Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
And in those hectic days on Elysium she began to realize just how much power the robots had. In all her years of construction she had never really tried to exert that power to the full; there simply had been no need. But now there were hundreds of jobs to be done, more than could be accomplished even with a total effort, and so she took the system right out to the bleeding edge as programmers would say, and saw just how much that effort could do, even as she tried to figure out how to do more. She had always considered teleoperation to be a basically local procedure, for instance, but it wasn’t necessarily so. Using relay satellites she could drive a bulldozer in the other hemisphere, and now, whenever she could establish a good link, she did so. She did not stop working for even a single waking second; she worked as she ate, she read reports and programs in the bathroom, and she never slept except when exhaustion knocked her out. While in this timeless state she told anyone and everyone she worked with what to do, without regard for their opinion or comfort; and in the face of her monomaniacal concentration, and the authority of her grasp of the situation, people obeyed her.
Despite all this effort, they could not do enough. It always came back to Nadia, and she alone through the sleepless hours gave the system a full stretch, out on the bleeding edge all the time. And Elysium had a huge fleet of construction robots already built, so that it was possible to attack most of the pressing problems simultaneously. Most of those were located among the canyons on Elysium’s western slope. All the roofed canyons had been broken open to one degree or another, but most of their physical plants were untouched, and there were a great number of survivors hunkered down in individual buildings running on emergency generators, as in South Fossa. When South Fossa was covered and heated and pumped up, she directed teams to go out and find all the survivors on the western slope, and they were pulled out of the other canyons and brought to South, and then sent back out with jobs to do. The roofing crews moved from canyon to canyon, and their ex-occupants went to work underneath, readying for the pump-ups. At that point Nadia turned her attention to other matters, programming toolmakers, starting robot linemen along the broken pipelines from Chasma Borealis. “Who
did
all this?” she said with disgust, staring one night at the TV’s image of burst water pipes.
The question was torn out of her; in reality she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the dunes. But Yeli took her at her word, and said, “It’s hard to tell. The Terran news programs are all about Earth now, there’s only an occasional clip from here, and they don’t know what to make of it either. Apparently the next few shuttles are bringing U.N. troops, who are supposed to restore order. But most of the news is about Earth— the Middle East war, the Black Sea, Africa, you name it. A lot of the Southern Club is bombing flag-of-convenience countries, and the Group of Seven has declared they’re going to defend them. And there’s a biological agent loose in Canada and Scandinavia—”
“And maybe here too,” Sasha interrupted. “Did you see that clip of Acheron? Something happened there, the windows of the habitat are all blown out, and the land underneath the fin is covered with these growths of God knows what, no one wants to get near enough to find out. . . .”
Nadia closed her mind to their talk, and concentrated on the problem of the pipeline. When she returned to real time, she found that every single robot she could find was in action reconstituting the towns, and the factories were busily pumping out more bulldozers, earthmovers, dump trucks, backhoes, frontloaders, steamrollers, framers, foundation diggers, welders, cement makers, plastic makers, roofers, everything. The system was at full pump, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her anymore. And so she told the others she wanted to take off again, and Ann and Simon and Yeli and Sasha decided to accompany her; Angela and Sam had met friends in South Fossa, and were going to stay.
So the five climbed into their two planes, and took off again. This was the way it would happen everywhere, Yeli asserted; whenever members of the first hundred encountered each other, they would not separate.
They headed in the two planes south, toward Hellas. Passing over Tyrrhena Mohole, next to Hadriaca Patera, they landed briefly; the mohole town was punctured, and needed help to start the rebuilding. There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miner. That kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was another aspect of their power. It was slower, no doubt of that. Still, within a month these three components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the sand: first the factories, then the assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absence. It really was confounding, their new power.
And yet all of it was as nothing in the face of human destructiveness. The five travelers flew from ruin to ruin, becoming numb to the damage and to the dead. Not that they were insensible to their own danger; after passing over a number of wrecked planes in the Hellas-Elysium flight corridor, they switched to night flights. These were more dangerous than day flights in many ways, but Yeli was more comfortable with their level of stealth. The 16Ds were nearly invisible to radar, and would leave only the faintest traces on the most powerful tight-focus IR detectors. All of them were willing to take the risk of that minute exposure. Nadia didn’t care at all, she would have been happy to fly by day. She lived in the moment as much as she could, but her thoughts ran in circles as she kept trying to drag them back to the moment. Stunned by the waste of all that had been destroyed, she was becoming far distanced from her emotions. She only wanted to work.
And Ann, some part of Nadia noticed, was worse. Of course she must have been worried about Peter. And then all the destruction as well— for Ann it was not the structures but the land itself, the floods, the mass wasting, the snow, the radiation. And she had no work to distract her. Her work would have been the study of the damage. And so she did nothing, or tried to help Nadia when she could, moving around like an automaton. Day after day they worked at initiating the repair of one ruined structure or another, a bridge, a pipeline, a well, a power station, a piste, a town. They lived in what Yeli called Waldo World, ordering robots about as if they were slavemasters or magicians, or gods; and the machines went to work, trying to reverse the film of time and make broken things fly back together. With the luxury of haste they could be sloppy, and it was incredible how fast they could initiate construction, and then fly on. “In the beginning was the word,” Simon said wearily one evening, punching at his wristpad. A bridge crane swung across the setting sun. And then they were off again.
They started up containment and burial programs for three blown reactors, staying safely over the horizon and working by teleoperation. While watching the operations, Yeli sometimes switched channels and had a look at the news. Once the shot was from orbit: a full disk shot of the Tharsis hemisphere, in daytime for all but the western limb. From that height they could see no sign of the outflows. But the voice-over claimed they had occurred in all the old outflow channels that ran north from Marineris into Chryse, and the image jumped to a telescopic shot, which showed whitish-pink bands in that region. Canals at last, of a sort.
