Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [243]
“How many are there?”
“A few thousand. Most live pretty close to Hell’s Gate. Upstream there are family homesteads and the like. And of course then the aquifer station at the head of the canyon, where a few hundred of them work.”
“It’s one of the biggest aquifers?”
“Yes. About three million cubic meters of water. So we’re pumping it out at a flow rate— well, you see it there. About a hundred thousand cubic meters a year.”
“So in thirty years, no more river?”
“Right. Although they could pump some water back upstream in a pipe, and let it out again. Or who knows, if the atmosphere gets humid enough, the slopes of Hadriaca might collect a snow-pack big enough to serve as a watershed. Then the river would fluctuate with the seasons, but that’s what rivers do, don’t they.”
Maya stared down at the scene, which looked so much like something from her youth, some river . . . the upper Rioni, in Georgia? The Colorado, seen once on a visit to America? She couldn’t recall. So fuzzy, all that life. “It’s beautiful. And so . . .” She shook her head; the sight had a quality she could not recall ever seeing before, as if it were out of time, a prophetic glimpse into a distant future.
“Here, let’s go up the road a bit farther and see Hadriaca.”
Maya nodded, and they returned to the car. Once or twice as they continued uphill, the road rose far enough above the foundation to give them another view down onto the canyon floor, and Maya saw that the little river continued to cut through rocks and vegetation. But Diana did not pause, and Maya saw no sign of settlements.
At the upper end of the tented canyon there was a big concrete block of a physical plant, housing the gas exchange mechanisms, and the pumping station. A forest of windmills stood on the rising slope to the north of this station, the big props all facing west and slowly spinning. Above that array rose the broad low cone of Hadriaca Patera, a volcano whose sides were unusually furrowed by a dense crisscrossing network of lava channels, the later ones cutting over the earlier ones. Now the winter’s snowpack had filled the channels, but not the exposed black rock between them, which had been blown clear by the strong winds accompanying the snowstorms. The result was an enormous black cone sticking into the bruised sky, festooned with hundreds of tangled white ribbons.
“Very handsome,” Maya said. “Can they see it from the canyon floor?”
“No. But a lot of them at this end work up on the rim anyway, at the well or the power station. So they see it every day.”
“These settlers— who are they?”
“Let’s go meet them and see,” Diana said. Maya nodded, enjoying Diana’s style, which still reminded her a bit of Ann. The sansei and yonsei were all strange to Maya, but Diana much less than most— a bit private perhaps, but compared to her more exotic contemporaries, and the Zygote kids, welcomely ordinary.
While Maya observed Diana, thinking this, Diana drove their rover into the canyon, down a steep road laid over a giant ancient talus slope near the head of Dao. This was where the original aquifer outburst had occurred, but there was very little chaotic terrain— just titanic talus slopes, permanently settled at the angle of repose.
The canyon floor itself was basically flat and unbroken. Soon they were driving down it, on a regolith track sprayed with a fixative. The track ran by the stream where it could. After about an hour’s driving they passed a green meadow, tucked into the lazy curve of a fat oxbow. In the center of this meadow, in a knot of piÃplusmn;on pine and aspen, huddled a gathering of low shingled roofs, with faint smoke rising from a solitary chimney.
Maya stared at the settlement (corral and pasture, truck garden, barn, bee boxes), marveling at its beauty, and its archaic wholeness, its seeming detachment from the great redrock desert plateau above the canyon— detachment from everything really, from history, from Time itself. A mesocosm. What did they think in those little buildings of Mars and Earth, and