Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Her work coordinating the various aspects of the flooding project began to get interesting. She trammed or walked down to the offices in the center of town, and there worked hard to process all the reports sent in by the many dowsing crews and drilling operations — all full of glowing estimates of the amounts of water they might put into the basin, and all accompanied by requests for more equipment and personnel, until altogether they added up to much more than Deep Waters could supply. Judging the competing claims was difficult from the office, and her technical staff usually just rolled their eyes and shrugged. “It’s like judging a liars’ contest,” one said.

  And then also reports were coming in from all around the basin of the new settlements under construction, and by no means all of the people building these settlements came from the Black Sea Group, or the metanats involved with them. A lot of them were simply unidentified — one of her dowsing crews would note the presence of a tent town which had no official existence, and leave it at that. And the two big canyon projects, in Dao Vallis and the Dao-Reull system, were clearly populated by many more people than could be accounted for in the official documentation — people who must therefore be living under assumed identities, like her, or else living out of the net entirely. Which was very interesting indeed.

  A circumHellas piste had just been completed the year before, a difficult piece of engineering as the rim of the basin was riven by cracks and ridges, and cratered by a heavy dose of ejecta reentry. But now the piste was in place, and Maya decided to satisfy her curiosity by taking a trip out to inspect all the Deep Waters projects in person, and look into some of the new settlements.

  To accompany her on this trip she requested the company of one of their areologists, a young woman named Diana, whose reports had been coming in from the east basin. Her reports were terse and unremarkable, but Maya had learned from Michel that she was the child of Esther’s son, Paul. Esther had had Paul very soon after leaving Zygote, and as far as Maya knew, she had never told anyone who Paul’s father was. So it could have been Esther’s husband Kasei, in which case Diana was Jackie’s niece, and John and Hiroko’s great-granddaughter — or else it could have been Peter, as many supposed, in which case she was Jackie’s half-niece, and Ann and Simon’s great-granddaughter. Either way Maya found it intriguing, and in any case the young woman was one of the yonsei, a fourth-generation Martian, and as such interesting to Maya no matter what her ancestry.

  Interesting also in her own right, as it turned out when Maya met her in the Odessa offices a few days before their trip. With her great size (over two meters tall, and yet very rounded and muscular) and her fluid grace, and her high-cheekboned Asiatic features, she seemed a member of a new race, there to keep Maya company in this new corner of the world.

  It turned out that Diana was completely obsessed with the Hellas Basin and its hidden water, and she talked about it for hours, at such length and in such detail that Maya became convinced that the mystery of parentage was solved — such a marsmaniac must be related to Ann Clayborne, and so it followed that Paul had been fathered by Peter. Maya sat in the train seat beside the big young woman, watching her or looking out the window at the steep northern slope of the basin, asking questions, observing as Diana shifted her knees against the seat back in front of her. They did not make train seats big enough for the natives.

  One thing that fascinated Diana was that the Hellas Basin had proved to be ringed by much more underground water than had been predicted by the areological models. This discovery, made in the field over the last decade, had inspired the current Hellas project, turning the hypothetical sea from a nice idea into a tangible possibility. It had also forced the areologists to reconsider their theoretical models of early Martian history, and caused people to start looking around the rims of the other big impact basins on the planet; reconnaissance expeditions were under way in the Chari-tum and Nereidum Monies encircling Argyre, and in ihe hills ringing south Isidis.

  Around Hellas itself they were near to completing the inventory, and they had found perhaps thirty million cubic meters all told, though some dowsers argued they were by no means finished. “Is there a way to know when they’re finished?” Maya asked Diana, thinking about all the requests for resources flooding her office.

  Diana shrugged. “After a while you’ve just looked everywhere.”

  “What about the basin floor itself? Might the flooding be destroying our ability to get to some aquifers out there?”

