Kitabı oku: «The Complete Mars Trilogy», sayfa 34

PART SEVEN Senzeni Na

On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box, before a small fire at the edge of the clearing: a kind of campfire, except that the long low tin-roofed buildings of Ugoly were just a hundred meters behind their backs. They had their bare hands extended to the radiant heat, and his father was once again telling the story of his encounter with the snow leopard. It was windy and the flames gusted. Then a fire alarm rang out behind them.

It was Arkady’s alarm, set for 4 a.m. He got up and took a hot sponge bath. An image from the dream re-occurred to him. He had not slept much since the revolt’s beginning, just a few hours snatched here or there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanism. Might one be able to remember every second of one’s life, but only in dreams that were always lost on waking? Might this be necessary, somehow? And if so, what would happen if people started living for two or three hundred years?

Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”

They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one for Arkady.”

An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.

“There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”

This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.

“I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”

Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability…”

“We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.

“It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt; while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.

But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week, UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.

A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look.

He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow; only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons. In the shadowed streets the city was just waking. A lot of rebels had come in from other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the park grass. People sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wild. Night temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight had crept. When they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advice. Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil, glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.

He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad’s diary file as he went. “The park reminds me of what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists; it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with — ”

His wristpad beeped and Phyllis’s face appeared on the tiny screen, which was annoying. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Nemesis is gone. We want you to surrender before any more damage is done. It’s simple now, Arkady. Surrender or die.”

He almost laughed. She was like the wicked witch in the Oz movie, appearing unexpectedly in his crystal ball.

“It’s no laughing matter!” she exclaimed. Suddenly he saw that she was scared.

“You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis,” he said. “It is irrelevant.”

“How can you be such a fool!” she cried.

“It is not foolishness. Listen, you tell your masters this; if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.” That was the Swiss defense.

“Do you think that matters?” She was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.

“It matters. Look, Phyllis, I’m only the polar cap of this, there’s a massive underground lens that you can’t see; it’s really vast, and they’ve got the means to strike back at you if they want.”

She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor. “You were always a fool,” her disembodied voice said. “Even back on the Ares.”

The connection went dead.

Arkady walked on, the city’s bustle no longer as exhilarating as it had been. If Phyllis were frightened…

At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction search. A couple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off; a tech had discovered it accidentally.

Half an hour’s work and they found it. A program had been substituted. They replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy. “Look, that had to be sabotage, and there’s still more oxygen than even this accounts for. Look, it’s nearly forty percent out there right now.”

“No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning.”

“I’m not. Besides that mood thing is a myth.”

“Are you sure? Go through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one.”

He headed back to the city offices. He was halfway there when there was a loud pop overhead. He looked up and saw a small hole in the dome. The air suddenly took on an iridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubble. A bright flash and a loud boom knocked him off his feet. Struggling back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people were burning like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.

It was not hard to destroy Martian towns. No harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.

Nadia Cherneshevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunset. All the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city offices or the physical plant. For three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was going on. But the Terran news packages were concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing into one. Only infrequently was there a brief report on the wrecked Martian towns. One said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity – from anti-personnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re-excavated the crater. Anti-personnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.

Tent towns were simpler still. Most of them had been punctured by Phobos-based lasers; some had had their physical plants targeted by guided cruise missiles; others had been invaded by troops of one kind or another, their spaceports seized, armored rovers crashing through city walls, and in rare cases rocketpack paratroopers descending from above.

Nadia watched the jiggling video images that so clearly revealed the fear of the camera operators, her stomach collapsing to a tight walnut inside her. “What are they doing, testing methods?” she cried.

“I doubt it,” said Yeli Zudov. “It’s probably just a matter of different groups using different methods. Some look like they’re trying to do as little damage as possible, others seem to want to kill as many of us as they can. Make more room for emigration.”

Nadia turned away, sickened. She got up and took off for the kitchen, bent slightly over her collapsed stomach, desperate to do something. In the kitchen they had turned on a generator and were microwaving frozen dinners. She helped hand them out, moving up and down a line of people sitting in the hall outside. Unwashed faces, splashed with black frostnip blisters: some people talked animatedly, others sat like statues, or slept leaning against each other. Most of them had been residents of Lasswitz, but a good number had driven in from tents or hideouts that had been destroyed from space, or attacked by ground forces. “Is stupid,” an old Arab woman was saying to a gnarled little man. “My parents were Red Crescent in Baghdad when the Americans bombed it, if they have the sky is nothing you can do, nothing! We have to surrender. Surrender as soon as possible!”

“But to whom?” the little man asked wearily. “And for whom? And how?”

“To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of course!” The woman glared at Nadia, who shrugged.

Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice; the water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.

“I’ll be right there,” Nadia said, shocked. The town’s water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz aquifer, which was a big one; if any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood – and worse, Burroughs was located only two hundred kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that far. Burroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.

“Surrender!” the Arab woman insisted from the hall. “All surrender!”

“I don’t think that will work anymore,” Nadia said, and ran for the building’s lock.

