Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [151]
His eyes were dry, and his mouth felt a bit caked. Lots of the fines were less than a micron across— was that a faint sheen of them, there already across the bamboo leaves? No. Only the weird light of the storm. But there would be dust on everything, eventually. No seal system could keep it out.
Vlad and Ursula were not completely confident of the greenhouse’s ability to withstand the wind, and they encouraged everyone up there to go downstairs. On the way down John reestablished contact with Sax. Sax’s mouth was bunched into a tighter knot than usual. They would lose a lot of insolation with this storm, he said evenly. Equatorial surface temperatures had been averaging eighteen degrees higher than the baseline figures, but temperatures near Thaumasia were already down six degrees, and they would continue to plummet for the duration of the storm. And, he added with what seemed to John an almost masochistic completeness, the mohole thermals would loft the dust higher than ever before, so that it was all too possible that the storm might last for a long time.
“Buck up, Sax,” John advised. “I think it’ll be shorter than ever before. Don’t be so pessimistic.”
Later on, when the storm was going into its second M-year, Sax would remind John of this prediction with a little laugh.
• • •
Traveling during the storm was officially restricted to the trains and to certain heavily used double-transponder roads, but when it became obvious that it wasn’t going to die back down that summer, John ignored the restrictions and resumed his wanderings. He made sure that his rover was well stocked, he had a backup rover follow him, and he had an extra-powerful radio transmitter installed. That and Pauline in the driver’s seat would be enough to get him around most of the northern hemisphere, he figured; rover breakdowns were rare, because of the really comprehensive internal monitoring systems hooked into their control computers. Two rover breakdowns at once was unheard of, there had been only a single recorded fatality as a result of that happening. So he said good-bye to the Acheron group, and took off again.
Driving in the storm was like driving at night, except more interesting. The dust rocketed by in gusts, leaving little pockets of visibility that gave him quick dim sepia snatches of a view, the landscape rolling, everything seeming to be moving south. Then blank rushing tempests of dust would return again, flush against the windows. The rover rocked hard on its shock absorbers during the worst gusts, and the dust did indeed get into everything.
On the fourth day of his drive he turned straight south, and began to drive up the northwest slope of the Tharsis Bulge. This was the great escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible in the storm’s dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side of Tharsis, five vertical kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.
He stopped at another mine, located near crater Pt (called Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae. Apparently the Tharsis Bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus canyons. Some of them had cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves