Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,152

could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weightless. The frame was to be made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential uses for it. Crater domes themselves were a thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect a big clear tent, with aerogel pillars.

She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe’s interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with sky-lighted rooms, and the domed interior would hold a farm that would feed 30,000. Earthmoving robots the size of buildings hummed out of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters away. These behemoths were working on their own, or by teleoperation, and the teloperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safe. John followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish the miners at Bradbury Point had been—and there they had been able to see what was happening! He had to laugh at Nadia’s obliviousness. When the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehicles. It was quite a tour. Nadia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machinery. The great storm was now four months old, the longest in years—and it still showed no sign of ending. Temperatures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificial light. And dust was in everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generally. Plus frequent cases of frostnip. And computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation. Middays inside Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal-mine fires. She hated it.

John changed the subject. “What do you think of this space elevator?”

“Big.”

“But the effect, Nadia. The effect.”

“Who knows? You can never tell with a thing like that, can you.”

“It’ll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos station. She’ll have made her own bottleneck. That’s a lot of power.”

“That’s what Arkady says, but I don’t see why it can’t be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“That’s what Arkady says.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to be sensible.”

“Me too.”

“I know. Sometimes I think we’re the only two.”

“And Arkady?”

She laughed.

“But you two are a couple!”

“Yes, yes. Like you and Maya.”

“Touché.”

Nadia smiled briefly. “I try to make Arkady think about things. That’s the best I can do. We’re meeting at Acheron in a month, to take the treatment. Maya tells me it’s a good thing to do together.”

“I recommend it,” John said with a grin.

“And the treatment?”

“Beats the alternative, right?”

She chuckled. Then the ground growled through their boots, and they stiffened and jerked their heads around, looking for shadows in the murk. A black bulk like a moving hill appeared to their right. They ran to the side, stumbling and hopping over cobbles and debris, John wondering if this were another attack, Nadia rapping out commands over the common band, cursing the teleoperators for not keeping track of them on the IR. “Watch your screens, you lazy bastards!”

The ground stopped trembling. The black leviathan no longer moved. They approached it warily. A Brobdingnagian dump truck, on tracks. Built locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines; a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.

John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his forehead. They were safe. His pulse slowed. “Monsters like this are all over the planet,” he said to Nadia wonderingly. “Cutting, scraping, digging, filling, building. Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The