so tired, why they had been so short with her and with each other. Michel had been unable to locate the last three caches they had passed—buried or drowned, it didn’t matter. The half-rations were 1,200 calories a day, much less than they were expending. Lack of food, lack of sleep: and then, for Ann at least, the same old depression, persistent as death, rising in her like a flood, like a black slurry of mud, steam, ice, shit. Doggedly she kept at the work, but her attention kept blinking out and the glossolalia kept returning, washing everything away in the white noise of despair.
The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer. The following day they seemed completely stopped, the boulders arrayed across the bench like tank stoppers in Big Man’s Maginot Line. It was a perfect fractal plane, Sax remarked, of about 2.7 dimensions. No one bothered to answer him.
Kasei, wandering on foot, found a passage right down on the bank of the flood. For the moment the whole visible expanse of the deluge was frozen, as it had been for the last couple of days. It stretched out to the horizon, a jumbled surface like Earth’s Arctic Sea, only much dirtier, a great mix of black and red and white lumps. The ice just offshore was flat, however, and in many places clear. They could look down into it, and see that it appeared to be only a couple of meters deep, and frozen right down to the bottom. So they drove down to this icy shore and ran along it, and when rocks in the way forced her to, Ann put the left wheels of the rover out onto the ice, and then the entire car; and it held like any other surface. Nadia and Maya snorted at the others’ nervousness about this course: “We spent all winter driving on the rivers in Siberia,” Nadia said. “They were the best roads we had.”
So for an entire day Ann drove along the ragged edge of the flood, and out onto its surface, and they made 160 kilometers, their best day in two weeks.
Near sunset it began to snow. The west wind poured out of Coprates, driving big gritty clumps of snow past them as if they weren’t moving at all. They came to a fresh-slide zone, which spilled right out onto the ice of the flood. Big boulders scattered over the ice gave it the air of an abandoned neighborhood. The light was dusky gray. They needed a foot guide through this maze, and in an exhausted conference Frank volunteered, and went out to do the job. At this point he was the only one of them with any strength left, more even than the younger Kasei; still boiling with the heat of his anger, a breeder fuel that would never give out.
Slowly he walked ahead of the car, testing routes and returning, either shaking his head or waving Ann on. Around them thin veils of frost steam lofted into the falling snow, the two mixing and gusting off together on the powerful evening wind, off into the murk. Watching the dark spectacle of one hard gust, Ann misread the configuration of the ice’s meeting with the ground, and the rover ran up onto a round rock right at the frozen shoreline, lifting the left rear wheel off the ground. Ann gunned the front wheels to roll them over the rock, but they dug into a patch of sand and snow, and suddenly both rear wheels were barely touching the ground, while the front two merely spun in the holes they had dug. She had run the rover aground.
It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Frank shouted over the intercom. Ann jumped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank’s biting vehemence. “Get going!” he shouted.
“I ran it onto a rock,” she said.
“Damn you! Why don’t you watch where you’re going! Here, stop the wheels, stop them! I’m gonna put the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There’s another surge coming!”
“Frank!” Maya cried. “Get inside!”
“Soon as I get the fucking pads down! Be ready to go!”
The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into