Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [248]
And this gigantic project was perfectly natural work to them. At one stop on the piste Maya and Diana got out and drove with some friends of Diana’s out onto one of the ridges of the Zea Dorsa, which ran out onto the southeast quarter of the basin floor. Now most of these dorsa were peninsulas running out under another ice lobe, and Maya looked down at the crevasse-riven glaciers to each side and tried to imagine a time when the surface of the sea would in fact lie hundreds of meters overhead, so that these craggy old basalt ridges would be nothing but blips on some ship’s sonar, home to starfish and shrimp and krill and extensive varieties of engineered bacteria. That time was not far off, amazing though it was to realize it. But Diana and her friends, these in particular of Greek ancestry, or was it Turkish— these young Martian dowsers were not awed by this imminent future, nor by their project’s vastness. It was their work, their life— to them it was human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren’t even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer— they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing.
“This is a stupendous act!” Maya told them sharply. “This is magnitudes bigger than anything people have been able to do before! This sea is going to be the size of the Caribbean! There’s never been any project anything like this on Earth—no project! Not even close!”
A pleasant oval-faced woman with beautiful skin laughed. “I don’t give a damn about Earth,” she said.
• • •
The new piste curved around the southern rim, crossing transversely some steep ridges and ravines which were called the Axius Valles. These corrugations ran from the rim’s rough hills down into the basin, forcing the piste viaduct to alternate between great arching bridges and deep cuts, or tunnels. The train they had boarded after the Zea Dorsa was a short private one belonging to the Odessa office, so Maya got it to stop at most of the small stations along this stretch, and she got out to meet and talk with the dowsing and construction crews. At one stop they were all Earthborn emigrants, and to Maya much more comprehensible than the blithe natives— normal-sized people, staggering around amazed and enthusiastic, or dismayed and complaining, in any case aware of how strange their enterprise was. They took Maya down a tunnel in a ridge, and it turned out that the ridge was a lava tunnel running down from Amphitrites Patera, its cylindrical cavity much the same size as Dorsa Brevia’s, but tilted at a sharp angle. The engineers were pumping the Amphitrites aquifer’s water into it, and using it as their pipeline to the basin floor. So now, as the grinning Earthborn hydrologists showed her as she stepped into an observation gallery cut into the side of the lava tube, black water was racing down the bottom of the huge tunnel, barely covering its bottom even at 200 cubic meters a second, the roar of its splashing echoing in the empty cylinder of basalt. “Isn’t it great?” the emigrants demanded, and Maya nodded, happy to be with people whose reactions she could understand. “Just like a damn big storm drain, isn’t it?”
But back at the train, the young natives nodded at Maya’s exclamations— lava tube pipeline, of course— very big, yes, it would be wouldn’t it— saved her some pipe for the less fortunate operations, yes? And then they went back to discussing some people they knew that Maya had never heard of.
• • •
As the train continued they rounded the southwest arc of the basin, and the piste led them north. They rode over four or five more