Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [250]
And yet all of it was as nothing in the face of human destructiveness. The five travelers flew from ruin to ruin, becoming numb to the damage and to the dead. Not that they were insensible to their own danger; after passing over a number of wrecked planes in the Hellas-Elysium flight corridor, they switched to night flights. These were more dangerous than day flights in many ways, but Yeli was more comfortable with their level of stealth. The 16Ds were nearly invisible to radar, and would leave only the faintest traces on the most powerful tight-focus IR detectors. All of them were willing to take the risk of that minute exposure. Nadia didn’t care at all, she would have been happy to fly by day. She lived in the moment as much as she could, but her thoughts ran in circles as she kept trying to drag them back to the moment. Stunned by the waste of all that had been destroyed, she was becoming far distanced from her emotions. She only wanted to work.
And Ann, some part of Nadia noticed, was worse. Of course she must have been worried about Peter. And then all the destruction as well— for Ann it was not the structures but the land itself, the floods, the mass wasting, the snow, the radiation. And she had no work to distract her. Her work would have been the study of the damage. And so she did nothing, or tried to help Nadia when she could, moving around like an automaton. Day after day they worked at initiating the repair of one ruined structure or another, a bridge, a pipeline, a well, a power station, a piste, a town. They lived in what Yeli called Waldo World, ordering robots about as if they were slavemasters or magicians, or gods; and the machines went to work, trying to reverse the film of time and make broken things fly back together. With the luxury of haste they could be sloppy, and it was incredible how fast they could initiate construction, and then fly on. “In the beginning was the word,” Simon said wearily one evening, punching at his wristpad. A bridge crane swung across the setting sun. And then they were off again.
• • •
They started up containment and burial programs for three blown reactors, staying safely over the horizon and working by teleoperation. While watching the operations, Yeli sometimes switched channels and had a look at the news. Once the shot was from orbit: a full disk shot of the Tharsis hemisphere, in daytime for all but the western limb. From that height they could see no sign of the outflows. But the voice-over claimed they had occurred in all the old outflow channels that ran north from Marineris into Chryse, and the image jumped to a telescopic shot, which showed whitish-pink bands in that region. Canals at last, of a sort.
Nadia snapped the TV back to their work. So much destroyed, so many people killed, people who might have lived a thousand years— and, of course, no word of Arkady. It had been twenty days now. People were saying he might have been forced into complete hiding, to avoid being killed by a strike from orbit. But Nadia no longer believed this, except in moments of extreme desire and pain, the two emotions surging up through the obsessive work mode in a brand-new mixture, a new feeling that she hated and feared: desire causing pain, pain causing desire— a hot fierce desire, that things not be as they were. How painful such a desire was! But if she worked hard enough, there was no time for it. No time to think or feel.
They flew over