Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [280]
Nanao told her after one such meeting that Nadia was making similar appeals in South Fossa, and that Sax’s team was begging them for more time; so there was some agreement on the policy, at least among the old-timers. And Nirgal was working closely with Nadia, supporting the policy as well. So it was the more radical groups that they would have to work hardest to rein in, and here Coyote had the most influence. He wanted to visit some of the Red refuges in person, and Maya and Michel went with him, to catch a ride up to Burroughs.
The region between Sabishii and Burroughs was saturated with crater impacts, so that they wound through the nights between flat-topped circular hills, stopping every dawn at small rim shelters crowded with Reds who were none too hospitable to Maya and Michel. But they listened to Coyote very attentively, and traded news with him about scores of places Maya had never heard of. On the third night of this they came down the steep slope of the Great Escarpment, through an archipelago of mesa islands, and abruptly onto the smooth plain of Isidis. They could see down the slope of the basin for a long way, all the way out to where a mound like the Sabishiians’ mohole mound ran across the land, in a great curve from Du Martheray Crater on the Great Escarpment, north-west toward Syrtis. This was the new dike, Coyote told them, built by a robot collection pulled from the Elysium mohole. The dike was truly massive, and looked like one of the basalt dorsa of the south, except that its velvety texture revealed it to be excavated regolith rather than hard volcanic rock.
Maya stared at the long ridge. The cascading recombinant consequences of their actions were, she thought, out of their control. They could try to build bulwarks to contain them— but would the bulwarks hold?
• • •
Then they were back in Burroughs, in through the Southeast Gate on their Swiss IDs, and secured in a safe house run by Bogdanovists from Vishniac, now working for Praxis. The safe house was an airy light-filled apartment about halfway up the northern wall of Hunt Mesa, with a view out over the central valley to Branch Mesa and Double Decker Butte. The apartment above it was a dance studio, and many of the hours of the day they lived to a faint thump, thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Just over the horizon to the north an irregular cloud of dust and steam marked where the robots were working still on the dike; every morning Maya looked out at it, thinking over the news reports on Mangalavid and in the long messages from Praxis. Then it was into the day’s work, which was entirely underground, and often confined to meetings in the apartment, or to work there on video messages. So it was not at all like life in Odessa, and it was hard to develop any habits, which made her feel jangly and dark.
But she could still walk the streets of the great city, one anonymous citizen among thousands of others— strolling by the canal, or sitting in restaurants around Princess Park, or on one of the less trendy mesa tops. And everywhere she went, she saw the neat red print of their stenciled graffiti: free mars. Or get ready. Or, as if she were hallucinating a warning made to her by her own soul: you can never go back. These messages were ignored by the populace as far as she could tell, never discussed, and often removed by cleaning crews; but they kept popping up in their neat red, usually in English but sometimes in Russian, the old alphabet like a long-lost friend, like some subliminal flash out of their collective unconscious, if they had one; and somehow the messages never lost their little electric shock. It was strange what powerful effects could be created with such simple means. People