Читать книгу The Complete Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 11

It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion years ago. That’s fifteen million human generations. Rocks banging together in space and then coming back and holding together, all because of the mysterious force we call gravity. That same mysterious warp in the weft of things caused the pile of rocks, when it was big enough, to crush in on its center until the heat of the pressure melted the rock. Mars is small but heavy, with a nickel-iron core. It is small enough that the interior has cooled faster than Earth’s: the core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed and so Mars has practically no magnetic field. No dynamo left. But one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, eleven kilometers high: three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth’s largest volcano.

So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars. The other major factor was meteor fall. In the Noachian Age, three to four billion years ago, millions of meteors were falling on Mars at a tremendous rate, and thousands of them were planetesimals, rocks as big as Vega or Phobos. One of the impacts left behind Hellas Basin, 2000 kilometers in diameter, the largest obvious crater in the solar system; although Daedalia Planum appears to be the remains of an impact basin 4500 kilometers across. Those are big; but then there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin.

These big impacts created explosions so cataclysmic that it is hard to imagine them; ejecta from them ended up on the Earth and the Moon, and as asteroids in Trojan orbits; some areologists think that the Tharsis Bulge started because of the Hellas impact; others believe that Phobos and Deimos are ejecta. And these were only the largest impacts. Smaller stones fell every day, so that the oldest surfaces on Mars are saturated with cratering, the landscape a palimpsest of newer rings obscuring older ones, with no patch of land untouched. And each of these impacts released explosions of heat that melted rock: elements were broken out of their matrix and fired away in the form of hot gases, liquids, new minerals. This and the outgassing from the core produced an atmosphere, and lots of water; there were clouds, storms, rain and snow, glaciers, streams, rivers, lakes, all scouring the land, all leaving unmistakable marks of their passage – flood channels, stream beds, shorelines, every kind of hydrologic hieroglyphic.

But all that went away. The planet was too small, too far from the sun. The atmosphere froze and fell to the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock and turned it red. The water froze, and over the ages seeped down through the kilometers of meteor-broken rock. Eventually this layer of regolith became permeated with ice, and the deepest parts were hot enough to melt the ice; so there were underground seas on Mars. And water always flows downhill; so these aquifers migrated down, slowly seeping, until they pooled behind some stoppage or another, a rib of high bedrock or a frozen soil barrier. Sometimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape in enormous floods, floods ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi. Eventually, however, the water on the surface would freeze and sublime away in the ceaseless dry winds, and fall on the poles in every winter’s fog hood. The polar caps therefore thickened, and their weight drove the ice underground until the visible ice was only the tip of two world-topping lenses of underground permafrost, lenses ten and then a hundred times the visible caps’ volume. While back down toward the equator, new aquifers were being filled from below, by outgassing from the core; and some of the old aquifers were refilling.

And so this slowest of cycles approached its second round. But as the planet was cooling, all of it happened more and more slowly, in a long ritard like a clock winding down. The planet settled into the shape we see. But change never stops; the ceaseless winds carved the land, with dust that grew finer and finer; and the eccentricities of Mars’s orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 year cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles. Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching, in geometrical patterns like Navajo sand paintings, banding the whole top of the world.

The colored sands in their patterns, the fluted and scalloped canyon walls, the volcanoes rising right through the sky, the rubbled rock of the chaotic terrain, the infinity of craters, ringed emblems of the planet’s beginning … Beautiful, or harsher than that: spare, austere, stripped down, silent, stoic, rocky, changeless. Sublime. The visible language of nature’s mineral existence.

Mineral; not animal, nor vegetable, nor viral. It could have happened but it didn’t. There was never any spontaneous generation out of the clays or the sulphuric hot springs; no spore falling out of space, no touch of a god; whatever starts life (for we do not know), it did not happen on Mars. Mars rolled, proof of the otherness of the world, of its stony vitality.

And then, one day …

She hit the ground with both feet solid, nothing tricky about it, the g familiar from nine months in the Ares; and with the suit’s weight, not that much different from walking on Earth, as far as she could remember. The sky was a pink shaded with sandy tans, a color richer and more subtle than any in the photos. “Look at the sky,” Ann was saying, “look at the sky.” Maya was chattering away, Sax and Vlad spun like rotating statues. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky took a few more steps, felt her boots crunch the surface. It was salt-hardened sand a couple of centimeters thick, which cracked when you walked on it; the geologists called it duricrust or caliche. Her boot tracks were surrounded by small systems of radial fractures.

She was out away from the lander. The ground was a dark rusty orange, covered with an even litter of rocks the same color, although some of the rocks showed tints of red or black or yellow. To the east stood a number of rocket landing vehicles, each one a different shape and size, with the tops of more sticking over the eastern horizon. All of them were crusted the same red-orange as the ground: it was an odd, thrilling sight, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. Parts of Baikonur would look like this, in a million years.

She walked to one of the nearest landing vehicles, a freight container the size of a small house, set on a skeletal four-legged rocket assembly. It looked like it had been there for decades. The sun was overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate; it was hard to judge through the polarization and other filters, but it seemed to her that the daylight was much like that on Earth, as far as she could remember. A bright winter’s day.

She looked around again, trying to take it in. They stood on a gently bumpy plain, covered with small sharp-edged rocks, all half-buried in dust. Back to the west the horizon was marked by a small flat-topped hill. It might be a crater rim, it was hard to say. Ann was already halfway there, still quite a large figure; the horizon was closer than seemed right, and Nadia paused to take note of that, suspecting that she would soon become accustomed to it, and never notice. But it was not Earthlike, that strangely close horizon, she saw that clearly now. They stood on a smaller planet.

She made a concerted effort to recall Earth’s gravity, wondering that it should be so hard. Walking in the woods, over tundra, on the river ice in winter … and now: step, step. The ground was flat, but one had to thread a course between the ubiquitous rocks; there was no place on Earth that she knew of where they were distributed so copiously and evenly. Take a jump! She did, and laughed; even with her suit on she could tell she was lighter. She was just as strong as ever, but weighed only thirty kilos! And the forty kilos of the suit … well, it threw her off balance, that was true. It made her feel that she had gone hollow. That was it: her center of gravity was gone, her weight had been shifted out to her skin, to the outside of her muscles rather than the inside. That was the effect of the suit, of course. Inside the habitats it would be as it had been in the Ares. But out here in a suit, she was the hollow woman. With the aid of that image she could suddenly move more easily, hop over a boulder, come down and take a turn, dance! Simply pop in the air, dance, land on top of a flat rock – watch out—

She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215° Kelvin, she recalled, or –90° Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements, like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.

She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semi-autonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.

She felt her face stretched in a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks; construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain. She began to hop from one lander to the next, taking stock. Some of them had obviously hit hard, some had their spider legs collapsed, others their bodies cracked, one was even flattened into a pile of smashed boxes, half-buried in dust; but these were just another kind of opportunity, the salvage and repair game, one of her favorites! She laughed aloud, she was a bit giddy, she noticed the comm light on her wrist console blinking; she switched to the common band and was startled by Maya and Vlad and Sax all talking at once, “Where’s Ann, you women get back here, hey Nadia, come help us get this damned habitat online, we can’t even get the door open!”

She laughed.

The habitats were scattered like everything else, but they had landed near one that they knew was functional; it had been turned on from orbit some days before, and run through a complete check. Unfortunately the outer lock door could not be included in the check, and it was stuck. Nadia went to work on it, grinning; it was odd to see what looked like a derelict trailer home sporting a space station lock door. It only took a minute for her to get it open, by tapping out the emergency open code while pulling out on the door. Stuck with cold, differential shrinking perhaps. They were going to have a lot of little problems like that.

Then she and Vlad were into the lock, and then inside the habitat. It still looked like a trailer home, but with the latest in kitchen fixtures. All the lights were on. The air was warm, and circulating well. The control panel looked like a nuclear power plant’s.

While the others came inside, Nadia walked down a row of small rooms, through door after door, and the oddest feeling suddenly came over her: things seemed out of place. The lights were on, some of them blinking; and down at the far end of the hall, a door was swinging slightly back and forth on its hinges.

Obviously the ventilation. And the shock of the habitat’s landing probably had disarranged things slightly. She shook off the feeling and went back to greet the others.

By the time everyone had landed and walked across the stony plain (stopping, stumbling, running, staring off at the horizon, spinning slowly, walking again), and had entered into the three functioning habitats, and gotten out of their EVA suits, and put them away, and checked out the habitats, and eaten a bit, talking it all over the whole while, night had fallen. They continued working on the habitats and talking through most of that night, too excited to fall asleep; then most of them slept in snatches until dawn, when they woke and suited up and went out again, looking around and checking manifests and running machines through checks. Eventually they noticed they were famished, and went back in to jam down a quick meal; and then it was night again!

And that was what it was like, for several days; a wild swirl of time passing. Nadia would wake to the bip of her wrist console and eat a quick breakfast looking out of the habitat’s little east window: dawn stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytime. All over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by the dawn. The kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than closets. Ann would stir as the room lightened and go to one of the four toilets. John was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly. Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn’t sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishly. She would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others’ morning routines.

Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.

The walkers were designed for the Martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the Terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars’s minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have. Walkers also had the very significant advantage of being fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.

Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in itself. Nadia wriggled the pants over her long underwear, then the jacket, and zipped the two sections of the suit together. After that she jammed into big thermal boots, and locked their toprings to the suit’s ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wrist rings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit’s neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her helmet. She breathed hard a few times, tasting the cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker’s wristpad indicated that all the seals were good; and she followed John and Samantha into the lock. They closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers; John unlocked the outer door. The three of them stepped outside.

It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the west, and the various small knolls and hollows revealed clearly. There was usually a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creep. Even the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an outstretched hand, but they hadn’t yet experienced one of the storm winds; at five hundred kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel something. At twenty, nearly nothing.

Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated and climbed in. Nadia drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X weave of the heating filaments in the suit material. A strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time and she had no complaints.

They came to the big lander and got out. Nadia picked up a drill with a Phillips screwdriver bit, and started dismantling the crate on top of the vehicle. The tractor inside the lander’s crate was a Mercedes-Benz. She poked the drill into the head of a screw, pulled the trigger and watched the screw spin out. She moved to the next, grinning. Innumerable times in her youth she had gone out in cold like this, with numb white chopped-up hands, and fought titanic battles to unscrew frozen or stripped screws … but here it was ziiip, another one out. And really with the walker it was warmer than it had been in Siberia, and freer than in space, the walker no more restrictive than a thin stiff wetsuit. Red rocks were scattered all around in their uncanny regularity; voices chattered on the common band: “Hey, I found those solar panels!” “You think that’s something, I just found the goddamn nuclear reactor.” Yes, it was a great morning on Mars.

The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander; they didn’t look strong enough, but that was the gravity again. Nadia had turned on the tractor’s heating system as soon as she could reach it, and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unreliable. She still found it almost impossible to think in terms of Martian g, to trust the designs that took it into account. The ramp just looked too flimsy!

But the tractor rolled down without incident, and stopped on the ground: eight meters long, royal blue, with wire mesh wheels taller than they were. They had to climb a short ladder into the cab. The crane prosthesis was already attached to the mount on the front end, and that made it easy to load the tractor with the winch, the sandbagger, the boxes of spare parts, and finally the crate walls. When they were done, the tractor looked as overloaded and topheavy as a steam calliope; but the g made it only a matter of balance. The tractor itself was a real pig, with six hundred horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks. The hydrazine motor had pick-up even worse than diesel, but it was like the ultimate first gear, completely inexorable. They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park – and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.

And that was the morning. Back into the habitat, helmet and tank off, a quick bite in walker and boots. With all that running around they were famished.

After lunch they went back out in the Mercedes-Benz, and used it to haul a Boeing air miner to an area east of the habitats, where they were going to gather all the factories. The air miners were big metal cylinders, somewhat resembling 737 fuselages except that they had eight massive sets of landing gear, and rocket engines attached vertically to their sides, and two jet engines mounted above the fuselage fore and aft. Five of these miners had been dropped in the area some two years before. In the time since, their jet engines had been sucking in the thin air and ramming it through a sequence of separating mechanisms, to divide it into its component gases. The gases had been compressed and stored in big tanks, and were now available for use. So the Boeings each now held 5,000 liters of water ice, 3,000 liters of liquid oxygen, 3,000 liters of liquid nitrogen, 500 liters of argon, and 400 liters of carbon dioxide.

It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on again. Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, even in a helmet or a habitat.

Nadia and Samantha’s miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatigue. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories a day. They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on their trays. Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women’s changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers. “It’s going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open holes.” “Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains …”

“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.

On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside. Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them. Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched – some of it even built in inches – so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.

Now she could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungee cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wirestripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber’s bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long nosed pliers, vise grip pliers, a tap and die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding and cutting set, a wheelbarrow—

and so on. And this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter’s tools. In other parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere team had warehouses of equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses of supplies for the clinic, and their research labs, and the genetic engineering facility. “You know what this is,” Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse. “It is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces.”

“And a very prosperous town at that.”

“Yes, a university town. With first-rate departments in several sciences.”

“But still in pieces.”

“Yes. But I kind of like it that way.”

Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day’s work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next morning. Frank and Maya were supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizeable crew working on the farm every morning. Nadia couldn’t really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of the tractors. But they did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building soon. It all interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each other. So when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, “Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can’t build the permanent farm until the base habitat itself is built. So really you ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?”

“No, no,” Hiroko said, laughing. “Day after, okay?”

Hiroko’s main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factories. Vlad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing; but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possible. So Nadia’s project would get help from them.

When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geologists. Ann looked nearly asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips away. To Nadia she seemed strangely tense, less happy about being on Mars than one would have thought. She appeared unwilling to work on the factories, or for Hiroko; indeed she usually came to work for Nadia, who, since she was only trying to build housing, could be said to be impacting the planet less than the more ambitious teams. Maybe that was it, maybe not; Ann wasn’t saying. She was hard to know, moody – not in Maya’s extravagant Russian manner, but more subtly, and, Nadia thought, in a darker register. In Bessie Smith land.

All around them people cleaned up after dinner and talked, and looked over manifests and talked, and bunched around computer terminals and talked, and washed clothes and talked; until most were stretched out on their beds, talking in lower voices, until they passed out. “It’s like the first second of the universe,” Sax Russell observed, rubbing his face wearily. “All crammed together and no differentiation. Just a bunch of hot particles rushing about.”

And that was just one day; and that was what it was like every day, for day after day after day. No change in the weather to speak of, except occasionally a wisp of cloud, or an extra-windy afternoon. In the main, the days rolled by one like the next. Everything took longer than planned. Just getting into the walkers and out of the habitats was a chore, and then all the equipment had to be warmed; and even though it had been built to a uniform set of standards, the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function; and the dust (“Don’t call it dust!” Ann would complain. “That’s like calling dust gravel! Call it fines, they’re fines!”) got into everything; and all the physical work in the penetrating cold was exhausting, so that they went slower than they thought they would and began to collect a number of minor injuries. And, finally, there was just an amazing number of things to do, some of which had never even occurred to them. It took them about a month, for instance (they had budgeted ten days) just to open all the freight loads, check their contents and move them into the appropriate stockpiles – to get to the point where they could really begin to work.

After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony’s chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called her. Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heaven. So much to do! So much to do! Every night in the planning sessions Hiroko worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the differential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they would go bang. But Nadia was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.

Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.

And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.

Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.

“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”

Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”

“You love gravity.”

With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut. Nadia listened to their conversation band as she worked. They figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia’s idea of good ground. At least its water content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn’t get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.

When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at hand. It would crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insulation. But she would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn’t below 13° Centigrade, so that meant heating elements … Slow, slow, everything was slow.

She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground and bucked. Then the weight of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed forward. “What a pig,” Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.

“Nadia’s in love with a bulldozer,” Maya said over their band.

At least I know who I’m in love with, Nadia mouthed. She had spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn’t decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. etc. Cleaning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to hide her lack of interest. The truth was she was tired of Maya’s problems and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.

A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. “Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?”

“Heat it.”

“We are!”

“Heat it more.”

“Oh!” They were almost done out there, Nadia judged: the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water (which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling the control rods. After that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to the nightly argument over who got the lion’s share of generator power the next day.

There was a call from Sax: one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn’t get the housing off it. So Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look. “I’m off to see the alchemists,” she said.

“Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?” Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the Sabatier. “If it’s built by car companies, it’s low-powered but reliable. If it’s built by the aerospace industry, it’s outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day.”

“And partnership products are horribly designed,” Nadia said.

“Right.”

“And chemical equipment is finicky,” Spencer Jackson added.

“I’ll say. Especially in this dust.”

The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined using chemical engineering operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electro-synthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process … Slowly they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.

Spencer’s current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian g that a big bar of it felt like a piece of plastic. “It’s too brittle when pure,” Spencer said, “but if we alloy it just a bit we’ll have an extremely light and strong metal.”

“Martian steel,” Nadia said.

“Better than that.”

So, alchemy; but with finicky machines. Nadia found the Sabatier’s problem and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pump. It was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps, sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.

Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.

Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her absence. She stood on the edge of the hole, looking down in it. They were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the Ares: a simple line of barrel-vaulted chambers, sharing adjacent walls. By setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with; then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildings: Portland cement and bricks were it, basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.

Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia a call. Nadia’s patience was running short, and she groaned. “We travel all the way to Mars and you can’t make bricks?”

“It’s not that we can’t make bricks,” said Gene. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” The brickmaking factory mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machine. The resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn’t happy. “We don’t want to be at minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads,” he said. “What if we pile one sandbag too many on top of it, or if we get a little marsquake? I don’t like it.”

After some thought Nadia said, “Add nylon.”

“What?”

“Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That’ll help their tensile strength.”

“Very true,” Gene said, after a pause. “Good idea! Think we can find the parachutes?”

“They must be east of here somewhere.”

So they had finally found a job for the geologists that actually helped the construction effort. Ann and Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.

One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeast. “It was strange,” Igor said, “because you can’t see them until the last minute, and then they’re like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallower. Fantastic. They’re probably thermokarsts, but they’re so big it’s hard to believe it.”

Sasha said, “It’s nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff.”

“They’re thermokarsts,” Ann said. But they had drilled and found no water. This was getting to be a concern; they hadn’t found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled: it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.

Nadia shrugged. The air miners were pretty tough. She wanted to think about her vaults. The new improved bricks were appearing and she had started the robots building the walls and roofs. The brick factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set of robots. The system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production itself. Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots: these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.

One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a private band. “Michel is useless,” she complained. “I’m really having a hard time, and he won’t even talk to me! You’re the only one I trust, Nadia. Yesterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in Houston, but that he shouldn’t tell anyone I thought so and the very next day John was asking me why I thought he was bothering Frank. There’s no one who will just listen and stay quiet!”

Nadia nodded, rolling her eyes. Finally she said, “Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can’t find.” She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya’s – symbol for a kiss on the cheek – switched to the common band and took off. Enough was enough. It was infinitely more interesting to talk to Hiroko: real conversations, about real problems in the real world. Hiroko was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously raised her estimate of Nadia’s abilities. Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business. Hermetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko’s talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, endless sessions about who liked Maya and who didn’t like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day … bah. Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.

At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered micro-organisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UN. Nadia herself found the idea alarming: it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing … Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.

When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15° Centigrade. It felt great.

The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows: lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.

As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed – the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.

More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia: she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much: plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing amount of time. Work work work, day after day!

One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day: she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about –50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days – but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”

“Why 1947?” he asked.

“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”

“A good year for him, I take it?”

“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces – and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power … It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”

“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you any thing but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.

Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947 – because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life – all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!

Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of – baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.

And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehaving” chasing her off to sleep.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s Ls 170 already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at Ls 7?”

So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be 0°, and then the year was divided into 360°, so that Ls = 0°–90° was the northern spring, 90–180° the northern summer, 180–270° the fall, and 270–360° (or 0° again) the winter.

This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the Martian orbit, which is extreme by Terran standards, for at perihelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.

So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of moderation. And the orbital eccentricity caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194. Spring fifty-one days longer than autumn! Some claimed this alone made it worth settling in the north.

In any case, in the north they were; and spring had arrived. The days got longer by a little bit every day and the work went on. The area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks; they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directions: the alchemists’ quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the biomed center to the south.

Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent habitat. The nightly conferences there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for help. There were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis’s prospecting unit, even Ann. One night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia’s, and invited her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the southwest. Obviously Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia declined. “I’ve got too much work to do, you know.” And seeing Ann’s disappointment: “Maybe next trip.”

And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of a new wing. Arkady had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by the square. “That’s where those magnesium beams will come in handy,” Nadia said. “If only we could make stronger glass panes …”

They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from Hebes. Everyone spent that evening looking at their videotapes. These showed the expedition’s rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Strange little meter-high cliffs finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.

Then abruptly the shot was from the rim, a one-eighty pan shot of a canyon that was so much bigger than the sinkholes of Ganges Catena that it was hard to grasp. The walls of the far side of the chasm were just visible on the distant horizon. In fact they could see walls all the way around, for Hebes was an almost-enclosed chasm, a sunken ellipse about two hundred kilometers long and a hundred across. Ann’s party had come to the north rim in late afternoon, and the eastern curve of the wall was clearly visible, flooded by sunset light; out to the west the wall was just a low dark mark. The floor of the chasm was generally flat, with a central dip. “If you could float a dome over the chasm,” Ann said, “you’d have a nice big enclosure.”

“You’re talking miracle domes, Ann,” Sax said. “That’s about ten thousand square kilometers.”

“Well, it would make a good big enclosure. And then you could leave the rest of the planet alone.”

“The weight of a dome would collapse the canyon walls.”

“That’s why I said you’d have to float it.”

Sax just shook his head.

“It’s no more exotic than this space elevator you talk about.”

“I want to live in a house located right where you took this video,” Nadia interrupted. “What a view!”

“Just wait till you get up on one of the Tharsis volcanoes,” Ann said, irritated. “Then you’ll get a view.”

There were little spats like that all the time now. It reminded Nadia unpleasantly of the last months on the Ares. Another example: Arkady and his crew sent down videos of Phobos, with his commentary: “The Stickney impact almost broke this rock in pieces, and it’s chondritic, almost twenty percent water, so a lot of the water outgassed on impact and filled the fracture system and froze in a whole system of ice veins.” Fascinating stuff, but all it did was cause an argument between Ann and Phyllis, their two top geologists, as to whether this was the real explanation for the ice. Phyllis even suggested shipping water down from Phobos, which was silly, even if their supplies were low and their demand increasing. Chernobyl took a lot of water, and the farmers were ready to start a little swamp in their biosphere; and Nadia wanted to install a swimming complex in one of the vaulted chambers, including a lap pool, three whirlpool baths, and a sauna. Each night people asked Nadia how it was coming along, because everyone was sick of washing with sponges and still being dusty, and of never really getting warm. They wanted a bath; in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.

So they needed more water, but the seismic scans were finding no evidence of ice aquifers underground, and Ann thought there weren’t any in the region. They had to continue to rely on the air miners, or scrape up regolith and load it into the soil-water distilleries. But Nadia didn’t like to overwork the distilleries, because they had been manufactured by a French-Hungarian-Chinese consortium, and were sure to wear out if used for bulk work.

But that was life on Mars; it was a dry place. Shikata ga nai.

“There are always choices,” Phyllis said to that. This was why she had suggested filling landing vehicles with Phobos ice, and bringing it on down; but Ann thought that was a ridiculous waste of energy; and they were off again.

It was especially irritating to Nadia because she herself was in such a good mood. She saw no reason to quarrel, and it disturbed her that the others didn’t feel the same. Why did the dynamics of a group fluctuate so? Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax? Nadia had a sense that there was time for things even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine and half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night – no doubt it had effects. Nadia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day’s work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke rested. That strange pause on the digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to 12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker; well, the Martian timeslip was something special. Often Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest of them. But Hiroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip – something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends.

But one Saturday night when she sat there, nearly comatose, Maya came over and sat against her shoulder for a talk. Maya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraught. “Nadia, you have to do me a favor, please, please.”

“What?”

“I need you to tell something to Frank for me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I can’t have John seeing us talk! I have to get a message to him, and please, Nadezhda Francine, you’re my only way.”

Nadia made a disgusted noise.

“Please.”

It was surprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, or Arkady. If only Arkady would come down from Phobos!

But Maya was her friend. And that desperate look on her face: Nadia couldn’t stand it. “What message?”

“Tell him that I’ll meet him tonight in the storage area,” Maya said imperiously. “At midnight. To talk.”

Nadia sighed. But later she went to Frank, and gave him the message. He nodded without meeting her eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.

Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going on. “Well, it’s John and Frank,” Maya said querulously. “They’re very competitive. They’re like brothers, and there’s a lot of jealousy there. John got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn’t think it was fair. Frank did a lot of the work in Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of his work. And now, well. John and I are good together, I like him. It’s easy with him. Easy, but maybe a little … I don’t know. Not boring. But not exciting. He likes to walk around, hang out with the farm crew. He doesn’t like to talk that much! Frank, now, we could talk forever. Argue forever, maybe, but at least we’re talking! And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn’t work out, but he still thinks it could.”

Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.

“So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that’s what he’s doing, so there’s a lot of jealousy between them. I’m just trying to keep them from each other’s throats, that’s all.”

Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about it again. But now she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Frank for her. “I’m not a go-between!” Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did. “Look,” Nadia said to him, “I can’t speak for Maya. I don’t know why she does what she does, you have to ask her yourself. But I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmother. And men were the enemies for Maya’s babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioshka. Maya’s mother used to say to her, ‘Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.’ There was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That’s where Maya comes from. And at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend’s life, you invade each other’s lives in a sense, and of course that’s impossible and it has to end, usually badly.”

Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something in it. Nadia sighed and went on. “These are the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it.”

And Frank – tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him), now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty – Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should.

Nadia did her best to ignore all that. But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well. Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, “We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well. Outdoor work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low.”

“I’ll be damned if I stay indoors all day,” Ann said, and many agreed with her.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Frank pointed out.

“But most of it could be done by teleoperation,” Vlad said. “And it should be. What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion —”

“So?” Ann said. “Soldiers did that — ”

“ — every six months,” Vlad finished, and stared at her. “Would you do that?”

Even Ann looked subdued. No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of ten rems per year.

And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors. There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation. And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below. So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted. Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed. In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, and they made the case with renewed intensity.

“That’s not our decision to make,” Frank told them sharply. “The UN decides that one. Besides it’s a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best. Don’t waste time talking about it!”

Ann said, “That’s all true, but I don’t want to waste my time down here in these caves, either. We should live our lives the way we want. We’re too old to worry about radiation.”

Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares. Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep. Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete. But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.

Then one night Maya came to her crying. There was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Look,” Nadia said at one point, “why don’t you just decide? Why don’t you quit playing one off against the other?”

“But I have decided! It’s John I love, it’s always been John. But now he’s seen me with Frank and he thinks I’ve betrayed him. It’s really petty of him! They’re like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it’s just a mistake!”

Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn’t want to hear it. She sat there listening anyway.

And then John was standing there before them. Nadia got up to leave, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Look,” he said to Maya. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Maya said, instantly composed. “I love you.”

John’s smile was rueful. “Yes. And I love you. But I want things simple.”

“It is simple!”

“No it isn’t. I mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the same time. Anyone can, that’s just the way it is. But you can only be loyal to one. And I want … I want to be loyal. To someone who is loyal to me. It’s simple, but …”

He shook his head; he couldn’t find the phrase. He walked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.

“Americans,” Maya said viciously. “Fucking children!” Then she was up through the door after him.

But soon she came back. He had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn’t leave. “I’m tired,” Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn’t hear it, she was getting more and more upset. For over an hour they discussed it, over and over. Eventually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it over. Nadia walked grimly through the chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings. The go-between that nobody noticed. Couldn’t they get robots to do this? She found John, who apologized for ignoring her earlier. “I was upset, I’m sorry. I figured you’d hear it all eventually anyway.”

