The insane roar of the flood was his only answer. They sat in the car, in their separate thoughts, separated by the roar as if by many kilometers of space. Ann found herself wishing the bench would slide from under them, or a piece of the south wall fall onto them, and put an end to their indecision, and to the awful, maddening noise.
They drove on. Frank and Maya and Simon and Nadia stood behind Michel and Kasei, watching them drive; Sax sat at his screen, stretching like a cat, staring myopically at the little picture of the deluge. The surface calmed for a moment, and froze over, and the explosive noise reduced to a violent low rumble. “It’s like the Grand Canyon on a kind of super-Himalayan scale,” Sax said, apparently to himself, although only Ann would be able to hear him. “The Kala Gandaki Gorge is like three kilometers deep, isn’t it? And Dhalagiri and Annapurna only forty or fifty kilometers apart, I think. Fill that with a flood like… “ He failed to recall any comparable flood. “I wonder what all that water was doing so high on the Tharsis bulge.”
Cracks like gunshots announced another surge. The white surface of the flood blew apart and tumbled downstream. White noise suddenly enveloped them, battening everything they said or thought, as if the universe were vibrating. A bass tuning fork…
“Outgassing,” Ann said. “Outgassing.” Her mouth was stiff, she could feel in her face how long it had been since she had last spoken. “Tharsis rests on an upwelling of magma. Rock alone couldn’t sustain the weight; the bulge would have subsided if it weren’t being supported by an upwelling current in the mantle.”
“I thought there was no mantle.” She could just hear him through the noise.
“No no.” She didn’t care if he could hear her or not. “It’s just slowed down. But currents are still there. And since the last great floods, they have refilled the high aquifers on Tharsis. And kept aquifers like Compton warm enough to stay liquid. Eventually the hydrostatic pressures were extreme. But with less vulcanism, and fewer big meteor strikes, nothing set it off. It might have been full for a billion years.”
“Do you think Phobos broke it open?”
“Maybe. More likely a reactor meltdown.”
“Did you know Compton was this big?” Sax asked.
“Yes.”
“I never heard of it.”
“No.”
Ann stared at him. Had he heard her say that?
He had. Concealing data: he was shocked, she could tell. He couldn’t imagine any reason good enough to conceal data. Perhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each other. Value systems based on entirely different assumptions. Completely different kinds of science.
He cleared his throat. “Did you know it was liquid?”
“I thought so. But now we know.”
Sax twitched, and called up on his screen the image from the left side camera. Black fizzing water, gray debris, shattered ice, boulders like great tumbling dice; standing waves freezing in place, collapsing and sweeping away in clouds of frost steam… the noise had risen back to its crackling jet howl.
“I wouldn’t have done it this way!” Sax exclaimed.
Ann stared at him. He steadfastly regarded the TV.
“I know,” she said. And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.
They drove as quickly as they could through the Dover Gate, following the Calais Ramp as Michel called their bench. Progress was nerve-rackingly slow, it was a bitter struggle to get the rover over the rockfall covering this narrow terrace; boulders were scattered everywhere, and the flood ate away at the land to their left, narrowing the bench at a perceptible rate. Landslides from the cliff walls fell ahead and behind them, and more than once individual rocks crashed into the car’s roof, making them all jump. It was perfectly possible that a bigger rock would hit them and smash them like bugs, without a single bit of warning. That possibility subdued them all, which was fine by Ann. Even Simon left her alone, throwing himself into the navigational effort and going out on scouting trips with Nadia or Frank or Kasei, happy, she thought, to have some excuse to get away from her. And why not?
They bumped along at a couple kilometers per hour. They traveled through a night and then the following day, even though the haze had diminished to the point where it was possible they were visible from satellites. There was no other choice.
And then finally they were through the Dover Gate, and Coprates opened up again, giving them some leeway. The flood veered a few kilometers to the north.
At dusk they stopped the car. They had been driving for some forty hours straight. They stood up and stretched, shuffled around, and then sat back down and ate a microwaved meal together. Maya, Simon, Michel and Kasei were in good spirits, cheerful to have gotten through the Gate; Sax was the same as always; Nadia and Frank a bit less grim than usual. The surface of the flood was frozen over for the moment, and it was possible to speak without hurting one’s throat, and still be heard. And so they ate, concentrating on the small portions of food, talking in a desultory manner.
Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together-while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other’s company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.
And so, in this moment of the storm, Ann Clayborne exerted herself. She stood up, she went to the table. She picked up Sax’s plate, Sax who had first drawn her out; and then Nadia’s and Simon’s. She carried the plates over to their little magnesium sink. And as she cleaned the dishes, she felt her stiff throat move; she croaked out her part of the conversation, and helped, with her little strand, to weave the human illusion. “A stormy night!” Michel said to her as he stood beside her drying plates, smiling. “A stormy night indeed!”
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; and 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.