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 flights were more dangerous than day flights in many ways, but Yeli was more comfortable with their level of stealth. The 17Ds 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, 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 her 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 voiceover 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 the bridge spanning Harmakhis Vallis, on the eastern border of Hellas; it was down. Repair robots were cached in endhouses on all major bridges, and these could be adapted to total reconstruction of the spans, although they would be slow at it. The travelers got them going, and that evening, after finishing the last programs, they sat down to microwaved spagetti in the plane’s cabins, and Yeli turned on the Terran TV channel again. There was nothing but static and a snaking, destroyed image. He tried switching channels, but all the channels were the same. Dense, buzzing static.
“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 stations 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 the frozen sea stretched right over the horizon.
After many second’s silence, Ann said, “They must have broken the Hellespontus aquifer. That was a really big one, and it would drain down to Low Point.”
“So the Hellas mohole must be flooded!” Yeli said.
“That’s right. And the water at the bottom of it will heat up. Probably hot enough to keep the surface of the lake from freezing. Hard to say. The air is cold, but with the turbulence there might be a clear spot. If not, then right under the surface it will be liquid for sure. Must be some strong currents in fact. But the surface…”