. “I’m glad you got us up here,” Nadia said. “It’s been great.”
“Someone should enjoy it,” Ann said. When she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fact. “It won’t be here long.”
“Are you sure, Ann? It’s five kilometers deep here, isn’t that what you said? Do you really think it will completely disappear just because of black dust on it?”
Ann shrugged. “It’s a question of how warm we make it. And of how much total water there is on the planet, and how much of the water in the regolith will surface when we heat the atmosphere. We won’t know any of those things until they happen. But I suspect that since this cap is the primary exposed body of water, it’ll be the most sensitive to change. It could sublime away almost entirely before any significant part of the permafrost has gotten within fifty degrees of melting.”
“Entirely?”
“Oh, some will be deposited every winter, sure. But there’s not that much water, when you put it in the global perspective. This is a dry world, the atmosphere is super-arid, it makes Antarctica look like a jungle, and remember how that place used to suck us dry? So if temperatures go up high enough, the ice will sublime at a really rapid rate. This whole cap will shift into the atmosphere and blow south, where it’ll frost out at nights. So in effect it’ll be redistributed more or less evenly over the whole planet, as frost about a centimeter thick.” She grimaced. “Less than that, of course, because most of it will stay in the air.”
“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 lasagne, 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 cross-hatched wheel tracks, and by the green canisters slightly dimmed by a rime of dust, all marking for them “the way.” It wasn’t wilderness any more; that was the point of road-building, after all. They could leave the driving to Rover One’s automatic pilot, and often did.
So they were trundling along at 30 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.
“Look how fast it froze!”
“Looks just like those splosh craters,” Nadia remarked, grinning. It had been a beautiful sight, water spilling out and steaming like mad as it froze.
Nadia chipped away at the ice around the stopvalve; Ann and Phyllis argued about migration of permafrost, quantities of water at this latitude, etc. etc. One would think they’d get sick of it. But they really did dislike each other, and so they were helpless to stop. It would be the last trip they ever took together, no doubt about it. Nadia herself would be disinclined to travel with Phyllis and George and Edvard anymore, they were too complacent, too much a little in-group of their own. But Ann was alienated from quite a few other people as well; if she didn’t watch out, she’d be without anyone at all to accompany her on trips. Frank, for instance – that comment to him the other night, and then telling Phyllis of all people how horrible he was; incredible.
And if she alienated everyone but Simon, she would be hurting for conversation; for Simon Frazier was the quietest man in the whole hundred. He had hardly said twenty sentences the entire length of the trip, it was uncanny, like traveling with a deaf-mute. Except maybe he talked to Ann when they were alone, who knew?
Nadia worked the valve into its stop position, then shut the whole pump down. “We’ll have to use thicker insulation this far north,” she said to no one in particular as she took her tools back to the rover. She was tired of all the sniping, anxious to get back to base camp and her work. She wanted to talk with Arkady; he would make her laugh. And without trying, or even knowing exactly how, she would make him laugh too.
They put a few chunks of the ice spill in among the rest of the samples, and set out four transponders to guide robot pilots around the spill. “Although it may sublime away, right?” Nadia said.
Ann, lost in thought, didn’t hear the question. “There’s a lot of water up here,” she muttered to herself, sounding worried.
“You’re damned right there is,” Phyllis exclaimed. “Now why don’t we have a look at those deposits we’ve spotted at the north end of Mareotis?”
As they got closer to base Ann became more close-mouthed and solitary, her face held tight as a mask. “What’s the matter?” Nadia asked one evening, when they were out together near sunset, fixing a defective transponder.
“I don’t want to go back,” Ann said. She was kneeling by an isolated rock, chipping at it. “I don’t want this trip to end. I’d like to keep traveling all the time, down into the canyons, up to the volcano rims, into the chaos and the mountains around Hellas. I don’t ever want to stop.”
She sighed. “But … I’m part of the team. So I have to climb back into the hovel with everyone else.”
“Is it really that bad?” Nadia said, thinking of her beautiful barrel vaults, of the steaming whirlpool bath and a glass of icy vodka.
“You know it is! Twenty-four and a half hours a day underground in those little rooms, with Maya and Frank running their political schemes, and Arkady and Phyllis fighting over everything, which I understand now, believe me – and George complaining and John floating in a fog and Hiroko obsessed by her little empire – Vlad too, Sax too … I mean, what a crowd!”
“They’re no worse than any other. No worse and no better. You have to get along. You couldn’t be here all by yourself.”
“No. But it feels like I’m not here anyway, when I’m at the base. Might as well be back on the ship!”
“No, no,” Nadia said. “You’re forgetting.” She kicked the rock Ann was working on, and Ann looked up in surprise. “You can kick rocks, see? We’re here, Ann. Here on Mars, standing on it. And every day you can go out and run around. And you’ll be taking as many trips as anyone, with your position.”
Ann looked away. “It just doesn’t seem like enough, sometimes.”
Nadia stared at her. “Well, Ann: it’s radiation keeping us underground more than anything. What you’re saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go away. Which means thickening the atmosphere, which means terraforming.”
“I know.” Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten: “Don’t you think I know?” She stood and waved the hammer. “But it isn’t right! I mean I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it – I destroy what it is, what I love in it. This road we made, it hurts me to see it! And base camp is like an open pit mine, in the middle of a desert never touched since time began. So ugly, so … I don’t want to do that to all of Mars, Nadia, I don’t. I’d rather die. Let the planet be, leave it wilderness and let radiation do what it will. It’s only a statistical matter anyway, I mean if it raises my chance of cancer to one in ten, then nine times out of ten I’m all right!”
