The land they walked over was dotted by scattered low plants, mostly tundra moss and alpine flowers, with occasional stands of ice cactus like spiky black fire hydrants. Midges and flies, disturbed by the strange invasion, whirred around in the air overhead. It was noticeably warmer than it had been in the morning, the temperatures rising fast; it felt a little above zero. “Two seventy-two!” Nirgal cried when Nadia asked him in passing. He was passing by every few minutes, running up and down the crowd from one end of the line to the other and back again. Nadia checked her wrist: 272°K. The wind was very slight, and from the southwest. The weather reports indicated the high-pressure zone would stay over Isidis for another day at least.
People were walking in small knots, in the process of finding other small knots, so that friends and work groups and acquaintances were greeting each other as they moved along, surprised often by familiar voices under masks, familiar eyes between mask and hood or hat. A diffuse frost cloud rose from the crowd, a mass exhalation, burning off quickly in the sun. Rovers from the Red army had driven up from both sides of the city, hurrying to get away from the flood; now they moved along slowly, their outriders passing out flasks of hot drinks. Nadia glared at them, mouthing silent curses inside the privacy of her mask, but one of the Reds saw the curse in her eyes, and said to her irritably, “It wasn’t us broke the dike, you know, it was the Marsfirst guerrillas. It was Kasei!”
And he drove on.
A convention was being established whereby ravines to the east of the piste were being used as latrines. They were getting far enough upslope that people often stopped to look back down into the strangely empty city, with its new moat of dark rusty ice-choked water. Groups of natives were chanting bits of the aerophany as they walked, and hearing it, Nadia’s heart squeezed inside her; she muttered, “Come back out, damn you, Hiroko, please—come back out today.”
She spotted Art, and walked over to his side. He was making a running commentary over the wrist, apparently sending it to a news consortium on Earth. “Oh yes,” he said in a quick aside when Nadia asked him about it. “We’re live. Real good vid too, I’m sure. And they can relate to the flood scenario.”
No doubt. The city with its mesas, surrounded now by black ice-choked water, which was steaming faintly, its surface turbulent, its edges bubbling madly with carbonation, as waves surged down from the north, the noise like waves in a high storm. . . . The air temperature was now just above freezing, and the surging water was staying liquid even when it pooled and went still, even when it was covered with floating brash ice. Nadia had never seen anything that brought home to her more strongly the fact that they had transformed the atmosphere—not the plants, nor the bluing of the sky color, nor even their ability to expose their eyes, and breathe through thin masks. The sight of water freezing during the Marineris deluge—going from black to white in twenty seconds or less—had marked her more deeply than she knew. Now they had open water. The low broad crease holding Burroughs looked like a gargantuan Bay of Fundy, with the tide racing up it.
People were exclaiming, their voices filling the thin air like bird-song, over the low continuo of the flood. Nadia didn’t know why; then she saw—there was movement at the spaceport.
The spaceport was located on a broad plateau to the northwest of the city, and at their height on the slope, the population of Burroughs could stand there and watch while the great doors of the spaceport’s largest hangar opened, and five giant space planes rolled out one after another: an ominous, somehow military sight. The planes taxied up to the spaceport’s main terminal, and jetways extended and latched on to their sides. Again nothing happened, and the refugees walked up toward the first real hills of the Great Escarpment for the better part of an hour, until, despite their increase in elevation, the spaceport runways and the lower halves of the hangars were under the watery horizon. The sun was well in the west now.
Attention turned to the city itself, as the water broached the tent wall on the east side of Burroughs, and ran in over the coping by Southwest Gate, where they had cut the tent. Soon thereafter it was flooding Princess Park and Canal Park and the Niederdorf, dividing the city in two and then slowly rising up the side boulevards, covering the roofs in the lower part of town.
