Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [284]
But then they found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and so on, for day after day after day. They went to half-rations. Ann drove more than anyone else, as she seemed to be fresher than the rest, and was the best driver there anyway with the possible exception of Michel. And she felt she owed it to them after her shameful collapse during the greater part of their journey. She wanted to do everything she could, and when she wasn’t driving, she went out to scout the way. It was still numbingly loud outside, and the ground trembled underfoot. It was impossible to get used to that, though she did her best to ignore it. Sunlight burned through the mist and haze in broad lurid splashes, and in the sunset hour icebows and sundogs appeared in the sky, along with rings of light around the dulled sun; often the whole sky seemed afire, a Turner vision of the apocalypse.
Soon enough Ann too wore down, and the work became exhausting. She understood now why her companions had been so tired, why they had been so short with her and with each other. Michel had been unable to locate the last three caches they had passed— buried or drowned, it didn’t matter. The half-rations were 1,200 calories a day, much less than they were expending. Lack of food, lack of sleep: and then, for Ann at least, the same old depression, persistent as death, rising in her like a flood, like a black slurry of mud, steam, ice, shit. Doggedly she kept at the work, but her attention kept blinking out and the glossolalia kept returning, washing everything away in the white noise of despair.
The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer. The following day they seemed completely stopped, the boulders arrayed across the bench like tank stoppers in Big Man’s Maginot Line. It was a perfect fractal plane, Sax remarked, of about 2.7 dimensions. No one bothered to answer him.
Kasei, wandering on foot, found a passage right down on the bank of the flood. For the moment the whole visible expanse of the deluge was frozen, as it had been for the last couple of days. It stretched out to the horizon, a jumbled surface like Earth’s Arctic Sea, only much dirtier, a great mix of black and red and white lumps. The ice just offshore was flat, however, and in many places clear. They could look down into it, and see that it appeared to be only a couple of meters deep, and frozen right down to the bottom. So they drove down to this icy shore and ran along it, and when rocks in the way forced her to, Ann put the left wheels of the rover out onto the ice, and then the entire car; and it held like any other surface. Nadia and Maya snorted at the others’ nervousness about this course: “We spent all winter driving on the rivers in Siberia,” Nadia said. “They were the best roads we had.”
So for an entire day Ann drove along the ragged edge of the flood, and out onto its surface, and they made 160 kilometers, their best day in two weeks.
Near sunset it began to snow. The west wind poured out of Coprates, driving big gritty clumps of snow past them as if they weren’t moving at all. They came to a fresh-slide zone, which spilled right out onto the ice of the flood. Big boulders scattered over the ice gave it the air of an abandoned neighborhood. The light was dusky gray. They needed a foot guide through this maze, and in an exhausted conference Frank volunteered, and went out to do the job. At