Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [83]
In fact these people seemed to think they knew a lot about Nadia. “She was against the war,” Claire told him confidently, “and she did everything she could to stop it and then to repair the damage, even while it was happening. People who saw her on Elysium say she never slept at all, just took stimulants to keep going. They say she saved ten thousand lives in the week she was active around South Fossa.”
“What happened to her?” Sax asked.
“No one knows. She disappeared from South Fossa.”
“She was headed for Low Point,” Berkina said. “If she got there in time for that flood, she was probably killed.”
“Ah.” Sax nodded solemnly. “That was a bad time.”
“Very bad,” Claire said vehemently. “So destructive. It set the terraforming back decades, I’m sure.”
“Although the aquifer outbreaks have been useful,” Sax murmured.
“Yes, but those could have been done anyway, in a controlled manner.”
“True.” Sax shrugged and let the conversation go on without him. After the encounter with Phyllis it was a bit much to get into a discussion of ‘61.
He still couldn’t quite believe she hadn’t recognized him. The passenger compartment they were in had shiny magnesium panels over the windows, and there, among the faces of his new colleagues, was the little face of Stephen Lindholm. A bald old man with a slightly hooked nose, which made the eyes somewhat hawkish rather than just birdlike. Visible lips, strong jaw, a chin— no, it didn’t look like him at all. No reason why she should have recognized him.
But looks weren’t everything.
He tried not to think about that as they hummed north over the road. He concentrated on the view. The passenger compartment had a domed skylight, as well as windows on all four sides, so he could see a lot. They were driving up the slope of west Isidis, a section of the Great Escarpment that was like a great shaved berm. The jagged dark hills of Syrtis Major rose over the northwest horizon, sharp as the edge of a saw. The air was clearer than it had been in the old days, even though it was fifteen times thicker. But there was less dust in it, as snowstorms were knocking the fines down and then fixing them on the surface in a crust. Of course this crust was often broken by strong winds, and the trapped fines reintroduced to the air. But these breaks were localized, and the sky-cleaning storms were slowly getting the upper hand.
And so the sky was changing color. Overhead it was a rich violet, and above the western hills it was whitish, shading up into lavender, and some color between lavender and violet that Sax didn’t have a name for. The eye could distinguish differences in light frequency of only a few wavelengths, so the few names for the colors between red and blue were totally inadequate to describe the phenomena. But whatever you called them, or didn’t, they were sky colors very unlike the tans and pinks of the early years. Of course a dust storm would always temporarily return the sky to that primeval ochre tone; but when the atmosphere washed out, its color would be a function of its thickness and chemical composition. Curious as to what they could expect to see in the future, Sax took his lectern from his pocket to try some calculations.
He stared at the little box, suddenly realizing that it was Sax Russell’s lectern— that if checked, it would give him away. It was like carrying around a genuine passport.
He dismissed the thought, as there was nothing to be done about it now. He concentrated on the color of the sky. In clean air, sky color was caused by preferential light scattering in the air molecules themselves. Thus the thickness of the atmosphere was critical. Air pressure when they had arrived had been about 10 millibars, and now it averaged about 160. But since air pressure was created by the weight of the air, creating 160 millibars on Mars had taken about three times as much air over any given spot than would have created such a pressure on Earth. So the 160 millibars here