Nadia shrugged. “No problem. But look, you have to go talk to her. That’s the way it is with Maya. We talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, and all the way out of it. If you don’t it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me.”

That got to him. Sobered, he went off to find her. Nadia went to bed.

The next day she was out working late on a trencher. It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble: Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out. They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.

Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists’ to the permanent habitat. The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree. Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft. “Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?” Spencer asked.

“Break the boulder,” Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe. She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked its drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.

Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest. Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white. There were shouts in her ears: “What’s wrong? What happened?” She must have screamed. “Help,” she grated. She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock. Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free. The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint. Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone. She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain. Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in … how long? “Freeze, damn you, freeze,” she cried. She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steaming. She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand. Already it hurt less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand! Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted. After that she was maimed. Nadia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstrong: “Do as you did in the past/And play.”

“How did you find that?” Nadia asked him. “I can’t imagine you reading Yevtushenko.”

“Of course I read him, it’s better than McGonagall! No, this was in a book on Armstrong. I’ve taken your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night.”

“I wish you’d come down here,” Nadia said.

Vlad had done the surgery. He told her it would be all right. “It caught you clean. The ring finger is a bit impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probably. But ring fingers never do much anyway. The two main fingers will be strong as ever.”

Everyone came by to visit. Nevertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four and a half hours between Phobos’s rising in the west and its setting in the east. He called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.

Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciously slender. She went out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupied. Michel Duval never came by at all, which she thought was strange. Wasn’t this what psychologists were for? She couldn’t help feeling depressed: she needed her hands for her work, she was a hand laborer. The cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her tool kit. But she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn’t much she could do. It really was depressing.

Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathing suits. She wasn’t the only one to have been injured, by any means; they were all a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work: almost everyone had frostburn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the pools. And several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs; all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.

All these bodies, and none for her. They knew each other like family, she thought; they were each other’s physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the time. Middle-aged bodies. Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounded. And single. Her closest friend these days was only a voice in her ear, a face on the screen. When he came down from Phobos … well, hard to say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him …

People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool. Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft. As usual, he didn’t appear to be listening. She would hit him one day if he didn’t watch out. It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing. She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it. It must make Michel’s job as their shrink almost impossible. Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met. No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists. But she still thought it was odd he hadn’t come by to see her after the accident.

One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel’s end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling: Frank’s face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him, “It was never like that,” and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank’s face a mask of pain. Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.

Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers. She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did. After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead. Maya came in and started to explain things to her: there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank’s mind only, he just wouldn’t give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank’s irrational desire, it wasn’t her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.

And Nadia listened with a careful show of patience, saying “Da, da,” and “I see,” and the like, until Maya was lying flat on her back on the floor, crying, and Nadia was sitting on the edge of a chair staring at her, wondering how much of it was true. And what the argument had really been about. And whether she was a bad friend to distrust her old companion’s story so completely. But somehow the whole thing felt like Maya covering her tracks, practising another manipulation. It was just this: those two distraught faces she had seen down the tunnel had been the clearest evidence possible of a fight between intimates. So Maya’s explanation was almost certainly a lie. Nadia said something soothing to her and went off to bed, thinking, you already have taken too much of my time and energy and concentration with these games, you cost me a finger with them, you bitch!

It was getting toward the end of the long northern spring, and they still had no good supply of water, so Ann proposed to make an expedition to the cap and set up a robot distillery, along the way establishing a route that rovers could follow on automatic pilot. “Come with us,” she said to Nadia. “You haven’t seen anything of the planet yet, just the stretch between here and Chernobyl, and that’s nothing. You missed Hebes and Ganges, and you’re not doing anything new here. Really, Nadia, I can’t believe what a grub you’ve been. I mean why did you come to Mars, after all?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why? I mean there’s two kinds of activities here, there’s the exploration of Mars and then there’s the life support for that exploration. And here you’ve been completely immersed in the life support, without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!”

“Well, it’s what I like to do,” Nadia said uneasily.

“Fine, but try to keep some perspective on it! What the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth and been a plumber! You didn’t have to come all this way to drive a goddamn bulldozer! Just how long are you going to go on grubbing away here, installing toilets, programming tractors?”

“All right, all right,” Nadia said, thinking of Maya and all the rest. The square of vaults was almost finished, anyway. “I could use a vacation.”

They took off in three big long-range rovers: Nadia and five of the geologists, Ann, Simon Frazier, George Berkovic, Phyllis Boyle and Edvard Perrin. George and Edvard were friends of Phyllis’s from their NASA days, and they supported her in advocating “applied geological studies", meaning prospecting for rare metals; Simon on the other hand was a quiet ally of Ann’s, committed to pure research and a hands-off attitude. Nadia knew all this even though she had spent very little time alone with any of these people, except for Ann. But talk was talk; she could have named all the allegiances of everyone at base if she had to.

The expedition rovers were each composed of two four-wheeled modules, coupled by a flexible frame: they looked a bit like giant ants. They had been built by Rolls-Royce and a multinational aerospace consortium, and had a beautiful sea green finish. The forward modules contained the living quarters and had tinted windows on all four sides; the aft modules contained the fuel tanks, and sported a number of black rotating solar panels. The eight wire mesh wheels were 2.5 meters high, and very broad.

As they headed north across Lunae Planum they marked their route with little green transponders, dropping one every few kilometers. They also cleared rocks from their path that might disable a robot-driven rover, using the snowplow attachment or the little crane at the front end of the first rover. So in effect they were building a road. But they seldom had to use the rockmoving equipment on Lunae; they drove northeast at nearly their full speed of thirty kilometers an hour for several days straight. They were heading northeast, to avoid the canyon systems of Tempe and Mareotis, and this route took them down Lunae to the long slope of Chryse Planitia. Both these regions looked much like the land around their base camp, bumpy and strewn with small rocks; but because they were heading downhill they often had much longer views than they were used to. It was a new pleasure to Nadia, to drive on and on and see new countryside continually pop over the horizon: hillocks, dips, enormous isolated boulders, the occasional low round mesa that was the outside of a crater.

When they had descended to the lowlands of the northern hemisphere, they turned and drove straight north across the immense Acidalia Planitia, and again ran straight for several days. Their wheel tracks stretched behind them like the first cut of a lawnmower through grass, and the transponders gleamed bright and incongruous among the rocks. Phyllis, Edvard and George talked about making a few side trips, to investigate some indications seen in satellite photos that there were unusual mineral outcroppings near Perepelkin Crater. Ann reminded them irritably of their mission. It made Nadia sad to see that Ann was nearly as distant and tense out here as she was back at base; whenever the rovers were stopped she was outside walking around alone, and she was withdrawn when they sat together in Rover One to eat dinner. Occasionally Nadia tried to draw her out: “Ann, how did all these rocks get scattered around like this?”

“Meteors.”

“But where are the craters?”

“Most are in the south.”

“But how did the rocks get here, then?”

“They flew. That’s why they’re so small. It’s only smaller rocks could be tossed so far.”

“But I thought you told me that these northern plains were relatively new, while the heavy cratering was relatively old.”

“That’s right. The rocks you see here come from late meteor action. The total accumulation of loose rock from meteor strikes is much greater than what we can see, that’s what gardened regolith is. And the regolith is a kilometer deep.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Nadia said. “I mean, that’s so many meteors.”

Ann nodded. “It’s billions of years. That’s the difference between here and Earth, the age of the land goes from millions of years to billions. It’s such a big difference it’s hard to imagine. But seeing stuff like this can help.”

Midway across Acidalia they began running into long, straight, steep-walled, flat-bottomed canyons. They looked, as George noted more than once, like the dry beds of the legendary canals. The geological name for them was fossae, and they came in clusters. Even the smallest of these canyons were impassable to rovers, and when they came on one they had to turn and run along its rim, until its floors rose or its walls drew together, and they could continue north over flat plain again.

The horizon ahead was sometimes twenty kilometers off, sometimes three. Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact. Nadia’s companions spent a day wandering eagerly over the splayed hills around one of these craters; the rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wet past. Or something like that. Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Further north, around latitude 54°, they drove into the weird-looking land of thermokarsts, hummocky terrain spotted by a great number of steep-sided oval pits, called alases. These alases were a hundred times bigger than their Terran analogues, most of them two or three kilometers across, and about sixty meters deep. A sure sign of permafrost, the geologists all agreed; seasonal freezing and thawing of the soil caused it to slump in this pattern. Pits this big indicated that water content in the soil must have been high, Phyllis said. Unless it was yet another manifestation of Martian time scales, Ann replied. Slightly icy soil, slumping ever so slightly, for eons.

Irritably Phyllis suggested that they try collecting water from the ground, and irritably Ann agreed. They found a smooth slope between depressions, and stopped to install a permafrost water collector. Nadia took charge of the operation with a feeling of relief; the trip’s lack of work had begun to get to her. It was a good day’s job: she dug a ten-meter long trench with the lead rover’s little backhoe; laid the lateral collector gallery, a perforated stainless steel pipe filled with gravel; checked the electric heating elements running in strips along the pipe and filters; then filled in the trench with the clay and rocks they had dug out earlier.

Over the lower end of the gallery was a sump and pump, and an insulated transport line leading to a small holding tank. Batteries would power the heating elements, and solar panels charge the batteries. When the holding tank was full, if there was enough water to fill it, the pump would shut off and a solenoid valve would open, allowing the water in the transport line to drain back into the gallery, after which the heating elements would shut off as well.

“Almost done,” Nadia declared late in the day, as she started to bolt the transport pipe onto the last magnesium post. Her hands were dangerously cold, and her maimed hand throbbed. “Maybe someone could start dinner,” she said. “I’m almost done here.” The transport pipe had to be packed in a thick cylinder of white polyurethane foam, then fitted into a larger protective pipe. Amazing how much insulation complicated a simple piece of plumbing.

Hex nut, washer, cotter pin, a firm tug on the wrench. Nadia walked along the line, checking the coupling bands at the joints. Everything firm. She lugged her tools over to Rover One, looked back at the result of the day’s work: a tank, a short pipe on posts, a box on the ground, a long low mound of disturbed soil running uphill, looking raw but otherwise not unusual in this land of lumps. “We’ll drink some fresh water on our way back,” she said.

They had driven north for over two thousand kilometers, and finally rolled down onto Vastitas Borealis, an ancient cratered lava plain that ringed the northern hemisphere between latitudes 60° and 70°. Ann and the other geologists spent a couple of hours every morning out on the bare dark rock of this plain, taking samples, after which they would drive north for the rest of the day, discussing what they had found. Ann seemed more absorbed in the work, happier. One evening Simon pointed out that Phobos was running just over the low hills to the south; the next day’s drive would put it under the horizon. It was a remarkable demonstration of just how low the little moon’s orbit was; they were only at latitude 69°! But Phobos was only some five thousand kilometers above the planet’s equator. Nadia waved goodbye to it with a smile; she would still be able to talk to Arkady using the newly arrived areosynchronous radio satellites.

Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackish sand. It was just like coming on the shore of a sea. They had reached the great northern dunes, which wrapped the world in a band between Vastitas and the polar cap; where they were going to cross, the band was about eight hundred kilometers wide. The sand was a charcoal color, tinged with purple and rose, a rich relief to the eye after all the red rubble of the south. The dunes trended north and south, in parallel crests that occasionally broke or merged. Driving over them was easy; the sand was hard-packed, and they only had to pick a big dune and run along its humpbacked western side.

After a few days of this, however, the dunes got bigger, and became what Ann called barchan dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other Martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their Terran analogs in the Sahara and Gobi. The expedition kept a level course over the backs of these great waves by contouring from one wave back to the next, their rovers like tiny boats, paddlewheeling over a sea that had frozen at the height of a titanic storm.

One day on this petrified sea, Rover Two stopped. A red light on the control panel indicated the problem was in the flexible frame between the modules; and in fact the rear module was tilted to the left, shoving the left side wheels into the sand. Nadia got into a suit and went back to have a look. She took the dust cover off the joint where the frame connected to the module chassis, and found that the bolts holding them together were all broken.

“This is going to take a while,” Nadia said. “You guys might as well have another look around.”

Soon the suited figures of Phyllis and George emerged, followed by Simon and Ann and Edvard. Phyllis and George took a transponder from Rover Three and set it out three meters to the right of their “road”. Nadia went to work on the broken frame, handling things as little as possible: it was a cold afternoon, perhaps seventy below, and she could feel the diamond chill right down to the bone.

The ends of the bolts wouldn’t come out of the side of the module, so she got out a drill and started drilling new holes. She began to hum “The Sheik of Araby”. Ann and Edvard and Simon were discussing sand. It was so nice, Nadia thought, to see ground that wasn’t red. To hear Ann absorbed in her work. To have some work to do herself.

They had almost reached the arctic circle, and it was Ls = 84, with the northern summer solstice only two weeks away; so the days were getting long. Nadia and George worked through the evening while Phyllis heated supper, and then after the meal Nadia went back out to finish the job. The sun was red in a brown haze, small and round even though it was near setting; there wasn’t enough atmosphere for oblation to enlarge and flatten it. Nadia finished, put her tools away, and had opened the outer lock door of Rover One, when Ann’s voice spoke in her ear. “Oh Nadia, are you going in already?”

Nadia looked up. Ann was on the ridge of the dune to the west, waving down at her, a black silhouette against a blood-colored sky.

“That was the idea,” Nadia said.

“Come on up here just a second. I want you to see this sunset, it’s going to be a good one. Come on, it’ll only take a minute, you’ll be glad you did it. There are clouds to the west.”

Nadia sighed and closed the outer lock door.

The east face of the dune was steep. Nadia carefully stepped in the prints Ann had made in her ascent. The sand there was packed and held firm most of the time. Near the crest it got steeper, and she leaned forward and dug in with her fingers. Then she was clambering onto the broad rounded crest, and could straighten up and have a look around.

Only the crests of the tallest dunes were still in sunlight; the world was a black surface, marred by short scimitar curves of steely gray. Horizon about five kilometers off. Ann was crouching, a scoop of sand in her palm.

“What’s it made of?” Nadia asked.

“Dark solid mineral particles.”

Nadia snorted. “I could have told you that.”

“Not before we got here you couldn’t. It might have been fines aggregated with salts. But it’s bits of rock instead.”