  “No.” Almost no water, she told Maya, was located under the basin floor itself. The floor had been desiccated by the original impact, and now it consisted of about a kilometer’s depth of eolian sediment, underlain by a hard cake of brecciated rock, formed during the brief but stupendous pressures of the impact. These same pressures had also caused deep fracturing all around the rim of the basin, and it was this fracturing that had allowed unusually large amounts of outgassing from the interior of the planet. Vola-tiles from below had seeped up and cooled, and the water portion of the volatiles had pooled in liquid aquifers, and in many zones of highly saturated permafrost.

  “Quite an impact,” Maya observed.

  “It was big all right.” As a general rule, Diana said, impactors were about one-tenth the size of the crater or basin they made (like historical figures, Maya thought); so the impacting planetesimal in this case had been a body about two hundred kilometers in diameter, coming down on ancient cratered highland terrain. Signature traces of it indicated it had probably been an ordinary asteroid, carbonaceous chondrite for the most part, with lots of water and some nickel-iron in it. It had had a speed on arrival of about 72,000 kilometers per hour, and had hit at a slightly eastward angle, which explained the huge devastated region east of Hellas, as well as the high, relatively well-organized concentric ridges of the Hellespontus Monies to the west.

  Then Diana described another rule of thumb which caused Maya to free-associate analogies to human history: the bigger an impactor, the less of it survived the impact. Thus almost every bit of this one had vaporized in the cataclysmic strike — though there was a small gravitational bolide under Gledhill Crater, which some areologists claimed was almost certainly the buried remainder of the planetesimal, perhaps one ten-thousandth of the original or less, which they claimed would supply all the iron and nickel that they would ever need if they cared to go digging for it.

  “Is that feasible?” Maya asked.

  “Not really. Cheaper just to mine the asteroids.”

  Which they were doing, Maya thought darkly. That was what a prison sentence meant now, under the latest UNTA regime — years in the asteroid belt, operating the very strictly circumscribed mining ships and robots. Efficient, the Transitional Authority said. Prisons that were both remote and profitable.

  But Diana was still thinking about the basin’s awesome birth. The impact had occurred about three and a half billion years before the present, when the planet’s lithosphere had been thinner, and its interior hotter. Energies released by the -impact were hard to imagine: the total energy created by humanity through all history was as nothing to it. And so the resulting volcanic activity had been considerable. Surrounding Hellas were a number of ancient volcanoes, which just postdated the impact, including Australis Tho-lus to the southwest, Amphitrites Patera to the south, and Hadriaca Patera and Tyrrhene Patera to the northeast. All of these volcanic regions had been found to have liquid water aquifers near them.

  Two of these aquifers had burst onto the surface in ancient times, leaving on the eastern slope of the basin two characteristic sinuous water-carved valleys: Dao Vallis, originating on the corrugated slopes of Hadriaca Patera; and farther south, a linked pair of valleys known as the Harmakhis-Reull system, which extended for a full thousand kilometers. The aquifers at the heads of these valleys had refilled over the eons since their outbreaks, and now big construction crews had tented Dao and were working on Harmakhis-Reull, and were letting the water from the aquifers run down the long enclosed canyon
s, to outlets on the basin floor. Maya was extremely interested in these big new additions to the habitable surface, and Diana, who knew them well, was going to take her to visit some friends in Dao.

  Their train glided along the northern rim of Hellas for all the first day, with the ice in view on the basin floor almost continually. They passed a little hillside town called Sebastopol, its stone walls Florentine yellow in the afternoon, and after that came to Hell’s Gate, the town at the bottom end of Dao Vallis. They walked out of the Hell’s Gate train station late in the afternoon, and looked down into a big ‘new tent town, located under an enormous suspension bridge. The bridge supported the train piste, spanning Dao Vallis just up from the canyon’s mouth, so that its towers were over ten kilometers apart. From the canyon rim by the bridge, where the train station was, they could see down the widening mouth of the canyon onto the basin floor, stretching out under a lattice of kinky sun-stained clouds. In the other direction there was a view well up into the steep narrow world of the canyon proper. As they walked down a staired and switchbacked street into the town, the new tenting over the canyon was visible only as a certain red haze to the color of the evening sky, the result of a dusting of fines on the tenting materials. “We’ll go upstream tomorrow by way of the rim road,” Diana said, “and get an overview. Then come back down on the canyon floor, so you can see what it’s like down there.”

