Blue Mars Part 20

The relationship with Mikhail had never improved, it was as if he wanted to be closer to Arkady's memory than she was. Peter she didn't feel she understood. Ariadne she didn't like, but in a way that made it easier; and Ariadne had come to Cairo as well. So Nadia decided to work on her first.

Ariadne was as committed to the const.i.tution as most of the Dorsa Brevians, but they were localists as well, and were no doubt thinking about keeping some independence of their own from the global government. And they too were far from any water supply. So Ariadne had been wavering.

"Look," Nadia said to her in a little room across the plaza from the city offices, "You've got to forget about Dorsa Brevia and think about Mars."

"I am, of course."

She was irritated that this meeting was taking place; she would rather have dismissed Nadia out of hand. The merits of the case weren't what mattered to her, it was just a matter of precedence, of not having to listen to any issei. It was power politics and hierarchy to these people now, they had forgotten the real issues involved. And in this d.a.m.ned city; suddenly Nadia lost her patience, and she almost shouted, "You're not! You're not thinking at all! This is the first challenge to the const.i.tution, and you're looking around for what you can get out of it! I won't have it!" She waved a finger under Ariadne's surprised face: "If you don't vote to enforce the court ruling, then the next time something you really want comes up for a council vote you'll see reprisals, from me from me. Do you understand?"

Ariadne's eyes were like billboards: first shocked, then a moment of pure fear. Then anger. She said, "I never said I wasn't going to vote for enforcement! What are you going ballistic for?"

Nadia returned to a more ordinary argument mode, although still hard and tense and unrelenting. Finally Ariadne threw up her hands: "It's what most of the Dorsa Brevia council wants to do, I was going to vote for it anyway. You don't have to be so frantic frantic about it." And she hurried out of the room, very upset. about it." And she hurried out of the room, very upset.

First Nadia felt a surge of triumph. But that look of fear in the young woman's eyes- it stuck with her, until she began to feel slightly sick to her stomach. She remembered Coyote on Pavonis, saying "Power corrupts." That was the sick feeling- that first hit of power used, or misused.

Much later that night she was still sick with repulsion, and almost weeping, she told Art about the confrontation. "That sounds bad," he said gravely. "That sounds like a mistake. You still have to deal with her. When that's the case, you have to just tweak people."

"I know I know. G.o.d G.o.d I hate this," she said. "I want to get away, I want to do something I hate this," she said. "I want to get away, I want to do something real real."

He nodded heavily, patted her shoulder.

Before the next meeting, Nadia went over to Jackie and told her quietly that she had the council votes to put police down at the dam to stop any further release of water. Then in the meeting itself, she reminded everyone in an offhand remark that Nirgal would be back among them very soon, along with Maya and Sax and Michel. This caused several of the Free Mars group on hand to look thoughtful, though Jackie of course showed no reaction. As they nattered on after that, Nadia rubbed her finger, distracted, still upset with herself about the meeting with Ariadne.

The next day the Cairenes agreed to accept the judgment of the Global Environmental Court. They would cease releasing water from their reservoir, and the settlements downcanyon would have to exist on piped water, which would certainly pinch their growth.

"Good," Nadia said, still bitter. "All that just to obey the law."

"They're going to appeal," Art pointed out.

"I don't care. They're done for. And even if they aren't, they've submitted to the process. h.e.l.l, they can win for all I care. It's the process that counts, so we win no matter what."

Art smiled to hear this. A step in her political education, no doubt, a step Art and Charlotte seemed to have taken long ago. What mattered to them was not the result of any single disagreement, but the successful use of the process. If Free Mars represented the majority now- and apparently it did, as it had the allegiance of almost all the natives, young fools that they were- then submitting to the const.i.tution meant that they could not simply push around minority groups by force of numbers. So when Free Mars won something, it would have to be on the merits of the case, judged by the full array of court justices, who came from all factions. That was quite satisfying, actually; like seeing a wall made of delicate materials bear more weight than it looked like it could, because of a cleverly built framework.

But she had used threats to sh.o.r.e up one beam, and so the whole thing left a bad taste in her mouth. "I want to do something real."

"Like plumbing?"