“Why so dark?”

“Volcanic. On Earth sand is mostly quartz, you see, because there’s a lot of granite there. But Mars doesn’t have much granite. These grains are probably volcanic silicates. Obsidian, flint, some garnet. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

She held out a handful of sand for Nadia’s inspection. Perfectly serious, of course. Nadia peered through her faceplate at the black grit. “Beautiful,” she said.

They stood and watched the sun set. Their shadows went right out to the eastern horizon. The sky was a dark red, murky and opaque, only slighty lighter in the west over the sun. The clouds Ann had mentioned were bright yellow streaks, very high in the sky. Something in the sand caught at the light, and the dunes were distinctly purplish. The sun was a little gold button, and above it shone two evening stars: Venus, and the Earth.

“They’ve been getting closer every night lately,” Ann said softly. “The conjunction should be really brilliant.”

The sun touched the horizon, and the dune crests faded to shadow. The little button sun sank under the black line to the west. Now the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion. Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain. Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord thrum. Beauty could make you shiver! It was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kind of sex. And this beauty was so strange, so alien. Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, living in a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her past. But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange: it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her mind and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in her head. Weight seeped inward from her skin, and she didn’t feel hollow anymore; on the contrary she felt extremely solid, compact, balanced. A little thinking boulder, set spinning like a top.

They glissaded down the steep face of the dune on their boot heels. At the bottom Nadia gave Ann an impulsive hug: “Oh Ann, I don’t know how to thank you for that.” Even through the tinted faceplates she could see Ann grin. A rare sight.

After that things looked different to Nadia. Oh she knew it was in herself, that it was a matter of paying attention in a new way, of looking. But the landscape conspired in this sensation, feeding her new attentiveness; because the very next day they left the black dunes, and drove on to what her companions called layered or laminate terrain. This was the region of flat sand that in winter would lie under the CO₂ skirt of the polar cap. Now in midsummer it lay revealed, a landscape made entirely of curvilinear patterns. They drove up broad flat washes of yellow sand that were bounded by long sinuous flat-topped plateaus; the sides of the plateaus were stepped and benched, laminated both finely and grossly, looking like wood that had been cut and polished to show a handsome grain. None of them had ever seen any land remotely like it, and they spent the mornings taking samples and borings, and hiking around in a loping Martian ballet, talking a blue streak, Nadia as excited as any of them. Ann explained to her that each winter’s frost caught a lamina on the surface. Then wind erosion had cut arroyos, and stripped away at their sides, and each stratum was stripped back farther than the one below it, so that the arroyo walls consisted of hundreds of narrow terraces. “It’s like the land is a contour map of itself,” Simon said.

They drove during the days and went out every evening in purply dusks that lasted until just before midnight. They drilled borings, and came up with cores that were gritty and icy, laminated for as far down as they could drill. One evening Nadia was climbing with Ann up a series of parallel terraces, half-listening to her explain about the precession of aphelion and perihelion, when she looked back across the arroyo and saw that it was glowing like lemons and apricots in the evening light, and that above the arroyo were pale green lenticular clouds, mimicking perfectly the terrain’s French curves. “Look!” she exclaimed.

Ann looked back and saw it, and was still. They watched the low banded clouds float overhead.

Finally a dinner call from the rovers brought them back. And walking down over the contoured terraces of sand, Nadia knew that she had changed – that, or else the planet was getting much more strange and beautiful as they traveled north. Or both.

They rolled over flat terraces of yellow sand, sand so fine and hard and clear of rocks that they could go at full speed, slowing down only to shift up or down from one bench to another. Occasionally the rounded slope between terraces gave them some trouble, and once or twice they even had to backtrack to find a way. But usually a route north could be found without difficulty.

On their fourth day in the laminate terrain, the plateau walls flanking their flat wash curved together, and they drove up the cleavage onto a higher plane; and there before them on the new horizon was a white hill, a great rounded thing, like a white Ayer’s Rock. A white hill – it was ice! A hill of ice, a hundred meters high and a kilometer wide – and when they drove around it, they saw that it continued over the horizon to the north. It was the tip of a glacier, perhaps a tongue of the polar cap itself. In the other cars they were shouting, and in the noise and confusion Nadia could only hear Phyllis, crying “Water! Water!”

Water indeed. Though they had known it was going to be there, it was still startling in the extreme to run into a whole great white hill of it, in fact the tallest hill they had seen in the entire five thousand kilometers of their voyage. It took them all that first day to get used to it: they stopped the rovers, pointed, chattered, got out to have a look, took surface samples and borings, touched it, climbed up it a ways. Like the sand around it, the ice hill was horizontally laminated, with lines of dust about a centimeter apart. Between the lines the ice was pocked and granular; in this atmospheric pressure it sublimed at almost all temperatures, leaving pitted, rotten side walls to a depth of a few centimeters; under that it was solid, and hard.

“This is a lot of water,” they all said at one point or another. Water, on the surface of Mars …

The next day the glacier hill formed their right horizon, a wall that ran on beside them for the whole day’s drive. Then it really began to seem like a lot of water, especially as over the course of the day the wall got taller, rising to a height of about three hundred meters. A kind of white mountain ridge, in fact, walling off their flat-bottomed valley on its east side. And then, over the horizon to the northwest, there appeared another white hill, the top of another ridge poking over the horizon, the base remaining beneath it. Another glacier hill, walling them in to the west, some thirty kilometers away.

So they were in Chasma Borealis, a wind-carved valley that cut north into the ice cap for some five hundred kilometers, more than half the distance to the Pole. The chasm’s floor was flat sand, hard as concrete, and often crunchy with a layer of CO₂ frost. The chasm’s ice walls were tall, but not vertical; they lay back at an angle less than 45°, and like the hillsides in the laminate terrain, they were terraced, the terraces ragged with wind erosion and sublimation, the two forces that over tens of thousands of years had cut the whole length of the chasm.

Rather than driving up to the head of the valley, the explorers crossed to the western wall, aiming toward a transponder that had been included in a drop of ice-mining equipment. The sand dunes mid-chasm were low and regular, and the rovers rolled over the corrugated land, up and down, up and down. Then as they crested a sand wave they spotted the drop, no more than two kilometers from the foot of the northwest ice wall: bulky lime green containers on skeletal landing modules, a strange sight in this world of whites and tans and pinks. “What an eyesore!” Ann exclaimed, but Phyllis and George were cheering.

During the long afternoon, the shadowed western iceside took on a variety of pale colors: the purest water ice was clear and bluish, but most of the hillside was a translucent ivory, copiously tinted by pink and yellow dust. Irregular patches of CO₂ ice were a bright pure white; the contrast between dry ice and water ice was vivid, and made it impossible to read the actual contours of the hillside. And foreshortening made it hard to tell how tall the hill really was; it seemed to go up forever, and was probably somewhere between three and five hundred meters above the floor of Borealis.

“This is a lot of water,” Nadia exclaimed.

“And there’s more underground,” Phyllis said. “Our borings show that the cap actually extends many degrees of latitude farther south than we see, buried under the layered terrain.”

“So we have more water than we’ll ever need!”

Ann pursed her mouth unhappily.

The drop of the mining equipment had determined the site of the ice mining camp: the west wall of Chasma Borealis, at longitude 41°, latitude 83° N. Deimos had just recently followed Phobos under the horizon; they wouldn’t see it again until they returned south of 82° N. The summer nights consisted of an hour’s purple twilight; the rest of the time the sun wheeled around, never more than twenty degrees above the horizon. The six of them spent long hours outside, moving the ice miner to the wall and then setting it up. The main component was a robotic tunnel borer, about the size of one of their rovers. The borer cut into the ice, and passed back cylindrical drums 1.5 meters in diameter. When they turned the borer on it made a loud, low buzz, which was louder still if they put their helmets to the ice, or even touched it with their hands. After a while white ice drums thumped into a hopper, and then a small robot forklift carried them to a distillery, which would melt the ice and separate out its considerable load of dust, then refreeze the water into one-meter cubes more suitable for packing in the holds of the rovers. Robot freight rovers would then be perfectly capable of driving to the site, loading up and returning to base on their own; and base would then have a regular water supply, larger than they could ever use. Around four or five trillion cubic kilometers in the visible polar cap, Edvard calculated, though there were a lot of guesses in the calculation.

They spent several days testing the miner and deploying an array of solar panels to power it. In the long evenings after dinner Ann would climb the ice wall, ostensibly to take more borings, although Nadia knew she just wanted away from Phyllis and Edvard and George. And naturally she wanted to climb all the way to the top, to get on the polar cap and look around, and take borings of the most recent layers of ice; and so one day when the miner had passed all the test routines, she and Nadia and Simon got up at dawn – just after two a.m. – and went out into the supercold morning air and climbed, their shadows like big spiders climbing before them. The slope of the ice was about 30°, steepening and then letting off time after time as they ascended the rough benches in the hill’s layered side.

It was seven a.m. when the slope laid back and they walked onto the surface of the polar cap. To the north was a plain of ice that extended as far as they could see, to a high horizon some thirty kilometers away. Looking back to the south they could see a great distance over the geometric swirls of the layered terrain; it was the longest view Nadia had ever had on Mars.

The ice of the plateau was layered much like the laminated sand below them, with wide bands of dirty pink contouring across cleaner stuff. The other wall of Chasma Borealis lay off to the east, looking almost vertical from their point of view, long, tall, massive: “So much water!” Nadia said again. “It’s more than we’ll ever need.”

“That depends,” Ann said absently, screwing the frame of the little borer into the ice. Her darkened faceplate turned up at Nadia: “If the terraformers have their way, this will all go like dew on a hot morning. Into the air to make pretty clouds.”

“Would that be so bad?” Nadia asked.

Ann stared at her. Through the tinted faceplate her eyes looked like ballbearings.

That night at dinner she said, “We really ought to make a run up to the pole.”

Phyllis shook her head. “We don’t have the food or air.”

“Call for a drop.”

Edvard shook his head. “The polar cap is cut by valleys almost as deep as Borealis!”

“Not so,” Ann said. “You could drive straight to it. The swirl valleys look dramatic from space, but that’s because of the difference in albedo between the water and the CO₂. The actual slopes are never more than 6° off the horizontal. It’s just more layered terrain, really.”

George said, “But what about getting onto the cap in the first place?”

“We drive around to one of the tongues of ice that drop to the sand. They’re like ramps up to the central massif, and once there, we drive right to the pole!”

“There’s no reason to go,” Phyllis said. “It’ll just be more of what we see here. And it means more exposure to radiation.”

“And,” George added, “we could use what food and air we do have to check out some of the sites we passed on the way up here.”

So that was their point. Ann scowled. “I’m the head of the geological survey,” she said sharply. Which may have been true, but she was a horrible politician, especially compared to Phyllis, who had any number of friends in Houston and Washington.

“But there’s no geological reason to go to the pole,” Phyllis said now with a smile. “It’ll be the same ice as here. You just want to go.”

“Well?” Ann said. “Say I do! There are still scientific questions to be answered up there. Is the ice the same composition, how much dust – everywhere we go up here we collect valuable data.”

“But we’re up here to get water. We’re not up here to fool around.”

“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 CO₂ 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!

But she had to work. So she worked, she bossed people around the construction sites, she stalked the building sites and snapped at her friends’ sloppy work. Her injured hand had regained some strength during the trip, so she was able to drive tractors and bulldozers again; she spent long days doing that, but it just wasn’t the same anymore.

At Ls = 208° Arkady came down to Mars for the first time. Nadia went out to the new spaceport and stood on the edge of the broad expanse of dusty cement to watch the arrival, hopping from foot to foot. The burnt sienna cement was already marked by the yellow and black stains of earlier landings. Arkady’s pod appeared in the pink sky, a white dot and then a yellow flame like an inverted gas burnoff stack. Eventually it resolved into a geodesic hemisphere with rockets and legs below, drifting down on a column of fire, and landing with unearthly delicacy right on the centerpoint dot. Arkady had been working on the descent program, apparently with good results.

He climbed out of the lander’s hatch about twenty minutes later, and stood upright on the top step, looking around. He descended the staircase confidently, and once on the ground bounced experimentally on the tips of his toes, took a few steps, then spun around, arms wide. Nadia had a sudden sharp memory of how it had felt, that hollow sensation. Then he fell over. She hurried over to him, and he saw her and stood and made straight for her and tripped again across the rough Portland cement. She helped pull him back to his feet, and they met in a hug and staggered, him in a big pressurized suit, her in a walker. His hairy face looked shockingly real through their faceplates; the video had made her forget the third dimension and all the rest that made reality so vivid, so real. He banged his faceplate lightly against hers, grinning his wild grin. She could feel the stretch of a similar smile on her face.

He pointed at his wrist console and switched to their private band, 4224, and she did the same.

“Welcome to Mars.”

Alex and Janet and Roger had come down with Arkady, and when they were all out of the lander they climbed into the open carriage of one of the Model Ts, and Nadia drove them back to base, over the wide paved road at first, and then shortcutting through the Alchemists’ Quarter. She told them about each building they passed, aware that they already recognized them all. Suddenly she was nervous, remembering what it had looked like to her after the trip to the pole. They stopped at the garage lock and she led them inside. There it was another family reunion.

Later that day Nadia led Arkady around the square of vaulted chambers, through door after door, room after furnished room, all twenty-four of them; and then out into the atrium. The sky was a ruby color through the glass panels, and the magnesium struts gleamed like tarnished silver.

“Well?” Nadia said at last, unable to stop herself: “What do you think?”

Arkady laughed and gave her a hug. He was still in his spacesuit, his head looking small in the open neck hole; he felt padded and bulky, and she wanted him out of it.

“Well, some of it is good and some of it is bad. But why is it so ugly? Why is it so sad?”

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 stripped 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 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 brecriated 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.”

He waved his hands around, stopped suddenly, popped his eyes at the dubious expressions framed in the faceplates around him. “Well, it’s an idea, yes?”

Yes, Nadia thought, looking around with interest, trying to visualize it. Perhaps that kind of process would bring back her pleasure in the work? Perhaps it would look different to Ann then? She wasn’t sure.

“More ideas from Arkady,” as Maya put it in the pool that night, looking sour. “Just what we need.”

