Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [283]
• • •
The next morning she woke before the rest, and looked at the faces of her sleeping companions, now revealed in the daylight to be utterly disheveled— grimy, puffy, black with frostnip, open-mouthed in the total sleep of exhaustion. They looked dead. And she had been no help to them— on the contrary! She had been a drag on the group; every time they had come back in the car they had had to step by the madwoman on the floor, lying there refusing to speak, often crying, clearly in the throes of severe depression. Just what they had needed!
Ashamed, she got up and quietly finished cleaning up the main room and the drivers’ area. And later that day she took her turn driving the rover, doing a six-hour shift and ending up exhausted. But she got them well east of the Dover Gate.
Their troubles, however, were not over. Coprates had opened up a bit, yes, and the south wall had for the most part held. But in this area there was a long ridge, now an island, running down the middle of the canyon, dividing it into north and south channels; and unfortunately the southern channel was lower than the northern one, so that the bulk of the flood was running down it, and crowding them tight against the southern wall. Happily the bench terrace gave them some five kilometers between the deluge and the wall proper; but with the flood so close on their left, and the steep cliffs on their right, they never lost the sense of danger. And they had to raise their voices to talk at least half the time; the crackling roar of the surges seemed to invade their heads, making it harder than ever to concentrate, or to pay attention, or indeed to think at all.
One day Maya crashed her fist against the table and cried, “Couldn’t we wait for the island ridge to get torn away?”
After an awkward pause Kasei said, “It’s a hundred kilometers long.”
“Well, shit— couldn’t we just wait until this flood stops? I mean, how long can it go on like this?”
“A few months,” Ann said.
“Can’t we wait that long?”
“We’re running low on food,” Michel explained.
“We have to keep going,” Frank snapped at Maya. “Don’t be stupid.” She glared at him and turned away, clearly furious. The rover suddenly seemed much too small, as if a bunch of tigers and lions had been thrown together in a dog’s kennel. Simon and Kasei, oppressed by the tension, suited up and went out to scout what lay ahead.
• • •
Beyond what they called Island Ridge, Coprates opened up like a funnel, with deep troughs under the diverging canyon walls. The northern trough was Capri Chasma, and the southern trough was Eos Chasma, which ran on as a continuation of Coprates. Because of the flood they had no choice but to follow Eos, but Michel said it was the way they would have wanted anyway. Here the southern cliff finally lowered a bit, and was cut with deep embayments, and shattered by a couple of good-sized meteor craters. Capri Chasma curved out of their sight to the northeast; between the two trough canyons was a low triangular mesa, now a peninsula dividing the course of the flood in two. Unfortunately the great bulk of the water ran into the somewhat lower Eos, so that even though they were out of the tight constriction of Coprates, they were still pressed against a cliff, and moving slowly, off any road or trail, and with diminishing supplies of food and gases. The cupboards were nearly bare.
They were tired, very tired. It had been twenty-three days since they had escaped from Cairo, now 2,500 kilometers up-canyon; and all that time they had been sleeping in shifts, and driving almost constantly, and living in the aural assault of the flood, the roar of a world falling down in pieces on their heads. They were too old for this, as Maya said more than once, and nerves were frayed; they were fudging things, making little mistakes, falling into little microbursts of sleep.
The bench that was their