  They descended the street, which had 700 numbered steps. In Hell’s Gate’s downtown they walked around and had dinner, and then climbed back up to the Deep Waters office, which was on the valley wall just under the bridge. They stayed in rooms there, and next morning went to a garage by the train station and borrowed a small company rover.

  Diana took the wheel and drove them northeast, paralleling the canyon rim on a road that ran next to the massive concrete foundation for the canyon’s tenting. Even though the fabrics were diaphanous to the point of vanishing, the sheer size of the roof made it a heavy weight to anchor. The concrete bulk of the foundation blocked their view down into the canyon itself, so that when they came to the first overlook, Maya had not seen into it since Hell’s Gate. Diana drove into a little parking lot up on the broad foundation itself, and they parked and put on helmets and got out of the car, and walked up a wooden staircase that seemed to ascend freestanding into the sky, although a closer look revealed first the clear aerogel beam supporting the staircase, and then the layers of tenting, stretching away from their beam to others that could not be seen. At the top of the stairs was a small railed viewing platform, with a prospect that gave a view of the canyon for many kilometers both upstream and downstream.

  And there was indeed a stream; the floor of Dao Vallis had a river in it. The canyon floor was dotted with green, or to be more precise, a collection of greens. Maya identified tamarisk, cotton-wood, aspen, cypress, sycamore, scrub oak, snow bamboo, sage — and then, on the steep talus and boulder slopes footing the canyon walls, many varieties of shrubs and low creepers, and of course sedge, and moss, and lichen. And running through this exquisite arboretum, a river.

  It was not a blue stream with white rapids. The water in the slower stretches was opaque, and the color of rust. In the rapids and waterfalls it foamed bright shades of pink. Classic Martian tones, caused, Diana said, by the fines that were suspended in the water like glacial silt — also by the reflected color of the sky, which was today a kind of hazy mauve, going lavender around the veiled sun, as yellow as the iris of a tiger’s eye.

  But no matter the color of the water — it was a running river, in an obviously riverine valley, placid in some places, agitated in others, with gravel fords, sandbars, braided sections, crumbling lem-niscate islands, there a big deep lazy oxbow, frequent rapids, and far upstream, a couple of small falls. Under the tallest waterfall they could see the pink foam turn almost white, and patches of white were then carried downstream, to catch on boulders and snags sticking out from the bank.

  “Dao River,” Diana said. “Also called the Ruby River by the people who live down there.”

  “How many are there?”

  “A few thousand. Most live pretty close to Hell’s Gate. Upstream there are family homesteads and the like. And of, course then the aquifer station at the head of the canyon, where a few hundred of them work.”

  “It’s one of the biggest aquifers?”

  “Yes. About three million cubic meters of water. So we’re pumping it out at a flow rate — well, you see it there. About a hundred thousand cubic meters a year.”

  “So in thirty years, no more river?”

  “Right. Although they could pump some water back upstream in a pipe, and let it out again. Or who knows, if the atmosphere gets humid enough, the slopes of Hadriaca might collect a snow-pack big enough to serve as a watershed. Then the river would fluctuate with the seasons, but that’s what rivers do, don’t they.”

  Maya stared down at the scene, which looked so much like something from her youth, some river … the upper Rioni, in Georgia? The Colorado, seen once on a visit to America? She couldn’t recall. So fuzzy, all that life. “It’s beautiful. And so …” She shook her head; the sight had a quality she could not recall ever seeing before, as if it were out of time, a prophetic glimpse into a distant future.

  “Here, let’s go up the road a bit farther and see Hadriaca.”