“But they’re good ideas,” Nadia said. She got out, showered, put on a jumper.

Later that night she met Arkady again, and took him to see the northwest corner chamber of Underhill, which she had left bare-walled so she could show him the structural detail.

“It’s very elegant,” he said, rubbing a hand over the bricks. “Really, Nadia, all of Underhill is magnificent. I can see your hand everywhere on it.”

Pleased, she went to a screen and called up the plans she had been working on for a larger habitat. Three rows of vaulted chambers stacked underground, in one wall of a very deep trench; mirrors on the opposite wall of the trench, to direct sunlight down into the rooms … Arkady nodded and grinned and pointed at the screen, asking questions and making suggestions: “An arcade between the rooms and the wall of the trench, open space; and each story laid back a bit from the one below it, so each has a balcony overlooking the arcade …”

“Yes, that should be possible …” And they tapped at the computer screen, altering the architectural sketch as they spoke.

Later they walked in the domed atrium. They stood under tall clusters of black bamboo leaves, the plants still in pots while the ground was prepared. It was quiet and dark.

“We could perhaps lower this area one story,” Arkady said softly. “Cut windows and doors into your vaults, and lighten them up.”

Nadia nodded. “We thought of that, and we’re going to do it, but it’s slow getting so much dirt out through locks.” She looked at him. “But what about us, Arkady? So far you’ve only talked about the infrastructure. I should have thought that beautifying buildings would be pretty low down on your list of things to do.”

Arkady grinned. “Well, maybe all the things higher on the list are already done.”

“What? Did I hear Arkady Nikelyovich say that?”

“Well, you know – I don’t complain just to complain, Ms. Nine Fingers. And the way things have been going down here, it’s very close to what I was calling for during the voyage out. Close enough that it would be stupid to complain.”

“I must admit you surprise me.”

“Do I? But think about how you all have been working together here, this last year.”

“Half a year.”

He laughed. “Half a year. And for all that time we have had no leaders, really. Those nightly meetings when everyone has their say, and the group decides what needs doing most; that’s how it should be. And no one is wasting time buying or selling, because there is no market. Everything here belongs to all equally. And yet none of us can exploit anything that we own, for there’s no one outside us to sell it to. It’s been a very communal society, a democratic group. All for one and one for all.”

Nadia sighed. “Things have changed, Arkady. It’s not like that anymore. And it’s changing more all the time. So it won’t last.”

“Why do you say that?” he cried. “It will last if we decide that it will.”

She glanced at him skeptically. “You know it isn’t so simple.”

“Well, no. Not simple. But within our power!”

“Maybe.” She sighed, thinking of Maya and Frank, of Phyllis and Sax and Ann. “There’s an awful lot of fighting going on.”

“That’s all right, as long as we agree on certain basic things.”

She shook her head, rubbed her scar with the fingers of her other hand. Her absent finger was itching, and suddenly she felt depressed. Overhead the long bamboo leaves were defined by occluded stars; they looked like sprays of a giant bacillus. They walked along the path between crop trays. Arkady picked up her maimed hand and peered at the scar, until it made her uncomfortable and she tried to pull it back. He drew it up, gave the newly exposed knuckle at the base of the ring finger a kiss. “You’ve got strong hands, Ms. Nine Fingers.”

“I did before this,” she said, making a fist and holding it up.

“Someday Vlad will grow you a new finger,” he said, and took the fist and opened it, then held the hand as they continued to walk. “This reminds me of the arboretum in Sebastopol,” he said.

“Mmm,” Nadia said, not really listening, intent on the warm heft of his hand in hers, in the tight intermingling of their fingers. He had strong hands too. She was fifty-one years old, a round little Russian woman with gray hair, a construction worker with a missing finger. So nice to feel the warmth of another body; it had been too long, and her hand soaked up the feeling like a sponge, until the poor thing tingled, full and warm. It must feel odd to him, she thought, then gave up on it. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

Having Arkady at Underhill made it like the hour before a thunderstorm. He made people think about what they were doing; habits that they had fallen into without thought came under scrutiny, and under this new pressure some became defensive, others aggressive. All the standing arguments got a bit more intense. Naturally this included the terraforming debate.

Now this debate was in no sense a single event but was rather an ongoing process, a topic that kept coming up, a matter of casual exchanges between individuals, out working, eating meals, falling asleep. Any number of things could bring it up: the sight of the white frost plume over Chernobyl; the arrival of a robot-driven rover, laden with water ice from the polar station; clouds in the dawn sky. Seeing these or many other phenomena someone would say, “That’ll add some BTUs to the system,” or, “Isn’t that a good greenhouse gas,” and perhaps a discussion of the technical aspects of the problem would follow. Sometimes the subject would come back up in the evenings back in Underhill, leading from the technical to the philosophical; and sometimes this led to long and heated arguments.

The debate was not, of course, confined to Mars. Position papers were being churned out by policy centers in Houston, Baikonur, Moscow, Washington, and the UN Office for Martian Affairs in New York, as well as in government bureaus, newspaper editorial offices, corporate board rooms, university campuses, and bars and homes all over the world. In the arguments on Earth, many people began to use the colonists’ names as a kind of shorthand for the various positions, so that watching the Terran news the colonists themselves would see people saying that they backed the Clayborne position, or were in favor of the Russell program. This reminder of their enormous fame on Earth, their existence as characters in an ongoing TV drama, was always peculiar and unsettling; after the flurry of TV specials and interviews following touchdown, they had tended to forget the ongoing video transmissions, absorbed in the daily reality of their lives. But the video cameras were still shooting tape to send back home; and there were a lot of people on Earth who were fans of the show.

So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell Program, an informal name for Sax’s plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could. But the minority who backed Ann’s hands-off attitude tended to be more vehement in their belief, insisting that it had immediate applications to the Antarctic policy, and indeed to all Terran environmental policy. Meanwhile different poll questions made it clear that many people were fascinated by Hiroko and the farming project, while others called themselves Bogdanovists; Arkady had been sending back lots of video from Phobos, and Phobos was good video, a real spectacle of architecture and engineering. New Terran hotels and commercial complexes were already imitating some of its features, there was an architectural movement called Bogdanovism, as well as other movements interested in him that were more concentrated on social and economic reforms in the world order.

But terraforming was near the center of all these debates, and the colonists’ disagreements about it were played out on the largest possible public stage. Some of them reacted by avoiding the cameras and requests for interviews; “It’s just what I came to get away from,” Hiroko’s assistant Iwao said, and quite a few agreed with him. Most of the rest didn’t care one way or the other; a few seemed actually to like it. Phyllis’s weekly program, for instance, was carried by both Christian cable stations and business analysis programs all over the world. But no matter how they dealt with it, looking at the polls and listening to the talk made it obvious that most people on Earth and on Mars assumed that terraforming would take place. It was not a question of whether but of when, and how much. Among the colonists themselves this was nearly the universal view. Very few sided with Ann: Simon of course; perhaps Ursula and Sasha; perhaps Hiroko; in his way John, and now in her way Nadia. There were more of these “reds” back on Earth, but they necessarily held the position as a theory, an aesthetic judgement. The strongest point to their arguments, and thus the one that Ann emphasized most often in her communiques back to Earth, was the possibility of indigenous life. “If there is Martian life here,” Ann would say, “the radical alteration of the climate might kill it off. We cannot intrude on the situation while the status of life on Mars is unknown; it’s unscientific, and worse, it’s immoral.”

Many agreed with that, including a lot of the Terran scientific community, which influenced the UNOMA committee charged with overseeing the colony. But every time Sax heard the argument he blinked rapidly. “There’s no sign of life on the surface, past or present,” he would say mildly. “If it does exist it has to be underground, near volcanic vents I suppose. But even if there is life down there, we could search for ten thousand years and never find it, nor eliminate the possibility it isn’t down there somewhere else, somewhere we haven’t looked. So waiting until we know for sure that there is no life” – which was a fairly common position among moderates – “effectively means waiting forever. For a remote possibility which terraforming wouldn’t immediately endanger anyway.”

“Of course it would,” Ann would retort. “Maybe not immediately, but eventually the permafrost would melt, there would be movement through the hydrosphere, and contamination of all of it by warmer water and Terran lifeforms, bacteria, viruses, algae. It might take a while, but it would surely happen. And we can’t risk that.”

Sax would shrug. “First, it’s postulated life, very low probability. Second, it wouldn’t be endangered for centuries. We could presumably locate it and protect it in that time.”

“But we may not be able to find it.”

“So we stop for low-probability life we can never actually find?”

Ann shrugged. “We have to, unless you want to argue that it’s okay to destroy life on other planets, as long as we can’t find it. And don’t forget; indigenous life on Mars would be the biggest story of all time, it would have implications for the galactic frequency of life that are impossible to exaggerate. Looking for life is one of the main reasons we’re here!”

“Well,” Sax would say, “in the meantime, life that we are quite sure exists is being exposed to an extraordinarily high amount of radiation. If we don’t do something to lessen it, we may not be able to stay here. We need a thicker atmosphere to cut down on radiation.”

This was not a reply to Ann’s point but the substitution of another one, and it was an argument that was very influential. Millions on Earth wanted to come to Mars, to the “new frontier,” where life was an adventure again; waiting lists for emigration both real and fake were massively oversubscribed. But no one wanted to live in a bath of mutagenic radiation, and the practical desire to make the planet safe for humans was stronger in most people than the desire to preserve the lifeless landscape already there, or to protect a postulated indigenous life that many scientists assured them did not exist.

So it did seem, even among those urging caution, that terraforming was going to happen. A subcommittee of UNOMA had been convened to study the issue, and on Earth it was now in the nature of a given, an unavoidable part of progress, a natural part of the order of things. A manifest destiny.

On Mars, however, the issue was both more open and more pressing, not so much a matter of philosophy as of daily life, of frigid poisonous air and the radiation being taken; and among those in favor of terraforming, a significant group was clustering around Sax – a group that not only wanted to do it, but to do it as fast as possible. What this meant in practice no one was sure; estimates of the time it would take to get to a “human-viable surface” ranged from a century to ten thousand years, with extreme opinions on either end, from thirty years (Phyllis) to a hundred thousand years (Iwao). Phyllis would say, “God gave us this planet to make in our image, to create a new Eden". Simon would say, “If the permafrost melts we’d be living on a collapsing landscape, and a lot of us would be killed". Arguments wandered over a wide range of issues: salt levels, peroxide levels, radiation levels, the look of the land, possibly lethal mutations of genetically engineered micro-organisms, and so on.

“We can try to model it,” Sax said, “but the truth is we’ll never be able to model it adequately. It’s too big and there are too many factors, many of them unknown. But what we will learn from it will be useful in controlling Earth’s climate, in avoiding global warming or a future ice age. It’s an experiment, a big one, and it will always be an ongoing experiment, with nothing guaranteed or known for sure. But that’s what science is.”

People would nod at this.

Arkady as always was thinking of the political point of view. “We can never be self-sufficient unless we do terraforming,” he pointed out. “We need to terraform in order to make the planet ours, so that we will have the material basis for independence.”

People would roll their eyes at this. But it meant that Sax and Arkady were allies of a sort, and that was a powerful combination. And so the arguments would go around, again and again and again, endlessly.

And now Underhill was nearly complete, a functioning and in most ways a self-sufficient village. Now it was possible to act further; now they had to decide what to do next. And most of them wanted to terraform. Any number of projects had been proposed to begin the process, with advocates for each, usually those who would be responsible for doing it. This was an important part of terraforming’s attraction; every discipline could contribute to the enterprise in one way or another, so it had broad-based support. The alchemists talked about physical and mechanical means to add heat to the system; the climatologists debated influencing the weather; the biosphere team talked about ecological systems theories to be tested. The bioengineers were already working on new micro-organisms; they were shifting, clipping and recombining genes from algae, methanogens, cyanobacteria, and lichens, trying to come up with organisms that would survive on the present Martian surface, or under it. One day they invited Arkady to take a look at what they were doing, and Nadia went along with him.

They had some of their prototype GEMs in Mars jars, the largest of which was one of the old habitats in the trailer park. They had opened it up, shoveled regolith onto the floor, and sealed it again. They worked inside it by teleoperation, and viewed the results from the next trailer over, where instrument gauges took readings, and video screens showed what the various dishes were producing. Arkady looked at every screen closely, but there wasn’t that much to see: their old quarters, covered with plastic cubicles filled with red dirt; robot arms extending from their bases against the walls. There were visible growths on part of the soil, a bluish furze.

“That’s our champion so far,” Vlad said. “But still only slightly areophylic.” They were selecting for a number of extreme characteristics, including resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock or soil. No single Terran organism had all these traits, and those that had them individually were usually very slow growers; but the engineers had started what Vlad called a mix and match program, and recently they had come up with a variant of the cyanophyte that was sometimes called bluegreen algae. “It is not precisely thriving, but it does not die so fast, let us put it that way.” They had named it cyanophyte primares, its common name becoming Underhill algae. They wanted to make a field trial with it, and had prepared a proposal to send down to UNOMA.

Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see; and that night he said to the dinner group, “We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act.”

Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortable as well. Maya insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation shifted. The next morning Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about Arkady. The two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night before. “He laughs in our face!” Maya exclaimed. “It’s useless to try to reason with him!”

“What he proposes could be very dangerous,” Frank said. “If we explicitly disregard a directive from the UN, they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the law. I mean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at this point, and we don’t have the right to ignore that. It’s international treaty. It’s how humanity in general wants to treat this planet at this time.”

“Can’t you talk to him?” Maya asked.

“I can talk to him,” Nadia said. “But I can’t say that it will do any good.”

“Please, Nadia. Just try. We’ve got enough problems as it is.”

“I’ll try, sure.”

So that afternoon she talked to Arkady. They were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in order. “It will only be a matter of time before the UN comes around to your view anyway.”

He stopped and lifted her maimed hand. “How long do you think we have?” he said. He pointed at the setting sun. “How long do you suggest we wait? For our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?”

“Come on,” Nadia said, pulling her hand free. “Cave fish.”

Arkady laughed. “Still, it’s a serious question. We don’t have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change.”

“Even so, why not wait a year?”

