Blue Mars (37 page)

Nadia dealt with all these issues in half-hour increments
scheduled by Art, and so the days passed in a blur. It got very difficult to
stay aware that some of these matters were much more important than others. The
Chinese, for instance, would flood Mars with immigrants if they got half a
chance . . . and the Red ecoteurs were getting more outrageous; there had even
been death threats made against Nadia herself. She now had escorts when she
left her apart> ment, and the apartment was discreetly guarded. Nadia
ignored that, and continued to work on the issues, and to work the council to
keep a majority on her side in the votes that mattered to her. She established
good working relations with Zeyk and Mikhail, and even with Marion. Things
never went quite right with Ariadne again, however, which was a lesson learned
twice; but learned well because of that.

So she did the job. But all the time she wanted off Pa-vonis. Art
saw her patience get shorter by the day; she knew by his look that she was
becoming crochety, crabby, dictatorial; she knew it, but could not help it.
After meetings with frivolous or obstructionist people she often unleashed a
torrent of vicious abuse, in a steady low cursing voice that Art obviously
found unnerving. Delegations would come in demanding an end to the death penalty,
or the right to build in the Olympus Mons caldera, or a free eighth spot on the
executive council, and as soon as the door closed Nadia would say, “Well
there’s a bunch of fucking idiots for you, stupid fools never even thought
about tie votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else’s life
abrogates your own right to live,” and so on. The new police captured a group
of Red ecoteurs who had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process
killed a security guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they
had: “Execute them!” she exclaimed. “Look, you kill someone, you lose your
right to live. Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life—make them pay
in a way that really gets the rest of the Reds’ attention.”

“Well,” Art said uneasily. “Well, after all.” But on she raged.
She couldn’t stop until she felt less angry. And Art could see that it was
getting harder every time.

Flailing a bit himself, he recommended she start another
conference, like the one in Sabishii she had missed; and make sure she made
this one. Organizing the efforts of different organizations for a single cause;
this was not really building, Nadia thought, but it looked like it would have
to do.

The fight in Cairo had gotten her thinking about the hy-drological
cycle, and what would happen when the ice began to melt. If they could set up
some kind of plan for a water cycle, even only an approximation, then it might
go far toward reducing conflicts over water. So she decided to see what could
be done.

As often happened these days when she thought about global issues,
she found herself wanting to talk to Sax about it. The travelers to Earth were
almost back now, close enough that transmission delay was insignificant, it was
almost like having a normal wrist conversation. So Nadia spent evenings talking
with Sax about terraforming. More than once he surprised her utterly; he did
not hold the opinions she had imagined he would hold, he seemed always to be
changing. “I want to keep things wild,” he said one night.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

His face took on the puzzled expression it wore when he was
thinking hard. It was considerably longer than the transmission delay before he
replied: “Many things. It’s a complicated word. But—I mean—I want to maintain
the primal landscape, as much as possible.”

Nadia could censor out her laughter at this; but still Sax said,
“What do you find amusing?”

“Oh nothing. It’s just you sound like, I don’t know, like some of
the Reds. Or the people in Christianopolis, they’re not Reds, but they said
almost the same thing to me, last week. They want to keep the primal landscape
of the far south preserved. I’ve helped them to set up a conference to talk
about southern watersheds.”

“I thought you were working on greenhouse gases?”

“They won’t let me work, I have to be president. But I am going to
go to this conference.”

“Good idea.”

The Japanese settlers in Messhi Hoko (which meant “self-sacrifice
for the sake of the group”) came to the council to demand that more land and
water be dedicated to their tent high on south Tharsis. Nadia walked out on
them, and flew with Art down to Christianopolis, in the far south.

The little town (and it seemed very little after Sheffield and
Cairo) was set in Phillips Rim Crater Four, at latitude sixty-seven degrees
south. During the Year Without Summer the far south had experienced many severe
storms, dropping about four meters of new snow, an unprecedented amount; the
previous record for a year had been less than one. Now it was Ls 281, just
after perihelion, and high summer in the south. And the various abatement
strategies for avoiding an ice age seemed to be working well; most of the new
snow had melted in a hot spring, and now there were round lakes on every crater
floor. The pond in the center of Christianopolis was about three meters deep,
and three hundred meters across; this was fine with the Christians, as it gave
them a nice park pond. But if the same thing happened every winter—and the
meteorologists believed that the coming winters would drop even more snow, and
the coming summers get ever warmer—then their town would quickly be inundated
by snowmelt, and Phillips Rim Crater Four become a lake full to the brim. And
this was true for craters all over Mars.

The conference in Christianopolis had been convened to discuss
strategies to deal with this situation. Nadia had done what she could to get
influential people down to it, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and
engineers, and the possibility of Sax, whose return was imminent. The problem of
crater flooding was to be only the initial point of discussion for the whole
question of watersheds, and the planetary hydrological cycle itself.

The crater problem specifically was to be solved as Nadia had
predicted: plumbing. They would treat the craters like bathtubs, and drill
drains to empty them. The brecciated pans under the dusty crater floors were
extremely hard, but they could be tunneled through robotically; then install
pumps and filters and pump the water out, keeping a central pond or lake if one
wanted, or draining it dry.