She nodded, not even close to a smile. "Yes. Hydrology."

"Can I come along?"

"Be a plumber's helper?"

He laughed. "I've done it before."

Nadia regarded him. He was making her feel better. It was peculiar, old-fashioned: to go somewhere just to be with someone. It didn't happen much anymore. People went where they needed to go, and hung out with whatever friends they found there, or made new friends. It was the Martian way. Or maybe just the First Hundred's way. Or her way.

Anyway, it was clear that doing this, traveling together, was more than just a friendship, more even perhaps than an affair. But that was not so bad, she decided. In fact not bad at all. Something to get used to, perhaps. But there was always something to get used to.

A new finger, for instance. Art was holding her hand, lightly ma.s.saging the new digit. "Does it hurt? Can you bend it?"

It did hurt, a little; and she could bend it, a little. They had injected some knuckle zone cells, and now it was just longer than the first joint of her other little finger, the skin still baby pink, unmarred by callus or scar. Every day a little bigger.

Art squeezed the tip of it ever so gently, feeling the bone inside. His eyes were round. "You can feel that?"

"Oh yes. It's like the other fingers, only a bit more sensitive maybe."

"Because it's new."

"I suppose."

Only the old lost finger was implicated, somehow; the ghost was calling again, now that there were signals coming from that end of the hand. The finger in the brain, Art called it. And no doubt there really was a cl.u.s.ter of brain cells devoted to that finger, which had been the ghost all along. It had faded over the years from lack of stimulus, but now it too was growing back, or being restimulated or reinforced; Vlad's explanations of the phenomenon were complex. But these days when she felt the finger, it sometimes felt just as large as the one on the other hand, even when she was looking right at it. Like feeling an invisible sh.e.l.l over the new one. Other times she felt the little thing at its proper size, short and skinny and weak. She could bend it at the hand knuckle, and just a little at the middle knuckle. The last kuckle, behind the fingernail, wasn't there yet. But it was on its way. Growing. Again Nadia joked about it growing on and on, though it was a creepy thought. "That would be good," Art said. "You'd have to get a dog."

But now she felt confident that wouldn't happen. The finger seemed to know what it was doing. It would be all right. It looked normal. Art was fascinated by it. But not just by it. He ma.s.saged her hand, which was a bit sore, and then her arm and shoulders too. He would ma.s.sage all of her if she let him. And judging by how her finger and arm and shoulders felt, she certainly ought to. He was so relaxed. Life for him was still a daily adventure, full of marvels and hilarity. People made him laugh every day; that was a great gift. Big, round-faced, round-bodied, somewhat like Nadia herself in certain aspects of appearance; balding, unpretentious, graceful on his feet. Her friend.

Well, she loved Art, of course. She had since Dorsa Brevia at least. Something like her feeling for Nirgal, who was a most beloved nephew or student or G.o.dchild or grandchild or child; and Art, therefore, one of her child's friends. Actually he was a bit older than Nirgal, but still, those two were like brothers. That was the problem. But all these calculations were being progressively thrown off by their increasing longevity. When he was only five percent younger than her, would it matter anymore? When they had gone through thirty years of intense experience together, as they already had, as equals and collaborators, architects of a proclamation, a const.i.tution, and a government; close friends, confidants, helpers, ma.s.sage partners; did it matter, the different number of years past their youths they were? No it did not. It was obvious, one only had to think about it. And then try to feel it too.

They didn't need her in Cairo anymore, they didn't need her in Sheffield right that second. Nirgal would be back soon, and he would help to keep Jackie in check; not a fun job, but that was his problem, no one could help him there. It was hard when you fixed all your love on one person. As she had with Arkady, for so many years, even though he had been dead for most of them. It made no sense; but she missed him. And she still got angry at him. He had not even lived long enough to realize how much he had missed. The happy fool. Art was happy too, but he was no fool. Or not much. To Nadia all happy people were a bit foolish by definition, otherwise how could they be so happy? But she liked them anyway, she needed them. They were like her beloved Satchmo's music; and given the world, and all that it held, that happiness was a very courageous way to live- not a set of circ.u.mstances, but a set of att.i.tudes. "Yes, come plumbing with me," she said to Art, and hugged him hard, hard, as if you could capture happiness by squeezing it hard enough. She pulled back and he was bug-eyed with surprise, as when holding her little finger.

