Green Mars Part 43

People were exclaiming, their voices filling the thin air like bird-song, over the low continuo of the flood. Nadia didn't know why; then she saw- there was movement at the s.p.a.ceport.

The s.p.a.ceport was located on a broad plateau to the northwest of the city, and at their height on the slope, the population of Burroughs could stand there and watch while the great doors of the s.p.a.ceport's largest hangar opened, and five giant s.p.a.ce planes rolled out one after another: an ominous, somehow military sight. The planes taxied up to the s.p.a.ceport's main terminal, and jetways extended and latched on to their sides. Again nothing happened, and the refugees walked up toward the first real hills of the Great Escarpment for the better part of an hour, until, despite their increase in elevation, the s.p.a.ceport runways and the lower halves of the hangars were under the watery horizon. The sun was well in the west now.

Attention turned to the city itself, as the water broached the tent wall on the east side of Burroughs, and ran in over the coping by Southwest Gate, where they had cut the tent. Soon thereafter it was flooding Princess Park and Ca.n.a.l Park and the Niederdorf, dividing the city in two and then slowly rising up the side boulevards, covering the roofs in the lower part of town.

In the midst of this spectacle one of the big jets appeared in the sky over the plateau, looking much too slow to fly, as big planes low to the ground always do. It had taken off southward, so for the spectators on the ground it grew larger and larger without ever seeming to gain speed, until the low rumble of its eight engines reached them, and it plowed overhead with the slow impossible awkwardness of a b.u.mblebee. As it lumbered off to the west the next one appeared over the s.p.a.ceport, and headed past the water-floored city and over them, off to the west. And so it went for all five planes, each one looking as unaerodynamic as the last, until the last one had trolled past them and disappeared over the western horizon.

Now they began to walk in earnest. The fastest walkers took off, making no attempt to stay back with the slower ones; it was important to begin to train people away from Libya Station as soon as possible, and this was understood by all. Trains were on their way to Libya from all over, but Libya Station was small and had only a few sidings, so the ch.o.r.eography of the evacuation was going to be complex.

It was now five in the afternoon, the sun low over the rise of Syrtis, the temperature plummeting past zero, on its way far down. As the faster walkers, mostly natives and the latest immigrants, pressed on ahead, the crowd became a long column. The people in rovers reported that it was several kilometers long now, and getting longer all the time. These rovers drove up and down the line, picking people up and sometimes letting others out. All available walkers and helmets were being used. Coyote had appeared on the scene, driving up from the direction of the dike, and seeing his boulder car, Nadia instantly suspected he was behind the broaching of the dike; but after greeting her cheerily over the wrist, and asking how things were going, he drove back toward the city. "Get South Fossa to send a dirigible over the city," he suggested, "in case anyone was left behind, and is up on the mesa tops. There must be some people in there who slept through the day, and when they wake up they are in for one very big surprise."

He laughed wildly, but it was a good point, and Art made the call.

Nadia walked along at the back of the column with Maya and Sax and Art, listening to reports as they came in. She got the rovers to drive on the dead piste, to avoid kicking dust into the air. She tried to ignore the fact that she was tired already. It was mostly lack of sleep, rather than muscular exhaustion. But it was going to be a long night. And not only for her. Many people on Mars were entirely city dwellers now, and unused to walking very far at a time. She herself seldom did, though she was often on her feet around construction sites, and did not have a desk job like many of these people. Luckily they were following a piste, and could even walk on its smooth surface if they cared to, between the suspension rails on the edges and the reaction rail running down the middle. Most preferred to stay on the concrete or gravel roads running alongside the piste, however.

Unfortunately, walking out of Isidis Planitia in any direction but north meant walking uphill. Libya Station was about seven hundred meters higher than Burroughs, not an inconsiderable height; but the grade was almost continuous over the seventy kilometers, and there were no steep sections anywhere along the way. "It will help keep us warm," Sax muttered when Nadia mentioned it.

It got later and later, until their shadows were cast far to the east, as if they were giants. Behind them the drowning city, lightless and empty, black-floored, disappeared over their horizon mesa by mesa, until finally Double Decker b.u.t.te and Moeris Mesa were submerged by the skysill. The dusky burnt umbers of Isidis took on more and more color, and the sky darkened and darkened, until the fat sun lay burning on the western horizon, and they walked slowly through a ruddy world, strung out like a ragtag army in retreat.

