Red Mars

After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony’s chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called her. Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heaven. So much to do! So much to do! Every night in the planning sessions Hiroko worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the differential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they would go bang. But Nadia was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.

Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.

And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.

Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.

“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”

Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”

“You love gravity.”

With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut. Nadia listened to their conversation band as she worked. They figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia’s idea of good ground. At least its water content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn’t get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.

When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at hand. It would crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insulation. But she would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn’t below 13° Centigrade, so that meant heating elements … Slow, slow, everything was slow.

She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground and bucked. Then the weight of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed forward. “What a pig,” Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.

“Nadia’s in love with a bulldozer,” Maya said over their band.

At least I know who I’m in love with, Nadia mouthed. She had spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn’t decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. etc. Cleaning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to hide her lack of interest. The truth was she was tired of Maya’s problems and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.

A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. “Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?”

“Heat it.”

“We are!”

“Heat it more.”

“Oh!” They were almost done out there, Nadia judged: the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water (which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling the control rods. After that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to the nightly argument over who got the lion’s share of generator power the next day.

There was a call from Sax: one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn’t get the housing off it. So Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look. “I’m off to see the alchemists,” she said.

“Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?” Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the Sabatier. “If it’s built by car companies, it’s low-powered but reliable. If it’s built by the aerospace industry, it’s outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day.”

“And partnership products are horribly designed,” Nadia said.

“Right.”

“And chemical equipment is finicky,” Spencer Jackson added.

“I’ll say. Especially in this dust.”

The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined using chemical engineering operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electro-synthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process … Slowly they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.

Spencer’s current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian g that a big bar of it felt like a piece of plastic. “It’s too brittle when pure,” Spencer said, “but if we alloy it just a bit we’ll have an extremely light and strong metal.”

“Martian steel,” Nadia said.

“Better than that.”

So, alchemy; but with finicky machines. Nadia found the Sabatier’s problem and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pump. It was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps, sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.

Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.

Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her absence. She stood on the edge of the hole, looking down in it. They were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the Ares: a simple line of barrel-vaulted chambers, sharing adjacent walls. By setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with; then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildings: Portland cement and bricks were it, basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.

Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia a call. Nadia’s patience was running short, and she groaned. “We travel all the way to Mars and you can’t make bricks?”

“It’s not that we can’t make bricks,” said Gene. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” The brickmaking factory mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machine. The resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn’t happy. “We don’t want to be at minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads,” he said. “What if we pile one sandbag too many on top of it, or if we get a little marsquake? I don’t like it.”

After some thought Nadia said, “Add nylon.”

“What?”

“Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That’ll help their tensile strength.”

“Very true,” Gene said, after a pause. “Good idea! Think we can find the parachutes?”

“They must be east of here somewhere.”

So they had finally found a job for the geologists that actually helped the construction effort. Ann and Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.

One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeast. “It was strange,” Igor said, “because you can’t see them until the last minute, and then they’re like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallower. Fantastic. They’re probably thermokarsts, but they’re so big it’s hard to believe it.”

Sasha said, “It’s nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff.”

“They’re thermokarsts,” Ann said. But they had drilled and found no water. This was getting to be a concern; they hadn’t found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled: it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.

Nadia shrugged. The air miners were pretty tough. She wanted to think about her vaults. The new improved bricks were appearing and she had started the robots building the walls and roofs. The brick factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set of robots. The system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production itself. Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots: these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.

One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a private band. “Michel is useless,” she complained. “I’m really having a hard time, and he won’t even talk to me! You’re the only one I trust, Nadia. Yesterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in Houston, but that he shouldn’t tell anyone I thought so and the very next day John was asking me why I thought he was bothering Frank. There’s no one who will just listen and stay quiet!”

Nadia nodded, rolling her eyes. Finally she said, “Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can’t find.” She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya’s – symbol for a kiss on the cheek – switched to the common band and took off. Enough was enough. It was infinitely more interesting to talk to Hiroko: real conversations, about real problems in the real world. Hiroko was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously raised her estimate of Nadia’s abilities. Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business. Hermetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko’s talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, endless sessions about who liked Maya and who didn’t like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day … bah. Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.

At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered micro-organisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UN. Nadia herself found the idea alarming: it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing … Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.

When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15° Centigrade. It felt great.

The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows: lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.

As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed – the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.

More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia: she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much: plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing amount of time. Work work work, day after day!

One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day: she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about –50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days – but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”

“Why 1947?” he asked.

“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”

“A good year for him, I take it?”

“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces – and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power … It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”

“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you any thing but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.

Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947 – because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life – all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!

Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of – baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.

And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehaving” chasing her off to sleep.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s Ls 170 already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at Ls 7?”

So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be 0°, and then the year was divided into 360°, so that Ls = 0°–90° was the northern spring, 90–180° the northern summer, 180–270° the fall, and 270–360° (or 0° again) the winter.

This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the Martian orbit, which is extreme by Terran standards, for at perihelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.