But she was still president of the executive council, and despite her resolve, every day they bound her to the job a little more tightly, with "developments" of all kinds. German immigrants wanted to build a new harbor town called Blochs Hoffnung on the peninsula that cut the North Sea in half, and then dig a broad ca.n.a.l through the peninsula. Red ecoteurs objected to this plan, and blew up the piste running down the peninsula. They blew up the piste leading to the top of Biblis Patera as well, to indicate they objected to that as well. Ecopoets in Amazonia wanted to start ma.s.sive forest fires. Other ecopoets in Kasei wanted to remove the fire-dependent forest that Sax had planted in the great curve of the valley (this pet.i.tion was the first to receive unanimous approval from the GEC). Reds living around White Rock, an eighteen-kilometer-wide pure white mesa, wanted it declared a "kami site" forbidden to human access. A Sabishii design team was recommending that they build a new capital city on the North-Sea coast at 0 longitude, where there was a deep bay. New Clarke was getting crowded with what looked suspiciously like metanat security snoopertroopers. The Da Vinci techs wanted to give control of Martian s.p.a.ce over to an agency of the global government that didn't exist. Senzeni Na wanted to fill their mohole. The Chinese were requesting permission to build an entirely new s.p.a.ce elevator tethered near Schiaparelli Crater, to accommodate their own emigration, and contract out to others. Immigration was growing every month.

Nadia dealt with all these issues in half-hour increments scheduled by Art, and so the days pa.s.sed in a blur. It got very difficult to stay aware that some of these matters were much more important than others. The Chinese, for instance, would flood Mars with immigrants if they got half a chance... and the Red ecoteurs were getting more outrageous; there had even been death threats made against Nadia herself. She now had escorts when she left her apartment, and the apartment was discreetly guarded. Nadia ignored that, and continued to work on the issues, and to work the council to keep a majority on her side in the votes that mattered to her. She established good working relations with Zeyk and Mikhail, and even with Marion. Things never went quite right with Ariadne again, however, which was a lesson learned twice; but learned well because of that.

So she did the job. But all the time she wanted off Pavonis. Art saw her patience get shorter by the day; she knew by his look that she was becoming crochety, crabby, dictatorial; she knew it, but could not help it. After meetings with frivolous or obstructionist people she often unleashed a torrent of vicious abuse, in a steady low cursing voice that Art obviously found unnerving. Delegations would come in demanding an end to the death penalty, or the right to build in the Olympus Mons caldera, or a free eighth spot on the executive council, and as soon as the door closed Nadia would say, "Well there's there's a bunch of f.u.c.king idiots for you, a bunch of f.u.c.king idiots for you, stupid stupid fools never even thought about tie votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else's life abrogates your own right to live," and so on. The new police captured a group of Red ecoteurs who had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process killed a security guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they had: "Execute them!" she exclaimed. "Look, you kill someone, you lose your fools never even thought about tie votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else's life abrogates your own right to live," and so on. The new police captured a group of Red ecoteurs who had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process killed a security guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they had: "Execute them!" she exclaimed. "Look, you kill someone, you lose your right right to live. Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life- make them pay in a way that really gets the rest of the Reds' attention." to live. Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life- make them pay in a way that really gets the rest of the Reds' attention."

"Well," Art said uneasily. "Well, after all." But on she raged. She couldn't stop until she felt less angry. And Art could see that it was getting harder every time.

Flailing a bit himself, he recommended she start another conference, like the one in Sabishii she had missed; and make sure she made this one. Organizing the efforts of different organizations for a single cause; this was not really building, Nadia thought, but it looked like it would have to do.

The fight in Cairo had gotten her thinking about the hydrological cycle, and what would happen when the ice began to melt. If they could set up some kind of plan for a water cycle, even only an approximation, then it might go far toward reducing conflicts over water. So she decided to see what could be done.