Nadia checked Mangalavid from time to time, and found the news from the rest of the planet mostly comforting. All the major cities but Sheffield had been secured by the independence movement. Sabis.h.i.+'s mound maze had provided refuge for the survivors of the fire, and though the fire was not yet put out everywhere, the maze meant they would be okay. Nadia talked to Nanao and Etsu for a while as she walked. The little wrist image of Nanao revealed his exhaustion, and she said something about how bad she felt- Sabis.h.i.+ burned, Burroughs drowned- the two greatest cities on Mars, destroyed. "No no," Nanao said. "We rebuild. Sabis.h.i.+ is in our mind."

They were sending their few unburned trains to Libya Station, as were many other cities. The nearest were also sending planes and dirigibles. The dirigibles would be able to come to their aid during the night's march, which was useful. Especially important would be any water they could bring with them, as dehydration in the cold and hyperarid night was going to be severe. Nadia's throat was already parched, and she happily took a cupful of warm water from a pa.s.sing rover handing them out. She lifted her mask and drank swiftly, trying not to breathe as she did. "Last call!" the woman pa.s.sing out the cups called cheerily. "We'll run out after the next hundred people."

Another kind of call came in from South Fossa. They had heard from several mining camps around Elysium, whose occupants had declared themselves independent of both the metanationals and the Free Mars movement, and were warning everyone to stay away. Some stations occupied by Reds were doing much the same. Nadia snorted. "Tell them fine," she said to the people in South Fossa. "Send them a copy of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration, and tell them to study it for a while. If they'll agree to uphold the human rights section, I don't see why we should bother with them."

The sun set as they walked. The long twilight slowly ran its course.

While there was still a dark purple twilight suffusing the hazy air, a boulder car drove up from the east and stopped just ahead of Nadia's group, and figures got out and walked over to them, wearing white masks and hoods. By silhouette alone Nadia recognized, all of a sudden, the one in the lead: it was Ann, tall and spare, walking right up to her, picking her out of the rabble at the tail end of the column without hesitation, despite the lack of light. The way the First Hundred knew each other....

Nadia stopped, stared up at her old friend. Ann was blinking at the sudden cold.

"We didn't do it," Ann said brusquely. "The Armscor unit came out in armored cars, and there was a real fight. Kasei was afraid that if they retook the dike they would try to retake everything, everywhere. He was probably right."

"Is he okay?"

"I don't know. A lot of people on the dike were killed. And a lot had to escape the flood by going up onto Syrtis."

She stood there before them, grim, unapologetic- Nadia marveled that one could read so much from a silhouette, a black cutout against the stars. Set of the shoulders, perhaps. Tilt of the head.

"Come on then," Nadia said. There was nothing else she could think to say, at this point. Going out onto the dike in the first place, setting the explosive charges... but there was no point now. "Let's keep walking."

The light leaked away from the land, out of the air, out of the sky. They hiked under the stars, through air as cold as Siberia. Nadia could have gone faster, but she wanted to stay at the back with the slowest group, to do what she could to help. People were giving piggyback rides to some of the smaller children among them, but the fact was there weren't very many children at the end of the column; the smallest ones were already in rovers, and the older ones were up front with the faster walkers. There hadn't been that many children in Burroughs to begin with.

Rover headlight beams cut through the dust they were throwing into the air, and seeing it Nadia wondered if the CO2 filters would get clogged by fines. She mentioned this aloud, and Ann said, "If you hold the mask to your face and blow out hard, it helps. You can also hold your breath and take it off, and blow compressed air through it, if you have a compressor."

Sax nodded.

"You know these masks?" Nadia said to Ann.

Ann nodded. "I've spent many hours using ones like them."

"Okay, good." Nadia experimented with hers, holding the fabric right against her mouth and blowing out hard. Quickly she felt short of breath. "We still should try walking on the piste and the roads, and cutting down on the dust. And tell the rovers to go slow."

They walked on. Over the next couple of hours they fell into a kind of rhythm. No one pa.s.sed them, no one fell back. It got colder and colder. Rover headlights partially illuminated the thousands of people ahead of them, all the way up the long gradual slope to the high southern horizon, which was perhaps twelve or fifteen kilometers ahead of them, it was hard to tell in the dark. The column ran all the way to the horizon: a bobbing, fencing collection of headlight beams, flashlight beams, the red glow of taillights... a strange sight. Occasionally there was a buzz overhead, as dirigibles from South Fossa arrived, floating like gaudy UFOs with all their running lights on, their engines humming as they wafted down to drop off loads of food and water for the cars to retrieve, and pick up groups from the back of the column. Then they hummed up into the air and away, until they were no more than colorful constellations, disappearing over the horizon to the east.

