“In the beginning,” George added with a flinty smile.
They told him their story, and he saw it had once been oft-repeated. Edvard told most of it, with George adding comments, or finishing some of Edvard's trailing sentences.
“We were there when it all came down. There wasn't any reason for it. They screwed it up when it all could have been so easy. I'm not saying we're bitter, but we are. 2061 wasn't necessary."
“It could have been avoided, if they had listened to Phyllis. It was all Arkady's fault.”
“Bogdanov's stupid confidence. Whereas Phyllis had a plan that would have worked fine, without all the destruction and death.”
“Without the war.”
“She saved us all when we were marooned on Clarke. After saving everyone on Mars before that.”
They glowed dimly as they remembered her. Happy to have their tale to tell. They had survived '61, they had worked for peace in the years between revolutions, helping UNTA in Burroughs to coordinate mining efforts in Vastitas, sequencing them so that sites in danger of inundation by the north sea were strip-mined with enormous speed before the ice and water buried them. Those were the glory years, a moment in history when the tremendous power of technology could be wielded on the landscape without consequences—no environmental impact statements, no scars that would last . . . billions of dollars of metals extracted before the ice overwhelmed the sites.
“That was when we found this place,” George said.
“Amazonia was full of metals,” Edvard added. “No way we got it all out.”
“And now, of course,” Edvard said, and sipped his tea.
Silence fell. George poured more tea, and Edvard began again.
“We were in Burroughs when the second revolution began, working for UNTA. Phyllis was dead at that point. Killed by red terrorists.”
“In Kasei.”
Nirgal kept his face still.
They watched him.
“Maya, in fact. Maya killed Phyllis. So we have heard.”
Nirgal stared back at them, sipping his tea.
They gave up the gambit. “Well, it's well-known. She was certainly capable of it. She would be the one to do it. Murderous. I'm still sick about it. Sick.”
“I can't believe it happened.”
“I sometimes wonder if it did. If maybe Phyllis got away and disappeared, like Hiroko is supposed to have. They never did find her body. I never saw it. We opposed Free Mars, we opposed you.” Glancing defiantly at him as he said it.
“We despised the red guerrillas. At least until—”
“But our special hatred is reserved for our crèche-mates, isn't it.”
“It's always that way.”
“Nadia, Sax, Maya—death and mass destruction. That's all they brought us with their so-called ideals. Death and mass destruction.”
“Not your fault,” George told Nirgal.
“But if Phyllis had lived . . . We were in Burroughs during the protests. The standoff with UNTA. The flooding of the city—the deliberate flooding of the greatest city on Mars! Phyllis would never have let that happen.”
“We were on the planes that evacuated.”
“Five planes, five giant planes. We flew to Sheffield. So we were there for that one too. Death and destruction. We tried to mediate. We tried to do what Phyllis would have done.”
“Tried to mediate.”
“Yes, to mediate, between UNTA and the reds. It was impossible, but we did it. We did it. The cable would have gone twice if it weren't for us. It's a monument to Phyllis just as much as our little gazebo down there. She was the first advocate of the elevator. A visionary. So we did what we could.”
“After the truce we went east.”
“By piste where it was still possible. In rovers where it wasn't. We separated at Underhill, didn't we.”
“And met again on Elysium. But only after the most amazing adventures I've ever heard of.”
“Crossing the north sea ice.”
“Slipping across the bridge over La Manche.”
“Walking all the way across the Hump. Finally we reunited, here, and helped to build Cimmeria Harbor. Lobbying all the while for the name Boyle Harbor, to match Boone Harbor in Tempe.”
“And all the places named Bogdanov.”
“But no such luck. She's a forgotten hero. But someday justice will be done. History will judge. Meanwhile we're helping to establish Cimmeria, and doing some prospecting in the forest.”
Nirgal said, “Ever hear anything of Hiroko?”
They looked at each other. Nirgal had no idea what their glances meant, but there was quite a silent conversation going on between them.
“No. Hiroko . . . she disappeared so long ago. We never heard from her again. But she's your mother, no?”
“Yes.”
“You don't hear from her?”
“No. She disappeared in Sabishii. When UNTA burned it down.” Reminding them. “Some say she was killed then. Others say that she got away with Iwao and Gene and Rya and the rest of them. Lately I heard they may have come to Elysium. Or to somewhere near here.”
They frowned. “I've never heard that, have you?”
“No. But they wouldn't have told us, would they.”
“No.”
“But you've seen nothing out here,” Nirgal said. “No settlements or camps?”
“No. Well . . .”
“There are settlements all over. But they all come into town. They're all natives like you. A few Kurds.”
“No one unusual.”
“And so all the settlements are accounted for, you think?”
“I think so.”
“I think so.”
Nirgal considered it. These were two of only a few, maybe a half dozen, of the First Hundred who had sided with the UNTA all the way. Would Hiroko reveal herself to them? Would she try to hide from them? If they knew of her presence, would they tell him?
But they didn't know. He sat there in the big comfortable armchair, falling asleep. There was nothing to know.