Nadia snapped the TV back to their work. So much destroyed, so many people killed, people who might have lived a thousand years— and, of course, no word of Arkady. It had been twenty days now. People were saying he might have been forced into complete hiding, to avoid being killed by a strike from orbit. But Nadia no longer believed this, except in moments of extreme desire and pain, the two emotions surging up through the obsessive work mode in a brand-new mixture, a new feeling that she hated and feared: desire causing pain, pain causing desire— a hot fierce desire, that things not be as they were. How painful such a desire was! But if she worked hard enough, there was no time for it. No time to think or feel.
They flew over the bridge spanning Harmakhis Vallis, on the eastern border of Hellas. It was down. Repair robots were cached in endhouses on all major bridges, and these could be adapted to total reconstruction of the spans, although they would be slow at it. The travelers got them going, and that evening, after finishing the last programs, they sat down to microwaved spaghetti in the plane’s cabins, and Yeli turned on the Terran TV channel again. There was nothing but static and a snaking, destroyed image. He tried switching channels, but all the channels were the same. Dense, buzzing static.
“Have they blown up Earth too?” Ann said.
“No no,” Yeli said. “Someone’s jamming it. The sun is between us and it, these days, and you would only have to interfere with a few relay satellites to cut contact.”
They stared glumly at the fizzing screen. In recent days the local areosynchronous communications satellites had been going down left and right, shut down or sabotaged, it was impossible to say. Now, without the Terran news, they would really be in the dark. Surface-to-surface radio was limited indeed, given the tight horizons and the lack of an ionosphere— not much more range than walker intercoms, really. Yeli tried a variety of stochastic resonance patterns, to see if he could cut through the jamming. The signals were scrambled beyond repair. He gave up with a grunt, punched out a search program. The radio oscillated up and down through the hertz, gathering static and stopping at the occasional faint punctuation: coded clicking, irretrievable snatches of music. Ghost voices gabbling in unrecognizable languages, as if Yeli had succeeded where SETI had failed, and finally, now that it was pointless, gotten messages from the stars. Probably just stuff from the asteroid miners. In any case incomprehensible, useless. They were alone on the face of Mars, five people in two small airplanes.
It was a new and very peculiar sensation, which only became more acute in the days that followed, when it didn’t go away, and they understood that they were going to have to proceed with all their TVs and radios blanked by white noise. It was an experience unique not only in their Martian experience, but in their whole lives. And they quickly found that losing the electronic information net was like losing one of their senses; Nadia kept glancing down at her wristpad, on which, until this breakdown, Arkady could have appeared any second; on which any of the first hundred might have showed up, and declared themselves safe; and then she would look up from the little blank square at the land around her, suddenly so much bigger and wilder and emptier than it had ever been before. It was frightening, truly. Nothing but jagged rust hills for as far as the eye could see, even when flying in the airplanes at dawn and looking for one of the little landing strips marked on the map, which when spotted would resemble little tan pencils. Such a big world! And they were alone in it. Even navigation could no longer be taken for granted, no longer be left to the computers; they had to use road transponders, and dead reckoning, and visual fixes, peering down anxiously in the dawn twilight to spot the next airstrip in the wilderness. Once it took them well into the morning to find a strip near Dao Vallis. After that Yeli began to follow pistes, flying low through the night and watching the silvery ribbon snake below them through the starlight, checking transponder signals against the maps.
And so they managed to fly down in the broad lowland of Hellas Basin, following the piste to Low Point Lakefront. Then in the horizontal red light and long shadows of sunrise, a sea of shattered ice came over the horizon into view. It filled the whole western part of Hellas. A sea!
The piste they had been following ran right into ice. The frozen shoreline was a jagged tangle of ice plates that were black or red or white or even blue, or a rich jade green— all piled together, as if a tidal wave had crushed Big Man’s butterfly collection, and left it strewn over a barren beach. Beyond it the frozen sea stretched right over the horizon.
After many seconds’ silence, Ann said, “They must have broken the Hellespontus aquifer. That was a really big one, and it would drain down to Low Point.”
“So the Hellas mohole must be flooded!” Yeli said.
“That’s right. And the water at the bottom of it will heat up. Probably hot enough to keep the surface of the lake from freezing. Hard to say. The air is cold, but with the turbulence there might be a clear spot. If not, then right under the surface it will be liquid for sure. Must be some strong convection currents in fact. But the surface . . .”
Yeli said, “We’ll see pretty soon, we’re going to fly over it.”
“We should be landing,” Nadia observed.
“Well, we will when we can. Besides, things seem to be calming down a bit.”
“That’s just a function of being cut off from news.”
“Hmm.”
As it turned out they had to fly all the way across the lake, and land on the other side. It was an eerie morning, flying low across a shattered surface reminiscent of the Arctic Sea, except here the ice flows were frosting like an open freezer door, and they were colored across the whole spectrum, heavy on the reds of course, but this only made the occasional blues and greens and yellows stand out more vividly, the focal points of an immense, chaotic mosaic.
And there at its center— where, even flying as high as they were, the ice sea still extended to the horizon in every direction— there was an enormous steam cloud, rising thousands of meters into the air. Circling this cloud cautiously, they saw that the ice underneath it was broken into bergs and floes, floating tight-packed in roiling, steaming black water. The dirty bergs rotated, collided, turned turtle and caused thick walls of red-black water to splash upward; when these walls fell back down, waves expanded out in concentric circles, bobbing all the bergs up and down as they passed.