  Maya nodded, and they returned to the car. Once or twice as they continued uphill, the road rose far enough above the foundation to give them another view down onto the canyon floor, and Maya saw that the little river continued to cut through rocks and vegetation. But Diana did not pause, and Maya saw no sign of settlements.

  At the upper end of the tented canyon there was a big concrete block of a physical plant, housing the gas exchange mechanisms, and the pumping station. A forest of windmills stood on the rising slope to the north of this station, the big props all facing west and slowly spinning. Above that array rose the broad low cone of Hadriaca Patera, a volcano whose sides were unusually furrowed by a dense crisscrossing network of lava channels, the later ones cutting over the earlier ones. Now the winter’s snowpack had filled the channels, but not the exposed black rock between them, which had been blown clear by the strong winds accompanying the snowstorms. The result was an enormous black cone sticking into the bruised sky, festooned with hundreds of tangled white ribbons.

  “Very handsome,” Maya said. “Can they see it from the canyon floor?”

  “No. But a lot of them at this end work up on the rim anyway, at the well or the power station. So they see it every day.”

  “These settlers — who are they?”

  “Let’s go meet them and see,” Diana said. Maya nodded, enjoying Diana’s style, which still reminded her a bit of Ann. The sansei and yonsei were all strange to Maya, but Diana much less than most — a bit private perhaps, but compared to her more exotic contemporaries, and the Zygote kids, welcomely ordinary.

  While Maya observed Diana, thinking this, Diana drove their rover into the canyon, down a steep road laid over a giant ancient talus slope near the head of Dao. This was where the original aquifer outburst had occurred, but there was very little chaotic terrain — just titanic talus slopes, permanently settled at the angle of repose.

  The canyon floor itself was basically flat and unbroken. Soon they were driving down it, on a regolith track sprayed with a fixative. The track ran by the stream where it could. After about an hour’s driving they passed a green meadow, tucked into the lazy curve of a fat oxbow. In the center of this meadow, in a knot of pinon pine and aspen, huddled a gathering of low shingled roofs, with faint smoke rising from a solitary chimney.

  Maya stared at the settlement (corral and pasture, truck garden, bam, bee boxes), marveling at its beauty, and its archaic wholeness, its seeming detachment from the great redrock desert plateau above the canyon — detachment from everything really, from history, from Time itself. A mesocosm. What did they think in those little buildings of Mars and Earth, and all their troubles? Why
should they care?

  Diana stopped the car, and a few people came out and crossed the meadow to see who they were. Pressure under the tent was 500 millibars, which helped to support the weight of the tenting, as the atmosphere at large was averaging about 250 millibars now. So Maya popped the lock of the car, and got out without her helmet on, feeling undressed and uncomfortable.

  These settlers were all young natives. Most of them had come down in the last few years from Burroughs and Elysium. Some Terrans lived in the valley too, they said — not many, but there was a Praxis program that brought up groups from smaller countries, and here in the valley they had recently welcomed some Swiss, and Greeks, and Navajo. And there was a Russian settlement down near Hell’s Gate. So they heard some different languages in the valley, but English was the lingua franca, and the first tongue of almost all of the natives. They had accents to their English that Maya had not heard before, and made odd mistakes in grammar, at least to her ear; almost every verb after the first one was in present tense, for instance. “We went downstream and see some Swiss are working on the river. Stabilizing the banks in some places, with plants or rocks. They say in a few years the streambed is flushed enough for the water to clear.”

  Maya said, “It will still be the color of the cliffs, and the sky.”

  “Yeah, of course. But clear water looks better than silty water, somehow.”

  “How do you know?” Maya enquired.

  They squinted and frowned, thinking about it. “Just from the way it looks in your hand, eh?”

  Maya smiled. “It’s wonderful you have so much room. Unbelievable what big spaces they can roof these days, isn’t it?”

  They shrugged, as if they hadn’t thought of it that way. One said, “We look forward to the day when we take the tenting off, actually. We miss the rain, and the wind.”