A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do something. And Nadia had planned and overseen the construction of Lasswitz, only six years before, so now she had an idea what to do. The town was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to the north. All the structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer high. The water station was located only a couple hundred meters from the canyon’s north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang at the top. As Nadia drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined her plan: “I think we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak.”

“Won’t the flood just carry the landslide’s rock away?” Sasha asked.

“It will if it’s a full aquifer outbreak, sure. But if we cover it when it’s still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough to hold it. Hydrostatic pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn’t all that high. If it were we’d be dead already.”

She braked the rover. Out of the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud of thin frost steam. A rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights and turned the radio to the common band. It was the water station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hour. When they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. “It could work,” Angela said. “Certainly nothing else will stop it now, it’s really pumping.”

“We’ll have to hurry,” Sam said. “It’s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate.”

“If we don’t cap it,” Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, “it’ll look like when the Atlantic first broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. That was a waterfall that lasted ten thousand years.”

“I never heard of that one,” Nadia said. “Come on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going.”

During the ride over she had directed all the town’s construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had already arrived, and the rest were grinding over the canyon floor toward them. There was a small talus slope at the foot of the cliff, which towered over them like an enormous frozen wave, gleaming in the noon light. Nadia linked into the earthmovers and bulldozers and gave them instructions to clear paths through the talus; when that was done, tunnelers would bore straight into the cliff. “See,” Nadia said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover’s screen, “there’s a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piece. It’s causing the lip of the wall to slump a bit, see that slightly lower shelf at the top? If we set off all the explosives we’ve got at the bottom of that fault, it’s sure to bring down the overhang, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Yeli said. “It’s worth a try.”

The slower robots arrived, bringing an array of explosives left over from the excavation of the town’s foundation. Nadia went to work programming the vehicles to tunnel into the bottom of the cliff, and for most of an hour she was lost to the world. When she was finished she said, “Let’s get back to town and get everyone evacuated. I can’t be sure how much of the cliff might come down, and we don’t want to bury everyone. We’ve got four hours.”

“Jesus, Nadia!”

“Four hours.” She typed in the last command and started up their rover. Angela and Sam followed with a cheer.

“You don’t seem very sorry to leave,” Yeli said to them.

“Hell, it was boring!” Angela said.

“I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem anymore.”

“Good.”

The evacuation was difficult; a lot of the town’s occupants didn’t want to leave, and there was barely room for them in the rovers at hand. Finally they were all stuffed into one vehicle or another, and off on the transponder road to Burroughs. Lasswitz was empty. Nadia spent an hour trying to contact Phyllis by satellite phone, but the comm channels were disrupted by what sounded like a number of different jamming efforts. Nadia left a message on the satellite itself: “We’re non-combatants in Syrtis Major, trying to stop the Lasswitz aquifer from flooding Burroughs. So leave us alone!” A surrender of sorts.

Nadia and Sasha and Yeli were joined in their rover by Angela and Sam, and they drove up the steep switchbacks of the cliff road, onto the south rim of Arena Canyon. Across from them was the imposing north wall; below to the left lay the town, looking almost normal; but to the right it was clear something was wrong: the water station was broken in the middle by a thick white geyser, which plumed like a broken fire hydrant, and then fell into a jumble of dirty red-white ice blocks. This weird mass shifted even as they watched, briefly exposing black flowing water which frost-steamed madly, white mists pouring out of the black cracks and then whipping downcanyon on the wind. The rock and fines of the Martian surface were so dehydrated that when water splashed onto them they seemed to explode in violent chemical reactions, so when the water ran over dry ground, great clouds of dust fired off into the air and joined the frost steam swirling off the water.

“Sax will be pleased,” Nadia said grimly.

At the appointed hour, four plumes of smoke shot out of the base of the northern wall. For several seconds nothing else happened, and the observers groaned. Then the cliff face jerked, and the rock of the overhang slipped down, slowly and majestically. Thick clouds of smoke shot up from the bottom of the cliff, and then sheets of ejecta shot out, like water from under a calving iceberg. A low roar shook their rover, and Nadia cautiously backed it away from the south rim. Just before a massive cloud of dust cut off their view, they saw the water station covered by the swift tumbling edge of the landslide.

Angela and Sam had been cheering. “How will we tell if it’s worked?” Sasha asked.

“Wait till we can see it again,” Nadia said. “Hopefully the flood downstream will have gone white. No more open water, no more movement.”

Sasha nodded. They sat looking down into the ancient canyon, waiting. Nadia’s mind was mostly blank; the thoughts that did occur to her were bleak. She needed more action like the last few hours’, the kind of intense activity that gave her no time to think; even a moment’s pause and the whole miserable situation crashed back in on her, the wrecked cities, the dead everywhere, Arkady’s disappearance. And no one in control, apparently. No plan to any of it. Police troops were wrecking towns to stop the rebellion, and rebels were wrecking towns to keep the rebellion alive. It would end with everything destroyed, her whole life’s work blown up before her eyes; and for no reason! No reason at all.