During the timeslip a crowd of exuberant young natives tried to sing, but it was too cold and dry, and they did not persist for long. Nadia liked the idea, and in her mind she sang some of her old favorites many times: "h.e.l.lo Central Give Me Dr. Jazz," "Bucket's Got a Hole in It," "On the Sunny Side of the Street." Over and over and over.

The longer the night went on, the better her mood became; it was beginning to seem like the plan was going to work. They were not pa.s.sing hundreds of prostrate people- although the word from the cars was that a fair number of the young natives appeared to have blown it and gone out too fast, and were now requiring a.s.sistance. Everyone had gone from 500 millibars to 340, which was the equivalent of going from 4,000 meters alt.i.tude on Earth to 6,500 meters, not an inconsiderable jump even with the higher percentage of oxygen in the Martian air to mitigate the effects; thus people were coming down with alt.i.tude sickness. Alt.i.tude sickness tended to strike the young a bit more than the old anyway, and many of the natives had taken off very enthusiastically. So some were paying for it now, with headaches and nausea felling quite a few. But the cars reported success so far taking in the ones on the edge of vomiting, and escorting the rest. And the rear of the column was keeping a steady pace.

So Nadia trudged on, sometimes hand in hand with Maya or Art, sometimes in her own world, her mind wandering in the biting cold, remembering odd shards of the past. She remembered some of the other dangerous cold walks she had taken over the surface of this world of hers: out in the great storm with John at Rabe Crater... searching for the transponder with Arkady... following Frank down into Noctis Labyrinthus, on the night they escaped from the a.s.sault on Cairo.... On that night too she had fallen into an odd bleak cheerfulness- response to a freeing from responsibility, perhaps, to becoming no more than a foot soldier, following someone else's lead. Sixty-one had been such a disaster. This revolution too could devolve into chaos- indeed it had. No one in control. But there were still voices coming in over her wrist, from everywhere. And no one was going to strafe them from s.p.a.ce. The most intransigent elements of the Transitional Authority had probably been killed outright, in Kasei Vallis- an aspect of Art's "integrated pest management" that was no joke. And the rest of UNTA was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They were incapable, as anyone would be, of controlling a whole planet of dissidents. Or too intimidated to try.

So they had managed to do it differently this time. Or else conditions on Earth had simply changed, and all the various phenomena of Martian history were only distorted reflections of those changes. Quite possible. A troubling thought, when considering the future. But that was for later. They would face all that when they came to it. Now they only had to worry about getting to Libya Station. The sheer physicality of the problem, and of the solution to the problem, pleased her immensely. Finally something she could get her hands on. Walk. Breathe the frigid air. Try to warm her lungs from the rest of her, from the heart- something like Nirgal's uncanny heat redistribution, if only she could!

It began to seem like she could actually catch little bursts of sleep while still walking. She worried it was CO2 poisoning, but continued to blink out from time to time. Her throat was very sore. The tail end of the column was slowing down, and rovers were now driving back to it and picking up all the people who were exhausted, and driving them up the slope to Libya Station, where they would drop them off, and return for another load. A lot more people were beginning to suffer alt.i.tude sickness, and the Reds were telling victims over the wrist how to pull off their masks and vomit, and then get the masks back on before breathing again. A difficult unpleasant operation at best, and many people were suffering CO2 poisoning as well as alt.i.tude sickness. Still, they were closing on their destination. The wrist images from Libya Station looked like the inside of a Tokyo subway station at rush hour, but trains were arriving and departing on a regular basis, so it looked like there was going to be room for the later arrivals.

A rover rolled up beside them, and asked them if they wanted a lift. Maya said, "Get out of here! What's the matter, can't you see? Go help those people up there, come on, stop wasting our time!"

The driver took off quickly to avoid more castigation. Maya said hoa.r.s.ely, "To h.e.l.l with that. I'm a hundred and forty-three years old, and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I don't walk the whole way. Let's pick up the pace a little."

They kept the same pace. They kept at the back of the column, watching the parade of lights bobbing in the haze ahead of them. Nadia's eyes had hurt for several hours, but now they were getting really painful, the numbness of the cold no longer a help, apparently; they were very, very dry, and sandy in their sockets. It stung to blink. Goggles with the masks would have been a good idea.