As often happened these days when she thought about global issues, she found herself wanting to talk to Sax about it. The travelers to Earth were almost back now, close enough that transmission delay was insignificant, it was almost like having a normal wrist conversation. So Nadia spent evenings talking with Sax about terraforming. More than once he surprised her utterly; he did not hold the opinions she had imagined he would hold, he seemed always to be changing. "I want to keep things wild," he said one night.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

His face took on the puzzled expression it wore when he was thinking hard. It was considerably longer than the transmission delay before he replied: "Many things. It's a complicated word. But- I mean- I want to maintain the primal landscape, as much as possible."

Nadia could censor out her laughter at this; but still Sax said, "What do you find amusing?"

"Oh nothing. It's just you sound like, I don't know, like some of the Reds. Or the people in Christianopolis, they're not Reds, but they said almost the same thing to me, last week. They want to keep the primal landscape of the far south preserved. I've helped them to set up a conference to talk about southern watersheds."

"I thought you were working on greenhouse gases?"

"They won't let me work, I have to be president. But I am going to go to this conference."

"Good idea."

The j.a.panese settlers in Messhi Hoko (which meant "self-sacrifice for the sake of the group") came to the council to demand that more land and water be dedicated to their tent high on south Tharsis. Nadia walked out on them, and flew with Art down to Christianopolis, in the far south.

The little town (and it seemed very little after Sheffield and Cairo) was set in Phillips Rim Crater Four, at lat.i.tude sixty-seven degrees south. During the Year Without Summer the far south had experienced many severe storms, dropping about four meters of new snow, an unprecedented amount; the previous record for a year had been less than one. Now it was Ls 281, just after perihelion, and high summer in the south. And the various abatement strategies for avoiding an ice age seemed to be working well; most of the new snow had melted in a hot spring, and now there were round lakes on every crater floor. The pond in the center of Christianopolis was about three meters deep, and three hundred meters across; this was fine with the Christians, as it gave them a nice park pond. But if the same thing happened every winter- and the meteorologists believed that the coming winters would drop even more snow, and the coming summers get ever warmer- then their town would quickly be inundated by snowmelt, and Phillips Rim Crater Four become a lake full to the brim. And this was true for craters all over Mars.

The conference in Christianopolis had been convened to discuss strategies to deal with this situation. Nadia had done what she could to get influential people down to it, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and engineers, and the possibility of Sax, whose return was imminent. The problem of crater flooding was to be only the initial point of discussion for the whole question of watersheds, and the planetary hydrological cycle itself.

The crater problem specifically was to be solved as Nadia had predicted: plumbing. They would treat the craters like bathtubs, and drill drains to empty them. The brecciated pans under the dusty crater floors were extremely hard, but they could be tunneled through robotically; then install pumps and filters and pump the water out, keeping a central pond or lake if one wanted, or draining it dry.

But what were they going to do with the water they pumped out? The southern highlands were everywhere lumpy, shattered, pocked, cracked, hillocky, scarped, slumped, fissured, and fractured; when a.n.a.lyzed as potential watersheds, they were hopeless. Nothing led anywhere; there was no downhill for long. The entire south was a plateau three to four kilometers above the old datum, with only local b.u.mps and dips. Never had Nadia seen more clearly the difference between this highland and any continent on Earth. On Earth, tectonic movement had pushed up mountains every few-score million years, and then water had run down these fresh slopes, following the paths of least resistance back to the sea, carving the fractal vein patterns of watersheds everywhere. Even the dry basin regions on Earth were seamed with arroyos and dotted with playas. In the Martian south, however, the meteoric bombardment of the Noachian had hammered the land ferociously, leaving craters and ejecta everywhere; and then the battered irregular wasteland had lain there for two billion years under the ceaseless scouring of the dusty winds, tearing at every flaw. If they poured water onto this pummeled land they would end up with a crazy quilt of short streams, running down local inclines to the nearest rimless crater. Hardly any streams would make it to the sea in the north, or even into the h.e.l.las or Argyre basins, both of which were ringed by mountain ranges of their own ejecta.