“Fine for you,” Nadia said. “Or for any individual. But for the group, for all the living things here – the genetic damage, you know. Over time it would cripple us. So, you know, you can’t just think of yourself.”
“Part of a team,” Ann said dully.
“Well, you are.”
“I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”
On the sixty-second day of their expedition they saw plumes of smoke over the southern horizon, strands of brown, gray, white and black rising and mixing, billowing into a flat-topped mushroom cloud that wisped off to the east. “Home again home again,” Phyllis said cheerily.
Their tracks from the trip out, half-filled by dust, led them back toward the smoke: through the freight landing zone, across ground crisscrossed with treadmarks, across ground trampled to light red sand, past ditches and mounds, pits and piles, and finally to the great raw mound of the permanent habitat, a square earthen redoubt now topped by a silvery network of magnesium beams. That sight piqued Nadia’s interest, but as they rolled on in she could not help noticing the litter of frames, crates, tractors, cranes, spare part dumps, garbage dumps, windmills, solar panels, water towers, concrete roads leading east west and south, air miners, the low buildings of the alchemists’ quarter, their smokestacks emitting the plumes they had seen; the stacks of glass, the round cones of gray gravel, the big mounds of raw regolith next to the cement factory, the small mounds of regolith scattered everywhere else. It had the disordered, functional, ugly look of Vanino or Usman or any of the Stalinist heavy industry cities in the Urals, or the oil camps of Yakut. They rolled through a good five kilometers of this devastation; and as they did Nadia did not dare to look at Ann, who sat silently beside her, emanating disgust and loathing. Nadia too was shocked, and surprised at the change in herself; this had all seemed perfectly normal before the trip, indeed had pleased her very much. Now she was slightly nauseated, and afraid Ann might do something violent, especially if Phyllis said anything more. But Phyllis kept her mouth shut, and they rolled into the tractor lot outside the northern garage and stopped. The expedition was over.
One by one they plugged the rovers into the wall of the garage and crawled through the doors. Familiar faces crowded around, Maya and Frank and Michel and Sax and John and Ursula and Spencer and Hiroko and all the rest, like brothers and sisters really, but so many of them that Nadia was overwhelmed, she shrivelled like a touched anenome, and had trouble talking. She wanted to grasp something she could feel escaping her, she looked around for Ann and Simon, but they were trapped by another group and seemed stunned, Ann stoical, a mask of herself.
Phyllis told their story for them. “It was nice, really spectacular, the sun shone all the time, and the ice is really there, we’ve got access to a lot of water, it’s like the Arctic when you’re up on that polar cap …”
“Did you find any phosphorus?” Hiroko asked. Wonderful to see Hiroko’s face, worried about the shortage of phosphorus for her plants. Ann told her that she had found drifts of sulphates in the light material around the craters in Acidalia, so they went off together to look at the samples. Nadia followed the others down the concrete-walled underground passageway to the permanent habitat, thinking about a real shower and fresh vegetables, half-listening to Maya give her the latest news. She was home.
Back to work; and as before, it was unrelenting and many-faceted, an endless list of things to do, and never enough time, because even though some tasks took much less human time than Nadia had expected, being robot-adequate, everything else took much more. And none of it gave her the same joy as building the barrel vault chambers, even if it was interesting in the technical sense.
If they wanted the central square under the dome to be any use, they had to lay a foundation that from bottom to top was composed of gravel, concrete, gravel, fiberglass, regolith, and finally treated soil. The dome itself would be made of double panes of thick treated glass, to hold the pressure and to cut down on UV rays, and a certain percentage of cosmic radiation. When all of it was done, they would have a central garden atrium of ten thousand square meters, really quite an elegant and satisfying plan; but as Nadia worked on the various aspects of the structure she found her mind wandering, her stomach tense. Maya and Frank were no longer speaking to one another in their official capacities, which indicated that their private relationship was going poorly indeed; and Frank did not seem to want to talk to John either, which was a shame. The broken affair between Sasha and Yeli had turned into a kind of civil war between their friends; and Hiroko’s band, Iwao and Paul and Ellen and Rya and Gene and Evgenia and the rest, perhaps in reaction to all this, spent every day out in the atrium or in the greenhouses, more withdrawn than ever. Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the medical team were absorbed in research almost to the exclusion of clinical work with the colonists, which made Frank furious; and the genetic engineers spent all their time out in the converted trailer park, in the labs.
And yet Michel was behaving as if nothing were abnormal, as if he were not the psychological officer for the colony; he spent a lot of time watching French TV. When Nadia asked him about Frank and John, he only looked blankly at her.
They had been on Mars for 420 days; the first seconds of their universe were past. They no longer gathered to plot the next day’s work, or discuss what they were doing. “Too busy,” people said to Nadia when she asked. “Well, it’s too involved to describe, you know, it’d put you to sleep. It does me.” And so on.
And then at odd moments she would see in her mind’s eye the black dunes, the white ice, the silhouetted figures against a sunset sky. She would shiver and come to with a sigh. Ann had already arranged another trip and was gone, this time south to the northernmost arms of great Valles Marineris, to see more unimaginable marvels. But Nadia was needed at base camp, whether she wanted to be out with Ann in the canyons or not. Maya complained about how much Ann was away. “It’s clear she and Simon have started something and are just out there having a honeymoon while we slave away in here.” That was Maya’s way of looking at things, that would be what it would take to make Maya as happy as Ann sounded in her calls. But Ann was in the canyons, and that was all that was needed to make her sound that way. If she and Simon had started something it would only be a natural extension of that, and Nadia hoped it was true, she knew that Simon loved her, and she had felt the presence of an immense solitude in Ann, something that needed a human contact. If only she could join them again!
