Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So they proceeded without difficulty for a couple of nights, until they came to the Geneva Spur, which stuck out from the gigantic south wall nearly to the edge of the flood. Here the official road had swung out into what was now the course of the deluge, and they had to find a higher route. The rocky traverses they made around the lower slopes of the Spur were really difficult for the rover. Once they were nearly hung up on an obtruding rounded rock, and Maya shouted at Michel, accusing him of recklessness. She took over the driving while Michel and Kasei and Nadia went out in walkers. They jacked them off the rock, and then walked ahead to reconnoiter the route of the traverse.

  Frank and Simon helped Maya look for obstructions as she drove. Sax continued to spend all his time at his screen. From time to time Frank would turn on the TV and run a search for signals, trying to piece together news from the occasional staticky voices the radio found in the jamming. On the very spine of the Geneva Spur, as they were crossing the absurdly thin concrete thread of the Transcanyon Highway, they were far enough out from the south wall to get some transmissions, something about it not becoming a global dust storm after all. And indeed the days were sometimes only hazy, rather than clotted with the dust. Sax claimed this as proof of the relative success of the dust-fixing strategies pursued since the Great Storm. No one responded to this. The haze that was in the air, Frank observed, seemed actually to help clarify weak radio signals. That was stochastic resonance, Sax said. The phenomenon was counterintuitive, and Frank questioned Sax closely for an explanation of it. When he understood, the room rang with his mirthless bray. “Maybe all the emigration was stochastic resonance, enhancing the weak signal of the revolution.”

  “I don’t think it helps to make analogies between the physical and social worlds,” Sax said primly.

  “Shut up, Sax. Go back to your virtual reality.”

  Frank was still angry; bitterness sublimed from him like the frost steam off the flood. He snapped questions at Michel about the hidden colony, his curiosity bursting out two or three times a day. Ann was happy to think she would not be Hiroko when Frank first met her. Michel answered these accusing questions calmly, ignoring the sarcasm and the furious gleam in Frank’s eye. Maya’s attempts to cool Frank only increased his rage, but she kept at it. Ann was impressed at how persistent she was, how insensitive to Frank’s brusque rejections. It was a side of Maya that Ann had never seen before; Maya was usually the most volatile person around. But not now, not when the pressure was really on.

  Eventually they rounded the Geneva Spur, and got back on the bench under the southern escarpment. The way east was often interrupted by landslides, but they always had room to veer left around them. Progress was good.

  But then they came to the eastern end of Melas. Here the greatest chasm of them all narrowed, and dropped several hundred meters down into the two parallel canyons of Coprates, which were separated by a long narrow plateau. South Coprates dead-ended in a cliffy headwall some 250 kilometers away; North Coprates connected with the lower canyons farther east, and therefore was the one they wanted to take. North Coprates was the longest single segment of the Marineris system; Michel called it La Manche, and like the English Channel it narrowed as it progressed eastward, until at around 60 ° longitude it narrowed and reared into a gigantic gorge— sheer cliffs four kilometers high, facing each other across a gap only twenty-five kilometers across. Michel called this gorge the Dover Gate; apparently the cliff walls in this gap were whitish, or had been.

  So they made their way down North Coprates, and the cliffs closed in on them more every day. The flood filled almost the whole width of the canyon floor, and its flow was so rapid that the ice on its surface had broken into small bergs, which flew off the lips of standing waves and crashed back into the cascade: a furious white-water rapid with the flow of a hundred Amazons, topped by icebergs. The canyon floor was being ripped away, torn free of its bed and rushing down in red jolts of water like massive pulses of rusty blood, as if the planet were bleeding to death. The noise was incredible, a roar so continuous and pervasive that it dulled thought, and made talk almost impossible; they had to shout everything at the top of their lungs, which quickly reduced them to communicating only the basic necessities.

  But then there was a very basic necessity to shout about, for when they came to the Dover Gate they found that the canyon floor was almost completely covered by the flood. Their bench below the southern wall of the gorge was no more than two kilometers wide, and diminishing every minute. It seemed possible the whole bench might be torn away in a flash. Maya cried that it was too dangerous to go on, and argued for a retreat. If they circled around and drove up to the dead end of South Coprates, she shouted, and managed to climb to the plateau above, then they could drive past the pits of Coprates, and proceed onward to Aureum.

  Michel shouted his insistence that they press forward, and get through the Gate on the bench. “If we hurry we can make it! We must try!” And when Maya continued to protest, he added forcefully, “The head of South Coprates is steep! The car would never get up it, it’s a cliff like these! And we don’t have the supplies to add so many extra days to our trip! We can’t go back!”

  The insane roar of the flood was his only answer. They sat in the car, in their separate thoughts, separated by the roar as if by many kilometers of space. Ann found herself wishing the bench would slide from under them, or a piece of the south wall fall onto them, and put an end to their indecision, and to the awful, maddening noise.

