Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [306]
Nadia gritted her teeth. “If you wreck Burroughs you wreck everything. Where are the people inside supposed to go? You’ll be no better than a murderer, a mass murderer. Simon would be ashamed.”
Ann scowled. “Power corrupts, I see. Put Sax on, will you? I’m tired of this hysteria.”
Nadia switched the call to Sax and walked away. It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power. Well, it could be that she had been too quick to anger, too harsh. But she was frightened of that dark place inside Ann, the part that might do anything; and fear corrupted more than power. Combine the two. . . .
Hopefully she had shocked Ann severely enough to squeeze that dark place back into its corner. Bad psychology, as Michel pointed out gently, when Nadia called him in Burroughs to talk about it. A strategy resulting from fear. But she couldn’t help it, she was afraid. Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.
• • •
So on Wednesday evening, five days after Nadia’s call from Sax, about a hundred people left for Burroughs in planes, as the pistes were judged too vulnerable to sabotage. They flew overnight to a rocky landing strip next to a large Bogdanovist refuge in the wall of Du Martheray Crater, which was on the Great Escarpment southeast of Burroughs. They landed at dawn, with the sun rising through mist like a blob of mercury, lighting distant ragged white hills to the north, on the low plain of Isidis: another new ice sea, whose progress south had been stopped only by the arcing line of the dike, curving across the land like a long low earthen dam— which was just what it was.
To get a better view Nadia went up to the top floor of the Du Martheray refuge, where an observation window, disguised as a horizontal crack just under the rim, gave a view down the Great Escarpment to the new dike and the ice pressing against it. For a long time she stared down at the sight, sipping coffee mixed with a dose of kava. To the north was the ice sea, with its clustered seracs and long pressure ridges, and the flat white sheets of giant frozen-topped melt lakes. Directly below her lay the first low hills of the Great Escarpment, dotted with spiky expanses of Acheron cacti, sprawling over the rock like coral reefs. Staircased meadows of black-green tundra moss followed the courses of small frozen streams dropping down the Escarpment; the streams in the distance looked like long algae diatoms, tucked into creases in the redrock.
Burroughs Region
And then in the middle distance, dividing desert from ice, ran the new dike, like a raw brown scar, suturing two separate realities together.
Nadia spent a long time studying it through binoculars. Its southern end was a regolith mound, running up the apron of Crater Wg and ending right at Wg’s rim, which was about half a kilometer above the datum, well above the expected sea level. The dike ran northwest from Wg, and from her prospect high on the Escarpment Nadia could see about forty kilometers of it before it disappeared over the horizon, just to the west of Crater Xh. Xh was surrounded by ice almost to its rim, so that its round interior was like an odd red sinkhole. Everywhere else the ice had pressed right up against the dike, for as far as Nadia could see. The desert side of the dike appeared to be some two hundred meters high, although it was difficult to judge, as there was a broad trench underneath the dike. On the other side, the ice bulked quite high, halfway up or more.
The dike was about three hundred meters wide at the top. That