There were, however, a few exceptions to this situation. The Noachian Age had been followed by a brief "warm wet period" in the late Hesperian, a period perhaps as short as a hundred million years, when a thick warm CO2 atmosphere had allowed liquid water to run on the surface, carving some river channels down the gentle tilts of the plateau, between crater ap.r.o.ns diverting them this way and that. And these watercourses had of course remained after the atmosphere had frozen out, empty arroyos gradually widened by the wind. These fossil riverbeds, like Nirgal Vallis, Warrego Valles, Protva Valles, Patana Valles, or Oltis Vallis, were narrow sinuous canyons, true riverine canyons rather than grabens or fossae. Some of them even had immature tributary systems. So efforts to design a macro-watershed system for the south naturally used these canyons as primary watercourses, with water pumped to the head of every tributary. Then there were also a number of old lava channels that could easily become rivers, as the lava, like the water, had tended to follow the path of least resistance downhill. And there were a number of tilted graben fractures and fissures, as at the foot of the Eridania Scopulus, that could likewise be turned to use.

In the conference, big globes of Mars were marked up daily to display different water regimes. There were also rooms full of 3-D topo maps, with groups standing around different watershed systems, arguing their advantages and disadvantages, or simply contemplating them, or fiddling with the controls to change them, restlessly, from one pattern to another. Nadia wandered the rooms looking at these hydrographies, learning much about the southern hemisphere that she had never known. There was a six-kilometer-high mountain near Richardson Crater, in the far south. The south polar cap itself was quite high. Dorsa Brevia, on the other hand, crossed a depression that looked like a ray cut out from the h.e.l.las impact, a valley so deep that it ought to become a lake, an idea that the Dorsa Brevians naturally did not like. And certainly the area could be drained if they cared to do it. There were scores of variant plans, and every single system was strange looking to Nadia. Never had she seen so clearly how different a gravity-driven fractal was from impact randomness. In the inchoate meteoric landscape, almost anything was possible, because nothing was obvious- nothing except for the fact that in any possible system, some ca.n.a.ls and tunnels would have to be built. Her new finger itched with the desire to get out there and run a bulldozer or a tunnel borer.

Gradually the most efficient, or logical, or aesthetically pleasing plans began to emerge from the proposals, the best for each region being patched together, in a kind of mosaic. In the eastern quadrant of the deep south, streams would tend to run toward h.e.l.las Basin and through a couple of gorges into the h.e.l.las Sea, which was fine. Dorsa Brevia accepted a plan to have their town's lava tunnel ridge become a kind of dam, crossing a watershed transversely so that there was a lake above it and a river below it, coursing down to h.e.l.las. Around the south polar cap, snowfall would remain frozen, but most of the meteorologists predicted that when things stabilized there wouldn't be much snowfall on the pole, that it would become a cold desert like Antarctica. Eventually of course they would end up with a largish ice cap, and then part of it would pool down into the huge depression under the Promethei Rupes, another partially erased old impact basin. If they didn't want too large of a southern ice cap, they would have to melt and pump some of the water back north, into the h.e.l.las Sea perhaps. They would have to do some similar pumping in Argyre Basin, if they decided to keep Argyre dry. A group of moderate Red lawyers was even now insisting on this before the GEC, arguing that one of the two great dune-filled impact basins on the planet ought to be preserved. It seemed certain this claim would receive a favorable judgment from the court, and so all the watersheds around Argyre had to take this into account.

Sax had designed his own southern watershed plan, which he sent to the conference from their rocket as it aerobraked into orbital insertion, to be considered with all the rest. It minimized surface water, emptied most craters, used tunnels extensively, and channelized almost all drained water into the fossil river canyons. In his plan vast areas of the south would stay arid desert, making for a hemisphere of dry tableland, cut deeply by a few narrow river-bottomed canyons. "Water is returned north," he explained to Nadia in a call, "and if you stay up on the plateaus, it will look like it always did, almost."

So that Ann would like it, he was saying.

"Good idea," Nadia said.

And indeed Sax's plan was not that much different than the consensus being hammered out by the conference. Wet north, dry south; one more dualism to add to the great dichotomy. And to have the old river canyons running with water again was satisfying. A good-looking plan, given the terrain.

