the surface without a walker, people say. Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a single night. Knew Big Man himself, back in the good old days. And a big friend of Hiroko’s. And a big enemy of terraforming.”
“Have you met him?”
She didn’t reply.
“Look,” he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, “people are going to get killed. Innocent bystanders.”
“Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet. I don’t have anything to do with that either. I just do my work. Trying to catalog what was here before we came.”
“Yes. But you’re the most famous red of all, Ann. These people must have contacted you because of that, and I wish you’d discourage them. It might save some lives.”
She turned to face him. Her helmet’s faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and raw. “If you left the planet alone, it would save lives. That’s what I want. I’d kill you if I thought it would help.”
After that there was little to say. On the way back down to the trailer, he tried another topic. “What do you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?”
“They disappeared.”
John rolled his eyes. “She didn’t talk to you about it?”
“No. Did she talk to you?”
“No. I don’t think she talked to anyone but her group. Do you know where they went?”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea why they left?”
“They probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted.”
John shook his head. “If they do it, they’ll do it for twenty people. I mean to do it for everyone.”
“Maybe they’re more realistic than you.”
“Maybe. We’ll find out. There’s more than one way to do this, Ann. You have to learn that.”
She didn’t reply.
The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generally. The big basins were low in elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them, and in general it appeared that the planet’s water had mostly seeped north. Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. In fact some people wanted to use the tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time. The areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.
They turned on the TV for news from Earth, and watched a short feature on the mining and oil drilling that was starting in Antarctica.
“That’s our doing you know,” Ann said from the kitchen. “They kept mining and oil out of Antarctica for almost a hundred years, ever since the IGY and the first treaty. But when terraforming began here it all collapsed. They’re running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there’s a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries. And then the south saw these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we’re supposed to protect this iceberg we’ve got right next door with all these resources we desperately need? Forget it! So they broke the Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one’s done a thing about it. And now the last clean place on Earth is gone too.”
She walked over and sat before the screen, stuck her face in a mug