Red Mars (73 page)

“And the cable itself?” Sasha said.

It got loud with cheers again, and it was Sax who answered her, in the next quiet moment. “Falling,” he said. He was at a computer console, typing as fast as he could, but Steve called out to him, “We have the figures on the descent if you want them. It’s pretty complex, a lot of partial differential equations.”

“I know,” Sax said.

“I can’t believe it,” said Simon. He still had his hands on Ann’s arm, and he looked around at the revelers, his face grim. “The impact’s going to kill a lot of people!”

“Probably not,” one of them replied. “And those it does kill will mostly be U.N. police, who have been using the elevator to get down and kill people here on the ground.”

“He’s probably been down a week or two,” Simon repeated emphatically to Ann, who was now white-faced.

“Maybe,” she said.

Some people heard this and quieted down. Others did not want to hear, and continued to celebrate.

“We didn’t know,” Steve said to Ann and Simon. His expression of triumph was gone, he was frowning with concern. “If we had known, I guess we could have tried to contact him. But we didn’t know. I’m sorry. Hopefully—” he swallowed—”Hopefully he wasn’t up there.”

Ann walked back to their table, sat down. Simon hovered anxiously at her side. Neither of them appeared to have heard anything Steve had said.

Radio traffic increased somewhat, as those in control of the remaining communications satellites got the news about the cable. Some of the celebrating rebels got busy monitoring and recording these messages; others continued to party.

Sax was still absorbed by the equations on the screen. “Going east,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Steve said. “It’ll make a big bow in the middle at first, as the lower part pulls down, and then the rest will follow.”

“How fast?”

“That’s hard to say, but we think about four hours for the first time around, and then an hour for the second time around.”

“Second time around!” Sax said.

“Well, you know, the cable is thirty-seven thousand kilometers long, and the circumference at the equator is twenty-one thousand. So it’ll go around almost twice.”

“The people on the equator had better move fast,” Sax said.

“Not exactly the equator,” Steve said. “The Phobos oscillation will cause it to swerve away from the equator to a certain extent. That’s actually the hardest part to calculate, because it depends where the cable was in its oscillation when it began to fall.”

“North or south?”

“We should know in the next couple of hours.”

The six travelers stared helplessly at the screen. It was quiet for the first time since their arrival. The screen showed nothing but stars. No vantage point existed from which to view the elevator’s fall; the cable, never visible for more than a fraction of its length to any single observer, would stay invisible to the end. Or visible only as a falling line of fire.

“So much for Phyllis’s bridge,” Nadia said.

“So much for Phyllis,” said Sax.

The Margaritifer group reestablished contact with the satellite transmissions they had located, and they found they were also able to poach a number of security satellites. From all these channels they were able to piece together a partial account of the cable’s fall. From Nicosia, a UNOMA team reported that the cable had fallen north of them, crumpling down vertically while yet still rapidly covering ground, as if it were cutting through the turning planet. Though north of them, they thought it was south of the equator. A staticky, panicky voice from Sheffield asked them for confirmation of this; the cable had already fallen across half the city and a line of tents east of it, all the way down the slope of Pavonis Mons and across east Tharsis, flattening a zone ten kilometers wide with its sonic boom; it would have been worse, but the air was so thin at that elevation that it did not carry much force. Now the survivors in Sheffield wanted to know whether to run south to escape the next wrapping, or try to get around the caldera to the north.

They got no reply. But more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channels that the cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact. Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.

There was an hour’s absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the static: “It’s exploding! It came down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped right under our feet! We’re having trouble with a leak here. We figure we’re about eighteen kilometers south of where it hit, and we’re twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hope. It was burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve still got afterimages in my vision, they’re bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched. . . Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he’s out there and saying it’s only about three meters high where he is. It’s soft regolith here, so the cable’s in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it’s so deep in places you could bury it and have a level surface. Those’ll be like fords, he says, because in other places it stands five or six meters high. I guess it’ll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It’ll be like the Great Wall of China.”

Then a call came in from Escalante Crater, which was right on the equator. They had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thing. The cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.

During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read. The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it— a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away— it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.

“Let’s go out and have a look,” Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann and Simon. A lot of them suited up and went outside. The travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the satellites. Clips shot from the night-side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.

Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about it. They had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in drones on the day side, showing a blackened steaming swath of desolation— the regolith blasted to the side in two long parallel ejecta dikes, banking a canal full of blackness, black all studded with a brecciated mix of stuff which got more exotic as the impact became more severe, until finally a drone camera sent along a clip of a horizon-to-horizon trench of what Sax said must be rough black diamonds.

The impact in the last half hour of the fall was so strong that everything far to north and south was flattened; people were saying that no one close enough actually to see the cable hit survived it, and most of the drone cameras had been smashed as well. For the final thousands of kilometers of the fall, there were no witnesses.