But the days were long gone when Sax or anyone else could choose a terraforming project and then go out and do it. Nadia could see that Sax hadn't fully understood this. Ever since the beginning, when he had slipped algae-filled windmills into the field without the knowledge or approval of anyone but his accomplices, he had been working on his own. It was an ingrained habit of mind, and now he seemed to forget the review process that any watershed plan was going to have to go through in the environmental courts. But the process was there, inescapable now, and because of the grand gesture, half the fifty GEC justices were Reds of one shade or another. Any watershed proposal from a conference including Sax Russell, even as a telepartic.i.p.ant, was going to get close and suspicious scrutiny.

But it seemed to Nadia that if the Red justices looked carefully at the proposal, they would have to be amazed at Sax's approach. Indeed it represented a kind of road-to-Damascus conversion- inexplicable, given Sax's history. Unless you knew all of it. But Nadia understood: he was trying to please Ann. Nadia doubted that was possible, but she liked to see Sax try. "A man full of surprises," she remarked to Art.

"Brain trauma will do that."

In any case, when the conference was done they had designed an entire hydrography, designating all the future major lakes and rivers and streams of the southern hemisphere. The plan would eventually have to be integrated with similar plans for the northern hemisphere, which were in considerable disarray by comparison, because of the uncertainty about just how big the northern sea was going to be. Water was no longer being actively pumped up out of permafrost and aquifers- indeed many of the pumping stations had been blown up in the last year by Red ecoteurs- but some water was still rising, under the weight put on the land by the water already pumped. And summer runoff was flowing into Vast.i.tas, more every year, both from the northern polar cap and the Great Escarpment; Vast.i.tas was the catchment basin for huge watersheds on all sides. So a lot of water was going to pour into it every summer. On the other hand, a lot of water was always being stripped off by the arid winds, eventually precipitating elsewhere. And water would evaporate much faster than the ice currently there was subliming. So calculating how much was leaving and how much coming back was a modeler's field day, and estimates were still all over the map, literally so in that differences in prediction led to putative sh.o.r.elines that were in some cases hundreds of kilometers apart.

That uncertainty would delay any GECO on the south, Nadia thought; in essence the court had to try to correlate all the current data, and evaluate the models, and then prescribe a sea level, and approve all watersheds accordingly. The fate of Argyre Basin in particular seemed impossible to decide at this point, before there was a northern plan; some plans called for pumping water up into Argyre from the northern sea if the northern sea got too full, to avoid flooding the Marineris canyons, South Fossa, and the new harbor towns being built. Radical Reds were already threatening to build "west-bank settlements" all over Argyre to forestall any such move.

So the GEC had yet another big issue to solve. Clearly it was becoming the most important political body on Mars; with the const.i.tution and its own previous rulings to guide it, it was ruling on almost every aspect of their future. Nadia thought that was probably as it should be; or at least that there was nothing wrong with it. They needed decisions with global ramifications reviewed globally, that was what it came down to.

But come what may in the courts, a provisional plan for the southern hemisphere had at least been formulated. And to everyone's surprise, the GEC gave the plan a positive preliminary judgment very soon after it was submitted- because, their ruling said, it could be activated in stages as water fell on the south, and it proceeded in much the same fashion through its first stages no matter what the eventual sea level in the north became. So there was no reason to delay beginning.

Art came in beaming with the news. "We can begin plumbing," he said.

But of course Nadia couldn't. There were meetings in Sheffield to go back to, decisions to be made, people to be convinced or coerced. Doggedly she did that work, stubbornly doing her duty whether she liked it or not, and as time pa.s.sed she got better and better at it. She saw how she could subtly pressure other people to get her way; saw how people would do her bidding if she asked or suggested in certain ways. The constant stream of decisions honed some of her views; she found that it helped to have at least some consciously held political principles, rather than judging each case by instinct. It also helped to have reliable allies, on the council and elsewhere, rather than being a supposedly neutral and independent person. And so by degrees she found herself joining the Bogdanovists, who, to her surprise, conformed more closely to her political philosophy than anything else on Mars. Of course her reading of Bogdanovism was relatively simple: things should be just, Arkady had insisted, and everyone free and equal; the past didn't matter; they needed to invent new forms whenever the old ones looked unfair or impractical, which was often; Mars was the only reality that counted, at least to them. Using these as her guiding principles, she found it easier to make up her mind about things, to see a course and cut for it directly.