She couldn’t afford to think. Down there a landslide had overrun a water station, hopefully, and the water rushing up the well had been blocked and frozen, making a composite dam. After that it was hard to say. If the hydrostatic pressure in the aquifer was high enough, a new breakout might be forced. But if the dam were thick enough… well, nothing to be done about it. Although if they could create some kind of escape valve, to take the pressure off the landslide dam…

Slowly the wind tattered the dust away. Her companions cheered; the water station was gone, covered by a fresh black landslide that spilled out from the northern wall, which now had a big new arc in its rim. But it had been a close thing, not anywhere near as big a landslide as she would have hoped; Lasswitz itself was still there, and it appeared that the layer of rock over the water station was not all that thick. The flood seemed to have stopped, it was true; it was motionless, a chunky, dirty white swath, like a glacier running down the middle of the canyon. And there was very little frost steam rising from it. Still…

“Let’s go back down to Lasswitz and look at the aquifer monitors,” Nadia said.

They drove back down the canyon wall road and into Lasswitz’s garage. They walked down the empty streets in walkers and helmets. The aquifer study center was located next to the city offices. It was odd to see their refuge of the last few days empty.

Inside the aquifer center they studied the readouts from the array of underground sensors. A lot of them were no longer functioning, but those that were showed that hydrostatic pressure inside the aquifer was higher than ever before, and increasing. As if to emphasize the point a small trembler shook the ground, vibrating the soles of their boots. None of them had ever felt such a thing on Mars before. “Shit!” Yeli said, “it’s going to blow again for sure!”

“We have to drill a runoff well,” Nadia said. “A kind of pressure valve. ”

“But what if it breaks out like the main one?” Sasha asked.

“If we put it at the upper end of the aquifer, or midway so that it takes some flow, it should be fine. Just as good as the old water station, which someone probably blew up, or else it would still be working fine.” She shook her head bitterly. “We have to risk it. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then maybe we cause an outbreak. But if we don’t do something, it looks like there’ll be an outbreak anyway.”

She led the little group down the main street to the robot warehouse in the garage, and sat down in the command center to begin programming again. A standard drilling operation, with maximum blowout baffling. The water would come to the surface under artesian pressure, and then they would direct it into a pipeline, which they would instruct a robot crew to lay in some direction that would take it out of the Arena canyon region. She and the others studied topographic maps, and ran simulated floods down several canyons paralleling Arena to north and south. They found that the watershed was huge – everything on Syrtis drained down toward Burroughs, the land was a big bowl here. They would have to pipe the water north for nearly three hundred kilometers to get it into the next watershed. “Look,” Yeli said, “released into the Nili Fossae, it will run straight north onto Utopia Planitia, and freeze on the northern dunes.”

“Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said again. “He’s getting stuff they never would have approved.”

“But a lot of his projects must be getting wrecked too,” Yeli pointed out.

“I bet it’s still a net gain, in Sax’s terms. All this water on the surface…”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

“If we ever see him again.”

Yeli was silent. Then he said, “Is it that much water, really?”

“It’s not just Lasswitz,” Sam said. “I saw a news bit a while ago – they’ve broken the Lowell aquifer, a big breakout like the ones that cut the outflow channels. It’ll rip billions of kilos of regolith downslope, and I don’t know how much water. It’s unbelievable.”

“But why?” Nadia said.

“It’s the best weapon they have, I guess.”

“Not much of a weapon! They can’t aim it or stop it!”

“No. But neither can anyone else. And think about it – all the towns downslope from Lowell are gone – Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even Silverton. And all those were transnational towns. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think.”

“So both sides are attacking the infrastructure,” Nadia said dully.

“That’s right.”

She had to work, there was no other choice. She got them going again on robot programming, and they spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and making sure the start-up went right. The drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in the aquifer didn’t cause a blowout. And the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon road bed, and on northward from there. No need to include pumps; artesian pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aero-lattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipeline was heated and running – then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it three hundred kilometers farther. The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four and a half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili Fossae. At that rate the pipeline would be done very soon after the well was drilled and ready. And if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.

So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by their efforts. They could go. But it was a question what their destination should be. Nadia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a Terran news show, listening to her companions debate the issue. Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve. No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists. And it didn’t help Nadia’s mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the description; it only made her angrier.

“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said.

“I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”

A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about eight hundred and sixty kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.

“I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis.”

“How will you get there?” Sam asked.

Nadia thought it over, took a deep breath. “Ultralite, I guess. There’s some of those new 16Ds up on the south rim airstrip. That would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who knows?” She looked at Yeli and Sasha. “Will you fly with me?”

“Yes,” Yeli said. Sasha nodded.

“We want to come with you,” Angela said. “It’ll be safer with two planes anyway.”

They took two planes that had been built by Spencer’s aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 16Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of aerogel and plastics, dangerous to fly because they were so light. But Yeli was an expert flier and Angela said she was too, so they climbed into two of them the next morning, after spending the night in the empty little airport, and taxied out to the packed dirt runway and took off directly into the sun. It took them a long time to rise to a thousand meters.

The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestation. But then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a dirty glacier, a river of broken ice blocks. The glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for a time. The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one Martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, cream, blood… spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.

Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over. Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier. They were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome; it was to the north also, so they were already on the right course.