  They drove on. Frank and Maya and Simon and Nadia stood behind Michel and Kasei, watching them drive. Sax sat at his screen, stretching like a cat, staring myopically at the little picture of the deluge. The surface calmed for a moment, and froze over, and the explosive noise reduced to a violent low rumble. “It’s like the Grand Canyon on a kind of super-Himalayan scale,” Sax said, apparently to himself, although only Ann would be able to hear him. “The Kala Gandaki Gorge is about three kilometers deep, isn’t it? And Dhaulagiri and Annapurna only forty or fifty kilometers apart, I think. Fill that with a flood like . . .” He failed to recall any comparable flood. “I wonder what all that water was doing so high on the Tharsis Bulge.”

  Cracks like gunshots announced another surge. The white surface of the flood blew apart and tumbled downstream. White noise suddenly enveloped them, battening everything they said or thought, as if the universe were vibrating. A bass tuning fork . . .

  “Outgassing,” Ann said. “Outgassing.” Her mouth was stiff, she could feel in her face how long it had been since she had last spoken. “Tharsis rests on an upwelling of magma. Rock alone couldn’t sustain the weight; the bulge would have subsided if it weren’t being supported by an upwelling current in the mantle.”

  “I thought there was no mantle.” She could just hear him through the noise.

  “No no.” She didn’t care if he could hear her or not. “It’s just slowed down. But currents are still there. And since the last great floods, they have refilled the high aquifers on Tharsis. And kept aquifers like Compton warm enough to stay liquid. Eventually the hydrostatic pressures were extreme. But with less vulcanism, and fewer big meteor strikes, nothing set it off. It might have been full for a billion years.”

  “Do you think Phobos broke it open?”

  “Maybe. More likely a reactor meltdown.”

  “Did you know Compton was this big?” Sax asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “No.”

  Ann stared at him. Had he heard her say that?

  He had. Concealing data— he was shocked, she could tell. He couldn’t imagine any reason good enough to conceal data. Perhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each other. Value systems based on entirely different assumptions. Completely different kinds of science.

  He cleared his throat. “Did you know it was liquid?”

  “I thought so. But now we know.”

  Sax twitched, and called up on his screen th
e image from the left side camera. Black fizzing water, gray debris, shattered ice, boulders like great tumbling dice; standing waves freezing in place, collapsing and sweeping away in clouds of frost steam. . . the noise had risen back to its crackling jet howl.

  “I wouldn’t have done it this way!” Sax exclaimed.

  Ann stared at him. He steadfastly regarded the TV.

  “I know,” she said. And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

  • • •

  They drove as quickly as they could through the Dover Gate, following the Calais Ramp as Michel called their bench. Progress was nerve-rackingly slow, it was a bitter struggle to get the rover over the rockfall covering this narrow terrace; boulders were scattered everywhere, and the flood ate away at the land to their left, narrowing the bench at a perceptible rate. Landslides from the cliff walls fell ahead and behind them, and more than once individual rocks crashed into the car’s roof, making them all jump. It was perfectly possible that a bigger rock would hit them and smash them like bugs, without a single bit of warning. That possibility subdued them all, which was fine by Ann. Even Simon left her alone, throwing himself into the navigational effort and going out on scouting trips with Nadia or Frank or Kasei, happy, she thought, to have some excuse to get away from her. And why not?

  They bumped along at a couple kilometers per hour. They traveled through a night and then the following day, even though the haze had diminished to the point where it was possible they were visible from satellites. There was no other choice.

  And then finally they were through the Dover Gate, and Coprates opened up again, giving them some leeway. The flood veered a few kilometers to the north.

  At dusk they stopped the car. They had been driving for some forty hours straight. They stood up and stretched, shuffled around, and then sat back down and ate a microwaved meal together. Maya, Simon, Michel and Kasei were in good spirits, cheerful to have gotten through the Gate; Sax was the same as always; Nadia and Frank a bit less grim than usual. The surface of the flood was frozen over for the moment, and it was possible to speak without hurting one’s throat, and still be heard. And so they ate, concentrating on the small portions of food, talking in a desultory manner.

  Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together— while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other’s company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.

  And so, in this moment of the storm, Ann Clayborne exerted herself. She stood up, she went to the table. She picked up Sax’s plate, Sax who had first drawn her out; and then Nadia’s and Simon’s. She carried the plates over to their little magnesium sink. And as she cleaned the dishes, she felt her stiff throat move; she croaked out her part of the conversation, and helped, with her little strand, to weave the human illusion. “A stormy night!” Michel said to her as he stood beside her drying plates, smiling. “A stormy night indeed!”