Around him the two wizened old men moved quietly about the dim room. Old turtleheads, deep in their dark cave. But they had loved Phyllis. Both of them. As friends. Or maybe it hadn't been like that. Maybe it hadn't been that simple. However it had happened, they were the partners now. Maybe they had always been the partners. In the First Hundred that might have been a difficulty. Phyllis of course seemed an unlikely refuge. All the better perhaps. Who knew what had happened in the beginning. The past was a mystery. Even to those who had been there and lived it. And of course even at the time none of it had made sense, not the kind of sense people talked about afterward. Now they puttered about in the dusk. He felt the exhaustion of his long run take hold of him.
Let him sleep.
We should tell him.
No.
Why not?
There's no need. Everyone will find out soon enough.
When things start dying. Phyllis wouldn't have wanted that.
But they killed her. So they don't have her here to save them.
So they get what they deserve? Everything dying?
Everything won't die.
It will if it works the way they want. She wouldn't have wanted that.
We had no choice. You know that. They would have killed us.
Would they? I'm not so sure. I think you wanted it. They kill Phyllis, and so we—
We had no choice I say! Come on. They could have gotten the locations from the records. And who's to say they aren't right anyway.
Revenge.
Okay, revenge. Say it was. Serves them right. This was never their planet.
Much later Nirgal found himself suddenly awake, and cold. Neck sore from being bent in the big armchair. The old men were slumped at the kitchen table over books, as still as wax figurines. One of them was asleep, dreaming the other's dream. The other watched it in the air. Their fire had banked to gray coals. Nirgal whispered that he had to leave. He got up and walked out into a
frigid predawn, walked for a while and then ran again through the dark trees, running as if to escape something.
Saving Noctis Dam
The Noctis Dam was not a good idea in any case, and then unfortunately they botched the engineering as well. They placed the dam in the mouth of the southernmost Noctis canyon, where the rim is a basalt cap resting on old sandstone. Naturally as soon as the reservoir filled the sandstone began to saturate, which weakened the dam foundations. Then the only emergency runoff as designed was a big glory hole that ran water down through a tunnel in the rock on the side, letting it out into the headwaters of the Ius River below. They lined the tunnel with concrete, of course, but it was sandstone behind that. Thus when the weather became more violent and we saw the first superstorms, the dam was not designed to handle such runoffs. The reservoir level would rise very fast. One of the very first times that happened I was there to see it, and it was a daunting thing to witness. We opened the glory hole the moment rain was forecast, but it seemed to make little difference. And this time the rock behind the concrete was so weakened by seepage that the cavitation ripped the concrete right out of there, apparently. All the instrument readings for the tunnel went dead, and then we saw the concrete being shot out of the hole at the bottom into the shallows of the headwaters; sometimes after a minute or two of complete blockage, so that house-sized chunks of concrete went flying hundreds of meters, as out of a cannon. A very disturbing sight for all of us.
Of course the water going down the tunnel would immediately begin to rip the sandstone out of the hole, and soon enough there would be no rim underneath us left to hold up the south side of the dam.
Thus we had no choice but to close the glory hole from the top; indeed we were happy that the option still existed. But after that we had no other way to release water from the reservoir. And it was still raining harder than we had ever seen, as if the clouds had been seeded; and Noctis Labyrinthus is an extremely big watershed, even just the southernmost quadrant of it, which was what drained into the reservoir.
So the reservoir level rose, two meters in an hour, then three. At that rate we had only a few more hours before it reached the top of the dam and started pouring over, and then inevitably the top would tear somewhere, and without further ado the entire dam, all 330 vertical meters of it, would peel down, probably in a single collapse. The rim walls just behind the dam were very likely to go as well. More importantly, the resulting flood would certainly sweep away all the canyon-floor settlements in Oudemans Crater and upper Marineris, perhaps all the way down to Melas Chasma.
For some time after we closed the glory hole we were at a loss concerning what next to do. Mary of course called emergency services in Cairo, and told them to warn the people down in Oudemans and in Ius Chasma to get out of the crater and canyon, or at least as high on their walls as they could, as there was no quick way for great numbers of people to get out of that deep crater and gorge. But beyond that it was not clear what we could do. We hastened back and forth between the command center and the dam, looking at the water rising, then walking back up to the command center to check the weather reports, all the while in a terrific downpour. The reports gave us reason to hope that the rain might soon stop—it already had upstream in the watershed, and farther west. And the last squall had consisted mostly of hail—hail the size of oranges, which drove us to the shelter of the center, but had the advantage of staying where it was on the ground upstream, at least until it melted. So that too gave us some hope.
Nevertheless, the upstream flow readings coming in to the center made it clear that the lake was going to rise higher than the dam, by what the AI said would be two or three meters. Some rough calculations led me to the conclusion that the overflow would probably be more than the lip of the dam could tolerate. I informed the others of this unhappy conclusion.
“Three meters!” Mary said at last, and expressed the wish that the dam were just four meters higher. Certainly that would have helped.
Without really considering it, I said, “Perhaps we can make it four meters higher.”
They said, “How is that?”
“Well,” I said, “the pressure up top will not be that bad. Even just a plywood barrier might do the trick.”
