Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [251]
“Have they blown up Earth too?” Ann said.
“No no,” Yeli said. “Someone’s jamming it. The sun is between us and it, these days, and you would only have to interfere with a few relay satellites to cut contact.”
They stared glumly at the fizzing screen. In recent days the local areosynchronous communications satellites had been going down left and right, shut down or sabotaged, it was impossible to say. Now, without the Terran news, they would really be in the dark. Surface-to-surface radio was limited indeed, given the tight horizons and the lack of an ionosphere— not much more range than walker intercoms, really. Yeli tried a variety of stochastic resonance patterns, to see if he could cut through the jamming. The signals were scrambled beyond repair. He gave up with a grunt, punched out a search program. The radio oscillated up and down through the hertz, gathering static and stopping at the occasional faint punctuation: coded clicking, irretrievable snatches of music. Ghost voices gabbling in unrecognizable languages, as if Yeli had succeeded where SETI had failed, and finally, now that it was pointless, gotten messages from the stars. Probably just stuff from the asteroid miners. In any case incomprehensible, useless. They were alone on the face of Mars, five people in two small airplanes.
It was a new and very peculiar sensation, which only became more acute in the days that followed, when it didn’t go away, and they understood that they were going to have to proceed with all their TVs and radios blanked by white noise. It was an experience unique not only in their Martian experience, but in their whole lives. And they quickly found that losing the electronic information net was like losing one of their senses; Nadia kept glancing down at her wristpad, on which, until this breakdown, Arkady could have appeared any second; on which any of the first hundred might have showed up, and declared themselves safe; and then she would look up from the little blank square at the land around her, suddenly so much bigger and wilder and emptier than it had ever been before. It was frightening, truly. Nothing but jagged rust hills for as far as the eye could see, even when flying in the airplanes at dawn and looking for one of the little landing strips marked on the map, which when spotted would resemble little tan pencils. Such a big world! And they were alone in it. Even navigation could no longer be taken for granted, no longer be left to the computers; they had to use road transponders, and dead reckoning, and visual fixes, peering down anxiously in the dawn twilight to spot the next airstrip in the wilderness. Once it took them well into the morning to find a strip near Dao Vallis. After that Yeli began to follow pistes, flying low through the night and watching the silvery ribbon snake below them through the starlight, checking transponder signals against the maps.
And so they managed to fly down in the broad lowland of Hellas Basin, following the piste to Low Point Lakefront. Then in the horizontal red light and long shadows of sunrise, a sea of shattered ice came over the horizon into view. It filled the whole western part of Hellas. A sea!
The piste they had been following ran right into ice. The frozen shoreline was a jagged tangle of ice plates that were black or red or white or even blue, or a rich jade green— all piled together, as if a tidal wave had crushed Big Man’s butterfly collection, and left it strewn over a barren beach. Beyond it