if they ran into John. They went to the parking lot and checked out a roadrunner. Michel drove the little jeep and listened to Maya talk. Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or—was this better or worse?—as if you were engaged in telepathy.
The cement road was smooth, and he drove at the roadrunner’s top speed of sixty kph. He could just feel the rush of thin air against his faceplate. All that CO2 that Sax so wanted to scrub from the atmosphere. Sax would need powerful scrubbers, even more powerful than the lichens; he needed forests, enormous multilayered halophilic rain forests, trapping enormous loads of carbon in wood, leaves, mulch, peat. He needed peat bogs a hundred meters deep, rain forests a hundred meters tall. He had said as much. It marked Ann’s face just to hear the sound of his voice.
Fifteen minutes’ drive and they came to Nadia’s arcade. The site was still under construction and looked raw and messy, like Underhill in the beginning but on a larger scale. A long mound of burgundy rubble had been excavated from the trench, which ran east and west like Big Man’s grave.
They stood at one end of the great trench. Thirty meters deep, thirty wide, a kilometer long. The south side of the trench was now a wall of glass, and the north side of the trench was covered with arrays of filtering mirrors, alternating with wall-mesocosms, Mars jars or terrariums, all of them together a colorful mix, like a tapestry of past and future. Most of the terrariums were filled with spruce trees and other flora that made it resemble the great world-wrapping Terran forest of the sixtieth latitude. Like Nadia Cherneshevsky’s old home in Siberia, in other words. Was this perhaps a sign that she had a touch of his disease? And could he prevail on her to build a Mediterranean?
Nadia was up working on a bulldozer. A woman with her own kind of viriditas. She stopped and came over to talk briefly with them. The project was coming along, she told them calmly. Amazing what one could do with the robot vehicles that were still being sent up from Earth. The concourse was done, and planted with a variety of trees, including a strain of dwarf sequoia already thirty meters tall, nearly as tall as the whole arcade. The three stacked rows of Underhill-style vaulted chambers behind the concourse were installed, their insulation in place. The settlement had just the other day been sealed and heated and pressurized, so that it was possible to work inside it without suits. The three floors were stacked on each other in ever smaller arches, reminding Michel of the Pont du Gard; of course all the architecture here was Roman in origin, so that should not be a surprise. The arches were wider, however, and slighter. Airier in the tolerance of the g.
Nadia went back to work. Such a calm person. Stabile, the very opposite of labile. Low-keyed, private, inward. Couldn’t be less like her old friend Maya, it was good for Maya to be around her. Opposite end of the scale, keep her from flying away. Set an example for her. As in this encounter, where Maya was matching Nadia’s calm tone. And when Nadia went back to work, Maya retained some of that serenity. “I’ll miss Underhill when we move out here,” she said. “Won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Michel said. “This will be a lot sunnier.” All three floors of the new habitat would open onto the tall concourse, and have terraced broad balconies on the sunny side of the rooms, so that even though the whole structure faced north and was buried deeper than Underhill, the heliotropic filtered mirrors on the other side of the trench would pour light onto them from dawn to dusk. “I’ll be happy to move. We’ve needed the space from the beginning.”
“But we won’t get all this space to ourselves. There’ll be new people here.”
“Yes. But that will give us space of a different kind.”
She looked thoughtful. “Like John and Frank leaving.”
“Yes. But even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” In a larger society, he told her, the claustrophobic village atmosphere of Underhill would begin to dissipate; this would give a better perspective on certain aspects of