“A Terran year or a Martian year?”

“A Martian year. Get readings on all the seasons, give the UN time to come around.”

“We don’t need the readings, they’ve been taken now for years.”

“Have you talked to Ann about that?”

“No. Well, sort of. But she doesn’t agree.”

“A lot of people don’t agree. I mean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convince them. You can’t just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people back home that you’re always criticizing.”

Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“You damned liberals.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its ejecta scattered around it. Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. You damned radicals,” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard, “you hate liberalism because it works.”

He snorted.

“It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.”

“Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again toward base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”

Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him; he quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new GEMs onto the surface, and he confined the agitprop to his beautification program, spending much of his time in the Quarter, trying to make colored bricks and glass. Nadia joined him for a swim before breakfast on most days, and they along with John and Maya took over a lane in the shallow pool that filled all of one of the vaulted chambers, and swam a brisk workout of one or two thousand meters. John led the sprint sets, Maya led the distance sets, Nadia followed in everything, hampered by her bad hand, and they churned through the extra-splashy water like a line of dolphins, staring through their goggles down at the sky-blue concrete of the pool bottom. “The butterfly was made for this g,” John would say, grinning at the way they could practically fly out of the water. Breakfasts afterwards were pleasant if brief, and the rest of the days were the usual round of work; Nadia seldom saw Arkady again till evenings at dinner, or afterward.

Then Sax and Spencer and Rya finished setting up the robot factory for making Sax’s windmill heaters, and they applied to UNOMA for permission to distribute a thousand of them around the equatorial regions, to test their warming effect. All of them together were only expected to add about twice the heat to the atmosphere that Chernobyl did, and there were even questions as to whether they would be able to distinguish the added heat from background seasonal fluctuations; but as Sax said, they wouldn’t know until they tried. And there was no doubt that the heaters would add some heat to the surface, detectable or not.

And so the terraforming argument flared again. And suddenly Ann flew into violent action, taping long messages that she sent to the members of UNOMA’s executive committee, and to the national offices for Martian affairs for all the countries that were currently on the committee; and finally to the UN General Assembly. These appearances were given enormous amounts of attention, from the most serious policy-making levels all the way down to the tabloid press and TV, media that regarded it as the newest episode of the red soap opera. Ann had taped and sent her messages in private, so the colonists learned of them by seeing excerpts on Terran TV, and watching the reaction to them in the days that followed: debates in government, a rally in Washington that drew twenty thousand; endless amounts of editorial space, and commentary in the scientific nets. It was a bit shocking to see the strength of these responses, and some of them felt Ann had gone behind their backs. Phyllis for one was outraged.

“Besides, it doesn’t make sense,” Sax said, blinking rapidly. “Chernobyl is already releasing almost as much heat into the atmosphere as these windmills, and she never complained about that.”

“Yes she did,” Nadia said. “She just lost the vote.”

Hearings were held at UNOMA, and while they were going on a group of the materials scientists confronted Ann after dinner. A lot of the rest of them were there to witness this confrontation; Underhill’s main dining hall filled four chambers, whose dividing walls had been removed and replaced by load-bearing pillars; it was a big room, filled with chairs and potted plants and the descendants of the Ares’ birds, and most recently lit by windows installed high across the northern wall, through which they saw the ground level crops of the atrium. A big space; and at least half the colonists were in it eating when the meeting took place.

“Why didn’t you discuss this with us?” Spencer asked her.

Ann’s glare forced Spencer to look away. “Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it – we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see – as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury and shuddering. The whole room had gone deadly quiet. “It’s not science, I say! It’s just playing around. And for that game you’re going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms – destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all.”

The room was as still as a tableau. The ventilators hummed. People began to eye one another warily. Simon took a step toward Ann, his hand outstretched; she stopped him dead with a glance, he might as well have stepped outside in his underwear and frozen stiff. His face reddened, and he cracked his posture and sat back down.

Sax Russell rose to his feet. He looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different from any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

He paused to look around at them all. Nadia gulped: it was strange in the extreme to hear these words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyze a graph. Too strange!

“Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and to the universe. We can do it, so we will do it. So—” he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph – as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true “ — we might as well start.”

He looked at Ann, and all eyes followed her. Ann’s mouth was tight, her shoulders slumped. She knew she was beaten.

She shrugged, as if she were shrugging a hooded cape back over her head and body, a heavy carapace that weighed her down, and covered her entirely from them. In the flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, “I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshipping it with our attention.” She met Sax’s mild gaze, and one final flare of her anger jetted out: “You’ve never even seen Mars.”

And she left the room.

Janet had had her camera specs on, and videotaped this exchange. Phyllis sent a copy back to Earth. A week later the UNOMA committee on environmental alterations approved the dissemination of the heater windmills.

The plan was to drop them from dirigibles. Arkady immediately claimed the right to pilot one, as a sort of reward for his work on Phobos. Maya and Frank were not unhappy at the thought of Arkady disappearing from Underhill for another month or two, so they immediately assigned him one of the craft. He would drift east in the prevailing winds, descending to place windmills in channel beds and on the outer flanks of craters, both places where winds tended to be strong. Nadia first heard of the expedition when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it.

“Sounds nice,” she said.

“Want to come along?” he asked.

“Why yes,” she said. Her ghost finger was tingling.

Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a planetary model built back in Germany by Friedrichshafen Nach Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so that it had just recently arrived. It was called the Arrowhead, and it measured 120 meters across the wings, 100 meters front to back, and 40 meters tall. It had an internal ultralite frame, and turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper surface of the bag. The pencil-shaped gondola extended most of the length of the underside, but it was smaller inside than Nadia had expected, because much of it was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills; at takeoff their clear space consisted of nothing more than the cockpit, two narrow beds, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet, and the crawlspace necessary to move among these. It was pretty tight, but happily both sides of the gondola were walled with windows, and though somewhat blocked by windmills these still gave them a lot of light, and good visibility.

Takeoff was slow. Arkady released the lines extending from the three mooring masts with the flip of a cockpit toggle; the turboprops ran hard, but they were dealing with air that was only twelve millibars thick. The cockpit bounced up and down in slow motion, flexing with the internal frame: and every up bounce was a little higher off the ground. For someone used to rocket launches it was comical.

“Let’s take a three-sixty and see Underhill before we go,” Arkady said when they were fifty meters high. He banked the ship and they made a slow wide turn, looking out Nadia’s window. Tracks, pits, mounds of regolith, all dark red against the dusty orange surface of the plain – it looked as if a dragon had reached down with a great taloned claw, and drawn blood time after time. Underhill sat at the center of the wounds, and by itself was a pretty sight, a square dark red setting for a shiny glass-and-silver jewel, with green just visible under the dome. Extending away from it were the roads east to Chernobyl and north to the spacepads. And over there were the long bulbs of the greenhouses, and there was the trailer park …

“The Alchemists’ Quarter still looks like something out of the Urals,” Arkady said. “We really have to do something about that.” He brought the dirigible out of its turn and headed east, moving with the wind. “Should I run us over Chernobyl and catch the updraft?”

“Why don’t we see what this thing can do unassisted?” Nadia said. She felt light, as if the hydrogen in the ballonets had filled her as well. The view was stupendous, the hazy horizon perhaps a hundred kilometers away, the contours of the land all clearly visible: the subtle bumps and hollows of Lunae, the more prominent hills and canyons of the channeled terrain to the east. “Oh, this is going to be wonderful!”

“Yes.”

It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done anything like this before. But flying on Mars was no easy thing, because of the thin atmosphere. They were in the best solution: a dirigible as big and light as possible, filled with hydrogen, which in Martian air was not only not flammable, but also even lighter relative to its surroundings than it would have been on Earth. Hydrogen and the latest in super-light materials gave them the necessary lift to carry a cargo like their windmills, but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously sluggish, and everything happened in extreme slow motion.

And so they drifted along. All that day they crossed the rolling plain of Lunae Planum, pushed southeast by the wind. For an hour or two they could see Juventa Chasm on the southern horizon, a gash of a canyon that looked like a giant pit mine. Farther east, the land turned yellowish; there was less surface rubble, and the underlying bedrock was more rumpled. There were also many more craters, craters big and small, crisp-rimmed or nearly buried. This was Xanthe Terra, a high region that was topographically similar to the southern uplands, here sticking into the north between the low plains of Chryse and Isidis. They would be over Xanthe for some days, if the prevailing westerlies held true.

They were progressing at a leisurely 10 kph. Most of the time they flew at an altitude of about a hundred meters, which put the horizons about fifty kilometers away. They had time to look closely at anything they wanted to, although Xanthe was proving to be little more than a steady succession of craters.

Late that afternoon Nadia tilted the nose of the dirigible down and circled into the wind, dropping until they were within ten meters of the ground and then releasing their anchor. The ship rose, jerked on its line, and settled downwind of the anchor, tugging at it like a fat kite. Nadia and Arkady twisted down the length of the gondola, to what Arkady called the bomb bay. Nadia lifted a windmill onto the bay’s winch hook. The windmill was a little thing, a magnesium box with four vertical vanes on a rod projecting from its top. It weighed about five kilos. They closed the bay door on it, sucked out the air, and opened the bottom doors. Arkady operated the winch, looking through a low window to see what he was doing. The windmill dropped like a plumb, and bumped onto hardened sand, on the southern flank of a small unnamed crater. He released the winch hook, reeled it back into the bay and closed the bomb doors.

They returned to the cockpit, and looked down again to see if the windmill was working. There it stood, a small box on the outside slope of a crater, somewhat tilted, the four broad vertical blades spinning merrily. It looked like an anemometer from a kid’s meteorology kit. The heating element, an exposed metal coil that would radiate like a stove-top, was on one side of the base. In a good wind the element might get up to 200° Centigrade, which wasn’t bad, especially in that ambient temperature. Still … “It’s going to take a lot of those to make any difference,” Nadia remarked.

“Sure, but every little bit helps, and in a way it’s free heat. Not only the wind powering the heaters, but the sun powering the factories making the windmills. I think they’re a good idea.”

They stopped once more that afternoon to set out another one, then anchored for the night in the lee of a crisp young crater. They microwaved a meal in the tiny kitchen, and then retired to their narrow bunks. It felt odd to rock on the wind, like a boat at its mooring: tug and float, tug and float. But it was very relaxing when you got used to it, and soon Nadia was asleep.

The next morning they woke before dawn, cast off, and motored up into the sunlight. From a hundred meters height they could watch the shadowed landscape below turn to bronze as the terminator rolled by and clear daylight followed, illuminating a fantastic jumble of bright rocks and long shadows. The morning wind pushed right to left across their bow, so they were pushed northeast toward Chryse, humming along with the props on full power. Then the land fell away below them, and they were over the first of the outflow channels they would pass, a sinuous unnamed valley west of Shalbatana Vallis. This little arroyo’s S shape was unmistakably water-cut. Later that day they lofted out over the deeper and much wider canyon of Shalbatana, and the signs were even more obvious: tear-shaped islands, curving channels, alluvial plains, scablands; there were signs everywhere of a massive flood, a flood that had created a canyon so huge that the Arrowhead suddenly looked like a butterfly.

The outflow canyons and the high land between them reminded Nadia of the landscape of American cowboy movies, with washes and mesas and isolated ship rocks, as in Monument Valley – except here it lasted for four days, as they passed in succession over the unnamed channel, Shalbatana, Simud, Tiu, and then Ares. And all of them had been caused by giant floods, which had burst onto the surface and flowed for months, at rates ten thousand times that of the Mississippi. Nadia and Arkady talked about that as they looked down into the canyons under them, but it was very hard to imagine floods so huge. Now the big empty canyons funnelled nothing but wind. They did that quite well, however, so Arkady and Nadia descended into them a number of times per day, to drop more windmills.

Then east of Ares Vallis they floated back over the densely cratered terrain of Xanthe. Again the land was everywhere marred by craters: big craters, little craters, old craters, new craters, craters with rims marred by newer craters, craters with floors punctured by three or five smaller craters; craters as fresh as if they had struck yesterday; craters that just barely showed, at dawn and dusk, as buried arcs in the old plateau. They passed over Schiaparelli, a giant old crater a hundred kilometers across; when they floated over its central uplift knob, its crater walls formed their horizon, a perfect ring of hills around the edge of the world.

After that winds blew from the south for several days. They caught a glimpse of Cassini, another great old crater, and passed over hundreds of smaller ones. They dropped several windmills per day, but the flight was giving them a stronger sense of the size of the planet, and the project began to seem like a joke, as if they flew over Antarctica and tried to melt the ice by setting down a number of camping stoves. “You’d have to drop millions to make any difference,” Nadia said as they climbed up from another drop.

“True,” Arkady said. “But Sax would like to drop millions. He’s got an automated assembly line that will just keep churning them out, it’s only distribution that is a problem. And besides, it’s just one part of the campaign he has in mind.” He gestured back toward the last arc of Cassini, inscribing the whole northwest. “Sax would like to bang out a few more holes like that one. Capture some icy moonlets from Saturn, or from the asteroid belt if he can find any, and push them back and smash them into Mars. Make hot craters, melt the permafrost – they’d be like oases.”

“Dry oases, wouldn’t they be? You’d lose most of the ice on entry, and have the rest disappear on contact.”

“Sure, but we can use more water vapor in the air.”

“But it wouldn’t just vaporize, it would break into its constituent atoms.”

“Some of it. But hydrogen and oxygen, we could use more of both.”

“So you’re bringing hydrogen and oxygen from Saturn? Come on, there’s lots of both here already! You could just break down some of the ice.”

“Well, it’s just one of his ideas.”

“I can’t wait to hear what Ann says to that.” She sighed, thought about it. “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to graze an ice asteroid through the atmosphere, as if trying to aerobrake it. That would burn it up without breaking the molecules apart. You’d get water vapor in the atmosphere, which would help, but you wouldn’t be bombing the surface with explosions as big as a hundred hydrogen bombs going off all at once.”

Arkady nodded. “Good idea! You should tell Sax.”

“You tell him.”

East of Cassini the terrain grew rougher than ever. This was some of the oldest surface on the planet, cratered to saturation in the earliest years of torrential bombardment. A hellish age, the Noachian, you could see that in the landscape. No Man’s Land from a Titanic trench war, the sight of it induced a kind of numbness after a while, a cosmological shell shock.

