Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,143
escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible in the storm’s dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side of Tharsis, five vertical kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.
He stopped at another mine, located near crater Pt (called Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae. Apparently the Tharsis Bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus canyons. Some of them had cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves Afrikaaners, and spoke Afrikaaner among themselves; white men who welcomed John with heavy doses of God, volk, and trek. They had named the canyons they worked in Neuw Orange Free State and Neuw Pretoria. And they, like the miners at Bradbury Point, worked for Armscor. “Yes,” the operations head said happily, with an accent like a New Zealander’s. He had a heavily-jowled face, a ski-jump nose and a big crooked smile, and a very intense manner. “We’ve found iron, copper, silver, manganese, aluminum, gold, platinum, titanium, chromium, you name it. Sulfides, oxides, silicates, native metals, you name it. The Great Escarpment has them all.” The mine had been running for about an M-year; it consisted of strip mines on the canyon floors, with a habitat half buried in the mesa between two of the largest canyons, looking like a clear eggshell, packed with a meat of green trees and orange tile roofs.
John spent several days with them, being sociable and asking questions. More than once, thinking of the Acheron group’s eco-economics, he asked them how they were going to get their valuable but heavy product back to Earth. Would the energy cost of the transfer overwhelm the potential profit?
“Of course,” they said, just like the men at Bradbury Point. “It will take the space elevator to make it worthwhile.”
Their chief said, “With the space elevator we are in the Terran market. Without it we will never get off Mars.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” John said. But they didn’t understand him, and when he tried to explain it they only went blank and nodded politely, anxious to avoid thinking about politics. Which was something Afrikaaners were good at. When John realized what was going on, he found he could bring up the topic of politics to get some time to himself; it was, he said to Maya one night on the wrist, like tossing a tear gas canister in the room. It even enabled him to wander into the mining operations center alone for most of an afternoon, linking Pauline to the records and recording everything that she could lift. Pauline noticed no unusual patterns in the operation. But she did flag an exchange of communications with the Armscor home office; the local group wanted a security unit of a hundred persons, and Singapore had agreed to it.
John whistled. “What about UNOMA?” Security was supposed to be entirely their purview, and they gave out approval for private security pretty routinely; but a hundred people? John instructed Pauline to look into the UNOMA dispatches on the subject, and left for dinner with the Afrikaaners.
Again the space elevator was declared a necessity. “They’ll just pass us by if we don’t have it, go straight out to the asteroids and not have any gravity well to worry about, eh?”
Despite the five hundred micrograms of omegendorph in his system, John was not in a happy mood. “Tell me,” he said at one point, “do any women work here?”
They stared at him like fish. They were even worse than Moslems, really.
He left the next day and drove up to Pavonis, intent on looking into the space elevator notion.
Up the long slope of Tharsis. He never saw the steep, blood-colored cone of Ascraeus Mons; it was lost in the dust along with everything else. Travel now consisted of life in a set of small rooms that bumped around a lot. He worked his way around Ascraeus on its west flank, and then motored up onto the crest of Tharsis, between Ascraeus and Pavonis. Here the double-transponder road became an actual concrete ribbon under the wheels—concrete under a rush of dust, concrete that finally tilted up sharply, and led him straight up the northern slope of Pavonis Mons. It went on for so long that it began to