Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [239]
So she had her work, and her apartment, which she filled with used furniture and hanging kitchen implements and potted plants. And Odessa proved to be a pleasant town. It was built principally of yellow stone and brown tile, and placed on a part of the slope of the basin rim that curved inward more than usual, so that every part of town looked down on the center of the dry waterfront, and every part had a great view over the basin to the south. The lower districts were devoted to shops and business and parks, the higher ones to residential neighborhoods and garden strips. The town lay just above 30° latitude in the south, and so she had gone from autumn to spring, with the big hot sun shining down the stepped streets of the upper town, and melting away the winter’s snow from the ice mass’s edge, and the peaks of the Hellespontus Mountains on their western horizon. A handsome little town.
And about a month after her arrival, Michel came down from Sabishii, and took over the apartment right next door to hers. At her suggestion he installed a connecting door between their two living rooms, and after that they wandered between the two apartments as if in one, living their lives in a conjugal domesticity which Maya had never experienced before, a normality that she found very restful. She did not love Michel passionately, but he was a good friend, a good lover, and a good therapist, and having him around was like having an anchor inside her, keeping her from flying away into exhilarations of hydrology or revolutionary fervor, also from sinking too deep into terrible abysses of political despair or personal repugnance. Cycling up and down the sine wave of her moods was a helpless oscillation that she hated, and anything Michel did in the way of amplitude modulation she appreciated. They kept no mirrors in the apartments, which along with clomipramine helped to dampen the cycle. But the bottoms of pots, and the windows at night, gave her the bad news if she cared to have it. As often enough she did.
With Spencer down the hall, the building had just the slightest feeling of Underhill to it, reinforced occasionally by visitors from out of town, using their apartment in its capacity as safe house. When others of the First Hundred came through, they would go out and walk the waterless waterfront, looking at the ice horizon and exchanging the news like old folks anywhere. Marsfirst, led by Kasei and Dao, was becoming more and more radical. Peter was working on the elevator, drawn like a moth back to its moon. Sax had stopped his mad ecotage campaign for the time being, thank God, and was concentrating on his industrial effort in Vishniac mohole, building surface-to-space missiles and the like. Maya shook her head at this news. It was not military might that would do it for them; on that issue she sided with Nadia and Nirgal and Art. They would need something else, something she could not yet visualize. And this gap in her thinking was one of the things that would start her downward in the sine wave of her moods, one of the things that made her mad.
• • •
Her work coordinating the various aspects of the flooding project began to get interesting. She trammed or walked down to the offices in the center of town, and there worked hard to process all the reports sent in by the many dowsing crews and drilling operations— all full of glowing estimates of the amounts of water they might put into the basin, and all accompanied by requests for more equipment and personnel, until altogether they added up to much more than Deep Waters could supply. Judging the competing claims was difficult from the office, and her technical staff usually just rolled