Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [64]
Ann shook her head and laughed, angry at the idiot writer, who simply didn’t understand. Of course you didn’t integrate the experience. It was meaninglessness. The experience that couldn’t be integrated.
• • •
The next day a tower poked over the horizon. She stopped the car, stared at it through the car’s telescope. There was a lot of ground mist behind it. The temblors registering on her seismograph were very strong now, and appeared to be coming from a bit to the north. She even felt one of them herself, which, given the car’s shock absorbers, meant they were strong indeed. It seemed likely there was a connection with the tower.
She got out of her car. It was almost sunset, the sky a great arch of violent colors, the sun low in the hazy west. The light would be behind her, making her very hard to see. She wound between dunes, then carefully made her way to the crest of one, and crawled the final meters of the way, and looked over the crest at the tower, now only a kilometer to the east. When she saw how close its base was she kept her chin right on the ground, among ejecta the size of her helmet.
It was some kind of mobile drilling operation, a big one. The massive base was flanked by giant caterpillar tracks, like those used to move the largest rockets around a spaceport. The drill tower rose out of this behemoth more than sixty meters, and the base and lower part of the tower clearly contained the technicians’ housing and equipment and supplies.
Beyond this thing, a short distance down a gentle slope to the north, was a sea of ice. Immediately north of the drill, the crests of the great barchan dunes still stuck out of the ice— first as a bumpy beach, then as hundreds of crescent islands. But a couple of kilometers out the dune crests disappeared, and it was ice only.
The ice was pure, clean— translucent purple under the sunset sky— clearer than any ice she had ever seen on the Martian surface, and smooth, not broken like all the glaciers. It was steaming faintly, the frost steam whipping east on the wind. And out on it, looking like ants, people in walkers and helmets were ice-skating.
• • •
It came clear the moment she saw the ice. Long ago she herself had confirmed the big impact hypothesis, which accounted for the dichotomy between the hemispheres: the low smooth northern hemisphere was simply a superhuge impact basin, the result of a scarcely imaginable collision in the Noachian, between Mars and a planetesimal nearly as big as it. The rock of the impact body that had not vaporized had become part of Mars itself, and there were arguments in the literature that the irregular movements in the mantle that had caused the Tharsis bulge were late developments resulting from perturbations originating with the impact. To Ann that wasn’t likely, but what was clear was that the great crash had happened, wiping out the surface of the entire northern hemisphere, and lowering it by an average of four kilometers relative to the south. An astonishing hit, but that was the Noachian. An impact of similar magnitude had in all probability caused the birth of Luna out of Earth. In fact there were some anti-impact holdouts arguing that if Mars had been hit as hard, it should have had a moon as big.
But now, as she lay flat looking at the giant drilling rig, the point was that the northern hemisphere was even lower than it first appeared, for its floor of bedrock was amazingly deep, as much as five kilometers beneath the surface of the dunes. The impact had blown that deep, and then the depression had mostly refilled, with a mixture of ejecta from the big impact, windblown sand and fines, later impact material, erosional material sliding down the slope of the Great Escarpment, and water. Yes, water, finding the lowest point as it always did; the water in the annual frost hood, and the ancient aquifer outbreaks, and the outgassing from the blistered bedrock, and the lensing from the polar