But what were they going to do with the water they pumped out? The
southern highlands were everywhere lumpy, shattered, pocked, cracked, hillocky,
scarped, slumped, fissured, and fractured; when analyzed as potential watersheds,
they were hopeless. Nothing led anywhere; there was no downhill for long. The
entire south was a plateau three to four kilometers above the old datum, with
only local bumps and dips. Never had Nadia seen more clearly the difference
between this highland and any continent on Earth. On Earth, tectonic movement
had pushed up mountains every few-score million years, and then water had run
down these fresh slopes, following the paths of least resistance back to the
sea, carving the fractal vein patterns of watersheds everywhere. Even the dry
basin regions on Earth were seamed with arroyos and dotted with playas. In the
Martian south, however, the meteoric bombardment of the Noachian had hammered
the land ferociously, leaving craters and ejecta everywhere; and then the
battered irregular wasteland had lain there for two billion years under the
ceaseless scouring of the dusty winds, tearing at every flaw. If they poured
water onto this pummeled land they would end up with a crazy quilt of short
streams, running down local inclines to the nearest rimless crater. Hardly any
streams would make it to the sea in the north, or even into the Hellas or
Argyre basins, both of which were ringed by mountain ranges of their own
ejecta.

There were, however, a few exceptions to this situation. The
Noachian Age had been followed by a brief “warm wet period” in the late
Hesperian, a period perhaps as short as a hundred million years, when a thick
warm CO2 atmosphere had allowed liquid water to run on the surface, carving some
river channels down the gentle tilts of the plateau, between crater aprons
diverting them this way and that. And these watercourses had of course remained
after the atmosphere had frozen out, empty arroyos gradually widened by the
wind. These fossil riverbeds, like Nirgal Vallis, Warrego Valles, Protva
Valles, Patana Valles, or Oltis Vallis, were narrow sinuous canyons, true
riverine canyons rather than grabens or fossae. Some of them even had immature
tributary systems. So efforts to design a macro-watershed system for the south
naturally used these canyons as primary watercourses, with water pumped to the
head of every tributary. Then there were also a number of old lava channels
that could easily become rivers, as the lava, like the water, had tended to follow
the path of least resistance downhill. And there were a number of tilted graben
fractures and fissures, as at the foot of the Eridania Scopulus, that could
likewise be turned to use.

In the conference, big globes of Mars were marked up daily to
display different water regimes. There were also rooms full of 3-D topo maps,
with groups standing around different watershed systems, arguing their
advantages and disadvantages, or simply contemplating them, or fiddling with
the controls to change them, restlessly, from one pattern to another. Nadia
wandered the rooms looking at these hydrographies, learning much about the
southern hemisphere that she had never known. There was a six-kilometer-high
mountain near Richardson Crater, in the far south. The south polar cap itself
was quite high. Dorsa Brevia, on the other hand, crossed a depression that
looked like a ray cut out from the Hellas impact, a valley so deep that it
ought to become a lake, an idea that the Dorsa Brev-ians naturally did not
like. And certainly the area could be drained if they cared to do it. There
were scores of variant plans, and every single system was strange looking to
Nadia. Never had she seen so clearly how different a gravity-driven fractal was
from impact randomness. In the inchoate meteoric landscape, almost anything was
possible, because nothing was obvious—nothing except for the fact that in any
possible system, some canals and tunnels would have to be built. Her new finger
itched with the desire to get out there and run a bulldozer or a tunnel borer.

Gradually the most efficient, or logical, or aesthetically
pleasing plans began to emerge from the proposals, the best for each region
being patched together, in a kind of mosaic. In the eastern quadrant of the
deep south, streams would tend to run toward Hellas Basin and through a couple
of gorges into the Hellas Sea, which was fine. Dorsa Brevia accepted a plan to
have their town’s lava tunnel ridge become a kind of dam, crossing a watershed
transversely so that there was a lake above it and a river below it, coursing
down to Hellas. Around the south polar cap, snowfall would remain frozen, but
most of the meteorologists predicted that when things stabilized there wouldn’t
be much snowfall on the pole, that it would become a cold desert like
Antarctica. Eventually of course they would end up with a largish ice cap, and
then part of it would pool down into the huge depression under the Promethei
Rupes, another partially erased old impact basin. If they didn’t want too large
of a southern ice cap, they would have to melt and pump some of the water back
north, into the Hellas Sea perhaps. They would have to do some similar pumping
in Argyre Basin, if they decided to keep Argyre dry. A group of moderate Red
lawyers was even now insisting on this before the GEQ arguing that one of the
two great dune-filled impact basins on the planet ought to be preserved. It
seemed certain this claim would receive a favorable judgment from the court,
and so all the watersheds around Argyre had to take this into account.

Sax had designed his own southern watershed plan, which he sent to
the conference from their rocket as it aero-braked into orbital insertion, to
be considered with all the rest. It minimized surface water, emptied most
craters, used tunnels extensively, and channelized almost all drained water
into the fossil river canyons. In his plan vast areas of the south would stay
arid desert, making for a hemisphere of dry tableland, cut deeply by a few
narrow river-bottomed canyons. “Water is returned north,” he explained to Nadia
in a call, “and if you stay up on the plateaus, it will look like it always
did, almost.”

So that Ann would like it, he was saying.

“Good idea,” Nadia said.

And indeed Sax’s plan was not that much different than the
consensus being hammered out by the conference. Wet north, dry south; one more
dualism to add to the great dichotomy. And to have the old river canyons
running with water again was satisfying. A good-looking plan, given the
terrain.

But the days were long gone when Sax or anyone else could choose a
terraforming project and then go out and do it. Nadia could see that Sax hadn’t
fully understood this. Ever since the beginning, when he had slipped
algae-filled windmills into the field without the knowledge or approval of
anyone but his accomplices, he had been working on his own. It was an ingrained
habit of mind, and now he seemed to forget the review process that any
watershed plan was going to have to go through in the environmental courts. But
the process was there, inescapable now, and because of the grand gesture, half
the fifty GEC justices were Reds of one shade or another. Any watershed
proposal from a conference including Sax Russell, even as a teleparticipant,
was going to get close and suspicious scrutiny.