This they found amusing, nevertheless we got in the truck and drove wildly to Cairo Lumber over a road sheeted with big hail balls, and we bought their entire stock of plywood sheets. We were too nervous to tell them what we wanted it for.
Back at the dam we set up the plywood sheets against the railing, nail-gunning them to the plastic footing of the rail just to keep the wind from blowing them away before the water trapped them against the railing. It started to rain again while we did this. We worked at the highest speed we could manage, I assure you—never have I worked with such a sense of haste. Even so, by the time we finished our work, the water had lipped over the concrete, and we had to run back along the road on the top of the dam splashing ankle deep through the water—an awful experience.
Once off the dam and up the road toward the command center, we stopped to look back. If the plywood did not hold and the dam gave way, the rim there would very likely go too, and we would all be killed; nevertheless, we stopped to look back. We could not help it.
The last squall had passed while we labored, and the sky had gone wild over our heads: dark orange to the east, then both to north and south an intense turquoise, like no sky color we had ever seen. It was still black to the west, but the sun was peeping under a distant cloud, illuminating the scene in brassy horizontal light. Below us we saw that the lake was continuing to rise, up the sides of the plywood. Finally, as dusk fell, it was quite a bit more than halfway up the plywood sheets. When we couldn't see it very well anymore—and I didn't want to see it either, I confess, it looked so flimsy—we walked back to the command center.
Up there we waited. Very possibly the whole structure would go very quickly; we would see this on the instrumentation, then perhaps be taken along with it, swept down with the rim walls. So all night we watched the readouts on the computers. Meanwhile we told people over the phone what we had done. My throat stayed dry no matter how hard I swallowed. We occupied ourselves telling jokes—a specialty of mine, but never had people laughed so hard at my jokes before. After one Mary hugged me, and I felt she was shaking; and I saw my hands too were shaking.
In the morning the water was still flush against the plywood, but it did not seem so high. It seemed it was going to hold. It remained a frightening sight, however; the lake surface was simply too high, as in some optical illusion; yet undeniably there below us, spread vast and colorful in the morning light.
So the dam held. But our celebration, after pumps arrived and we slowly lowered the water level back below the top of the dam, was muted, almost stunned. We too were drained, so to speak. Looking at the wet curve of plywood sheets topping the dam, Mary said, “By God, Stephan, we did a Nadia on that dam!”
Later of course they took it out. I cannot say I regret it.
Big Man in Love
When Big Man fell in love with a human woman, it was big trouble.
Her name was Zoya. Yes, she had the same first name as Zo Boone—she was a clone of Zo's, in fact, cloned by Zo's friends after Zo's fatal accident. So genetically Zoya was another daughter of Jackie's, therefore granddaughter of Kasei, and great-granddaughter of John Boone himself. That wasn't all; because Zo's body had floated for a while in the north sea, she had been slightly salted, and thereby became inadvertently related to the resurgent archaea. And in that salty fizzing primeval soup of a sea it seems she also picked up traits of kelp and limpet, dolphin and sea otter, and who knows what else. So she was a lot of things—big like Paul Bunyan, wild like Zo, rebellious like the archaea, happy like John, and as stormy and tempestuous as the northern sea. That was Zoya; Zoya was everything. She swam through icebergs, and flew in the jet stream, and ran the round-the-worlder for an afternoon jog. She drank and she smoked and she took strange drugs, she ha
d casual sex with strangers and even with friends, and she skipped work anytime the waves were big. In short, she was a thrill seeker; she was a disgrace to propriety and morality; she mocked all principles of human progress. She could kill with a glance or a palm punch to the nose. Her motto was “Fun at all costs.”
Thus when Big Man dropped by Mars one day, and saw Zoya out surfing the hundred-meter waves of the Polar Peninsula, it was love at first sight. This was his kind of woman!
And Zoya proved agreeable. She liked big men, and Big Man was a big man. So they played around Mars together, Big Man stepping carefully in his old footsteps to avoid wreaking any new havoc, and trying hard not to get tangled in things. But he couldn't help it. They gamboled along the Ius Ridge Trail, and his tiptoeing is what brought down all those cliffs ten years ago. He went swimming with Zoya and that's what flooded Boone's Neck peninsula, even though he only went in knee deep. He flew in the jet stream with her and his shadow caused the first year without a summer. They didn't notice any of that; they were having too much fun together.
They even tried to have sex together. Zoya would climb into Big Man's ears and fool around, and afterward he would hold her in the palm of his hand and moan like King Kong with Fay Wray, you know, Come on, baby, please let's make love, make love with me, and she would just laugh and point down at his erection and say, Sorry, Big Man. I'd like to but you won't fit. Why it'd take me all day just to climb that willful tower, it'd be as hard as climbing Dishes in the Sink or the Other Old Man of Hoy. And to show him she even tried a little of that too, free-climbing to the overhang and massaging what she could reach. But to Big Man it felt like he was being pinched by an ant.
Too bad, she would say, going for a swim. Best I can do.
But I gotta, moaned Big Man, I wanna, I hafta, I needta, the usual line, familiar to guys and gals everywhere. But this time there was nothing to be done. Sorry, Zoya would say. No can do. If only you were smaller.
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