Furious Gulf (44 page)

She paused beside the splashing fountain. She plucked up a cup they had planted there and drank some of the water. “On Earth,
you can drink all the water you want and leave the tap on between cupfuls. Here, nobody does.” She smiled and walked on. “You’ve
seen this before, of course, but imagine if it were the only fountain you’d seen in a quarter century. That’s why I come here
to read, meditate, think. That—and our newest wonder . . .”

Let them wait.
She had learned that trick early on. Mars couldn’t be chopped up into five-second image-bites and have any lasting impression.
She circled around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall
or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid
but subtle advertisement.

Crowded? Here’s a whole world, only a few dozen people on it, well, actually about ten dozen, and it has the same land area
as the Earth. A different world entirely.

Things were different, all right. The dome was great, the biggest of several, a full hundred and fifty meters tall. It would
have been far more useful in the first years, when they still lived in apartment-sized habs. Now her pressure suit was supple,
moving fluidly over her body as she walked and stooped. The first expedition suits had been the best of their era, but they’d
still made you as flexible as a barely oiled Tin Man, as dextrous as a bear in mittens. The old helmets had misted over unless
you remembered to swab the inside with ordinary dish soap. And the catheters had been always irksome, especially for women;
now they fit beautifully.

Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds
didn’t carry well in Mars’s thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

The grass ended and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time—lots
of it. So they’d taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot
of their organic waste, spaded in over decades—everything from kitchen leftovers to lightly cleaned excrement. Add compost-starter
bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes like free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She
and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis
got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.

She hit the marker they had laid out—a rock—and turned, pointing off-camera. “And now—
ta-daah!
—we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.”

Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis—but it’s a step.

“I’m going for my first swim—now.” She shucked off her blue jump suit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular,
breasts midsized, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys,
somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.

Hey, we’re looking for market share here!
She grinned, turned and dove into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped—she wasn’t faking, this really was her first
swim in a quarter century—and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breast stroke, feeling the tug
and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her.
Fun, yes—not nearly enough fun on Mars.

Or water.
They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside shipped enough gear to build a real
water retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures—mostly
light and portable—to the ice hills.

Mars was in some ways an upside down world. On Earth, one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in
Gusev, water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists “pingos.” When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust
up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their
drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod’s solar energy grid on the
Moon. Time . . .

She stopped at the pool edge, flipped out and sprang to her feet—
thanks, 0.38 g!
“The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.”
Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini . . . She donned a blue terry cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the
air feel decidedly chilly. “In case you’re wondering, swimming doesn’t feel any different here. That’s because the water you
displace makes you float—we’re mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn’t matter much what the local gravity
is.”

Okay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.

“Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.” She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward
a squat inflated building. “Robotic, nuclear powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface.
Took nine years to build—whoosh! Thank you, engineers.”

What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water—no longer a cold, dusty desert.
Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones,
and you have a colony. They could grow crops big time. Red Kansas . . .

A gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-eggs smell. Andy had put the finishing touches
on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor.
Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the
geologists—“areologists” when on Mars, the purists said—had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling
heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would
start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along tree-lined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown
ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes . . .

In the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than lose 90 percent
of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and
relished dinner on “meat nights.” They’d have one tonight, after this media show.

“So that’s it—life on Mars gets a bit better. We’re still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat—the biggest
conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a
week, we’ll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!”

She grinned, waved, and Viktor called, “Is done.”

She had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.

“Am still running.”

“Check it for editing,” she said quickly. “I’m going to splash.” She dove into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it
in slow-mo.

Julia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy’s kick off the platform and watched him
swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it,
which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy,
grinning relentlessly.

Even with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and
the Consortium board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.

And Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above her. He rotated
his arms, mimicking the motion birds made in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle,
coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward and wind rippled his
hair. She watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright winds sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.

But he was cutting it close to the tree, still far up its slope. The Consortium board had chosen Andy both for his engineering
skills and this grinning, showoff personality, just the thing to perk up their audience numbers.

His T-shirt flapped and he turned in closer still. She lost sight of him behind the eucalyptus and when he came within view
again there seemed to be no separation at all between his body and the tree. Ahead of him a limb stuck out a bit farther than
the rest. He saw it and turned his right wing to push out, away, and the wing hit the limb. For an instant it looked as though
he would bank down and away from the glancing brush. But the wing caught on the branch.

It ripped, showing light where the monolayer split away from the brace. Impact united with the change in flow patterns around
his body. The thin line of light grew and seemed to turn Andy’s body on a pivot, spinning him sideways.

The eucalyptus wrenched sideways. It was thin and the wrench of collision pulled it sideways.

He fought to bring the wing into a plane with his left arm but the pitch was too much. She gasped as his right arm frantically
pumped for leverage it did not have. The moment froze, slowed—and then he was tumbling in air, away from the tree, falling,
gathering speed.

The tree toppled, too.

In the low gravity the plunge seemed to take long moments. All the way down he fought to get air under his remaining wing.
The right wing flapped and rattled and kept him off kilter. His efforts brought his head down and when he hit in the rocks
near the pool the skull struck first.

The smack was horrible. She cried out in the silence.

Andy had not uttered a sound on the way down.

THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES BY GREGORY BENFORD

The classic series that explores the galaxy’s greatest mystery and mankind’s destiny.

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