Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [244]
Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites. The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and green-house-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feed-stocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.
One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.
Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”
“Yes,” Zo said.
“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.
“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.
“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.
The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.
• • •
They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled