Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [156]
Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast table. “Well,” he said once, after she explained what was bothering her, “power is power.” He was thinking hard. “You’re the first president of Mars. So in a way you define the office. Maybe you should declare you’re only going to work the one month and not the two months, and delegate the two months to your staff. Something like that.”
She stared at him, mouth full of toast.
Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again, joining a caravan of people working their way from crater to crater, installing drainage systems. Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter of picking the right angle to emerge from the crater apron, and then setting the robots to work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Agassiz, Heaviside, Bianchini, Lau, Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier, Suess . . . they plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones, although the craters were taking on names even faster than they drilled them: 85 South, Too Dark, Fool’s Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole, Proudhon, Bellamy, Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon. The migration from one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around the south polar cap during the underground years; except now everything was out in the open, and through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team luxuriated in the sun, in the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled across rough frozen bogs brilliant with sunny meltwater and meadow grass, and always of course they crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into the light, ring after ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid watershed pipes, and attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators whenever the rock had any gas feedstocks in it.
But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia meant. She missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been hand labor, but one’s touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and the repeated gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level of engagement than this “work,” which consisted of talking to AIs and then walking around and watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot diggers, city-block-sized mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth that grew back like sharks’ teeth— everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys stronger than the elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself. It just wasn’t what she had in mind.
5
Try again. She went through another cycle; return to Sheffield, engagement in the council work, increasing disgust, merging with despair; look around for anything to get her out of it; notice some likely project and seize on it. Run off to check it out. Like Art had said, she could call her own shots. There was that in power too.
The next time out it was soil that drew her. “Air, water, earth,” Art said. “Next it’ll be forest fires, eh?”
But she had heard that there were scientists in Bogdanov Vishniac trying to manufacture soil, and this interested her. So off she went, flying south to Vishniac, where she had not been for years. Art accompanied her. “It’ll be interesting to see how the old underground cities adapt, now that there’s no need to hide.”
“I don’t see why anyone stays down here, to tell you the truth,” Nadia said as they flew down into the rugged southern polar region. “They’re so far south their winters last forever. Six months with no sun at all. Who would stay?”
“Siberians.”
“No Siberian in his right mind would move here. They know better.”
“Laplanders, then. Inuit. People who like the poles.”
“I suppose.”
As it turned out, no one in Bogdanov Vishniac seemed to mind the winters. They had redistributed their mohole mound in a ring around the mohole itself, creating an immense circular amphitheater facing down into the hole. This terraced amphitheater was to be the surface Vishniac. In the