Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [267]
Near midnight and the timeslip, something on the screens caught Sax’s attention, and with some furious typing on Frank’s channels he got through to the Olympus Mons observatory. It was just before dawn there, still dark, and one of the observatory cameras gave them its low space view southward, the black curve of the planet blocking the stars. Shooting stars were blazing down at an angle out of the western sky, as fast and bright as if they were perfectly straight lightning bolts, or titanic tracer bullets, spraying in a sequence eastward, breaking apart in the last moments before impact, causing phosphor blobs to burst into existence at every impact point, like the first moments of a whole string of nuclear explosions. In less than ten seconds the strike was over, leaving the black field dotted with a line of glowing yellow smoke-obscured patches.
Nadia closed her eyes, saw swimming afterimages of the strike. She opened them again, looked at the screen. Clouds of smoke were surging up into the predawn sky over west Tharsis, pouring so high that they got up out of the shadow of the planet and were lit by the rising sun; they were mushroom clouds, their heads a bright pale pink, their dark gray stalks illuminated by reflection from above. Slowly the sunlight moved down the tumultuous stalks, until they were all burnished by the new morning sun. Then the lofty line of yellow and pink mushroom clouds drifted across a sky that was a delicate shade of indigo pastel: it looked like a Maxfield Parrish nightmare, too strange and beautiful a sight to believe. Nadia thought of the cable’s last moment, that image of the incandescent double helix of diamonds. How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension? She stared and stared at the image, focused all her will on it; but she could not make it make sense.
“That may be enough particulate matter to trigger another global dust storm,” Sax observed. “Although the net heat addition to the system will surely be considerable.”
“Shut up, Sax,” Maya said.
Frank said, “It’s about our turn to get hit, right?”
Sax nodded.
They left the city offices and went out into the park. Everyone stood facing northwest. It was silent, as if they were performing some religious ritual. It felt completely different from waiting for bombardment by the police. By now it was mid-morning, the sky a dull dusty pink.
Then over the horizon lanced a painfully bright comet; there was a collective indrawn gasp, punctuated by scattered cries. The brilliant white line curved down toward them, then shot over their heads in an instant, disappearing over the eastern horizon. There hadn’t even been time to catch one’s breath as it passed. A moment later the ground trembled slightly under their feet, and the silence was broken by exclamations. To the east a cloud shot up, redefining the height of the sky’s pink dome; it must have plumed 20,000 meters.
Then another brilliant white blaze crossed the sky overhead, trailing comet tails of fire. Then another, and another, and a whole blazing cluster of them, all crossing the sky and dropping over the eastern horizon, down into great Marineris. Finally the shower stopped, leaving the witnesses in Cairo half-blinded, staggering, afterimages bouncing in their sight. They had been passed over.
• • •
“Now comes the U.N.,” Frank said. “At best.”
“Do you think we ought to . . .” Maya said. “Do you think we’re . . .”
“Safe in their hands?” Frank said acidly.
“Maybe we should take to the planes again.”
“In daylight?”
“Well, it might be better than staying here!” she retorted. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just get lined