  • • •

  The next morning she woke before the rest, and looked at the faces of her sleeping companions, now revealed in the daylight to be utterly disheveled— grimy, puffy, black with frostnip, open-mouthed in the total sleep of exhaustion. They looked dead. And she had been no help to them— on the contrary! She had been a drag on the group; every time they had come back in the car they had had to step by the madwoman on the floor, lying there refusing to speak, often crying, clearly in the throes of severe depression. Just what they had needed!

  Ashamed, she got up and quietly finished cleaning up the main room and the drivers’ area. And later that day she took her turn driving the rover, doing a six-hour shift and ending up exhausted. But she got them well east of the Dover Gate.

  Their troubles, however, were not over. Coprates had opened up a bit, yes, and the south wall had for the most part held. But in this area there was a long ridge, now an island, running down the middle of the canyon, dividing it into north and south channels; and unfortunately the southern channel was lower than the northern one, so that the bulk of the flood was running down it, and crowding them tight against the southern wall. Happily the bench terrace gave them some five kilometers between the deluge and the wall proper; but with the flood so close on their left, and the steep cliffs on their right, they never lost the sense of danger. And they had to raise their voices to talk at least half the time; the crackling roar of the surges seemed to invade their heads, making it harder than ever to concentrate, or to pay attention, or indeed to think at all.

  One day Maya crashed her fist against the table and cried, “Couldn’t we wait for the island ridge to get torn away?”

  After an awkward pause Kasei said, “It’s a hundred kilometers long.”

  “Well, shit— couldn’t we just wait until this flood stops? I mean, how long can it go on like this?”

  “A few months,” Ann said.

  “Can’t we wait that long?”

  “We’re running low on food,” Michel explained.

  “We have to keep going,” Frank snapped at Maya. “Don’t be stupid.” She glared at him and turned away, clearly furious. The rover suddenly seemed much too small, as if a bunch of tigers and lions had been thrown together in a dog’s kennel. Simon and Kasei, oppressed by the tension, suited up and went out to scout what lay ahead.

  • • •

  Beyond what they called Island Ridge, Coprates opened up like a funnel, with deep troughs under the diverging canyon walls. The northern trough was Capri Chasma, and the southern trough was Eos Chasma, which ran on as a continuation of Coprates. Because of the flood they had no choice but to follow Eos, but Michel said it was the way they would have wanted anyway. Here the southern cliff finally lowered a bit, and was cut with deep embayments, and shattered by a couple of good-sized meteor craters. Capri Chasma curved out of their sight to the northeast; between the two trough canyons was a low triangular mesa, now a peninsula dividing the course of the flood in two. Unfortunately the great bulk of the water ran into the somewhat lower Eos, so that even though they were out of the tight constriction of Coprates, they were still pressed against a cliff, and moving slowly, off any road or trail, and with diminishing supplies of food and gases. The cupboards were nearly bare.

  They were tired, very tired. It had been twenty-three days since they had escaped from Cairo, now 2,500 kilometers up-canyon; and all that time they had been sleeping in shifts, and driving almost constantly, and living in the aural assault of the flood, the roar of a world falling down in pieces on their heads. They were too old for this, as Maya said more than once, and nerves were frayed; they were fudging things, making little mistakes, falling into little microbursts of sleep.

  The bench that was their road between cliff and flood became an immense boulder field, the boulders mostly ejecta from nearby craters, or detritus from really extensive mass wasting. It looked to Ann like the big fluted and scalloped embayments in the southern cliff were sappings that would initiate tributary subsidence canyons; but she didn’t have the time to look very closely.
Often it seemed that they were going to have their way blocked entirely by boulders, that after all these days and kilometers, after negotiating most of Marineris in the midst of a most violent cataclysm, they were going to be halted just short of the tremendous washes leading out of its lower end.

  But then they found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and so on, for day after day after day. They went to half-rations. Ann drove more than anyone else, as she seemed to be fresher than the rest, and was the best driver there anyway with the possible exception of Michel. And she felt she owed it to them after her shameful collapse during the greater part of their journey. She wanted to do everything she could, and when she wasn’t driving, she went out to scout the way. It was still numbingly loud outside, and the ground trembled underfoot. It was impossible to get used to that, though she did her best to ignore it. Sunlight burned through the mist and haze in broad lurid splashes, and in the sunset hour icebows and sundogs appeared in the sky, along with rings of light around the dulled sun; often the whole sky seemed afire, a Turner vision of the apocalypse.

  Soon enough Ann too wore down, and the work became exhausting. She understood now why her companions had been so tired, why they had been so short with her and with each other. Michel had been unable to locate the last three caches they had passed— buried or drowned, it didn’t matter. The half-rations were 1,200 calories a day, much less than they were expending. Lack of food, lack of sleep: and then, for Ann at least, the same old depression, persistent as death, rising in her like a flood, like a black slurry of mud, steam, ice, shit. Doggedly she kept at the work, but her attention kept blinking out and the glossolalia kept returning, washing everything away in the white noise of despair.