They floated on, east, northeast, southeast, south, northeast, west, east, east. They finally came to the end of Xanthe, and began to descend the long slope of Syrtis Major Planitia. This was a lava plain, much less densely cratered than Xanthe. The land sloped down and down, until finally they drifted over a smooth-floored basin: Isidis Planitia, one of the lowest points on Mars. It was the essence of the northern hemisphere, and after the southern highlands it seemed especially smooth and flat and low. And it too was a very large region. There really was a lot of land on Mars.

Then one morning when they lofted up to cruising altitude, a trio of peaks rose over the eastern horizon. They had come to Elysium, the only other Tharsislike “bulge continent” that the planet had. Elysium was a much smaller bulge than Tharsis, but it was still big, a high continent, one thousand kilometers long and ten kilometers taller than the surrounding terrain. As with Tharsis, it was ringed by patches of fractured land, crack systems caused by the uplift. They flew over the westernmost of these crack systems, Hephaestus Fossae, and found the area an unearthly sight: five long deep parallel canyons, like claw marks in the bedrock. Elysium loomed beyond, a saddleback in shape, Elysium Mons and Hecates Tholus rearing at each end of a long spine range, five thousand meters higher than the bulge they punctuated: an awesome sight. Everything about Elysium was so much bigger than anything Nadia and Arkady had seen so far that as the dirigible floated toward the range, the two were speechless for minutes at a time. They sat in their seats, watching it all float slowly toward them. When they did speak, it was just thinking aloud: “Looks like the Karakoram,” Arkady said. “Desert Himalayas. Except these are so simple. Those volcanoes look like Fuji. Maybe people will hike up them someday in pilgrimages.”

Nadia said, “These are so big, it’s hard to imagine what the Tharsis volcanoes will look like. Aren’t the Tharsis volcanoes twice as big as these?”

“At least. It does look like Fuji, don’t you think?”

“No, it’s a lot less steep. Why, did you ever see Fuji?”

“No.”

After a while: “Well, we’d better try to go around the whole damn thing,” Arkady said. “I’m not sure we have the loft to get over those mountains.”

So they turned the props, and pushed south as hard as they could, and the winds naturally co-operated, as they were curving around the continent too. So the Arrowhead floated southeast into a rough mountainous region called Cerberus; and all of the next day they could mark their progress by the sight of Elysium, passing slowly to their left. Hours passed, the massif shifted in their side windows; the slowness of the shift made it plain just how big this world was. Mars has as much land surface as the Earth – everyone always said that, but it had been just a phrase. Their creep around Elysium was the proof of the senses.

The days passed: up in the frigid morning air, over the jumbled red land, down in the sunset, to bounce at an airy anchorage. One evening when the supply of windmills had dwindled they rearranged those that remained, and moved their beds together under the starboard windows. They did it without discussion, as if it had been the obvious thing to do when they had room; as if they had already agreed to do it long before. And as they moved around the cramped gondola rearranging things, they bumped into each other just as they had all trip long, but now intentionally, and with a sensuous rubbing which accentuated what they had been up to all along, accidents become foreplay; and finally Arkady burst out laughing and caught her up into a wild bear hug, and Nadia shouldered him back onto their new double bed and they kissed like teenagers, and made love through the night. And after that they slept together, and made love frequently in the ruddy glow of dawn and in the starry black nights, with the ship lightly bobbing at its moorings. And they lay together talking, and the sensation of floating as they embraced was palpable, more romantic than any train or ship. “We became friends first,” Arkady said once, “that’s what makes this different, don’t you think?” He prodded her with a finger. “I love you.” It was as if he were testing the words with his tongue. It was clear to Nadia that he hadn’t said them often, it was clear they meant a lot to him, a kind of commitment. Ideas meant so much to him! “And I love you,” she said.

And in the mornings Arkady would pad up and down the narrow gondola naked, his red hair bronzed like everything else by the horizontal morning light, and Nadia would watch from their bed feeling so serene and happy that she had to remind herself that the floating sensation was probably just Martian g. But it felt like joy.

One night as they were falling asleep Nadia said curiously, “Why me?”

“Huhn?” He had been almost asleep.

“I said, why me? I mean, Arkady Nikelyovich, you could have loved any of the women here, and they would have loved you back. You could have had Maya if you wanted.”

He snorted. “I could have had Maya! Oh my! I could have had the joy of Maya Katarina! Just like Frank and John!” He snorted, and they both laughed out loud. “How could I have passed on such joy! Silly me!” He giggled until she punched him.

“All right, all right. One of the others then, the beautiful ones, Janet or Ursula or Samantha.”

“Come on,” he said. He propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. “You really don’t know what beauty is, do you?”

“I certainly do,” Nadia said mulishly.

Arkady ignored her and said, “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”

“Curves I’ve got,” Nadia said, pushing his hand away.

He leaned forward and tried to bite her breast, but she dodged him.

“Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda Francine. By these criteria you are queen of Mars.”

“Princess of Mars,” she corrected absently, thinking it over.

“Yes that’s right. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars.”

“You’re not a conventional man.”

“No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! – the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.

One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia. Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old Cerberus. Something went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the ground. The windmill thumped down flat on its base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.

And there, behind the plate, was a mass of something. A dull green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the box. She reached in with a screwdriver and poked at it carefully. “Shit,” she said.

“What?” Arkady said above.

She ignored him and scraped some of the substance into a bag she used for screws and nuts.

She got into the sling. “Pull me back up,” she ordered.

“What’s wrong?” Arkady asked.

“Just get me up there.”

He closed the bomb bay doors after her, and met her as she was getting out of the sling. “What’s up?”

She took off her helmet. “You know what’s up, you bastard!” She took a swing at him and he leaped back, banging into a wall of windmills. “Ow!” he cried; a vane had caught him in the back. “Hey! What’s the problem! Nadia!”

She took the bag from her walker pocket and waved it before him. “This is the problem! How could you do it? How could you lie to me? You bastard, do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to get us in? They’ll come up here and send us all back to Earth!”

Round-eyed, Arkady rubbed his jaw. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Nadia,” he said earnestly. “I don’t lie to my friends. Let me see that.”

She stared at him and he stared back, his arm stretched out for the bag, the whites of his eyes visible all the way round the irises. He shrugged, and she frowned.

“You really don’t know?” she demanded.

“Know what?”

She couldn’t believe he would fake ignorance; it just wasn’t his style. Which suddenly made things very strange. “At least some of our windmills are little algae farms.”

“What ?”

“The fucking windmills that we’ve been dropping everywhere,” she said. “They’re stuffed with Vlad’s new algae or lichen or whatever it is. Look.” She put the little bag on the tiny kitchen table, opened it and used the screwdriver to spoon out a little bit of it. Little knobby chunks of bluish lichen. Like Martian life forms out of an old pulp novel.

They stared at it.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Arkady said. He leaned over until his eyes were a centimeter from the stuff on the table.

“You swear you didn’t know?” Nadia demanded.

“I swear. I wouldn’t do that to you, Nadia. You know that.”

She heaved a big breath. “Well – our friends would do it to us, apparently.”

He straightened up and nodded. “That’s right.” He was distracted, thinking hard. He went to one of the windmill bases and hefted it away from the others. “Where was it?”

“Behind the heating pad.”

They went to work on it with Nadia’s tools, and got it open. Behind the plate was another colony of Underhill algae. Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate, and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the insides of the container wall. “Look, it’s made to open.”

“But who opens it?” Arkady said.

“Radio?”

“Well I’ll be damned.” Arkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corridor. “I mean— ”

“How many dirigible trips have been made so far, ten? Twenty? And all of them dropping these things?”

Arkady started to laugh. He tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and he laughed until he held his sides. “Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Nadia, who didn’t think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sight of him. “It’s not funny!” she protested. “We’re in big trouble!”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Definitely! And it’s all your fault! Some of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!”

“Well,” he said, “that at least is a point in their favor, the bastards. I mean —” he went back to the kitchen table to stare at the clump of blue stuff “— who exactly do you think we’re talking about, anyway? How many of our friends are in on this? And why in the world didn’t they tell me?”

This really rankled, she could tell. In fact the more he thought about it, the less amused he was, because the algae meant there was a subculture in their group that was acting outside UNOMA supervision but had not let Arkady in on it, even though he had been the first and most vocal advocate of such subversion. What did that mean? Were there people who were on his side but didn’t trust him? Were there dissidents with a competing program?

They had no way of telling. Eventually they pulled anchor, and sailed on over Amazonis. They passed a medium-sized crater named Pettit, and Arkady remarked that it would make a good site for a windmill, but Nadia only snarled. They flew by, talking the situation over. Certainly several people in the bioengineering labs had to be in on it; probably most of them; maybe all. And then Sax, the designer of the windmills, certainly had to be a part of it. And Hiroko had been an advocate of the windmills, but they had neither been sure why; it was impossible to judge whether she would approve of something like this or not, as she was simply too close with her opinions. But it was possible.

As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completely apart. The heating plate doubled as a gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plate itself. Each windmill thus functioned as a micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then good. If not it was not going to do very well on Mars anyway. The hot plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing more. Or so its designers must have thought. “We’ve been made into Johnny Appleseed,” Arkady said.

“Johnny what?”

“American folk tale.” He told her about it.

“Yeah, right. And now Paul Bunyan is going to come kick our ass.”

“Ha. Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyan, believe me.”

“Big Man?”

“You know, all those names for landscape features. Big Man’s Footprints, Big Man’s Bathtub, Big Man’s Golf Course, whatever.”

“Ah yeah.”

“Anyway, I don’t see why we should get in trouble. We didn’t know anything about it.”

“Now who’s going to believe that?”

“… Good point. Those bastards, they really got me with this one.”

Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it. And Arkady, he had his own group of friends, perhaps more than that: people who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in Underhill. And if some of his own people were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.

Or so he seemed to think. He wouldn’t say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency. But she wasn’t too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.

“Well, but come on!” he cried. “Why should they keep it a secret from me, when it was my idea to begin with?”

“Because they knew I might come along with you. If they told you, you would have had to tell me. And if you told me, I would have stopped it!”

Arkady laughed outrageously at this. “So it was pretty considerate of them after all!”

“Fuck.”

The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed the things. Someone in communications, probably – there were quite a few who must have known.

“What about Hiroko?” Arkady asked.

They couldn’t decide. They didn’t know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn’t explain why. “I suppose,” she said, thinking about it, “I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and – follow her. Even Ann, in a way. Although Ann will hate this when she hears about it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that she would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her. They probably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!”

“Hmm …”

“So they probably got her agreement for the idea. Maybe I should even say her permission.”

Arkady nodded. “I see your point.”

On and on they talked, hashing over every point of it. The land they passed over, flat and immobile, looked different to Nadia now. It was seeded, fertilized; it was going to change, now, inevitably. They talked about the other parts of Sax’s terraforming plans, giant orbiting mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the dawn and dusk terminators, carbon distributed over the polar caps, areothermal heat, the ice asteroids. It was all really going to happen, it seemed. The debate had been bypassed; they were going to change the face of Mars.

The second evening after their momentous discovery, as they were cooking dinner in a crater’s lee anchorage, they got a call from Underhill, relayed off one of the comm satellites. “Hey you two!” John Boone said by way of greeting. “We’ve got a problem!”

“You’ve got a problem,” Nadia replied.

“Why, something wrong out there?”

“No no.”

“Well good, because really it’s you guys who have the problem, and I wouldn’t want you to have more than one! A dust storm has started down in the Claritas Fossae region, and it’s growing, and coming north at a good rate. We think it’ll reach you in a day or so.”

“Isn’t it early for dust storms?” Arkady asked.

“Well no, we’re at Ls = 240, which is pretty much the usual season for it. Southern spring. Anyway, there it is, and it’s coming your way.”

He sent a satellite photo of the storm, and they studied their TV screen closely. The region south of Tharsis was now obscured by an amorphous yellow cloud.

“We’d better take off for home right now,” Nadia said after studying the photo.

“At night?”

“We can run the props on batteries tonight, and recharge the batteries tomorrow morning. After that we may not have much sunlight, unless we can get above the dust.”

After some discussion with John, and then with Ann, they cast off. The wind was pushing them east-northeast, and on this heading they would pass just to the south of Olympus Mons. After that their hope was to get around the north flank of Tharsis, which would protect them from the dust storm for at least a while.

It seemed louder flying at night. The wind’s rush over the fabric of the bag was a fluctuating moan, the sound of their engines a pitiful little hum. They sat in the cockpit, lit only by dim green instrument lights, and talked in low voices as they moved over the black land below. They had about three thousand kilometers to go before reaching Underhill; that was about three hundred hours of flying time. If they went round the clock, it would be twelve days or so. But the storm, if it grew in the usual pattern, would reach them long before then. After that – it was hard to tell how it would go. Without sunlight the props would drain the batteries, and then – “Can we just float on the wind?” Nadia said. “Use the props for occasional directional nudges?”

“Maybe. But these things are designed with the props as part of the lift, you know.”

“Yeah.” She made coffee and brought mugs of it up to the cockpit. They sat and drank, and looked out at the black landscape, or the green sweep of the little radar screen. “We probably ought to drop everything we don’t need. Especially those damned windmills.”

“It’s all ballast, save it for when we need the lift.”

The hours of the night wore on. They traded shifts at the helm, and Nadia caught an uneasy hour’s sleep. When she returned to the cockpit, she saw that the black bulk of Tharsis had rolled over the horizon ahead of them: the two northernmost of the three prince volcanoes, Ascraeus Mons and Pavonis Mons, were visible as humps of occluded stars, out at the edge of the world. To their left Olympus Mons still bulked well above the horizon, and taken with the other two volcanoes, it looked as if they flew low in some truly gigantic canyon. The radar screen reproduced the view in miniature, in green lines on the screen’s gridwork.

Then, in the hour before dawn, it seemed as though another massive volcano were rising behind them. The whole southern horizon was lifting, low stars disappearing as they watched, Orion drowned in black. The storm was coming.

