Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,90

outrageously at this. “So it was pretty considerate of them after all!”

“Fuck.”

The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed the things. Someone in communications, probably … there were quite a few who must have known.

“What about Hiroko?” Arkady asked.

They couldn’t decide. They didn’t know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn’t explain why. “I suppose,” she said, thinking about it, “I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and … follow her. Even Ann, in a way. Although Ann will hate this when she hears about it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that Hiroko would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her. They probably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!”

“Hmm….”

“So they probably got her agreement for the idea. Maybe I should even say her permission.”

Arkady nodded. “I see your point.”

On and on they talked, hashing over every point of it. The land they passed over, flat and immobile, looked different to Nadia now. It was seeded, fertilized; it was going to change, now, inevitably. They talked about the other parts of Sax’s terraforming plans, giant orbiting mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the dawn and dusk terminators, carbon distributed over the polar caps, areothermal heat, the ice asteroids. It was all really going to happen, it seemed. The debate had been bypassed; they were going to change the face of Mars.

The second evening after their momentous discovery, as they were cooking dinner in a crater’s lee anchorage, they got a call from Underhill, relayed off one of the comm satellites. “Hey you two!” John Boone said by way of greeting. “We’ve got a problem!”

“You’ve got a problem,” Nadia replied.

“Why, something wrong out there?”

“No no.”

“Well good, because really it’s you guys who have the problem, and I wouldn’t want you to have more than one! A dust storm has started down in the Claritas Fossae region, and it’s growing, and coming north at a good rate. We think it’ll reach you in a day or so.”

“Isn’t it early for dust storms?” Arkady asked.

“Well no, we’re at Ls = 240, which is pretty much the usual season for it. Southern spring. Anyway, there it is, and it’s coming your way.”

He sent a satellite photo of the storm, and they studied their TV screen closely. The region south of Tharsis was now obscured by an amorphous yellow cloud.

“We’d better take off for home right now,” Nadia said after studying the photo.

“At night?”

“We can run the props on batteries tonight, and recharge the batteries tomorrow morning. After that we may not have much sunlight, unless we can get above the dust.”

After some discussion with John, and then with Ann, they cast off. The wind was pushing them east-northeast, and on this heading they would pass just to the south of Olympus Mons. After that their hope was to get around the north flank of Tharsis, which would protect them from the dust storm for at least a while.

It seemed louder flying at night. The wind’s rush over the fabric of the bag was a fluctuating moan, the sound of their engines a pitiful little hum. They sat in the cockpit, lit only by dim green instrument lights, and talked in low voices as they moved over the black land below. They had about 3,000 kilometers to go before reaching Underhill; that was about 300 hours of flying time. If they went round the clock, it would be twelve days or so. But the storm, if it grew in the usual pattern, would reach them long before then. After that … it was hard to tell how it would go. Without sunlight the props would drain the batteries, and then—“Can we just float on the wind?” Nadia said. “Use the props for occasional directional nudges?”

“Maybe. But these things are designed with the props as part of the lift, you know.”

“Yeah.” She made coffee and brought mugs of it up to the cockpit. They sat and drank, and looked out at the black landscape, or the green sweep of the little radar screen. “We probably ought to drop everything we don’t need. Especially