Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [324]
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. A lot of people on the dike were killed. And a lot had to escape the flood by going up onto Syrtis.”
She stood there before them, grim, unapologetic— Nadia marveled that one could read so much from a silhouette, a black cutout against the stars. Set of the shoulders, perhaps. Tilt of the head.
“Come on then,” Nadia said. There was nothing else she could think to say, at this point. Going out onto the dike in the first place, setting the explosive charges . . . but there was no point now. “Let’s keep walking.”
The light leaked away from the land, out of the air, out of the sky. They hiked under the stars, through air as cold as Siberia. Nadia could have gone faster, but she wanted to stay at the back with the slowest group, to do what she could to help. People were giving piggyback rides to some of the smaller children among them, but the fact was there weren’t very many children at the end of the column; the smallest ones were already in rovers, and the older ones were up front with the faster walkers. There hadn’t been that many children in Burroughs to begin with.
Rover headlight beams cut through the dust they were throwing into the air, and seeing it Nadia wondered if the CO2 filters would get clogged by fines. She mentioned this aloud, and Ann said, “If you hold the mask to your face and blow out hard, it helps. You can also hold your breath and take it off, and blow compressed air through it, if you have a compressor.”
Sax nodded.
“You know these masks?” Nadia said to Ann.
Ann nodded. “I’ve spent many hours using ones like them.”
“Okay, good.” Nadia experimented with hers, holding the fabric right against her mouth and blowing out hard. Quickly she felt short of breath. “We still should try walking on the piste and the roads, and cutting down on the dust. And tell the rovers to go slow.”
They walked on. Over the next couple of hours they fell into a kind of rhythm. No one passed them, no one fell back. It got colder and colder. Rover headlights partially illuminated the thousands of people ahead of them, all the way up the long gradual slope to the high southern horizon, which was perhaps twelve or fifteen kilometers ahead of them, it was hard to tell in the dark. The column ran all the way to the horizon: a bobbing, fencing collection of headlight beams, flashlight beams, the red glow of taillights . . . a strange sight. Occasionally there was a buzz overhead, as dirigibles from South Fossa arrived, floating like gaudy UFOs with all their running lights on, their engines humming as they wafted down to drop off loads of food and water for the cars to retrieve, and pick up groups from the back of the column. Then they hummed up into the air and away, until they were no more than colorful constellations, disappearing over the horizon to the east.
During the timeslip a crowd of exuberant young natives tried to sing, but it was too cold and dry, and they did not persist for long. Nadia liked the idea, and in her mind she sang some of her old favorites many times: “Hello Central Give Me Dr. Jazz,” “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Over and over and over.
The longer the night went on, the better her mood became; it was beginning to seem like the plan was going to work. They were not passing hundreds of prostrate people— although the word from the cars was that a fair number of the young natives appeared to have blown it and gone out too fast, and were now requiring assistance. Everyone had gone from 500 millibars to 340, which was the equivalent of going from 4,000 meters altitude on Earth to 6,500 meters, not an inconsiderable jump even with the higher percentage of oxygen in the Martian air to mitigate the effects; thus people were coming down with altitude sickness. Altitude sickness tended to strike the young a bit more than the old anyway, and many of the natives had taken off very enthusiastically.