Also she became more and more ruthless. From time to time she felt freshly how power could corrupt, felt it as a slight nausea within her. But she was getting habituated. She clashed often with Ariadne, and when she recalled the remorse she had felt after her first wrangle with the young Minoan, it seemed to her ridiculously overfastidious; she was far tougher than that every day now on people who crossed her, she showed the knives in meeting after meeting, in calculated microbursts of brutality that put people in line very effectively indeed. In fact the more she allowed herself to release little outbursts of fury and scorn, the more certainly she could control them and put them to some use. She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive. Power was powerful, in more ways than one. And now Nadia felt very little remorse about that; they deserved a pop on the nose, generally; they had thought they were going to get a harmless old babushka to sit in the big chair while they worked their games on each other, but the big chair was the power seat, and she was d.a.m.ned if she was going to go through all this s.h.i.t and not use some of that power to try to get what she wanted.

And so less and less often did she feel how ugly it was. Once when she did, after a particularly hard-nosed day, she thumped down in a chair and almost cried, sick with disgust. Only seven months of her three m-years had pa.s.sed. What would she become by the time her stint was done? Already she was used to power; by then she might even like it.

Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast table. "Well," he said once, after she explained what was bothering her, "power is power." He was thinking hard. "You're the first president of Mars. So in a way you define the office. Maybe you should declare you're only going to work the one month and not the two months, and delegate the two months to your staff. Something like that."

She stared at him, mouth full of toast.

Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again, joining a caravan of people working their way from crater to crater, installing drainage systems. Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter of picking the right angle to emerge from the crater ap.r.o.n, and then setting the robots to work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Aga.s.siz, Heaviside, Bianchini, Lau, Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier, Suess... they plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones, although the craters were taking on names even faster than they drilled them: 85 South, Too Dark, Fool's Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole, Proudhon, Bellamy, Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon. The migration from one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around the south polar cap during the underground years; except now everything was out in the open, and through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team luxuriated in the sun, in the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled across rough frozen bogs brilliant with sunny melt.w.a.ter and meadow gra.s.s, and always of course they crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into the light, ring after ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid watershed pipes, and attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators whenever the rock had any gas feedstocks in it.

But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia meant. She missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been hand labor, but one's touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and the repeated gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level of engagement than this "work," which consisted of talking to AIs and then walking around and watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot diggers, city-block-sized mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth that grew back like sharks' teeth- everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys stronger than the elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself. It just wasn't what she had in mind.

Try again. She went through another cycle; return to Sheffield, engagement in the council work, increasing disgust, merging with despair; look around for anything to get her out of it; notice some likely project and seize on it. Run off to check it out. Like Art had said, she could call her own shots. There was that in power too.

The next time out it was soil that drew her. "Air, water, earth," Art said. "Next it'll be forest fires, eh?"

But she had heard that there were scientists in Bogdanov Vishniac trying to manufacture soil, and this interested her. So off she went, flying south to Vishniac, where she had not been for years. Art accompanied her. "It'll be interesting to see how the old underground cities adapt, now that there's no need to hide."

"I don't see why anyone stays down here, to tell you the truth," Nadia said as they flew down into the rugged southern polar region. "They're so far south their winters last forever. Six months with no sun at all. Who would stay?"

"Siberians."

"No Siberian in his right mind would move here. They know better."

"Laplanders, then. Inuit. People who like the poles."

"I suppose."

As it turned out, no one in Bogdanov Vishniac seemed to mind the winters. They had redistributed their mohole mound in a ring around the mohole itself, creating an immense circular amphitheater facing down into the hole. This terraced amphitheater was to be the surface Vishniac. In the summers it would be a green oasis, and in the dark winters a white oasis; they planned to illuminate it with hundreds of brilliant streetlights, giving themselves a stage set day, in a town contemplating itself across a round gap in things, or from the upper wall looking out at the frosted chaos of the polar highlands. No, they were going to stay, no question of it. It was their place.

Nadia was greeted at the airport as a special guest, as always when she stayed with Bogdanovists. Before joining them this had struck her as ridiculous, and even a bit offensive: girlfriend of The Founder! But now she accepted their offer of a guest suite located on the lip of the mohole, with a slightly overhanging window that gave one a view straight down for eighteen kilometers. The lights on the mohole's bottom looked like stars seen through the planet.

Art was petrified, not at the sight but at the very thought of the sight, and he would not go near that half of the room. Nadia laughed at him, and then when she was done looking, closed the drapes.

The next day she went out to visit the soil scientists, who were happy at her interest. They wanted to be able to feed themselves, and as more and more settlers moved south, this was going to be impossible without more soil. But they were finding that manufacturing soil was one of the most difficult technical feats they had ever undertaken. Nadia was surprised to hear this- these were the Vishniac labs, after all, world leaders in technologically supported ecologies, having lived for decades hidden in a mohole. And topsoil was, well, soil. Dirt with additives, presumably, and additives one could add.

No doubt she conveyed some of this impression to the soil scientists, and the man named Arne leading her around told her with some exasperation that soil was in fact very very complex. About five percent of it by weight was made of living things, and this critical five percent consisted of dense populations of nematodes, worms, mollusks, arthropods, insects, arachnids, small mammals, fungi, protozoa, algae, and bacteria. The bacteria alone included several thousand different species, and could number as high as a hundred million individuals per gram of soil. And the other members of the microcommunity were almost as plentiful, in both number and variety. complex. About five percent of it by weight was made of living things, and this critical five percent consisted of dense populations of nematodes, worms, mollusks, arthropods, insects, arachnids, small mammals, fungi, protozoa, algae, and bacteria. The bacteria alone included several thousand different species, and could number as high as a hundred million individuals per gram of soil. And the other members of the microcommunity were almost as plentiful, in both number and variety.

Such complex ecologies could not be manufactured in the way Nadia had been imagining, which was basically to grow the ingredients separately and then mix them in a hopper, like a cake. But they didn't know all the ingredients, and they couldn't grow some of the ingredients, and some that they could grow died on mixing. "Worms in particular are sensitive. Nematodes have trouble too. The whole system tends to crash, leaving us with minerals and dead organic material. That's called humus. We're very good at making humus. Topsoil, however, has to grow."

"Which is what happens naturally?"

"Right. We can only try to grow it faster than it grows in nature. We can't a.s.semble it, or manufacture it in bulk. And many of the living components grow best in soil itself, so there's a problem providing feedstock organisms at any faster rate than natural soil formation would provide them."

"Hmm," Nadia said.

Arne took her through their labs and greenhouses, which were filled with hundreds of pedons, tall cylindrical vats or tubes, in racks, all holding soil or its components. This was experimental agronomy, and from her experience with Hiroko Nadia was prepared to understand very little of it. The esoterica of science could go right off her scale. But she did understand that they were doing factorial trials, altering the conditions in each pedon and tracking what happened. There was a simple formula Arne showed her to describe the most general aspects of the problem: S = = f f(PM,C,R,B,T), meaning that any soil property S was a factor (f) of the semi-independent variables, parent material (PM), climate (C), topography or relief (R), biota (B), and time (T). Time, of course, was the factor they were trying to speed up; and the parent material in most of their trials was the ubiquitous Martian surface clay. Climate and topography were altered in some trials, to imitate various field conditions; but mostly they were altering the biotic and organic elements. This meant microecology of the most sophisticated kind, and the more Nadia learned about it the more difficult their task seemed- not so much construction as alchemy. Many elements had to cycle through soil to make it a growth medium for plants, and each element had its own particular cycle, driven by a different collection of agents. There were the macronutrients- carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, pota.s.sium, calcium, and magnesium- then the micronutrients, including iron, manganese, zinc, copper, molybdenum, boron, and chlorine. None of these nutrient cycles was closed, as there were losses due to leaching, erosion, harvesting, and outga.s.sing; inputs were just as various, including absorption, weathering, microbial action, and application of fertilizers. The conditions that allowed the cycling of all these elements to proceed were varied enough that different soils encouraged or discouraged each cycle to different degrees; each kind of soil had particular pH levels, salinities, compaction, and so forth; thus there were hundreds of named soils in these labs alone, and thousands more back on Earth.