She stumbled over an unseen rock, and a memory shot into her from her youth: one time she and some coworkers had had their truck break down, in the southern Urals in winter. They had had to walk from the outskirts of the abandoned Chelyabinsk-65 to Chelyabinsk-40, over fifty frozen kilometers of devastated Stalinist industrial wasteland- black abandoned factories, broken smoke-stacks, downed fences, gutted trucks... all in the snowy frigid winter night, under low clouds. Like something out of a dream it had been, even at the time. She told Maya and Art and Sax about it, her voice hoa.r.s.e. Her throat hurt, but not as badly as her eyes. They had gotten so used to intercoms, it was funny to have to talk through the air separating them. But she wanted to talk. "I don't know how I ever could have forgotten that night. But I haven't thought of it in the longest time. I'd forgotten it. It must have happened, what, a hundred and twenty years ago."

"This is another one you'll remember," Maya said.

They shared brief stories about the coldest they had ever been. The two Russian women could list ten incidents colder than the very coldest experiences Sax or Art could come up with. "How about the hottest?" Art said. "I can win that one. One time I was in a log-cutting contest, in the chainsaw division, and that just comes down to who has the most powerful saw, so I replaced my saw's engine with one off a Harley-Davidson, and cut the log in under ten seconds. But motorcycle engines are air-cooled, you know, and did my hands get hot!"

They laughed. "Doesn't count," Maya declared. "It wasn't your whole body."

Fewer stars were visible than before. At first Nadia put it down to the fines in the air, or the trouble with her sanded eyes. But then she looked at her wristpad, and saw it was almost five A.M. Dawn soon. And Libya Station was only a few kilometers away. It was 256 Kelvin.

They came in at sunrise. People were pa.s.sing around cups of hot tea that smelled like ambrosia. The station was too crowded to enter, and there were several thousand people waiting outside. But the evacuation had been proceeding smoothly for several hours, organized and run by Vlad and Ursula and a whole crowd of Bogdanovists. Trains were still coming in on all three pistes, from east south and west, and loading up and leaving soon thereafter. And dirigibles were floating in over the horizon. The population of Burroughs was going to be split up immediately- some taken to Elysium, some to h.e.l.las, and farther south to Hiranyagarbha, and Christianopolis- others to the small towns on the way to Sheffield, including Underhill.

So they waited their turn. In the dawn light they could see that everyone's eyes were extremely bloodshot, which, along with the dust-caked masks still over their mouths, gave people a wild and b.l.o.o.d.y look. Clearly goggles were in order for walks out.

Finally Zeyk and Marina escorted the last group into the station. At this point quite a few of the First Hundred had found each other and cl.u.s.tered against one wall, drawn by the magnetism that always pulled them together in a crisis. Now, with the final group in, there were several of them: Maya and Michel, Nadia and Sax and Ann, Vlad, Ursula, Marina, Spencer, Ivana, the Coyote....

Over by the pistes Jackie and Nirgal were directing people into trains, waving their arms like symphony conductors, and steadying those whose legs were giving out at the last minute. The First Hundred walked out to the platform together. Maya ignored Jackie as she walked past her onto a train. Nadia followed Maya on board, and then came the rest of them. They walked down the central aisle, past all the happy two-toned faces, brown with dust above, clean around the mouth. There were some dirty facemasks on the floor, but most people were holding theirs clutched in their hands.

Screens at the front of each car relayed film that a dirigible was showing of Burroughs, which this morning was a sea of ice-coated water, the ice predominant, although black polynyas were everywhere. Above this new sea stood the nine mesas of the city, now nine cliff-walled islands, not very tall, their top gardens and remaining rows of windows truly strange-looking above the dirty brash ice.

Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred followed Maya through the cars to the last one. Maya turned around and saw them all, filling the final little compartment of the train, and said, "What, is this one going to Underhill?"

"Odessa," Sax told her.

She smiled.

People were getting up and moving forward, so that the old ones could sit together in the final compartment, and they did not decline the courtesy. They thanked them and sat. Soon after that, the compartments ahead of them were full. The aisles began to fill. Vlad said something about the captain being the last to leave a sinking s.h.i.+p.

Nadia found the remark depressing. She was truly weary now, she couldn't remember when she had last slept. She had liked Burroughs, and a huge number of construction hours had been poured into it.... She remembered what Nanao had said about Sabis.h.i.+. Burroughs too was in their minds. Perhaps when the sh.o.r.eline of the new ocean stabilized, they could build another one, somewhere else.

