Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,73
many trips as anyone, with your position.”
Ann looked away. “It just doesn’t seem like enough, sometimes.”
Nadia stared at her. “Well. Ann. It’s radiation keeping us underground more than anything. What you’re saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go away. Which means thickening the atmosphere, which means terraforming.”
“I know.” Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten. “Don’t you think I know?” She stood and waved the hammer. “But it isn’t right! I mean I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it—I destroy what it is, what I love in it. This road we made, it hurts me to see it! And base camp is like an open pit mine, in the middle of a desert never touched since time began. So ugly, so … I don’t want to do that to all of Mars, Nadia, I don’t. I’d rather die. Let the planet be, leave it wilderness and let radiation do what it will. It’s only a statistical matter anyway, I mean if it raises my chance of cancer to one in ten, then nine times out of ten I’m all right!”
“Fine for you,” Nadia said. “Or for any individual. But for the group, for all the living things here—the genetic damage, you know. Over time it would cripple us. So, you know, you can’t just think of yourself.”
“Part of a team,” Ann said dully.
“Well, you are.”
“I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”
On the sixty-second day of their expedition they saw plumes of smoke over the southern horizon, strands of brown, gray, white and black rising and mixing, billowing into a flat-topped mushroom cloud that wisped off to the east. “Home again home again,” Phyllis said cheerily.
Their tracks from the trip out, half-filled by dust, led them back toward the smoke: through the freight-landing zone, across ground crisscrossed with treadmarks, across ground trampled to light red sand, past ditches and mounds, pits and piles, and finally to the great raw mound of the permanent habitat, a square earthen redoubt now topped by a silvery network of magnesium beams. That sight piqued Nadia’s interest, but as they rolled on in she could not help noticing the litter of frames, crates, tractors, cranes, spare-part dumps, garbage dumps, windmills, solar panels, water towers, concrete roads leading east, west and south, air miners, the low buildings of the alchemists’ quarter, their smokestacks emitting the plumes they had seen; the stacks of glass, the round cones of gray gravel, the big mounds of raw regolith next to the cement factory, the small mounds of regolith scattered everywhere else. It had the disordered, functional, ugly look of Chelyabinsk-65 or any of the rest of the other Stalinist heavy-industry cities in the Urals, or the oil camps of Yakut. They rolled through a good five kilometers of this devastation, and as they did Nadia did not dare to look at Ann, who sat silently beside her, emanating disgust and loathing. Nadia too was shocked, and surprised at the change in herself; this had all seemed perfectly normal before the trip, indeed had pleased her very much. Now she was slightly nauseated, and afraid Ann might do something violent, especially if Phyllis said anything more. But Phyllis kept her mouth shut, and they rolled into the tractor lot outside the northern garage and stopped. The expedition was over.
One by one they plugged the rovers into the wall of the garage and crawled through the doors. Familiar faces crowded around, Maya and Frank and Michel and Sax and John and Ursula and Spencer and Hiroko and all the rest, like brothers and sisters really, but so many of them that Nadia was overwhelmed, she shriveled like a touched anemone, and had trouble talking. She wanted to grasp something she could feel escaping her, she looked around for Ann and Simon, but they were trapped by another group and seemed stunned, Ann stoical, a mask of herself.