Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [249]
Diana nodded. “Nice sailing.”
As they came around the last curve of their circumnavigation, the piste had to cross the Niesten Glacier, the frozen remainder of the massive outburst that had drowned Low Point in ‘61. There was no easy way to make this crossing, as the glacier was thirty-five kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and no one had yet marshaled the time and equipment to build a suspension bridge over it. Instead several support pylons had been rammed through the ice and secured in the rock below. These pylons had prows like icebreakers on their upstream side, and on their downstream side there was attached a kind of pontoon bridge, which rode over the passing ice of the glacier using cushioned smart pads that expanded or contracted to compensate for drops and rises in the ice.
The train slowed for the crossing of this pontoon, and as they glided over it Maya looked upstream. She could see where the glacier fell out of the gap between two fanglike peaks, very near Niesten Crater. Never-identified rebels had broken open the Niesten aquifer with a thermonuclear explosion, and released one of the five or six largest outbursts of ‘61, almost as big as the one that had harrowed the Marineris canyons. The ice under them was still a bit radioactive. But now it lay under the bridge frozen and still, the aftermath of that terrible flood nothing more than an astonishingly broken field of ice blocks. Beside her Diana said something about climbers who liked to ascend the icefalls on the glacier for the fun of it. Maya shuddered with disgust. People were so crazy. She thought of Frank, carried away by the Marineris flood, and cursed out loud.
“You don’t approve?” Diana asked.
She cursed again.
An insulated pipeline ran down the midline of the ice, under the pontoon and down toward Low Point. They were still draining the bottom of the broken aquifer. Maya had overseen the building of Low Point, she had lived there for years and years, with an engineer whose name she could not now recall— and now they were pumping up what was left at the bottom of Niesten aquifer, to add to the water over that drowned city. The great outburst of ‘61 was now reduced to a slender pipeline’s worth of water, channelized and regulated.
Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen . . . ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer— drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.
4
“Things are changing,” she told Michel and Spencer. “I don’t think we understand things anymore.”
She settled back into her life in Odessa, happy to be back but also disturbed, inquisitive, seeing everything anew. On the wall above her desk at the office she kept a drawing by Spencer, of an alchemist flinging a big volume into a turbulent sea. At the bottom he had written, “I’ll drown my book.”
She left the apartment every morning early, and walked down the corniche to the Deep Waters offices near the dry waterfront, next to another Praxis firm called Séparation de L’Atmosphère. There she worked through the days directing the synthesis team, coordinating the field units, and concentrating