A late clip came in from the west side of Tharsis, from the second pass up that great slope. It was brief but powerful: a white blaze in the sky, and an explosion running up the west side of the volcano. Another shot, from a robot in West Sheffield, showed the cable blasting by just to the south; then an earthquake or sonic blast struck, and the whole rim district of Sheffield fell off the rim in a mass, dropping slowly to the caldera floor five kilometers below.

After that there were any number of video clips bouncing around the fragmented system, but they proved to be only repeats, or late arrivals, or film of the aftermath. And then the satellites began to shut down again.

It had been five hours since the fall began. The six travelers slumped in their chairs, watching or not watching the TV, too tired to feel anything, too tired to think.

“Well,” Sax said, “now we’ve got an equator just like the one I thought the Earth had when I was four years old. A big black line running right around the planet.”

Ann glared at Sax so bitterly that Nadia worried she would get up and hit him. But none of them moved. The images on the TV flickered, and the speakers hissed and crackled.

They saw the new equator line in person, the southern-most one anyway, on the second night of their flight toward Shalbatana Vallis. In the dark it was a broad straight black swath, leading them west. As they flew over it Nadia stared down somberly. It hadn’t been her project, but it was work, and work destroyed. A bridge brought down.

And that black line was also a grave. Not many people on the surface had been killed, except on the east side of Pavonis, but most if not all of those on the elevator must have been, and that in itself meant several thousand people. Most of whom had probably been all right until their part of the cable hit the atmosphere and burned up.

As they flew over the wreckage Sax intercepted a new video of the fall. Someone had already stitched up a chronological montage from all the images that had been sent onto the net live, or in the hours immediately afterward. In this montage, a very effective bit of work, the final clips were of the last section of the cable, exploding into the landscape. The impact zone was never anything but a moving white blob, like a flaw in the tape; no video was capable of registering such illumination. But as the montage continued the images had been slowed down and processed in every way possible, and one of these processed images was the final clip, an ultra-slow motion shot in which one could see details that would have been impossible to spot live. And so they could see that as the line had crossed the sky, the burning graphite had stripped away first, leaving an incandescent double helix of diamond, flowing majestically out of a sunset sky.

All a gravestone, of course, the people on it already dead at that point, burned away; but it was hard to think of them when the image was so utterly strange and beautiful, a vision of some kind of fantasy DNA, DNA from a macroworld made of pure light, plowing into our universe to germinate a barren planet. . . .

Nadia stopped watching the TV, moved into the copilot’s seat to help spot the other plane. All that long night she stared out the window, unable to sleep, unable to get the image of that diamond descent out of her mind’s eye. It was the longest night of their trip so far, for her. It seemed a kind of eternity before dawn came.

But time passed, another night of their lives, and at last dawn came. Soon after sunrise they landed at a pipeline service airstrip above Shalbatana, and stayed with a group of refugees who had been working on the pipeline, and were now caught there. This group had no political stance in common, and wanted only to survive until things got back to normal. Nadia found their attitude only partly refreshing, and tried to get them to go out and repair pipelines; but she did not think they were convinced.

That evening they took off once more, again laden with supplies given to them by their hosts. And the following dawn they landed on the abandoned airstrip of Carr Crater. Before eight, Nadia and Sax and Ann and Simon and Sasha and Yeli were out in walkers, and up to the crater rim.

The dome was gone. There had been a fire below. All the buildings were intact but scorched, and almost all their windows had been broken or melted. Plastic walls were bent or deformed; concrete was blackened. There were splashes of soot scattered everywhere, and piles of soot scattered here and there on the ground, little heaps of blackened carbon. Sometimes they looked like Hiroshima shadows. Yes, they were bodies. The outlines of people trying to claw down through the sidewalks. “The city’s air was hyperoxygenated,” Sax ventured. In such an atmosphere human skin and flesh were combustible and flammable. That was what had happened to those early Apollo astronauts, stuck in a test capsule filled with an atmosphere of pure oxygen; when the fire started they had burnt like paraffin.

And so here. Everyone on the streets had caught fire and rushed around like torches, one could see that by the placement of the soot piles.

The six old friends walked down together into the shadow of the eastern crater wall. Under a circular dark pink sky they stopped at the first clutch of blackened bodies, and then walked quickly on. They opened doors in buildings when it was possible, and knocked on all the jammed doors, and listened at the walls with a stethoscope device Sax had brought along. No sound but their own heartbeats, loud and fast at the backs of their coppery throats.

Nadia stumbled around, her breath harsh and ragged. She forced herself to look at the bodies she passed, trying to estimate heights from the black piles of carbon. Like Hiroshima, or Pompeii. People were taller now. They still burnt to the bone, though, and even the bones were thin black sticks.

When she came to a likely sized pile, she stood staring at it. After a while she approached, and found the right arm, and scraped with her four-fingered glove at the back of the charred wristbones, looking for the dotcode tag. She found it, cleaned it. Ran her laser over it like a grocery clerk pricing goods. Emily Hargrove.