As for now, Ann was sitting on the other side of the car, and Coyote was coming down the aisle to them, stopping to press his face to the window gla.s.s, and give a thumbs-up to Nirgal and Jackie, still outside. Those two got on board the train, several cars ahead of the last one. Michel was laughing at something Maya had said, and Ursula, Marina, Vlad, Spencer- these members of Nadia's family were around her and safe, at least for the moment. And as the moment was all they ever had... she felt herself melting into her seat. She would be asleep in minutes, she could feel it in her dry burning eyes. The train began to move.

Sax was inspecting his wristpad, and Nadia said to him drowsily, "What's happening on Earth?"

"Sea level is still rising. It's gone up four meters. It looks like the metanationals have stopped fighting, for the time being. The World Court has brokered a cease-fire. Praxis has put all its resources into flood relief. Some of the other metanats look like they might go the same way. The UN General a.s.sembly has convened in Mexico City. India has agreed that it has a treaty with an independent Martian government."

"That's a devil's bargain," Coyote said from across the compartment. "India and China, they're too big for us to handle. You wait and see."

"So the fighting down there has ended?" Nadia said.

"It's not clear if that's permanent or not," Sax said.

Maya snorted. "No way it's permanent."

Sax shrugged.

"We need to set up a government," Maya said. "We have to set it up fast, and present Earth with a united front. The more established we seem, the less likely they'll be to come hard to root us out."

"They'll come," Coyote said from the window.

"Not if we prove to them that they'll get everything from us they would have gotten on their own," Maya said, irritated at Coyote. "That will slow them down."

"They'll come anyway."

Sax said, "We will never be out of danger until Earth is calm. Is stabilized."

"Earth will never be stabilized," Coyote said.

Sax shrugged.

"It's we who have to stabilize it!" Maya exclaimed, shaking a finger at Coyote. "For our own sakes!"

"Areoforming Earth," Michel said with his ironic smile.

"Sure, why not?" Maya said. "If that's what it takes."

Michel leaned over and gave Maya a kiss on her dusty cheek.

Coyote was shaking his head. "It's moving the world without a fulcrum," he said.

"The fulcrum is in our minds," Maya said, startling Nadia.

Marina also was watching her wrist, and now she said, "Security still has Clarke, and the cable. Peter says they've left all of Sheffield but the Socket. And someone- hey- someone has reported seeing Hiroko in Hiranyagarbha."

They went silent at this, thinking their own thoughts.

"I got into the UNTA records of that first takeover of Sabis.h.i.+," Coyote said after a while, "and there was no mention at all of Hiroko, or any of her group. I don't think they got them."

Maya said darkly, "What's written down has nothing to do with what happened."

"In Sanskrit," Marina said, "Hiranyagarbha means 'The Golden Embryo.'"

Nadia's heart squeezed. Come out, Hiroko, she thought. Come out, d.a.m.n you, please, please, d.a.m.n you, come out. The look on Michel's face was painful to see. His whole family, disappeared....

"We can't be sure we've got Mars together yet," Nadia said, to distract him. She caught his eye. "We couldn't agree in Dorsa Brevia- why should we now?"

"Because we are free," Michel replied, rallying. "It's real now. We are free to try. And you only put your full effort into a thing when there is no going back."

The train slowed to cross the equatorial piste, and they rocked back and forth with it.

"There are Reds blowing up all the pumping stations on Vast.i.tas," Coyote said. "I don't think you're going to get any easy consensus on the terraforming."

"That's for sure," Ann said hoa.r.s.ely. She cleared her throat. "We want the soletta gone too."

She glared at Sax, but he only shrugged.

"Ecopoesis," he said. "We already have a biosphere. It's all we need. A beautiful world."

Outside the broken landscape flashed by in the cool morning light. The slopes of Tyrrhena were tinted khaki by the presence of millions of small patches of gra.s.s and moss and lichen, tucked between the rocks. They looked out at it silently. Nadia felt stunned, trying to think about all of it, trying to keep it from all mixing together, blurring like the rust-and-khaki flow outside....

She looked at the people around her, and some key inside her turned. Her eyes were still dry and raw, but she was no longer sleepy. The tautness in her stomach eased, for the first time since the revolt had begun. She breathed freely. She looked at the faces of her friends- Ann still angry at her, Maya still angry at Coyote, all of them beat, dirty, as red-eyed as the little red people, their irises like round chips of semi-precious stone, vivid in their bloodshot settings. She heard herself say, "Arkady would be pleased."

The others looked surprised. She never talked about him, she realized.

"Simon too," Ann said.

"And Alex." "And Sasha." "And Tatiana-"

"And all our lost ones," Michel said quickly, before the length of the list grew too great.

"But not Frank," Maya said. "Frank would be thoroughly p.i.s.sed off at something."