In the midst of this spectacle one of the big jets appeared in the sky over the plateau, looking much too slow to fly, as big planes low to the ground always do. It had taken off southward, so for the spectators on the ground it grew larger and larger without ever seeming to gain speed, until the low rumble of its eight engines reached them, and it plowed overhead with the slow impossible awkwardness of a bumblebee. As it lumbered off to the west the next one appeared over the spaceport, and headed past the water-floored city and over them, off to the west. And so it went for all five planes, each one looking as unaerodynamic as the last, until the last one had trolled past them and disappeared over the western horizon.
Now they began to walk in earnest. The fastest walkers took off, making no attempt to stay back with the slower ones; it was important to begin to train people away from Libya Station as soon as possible, and this was understood by all. Trains were on their way to Libya from all over, but Libya Station was small and had only a few sidings, so the choreography of the evacuation was going to be complex.
It was now five in the afternoon, the sun low over the rise of Syrtis, the temperature plummeting past zero, on its way far down. As the faster walkers, mostly natives and the latest immigrants, pressed on ahead, the crowd became a long column. The people in rovers reported that it was several kilometers long now, and getting longer all the time. These rovers drove up and down the line, picking people up and sometimes letting others out. All available walkers and helmets were being used. Coyote had appeared on the scene, driving up from the direction of the dike, and seeing his boulder car, Nadia instantly suspected he was behind the broaching of the dike; but after greeting her cheerily over the wrist, and asking how things were going, he drove back toward the city. “Get South Fossa to send a dirigible over the city,” he suggested, “in case anyone was left behind, and is up on the mesa tops. There must be some people in there who slept through the day, and when they wake up they are in for one very big surprise.”
He laughed wildly, but it was a good point, and Art made the call.
Nadia walked along at the back of the column with Maya and Sax and Art, listening to reports as they came in. She got the rovers to drive on the dead piste, to avoid kicking dust into the air. She tried to ignore the fact that she was tired already. It was mostly lack of sleep, rather than muscular exhaustion. But it was going to be a long night. And not only for her. Many people on Mars were entirely city dwellers now, and unused to walking very far at a time. She herself seldom did, though she was often on her feet around construction sites, and did not have a desk job like many of these people. Luckily they were following a piste, and could even walk on its smooth surface if they cared to, between the suspension rails on the edges and the reaction rail running down the middle. Most preferred to stay on the concrete or gravel roads running alongside the piste, however.
Unfortunately, walking out of Isidis Planitia in any direction but north meant walking uphill. Libya Station was about seven hundred meters higher than Burroughs, not an inconsiderable height; but the grade was almost continuous over the seventy kilometers, and there were no steep sections anywhere along the way. “It will help keep us warm,” Sax muttered when Nadia mentioned it.
It got later and later, until their shadows were cast far to the east, as if they were giants. Behind them the drowning city, lightless and empty, black-floored, disappeared over their horizon mesa by mesa, until finally Double Decker Butte and Moeris Mesa were submerged by the skysill. The dusky burnt umbers of Isidis took on more and more color, and the sky darkened and darkened, until the fat sun lay burning on the western horizon, and they walked slowly through a ruddy world, strung out like a ragtag army in retreat.
Nadia checked Mangalavid from t
ime to time, and found the news from the rest of the planet mostly comforting. All the major cities but Sheffield had been secured by the independence movement. Sabishii’s mound maze had provided refuge for the survivors of the fire, and though the fire was not yet put out everywhere, the maze meant they would be okay. Nadia talked to Nanao and Etsu for a while as she walked. The little wrist image of Nanao revealed his exhaustion, and she said something about how bad she felt—Sabishii burned, Burroughs drowned—the two greatest cities on Mars, destroyed. “No no,” Nanao said. “We rebuild. Sabishii is in our mind.”
They were sending their few unburned trains to Libya Station, as were many other cities. The nearest were also sending planes and dirigibles. The dirigibles would be able to come to their aid during the night’s march, which was useful. Especially important would be any water they could bring with them, as dehydration in the cold and hyperarid night was going to be severe. Nadia’s throat was already parched, and she happily took a cupful of warm water from a passing rover handing them out. She lifted her mask and drank swiftly, trying not to breathe as she did. “Last call!” the woman passing out the cups called cheerily. “Well run out after the next hundred people.”