It caught them just at daybreak, choking off the red in the eastern sky, rolling over them, returning the world to rusty darkness. The wind picked up until it swept past the gondola windows in a muted roar, and then with a loud howling; dust flew by them with terrifying, surreal speed. Then the wind grew even more violent, and the gondola jerked up and down as the frame of the dirigible was twisted back and forth.

They were lucky north was the direction they wanted to go. At one point Arkady said, “The wind should hopefully wrap around the north shoulder of Tharsis.”

Nadia nodded silently. They hadn’t gotten the chance to recharge the batteries after the night’s flight, and without sunlight the motors wouldn’t run too much longer. “Hiroko told me sunlight on the ground during a storm is supposed to be about fifteen percent of normal,” she said. “Higher there should be more. So we’ll get some recharge, but it’ll be slow. Could be that over the course of the day we might get enough to use the props a bit tonight.” She flicked on a computer to do the calculations. Something in the expression on Arkady’s face – not fear, not even anxiety, but a curious little smile – made her aware of how much danger they were in. If they couldn’t use the props, they wouldn’t be able to direct their movement, and they might not even be able to stay aloft. They could descend, it was true, and try to anchor; but they had only a few weeks’ more food, and storms like these often persisted for two months, sometimes three.

“There’s Ascraeus Mons,” Arkady said, pointing at the radar screen. “Good image.” He laughed. “Best view of it we’re going to get this time around, I’m afraid. Too bad, I was really looking forward to seeing them! Remember Elysium?”

“Yeah yeah,” Nadia said, busy running simulations of the batteries’ efficiency. Daily sunlight was near its perihelion peak, which was why the storm had started in the first place; and the instruments said that about twenty percent of full daylight was penetrating to this level (it felt to her eye more like thirty or forty); therefore it might be possible to run the props half the time, which would help tremendously. Without them they were moving at around twelve kilometers per hour, and losing altitude as well, although that might just be the ground rising under them. With the props they might be able to hold a steady altitude, and influence their course by a degree or two.

“How thick is this dust, do you think?”

“How thick?”

“You know, grams per cubic meter. Try to get Ann or Hiroko on the radio and find out, will you?”

She went back to see what they had on board that could be used to power the props. Hydrazine, for the bomb bay vacuum pumps; the pump motors could be wired to the props, probably … She was kicking one of the damned windmills out of the way when she stared at it. The hot plates were heated by an electric charge generated by the spinning of the windmills. So if she could run that charge into the prop batteries, the windmills could be attached to the outside of the gondola, and this wind would spin them like tops, and the resulting electricity could help power the props. As she rooted through the equipment locker looking for wire and transformers and tools she told Arkady the idea, and he laughed his madman laugh. “Good idea, Nadia! Great idea!”

“If it works.” She rummaged through the tool kit, sadly smaller than her usual supply. The light in the gondola was eerie, a dim yellow glow flickering with every gust. The view out the side windows shifted from pockets of complete clarity, with thick yellow clouds like thunderheads flying past them, to complete obscurity, all the window surfaces streaming with dust that flashed by at well over three hundred kilometers per hour. Even at twelve millibars the blast of the wind was tossing the dirigible about; up in the cockpit Arkady was cursing the autopilot’s insufficiency. “Reprogram it,” Nadia called forward, and then remembered him and all his sadistic simulations on the Ares, and laughed out loud: “Problem run! Problem run!” She laughed again at his shouted curses, and went back to work. At least the wind would push them along faster. Arkady yelled back information from Ann: the dust was extremely fine, average particle size about 2.5 microns; total column mass about 10^-3 grams per cm^-2, pretty evenly distributed from top to bottom of the column. That wasn’t so bad; drop it on the ground and it would be a really thin layer, which was consistent with what they had seen on the oldest freight drops at Underhill.

When she had rewired a number of the windmills she banged down the passageway to the cockpit. “Ann says the winds will be slowest close to the ground,” Arkady said.

“Good. We need to land to get those windmills outside.”

So that afternoon they descended blind, and let the anchor drag until it hooked and held. The wind here was slower, but even so Nadia’s descent in the sling was harrowing; down and down into rushing clouds of yellow dust, swinging back and forth … and there it was right under her boots, the ground! She hit and dragged to a halt. Once out of the sling she found herself leaning into the wind; thin as it was it still struck like blows, and her old feeling of hollowness was extreme. Visibility billowed back and forth in waves, and the dust flew past so fast it was disorienting; on Earth a wind that fast would simply pick you up and throw you, like a broomstraw in a tornado.

But here you could hold your ground, if only just. Arkady had been slowly winching the dirigible down on its anchor line, and now it bulked over her like a green roof. It was weirdly dark underneath it. She unreeled the wires out to the wingtip turboprops, taped them to the dirigible and crimped them to the contacts inside, working fast to try to reduce their exposure to dust, and to get out from under the Arrowhead; it was bouncing on the wind. With difficulty she drilled holes in the bottom of the gondola fuselage, and attached ten windmills with screws. As she was taping the wiring from these to the plastic fuselage, the whole dirigible dropped so fast that she had to collapse onto her face, her whole body spreadeagled on the cold ground, the drill a hard lump under her stomach. “Shit!” she shouted. “What’s wrong?” Arkady cried over the intercom. “Nothing,” she said, jumping up and taping faster than ever. “Fucking thing – it’s like working on a trampoline!” Then as she was finishing the wind picked up strength yet again, and she had to crawl back down to the bomb bay, her breath rasping in and out of her.

“The damn thing almost crushed me!” she shouted forward to Arkady when she had her helmet off. While he worked to unhook the anchor she staggered around the interior of the gondola, picking up things that they wouldn’t need and taking them into the bomb bay: a lamp, one of the mattresses, most of the cooking utensils and dinnerware, some books, all the rock samples. In they went, and she jettisoned them happily. If some traveler ever came upon the resulting pile of stuff, she thought, they would really wonder what the hell had happened.

They had to run both props full out to get the anchor unhooked, and when they succeeded they were off and flying like a leaf in November. They kept the props on full, to gain altitude as fast as possible; there were some small volcanoes between Olympus and Tharsis, and Arkady wanted to pass several hundred meters over them. The radar screen showed Ascraeus Mons falling steadily behind. When they were well north of it they could turn east, and try to chart a course around the northern flank of Tharsis, and then down to Underhill.

But as the long hours passed they found that the wind was rushing down the north slope of Tharsis, across their bow; so that even when running full power toward the southeast, they were still only moving northeast at best. In their attempts to fly across the wind the poor Arrowhead was bouncing like a hang glider, yanking them up and down, up and down, up and down, as if the gondola were indeed attached to the underside of a trampoline. But despite all that, they still weren’t going in the direction they wanted to go.

Darkness fell again. They were carried farther northeast. On this heading, they were going to miss Underhill by several hundred kilometers. After that, nothing; no settlements at all, no refuge. They would be blown over Acidalia, up onto Vastis Borealis, up to the empty petrified sea of black dunes. And they did not have enough food and water to circumnavigate the planet again and give it another try.

Feeling dust in her mouth and eyes, Nadia went back to the kitchen and heated them a meal. Already she was exhausted, and, she realized as the smell of food filled the air, extremely hungry. Thirsty, too; and the water recycler ran on hydrazine.

Thinking about water, an image came to her mind, from the trip to the north pole: that broken permafrost gallery, with its white spill of water ice. Now how was that relevant?

She worked her way back up to the cockpit, holding onto a wall with every step. She ate a dusty meal with Arkady, trying to figure it out. Arkady watched their radar screen, saying nothing; but he was looking concerned.

Ah. “Look,” she said, “if we could pick up the signals from the transponders on our road to Chasma Borealis, we could come down and land by it. Then one of the robot rovers could be sent up to get us. The storm won’t matter to the robot rovers, they don’t go by sight anyway. We could leave the Arrowhead tethered, and drive back home.”

Arkady looked at her, finished swallowing. “Good idea,” he said.

But only if they could actually pick up the road’s transponder signals. Arkady flicked on the radio and called Underhill. The connection crackled in a storm of static almost as dense as the dust, but they could still make themselves understood. All through that night they conferred with the crowd back home, discussing frequencies, bandwidths, the power of the dust to mask the transponders’ fairly weak signals, and so on. Because the transponders were designed only to signal rovers that were nearby and on the ground, it was going to be a problem hearing them. Underhill might be able to pinpoint their location well enough to tell them when to descend, and their own radar map would give them a general fix on the road’s location as well; but neither of these methods would be very exact, and it would be almost impossible to find the road in the storm if they didn’t land right on it. Ten kilometers either way and it would be over the horizon, and they would be out of luck. It would be a lot more certain if they could just latch onto one of the transponder signals, and follow it down.

In any case, Underhill dispatched a robot rover on the road north. It would arrive in the area of the road they were expected to cross in about five days; at their current speed, now nearly thirty kilometers per hour, they would cross the road themselves in about four days.

When the arrangements were finished, they traded watches through the rest of the night. Nadia slept uneasily on her off watches, and spent much of the time lying on the bed feeling the wind bounce her. The windows were as dark as if curtains had been drawn. The roar of the wind was like a gas stove, and then occasionally like banshees; once she dreamed they were inside a great furnace full of flame demons, and woke sweating, and went forward to relieve Arkady. The whole gondola smelled of sweat and dust, and burnt hydrazine. Despite all the gaskets’ micron seals, there was a visible whitish film on all the surfaces inside the gondola. She wiped her fingers across a pale blue plastic bulkhead, and stared at her fingers’ mark. Incredible.

They bounded along through the gloom of the days, through the starless black of the nights. The radar showed what they thought was Fesenkov Crater, running under them; they were being shoved northeast still, and there was absolutely no chance they would be able to buck the storm and get south to Underhill. The polar road was their only hope. Nadia occupied her off watches by looking for things to throw overboard, and cutting away at parts of the gondola frame she judged inessential, until the engineers in Friedrichshafen would have shuddered. But Germans always over-engineered things, and no one on Earth could ever really believe in Martian g anyway. So she sawed and hammered until everything inside the gondola was latticed nearly to nothing. Every use of the bay brought in another small cloud of dust, but she figured it was worth it; they needed the loft, her windmill arrangement was not getting sufficient power to the batteries, and she had tossed the rest of them overboard long before. Even if she had had them, she would not have gone back under the dirigible to install them; the memory of the incident still gave her the shivers. Instead she kept cutting further and further; she would have tossed out pieces of the dirigible frame too, if she could have gotten into the ballonets.

While she did this Arkady padded around the gondola cheering her on, naked and dust-caked, the red man incarnate, singing songs and watching the radar screen, jamming down quick meals, planning their course such as it was. It was impossible not to catch a bit of his exhilaration, to marvel with him at the strongest buffets of the wind, to feel the dust flying wild in her blood.

And so three long intense days passed, in the wild grip of the dark orange wind. And on the fourth day, a bit after noon, they turned the radio receiver up to full volume, and listened to the crackly roar of static at the transponders’ frequency. Concentrating on the white noise made Nadia drowsy, for they had had very little sleep; and she was almost unconscious when Arkady said something, and she jerked up in her seat.

“Hear it?” he asked again. She listened, and shook her head. “There, it’s a kind of ping.”

She heard a little bip. “Is that it?”

“I think so. I’m going to get us down as fast as I can, I’ll have to empty some of the ballonets.”

He tapped away at the control keyboard, and the dirigible tilted forward and they began to drop at emergency speed. The altimeter’s numbers flickered down. The radar screen showed the ground below to be basically flat. The ping got louder and louder; without a directional receiver, that was going to be their only way to tell if they were still approaching it or moving away. Ping – ping – ping – In her exhaustion it was hard to tell whether it was getting louder or sorter, and it seemed every beep was a different volume, depending on the attention she could bring to bear.

“It’s getting softer,” Arkady said suddenly. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t tell.”

“It is.” He switched on the props, and with the whir of the motors the signal definitely seemed quieter. He turned into the wind, and the dirigible bounced wildly; he fought to steady its downward movement, but there was a delay between every shift of the flaps and the dirigible’s bucking, and in reality they were in little more than a controlled crash. The ping was perhaps getting softer at a slower rate.

When the altimeter indicated they were low enough to drop the anchor they did so, and after an anxious bit of drifting it caught, and held. They dropped all the anchors they had, and pulled the Arrowhead down on the lines. Then Nadia suited up and climbed into the sling and winched down, and once on the surface she began walking around in a chocolate dawn, leaning hard into the irregular torrent of wind. She found she was more physically exhausted than she could ever remember being, it was really hard to make headway upwind, she had to tack. Over her intercom the transponder signal pinged, and the ground seemed to bounce under her feet; it was hard to keep her balance. The ping was quite distinct. “We should have been listening on our helmet intercoms all along,” she said to Arkady. “You can hear better.”

A gust knocked her over. She got up and shuffled slowly along, letting out a nylon line behind her, adjusting her course as she followed the volume of the pings. The ground flowed underfoot, when she could see it; visibility was actually down to a meter or less, at least in the thickest gusts. Then it would clear a touch and brown jets of dust would flash by, sheet after sheet, moving at an awesome speed. The wind buffeted her as hard as anything she had ever felt on Earth, or harder; it was painful work to keep her balance, a constant physical effort.

While inside a thick, blinding cloud, she nearly shuffled right into one of the transponders, standing there like a fat fencepost. “Hey!” she shouted.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! I scared myself running into the roadmark.”

“You found it!”

“Yeah.” She felt her exhaustion run down into her hands and feet. She sat on the ground for a minute, then stood again; it was too cold to sit. Her ghost finger hurt.

She took up the nylon line, and returned blindly to the dirigible, feeling she had wandered into the ancient myth, and was following the only thread out of the labyrinth.

During their rover trip south, blind in the flying dust, word came crackling over the radio that UNOMA had just approved and funded the establishment of three follow-up colonies. Each would consist of five hundred people, all to be from countries not represented in the first hundred.

And the subcommittee on terraforming had recommended, and the General Assembly approved, a whole package of terraforming efforts, among them the distribution on the surface of genetically engineered micro-organisms, GEMs constructed from parent stock such as algaes, bacteria, or lichens.

Arkady laughed for a good thirty seconds. “Those bastards, those lucky bastards! They’re going to get away with it.”