tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.
At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unself-conscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered microorganisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the U.N. Nadia herself found the idea alarming; it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing. Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts, and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick, and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.
When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15 degrees Centigrade. It felt great.
The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two-and-a-half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium-and-bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows; lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.
As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera: underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown—storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed—the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archaeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.
More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia, she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much with plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, and kitchens. Nadia’s team had all the fixtures and tools, and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing