Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [118]
Three of the giant dump trucks ground slowly up the last stretch of the road, full of black boulders. These days it took them five hours to make the trip from the bottom of the shaft, Okakura said. Very little supervision, like most of the project, in both manufacture and operation. The inhabitants of the town only had to see to programming, deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooting. And, now, security.
The town, called Senzeni Na, was scattered over the floor of Thaumasia Fossae’s deepest canyon. Nearest to the hole was the industrial park; here most of the excavation equipment was manufactured, and the rock from the hole processed for its trace amounts of valuable metals. Boone and Okakura stepped into the rim station, changed out of their pressure suits into coppery jumpers, and entered one of the clear walktubes that connected all the buildings in the town. It was cold and sunny in the tubes, and everyone in them wore clothing with an outer layer of copper-colored foil, the latest in Japanese radproofing. Copper creatures, moving in clear tubes; it looked to Boone like a giant ant farm. Overhead the thermal cloud frosted into existence and shot up like steam from a valve, until it was caught by high winds and blown out in a long flattened contrail.
The town’s actual living quarters were built into the southeast wall of the canyon. A big rectangular section of the cliff had been replaced by glass; behind it was a tall open concourse, backed by five stories of terraced apartments.
They walked through the concourse and Okakura led him up to the town offices, on the fifth floor. A small crowd of concerned-looking people gathered in their wake, chattering to Okakura and among themselves. They all went through the office and out onto its balcony. John watched closely as Okakura described in Japanese what had happened. A number of his audience looked nervous, and most would not meet John’s eye. Had the near accident itself been enough to incur giri? It was important to make sure they didn’t feel publicly shown up, or anything like it. Shame was strong stuff for the Japanese, and Okakura was beginning to look desperately unhappy, as if he were deciding it had been his fault.
“Look, it could just as easily have been outsiders as someone from here,” John said boldly. He made some suggestions for future security. “The rim is a perfect barrier. Set up an alarm system, and a few people at the rim station could keep an eye on both the system and the elevators. A waste of time, but I guess we have to do it.”
Diffidently Okakura asked him if he knew anything about who might be responsible for the sabotage. He shrugged. “No idea, sorry. People opposed to the moholes, I guess.”
“But the moholes are dug,” one of them said.
“I know. I guess it’s symbolic.” He grinned. “But if a truck falls on someone, it would be a bad symbol.”
They nodded seriously. He wished he had Frank’s facility for languages— it would help to be able to communicate better with these people. They were hard to read; inscrutable and all that.
They wondered if he wanted to lie down.
“I’m okay,” he said. “It missed us. We’ll have to look into it, but today let’s just continue according to the schedule we had.”
So Okakura and several men and women led him on a tour of the town, and cheerfully he visited labs and meeting rooms, lounges and dining halls. He nodded and shook hands and said Hi until he was sure he had met over fifty percent of Senzeni Na’s inhabitants. Most had not yet heard of the incident in the hole, and all were pleased to meet him, happy to shake his hand, to speak with him, to show him something, to look at him. It happened everywhere he went, reminding him unpleasantly of the fishbowl years between his first trip and his second.
But he did his job. An hour’s work, then four hours of being The First Man On Mars: the usual ratio. And as afternoon darkened to evening, and the whole town gathered for a banquet in honor of his visit, he settled back and patiently played his part. That meant shifting into a good mood, no easy task that night.