Another kind of call came in from South Fossa. They had heard from several mining camps around Elysium, whose occupants had declared themselves independent pf both the metanationals and the Free Mars movement, and were warning everyone to stay away. Some stations occupied by Reds were doing much the same. Nadia snorted. “Tell them fine,” she said to the people, in South Fossa. “Send them a copy of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration, and tell them to study it for a while. If they’ll agree to uphold the human rights section, I don’t see why we should bother with them.”
The sun set as they walked. The long twilight slowly ran its course.
While there was still a dark purple twilight suffusing the hazy air, a boulder car drove up from the east and stopped just ahead of Nadia’s group, and figures got out and walked over to them, wearing white masks and hoods. By silhouette alone Nadia recognized, all of a sudden, the one in the lead: it was Ann, tall and spare, walking right up to her, picking her out of the rabble at the tail end of the column without hesitation, despite the lack of light. The way the First Hundred knew each other. . . .
Nadia stopped, stared up at her old friend. Ann was blinking at the sudden cold.
“We didn’t do it,” Ann said brusquely. “The Armscor unit came out in armored cars, and there was a real fight. Kasei was afraid that if they retook the dike they would try to retake everything, everywhere. He was probably right.”
“is he okay?”
“I don’t know. A lot of people on the dike were killed. And a lot had to escape the flood by going up onto Syrtis.”
She stood there before them, grim, unapologetic—Nadia marveled that one could read so much from a silhouette, a black cutout against the stars. Set of the shoulders, perhaps. Tilt of the head.
“Come on then,” Nadia said. There was nothing else she could think to say, at this point. Going out onto the dike in the first place, setting the explosive charges . . . but there was no point, now. “Let’s keep walking.”
The light leaked away from the land, out of the air, out of the sky. They hiked under the stars, through air as cold as Siberia. Nadia could have gone faster, but she wanted to stay at the back with the slowest group, to do what she could to help. People were giving piggyback rides to some of the smaller children among them, but the fact was there weren’t very many children at the end of the column; the smallest ones were already in rovers, and the older ones were up front with the faster walkers. There hadn’t been that many children in Burroughs to begin with.
Rover headlight beams cut through the dust they were throwing into the air, and seeing it Nadia wondered if the CO2 filters would get clogged by fines. She mentioned this aloud, and Ann said, “If you hold the mask to your face and blow out hard, it helps. You can also hold your breath and take it off, and blow compressed air through it, if you have a compressor.”
Sax nodded.
“You know these masks?” Nadia said to Ann.
Ann nodded. “I’ve spent many hours using ones like them.”
“Okay, good.” Nadia experimented with hers, holding the fabric right against her mouth and blowing out hard. Quickly she felt short of breath. “We still should try walking on the piste and the roads, and cutting down on the dust. Arid tell the rovers to go slow.”
They walked on. Over the next couple of hours they fell into a kind of rhythm. No one passed them, no one fell back. It got colder and colder. Rover headlights partially illuminated the thousands of people ahead of them, all the way up the long gradual slope to the high southern horizon, which was perhaps twelve or fifteen kilometers ahead of them, it was hard to tell in the dark. The column ran all the way to the horizon: a bobbing, fencing collection of headlight beams, flashlight beams, the red glow of taillights . . . a strange sight. Occasionally there was a buzz overhead, as dirigibles from South Fossa arrived, floating like gaudy UFOs with all their running lights on, their engines humming as they wafted down to drop off loads of food and water for the cars to retrieve, and pick up groups from the back of the column, then they hummed up into the air and away, until they were no more than colorful constellations, disappearing over the horizon to the east.
During the timeslip a crowd of exuberant young natives tried to sing, but it was too cold and dry, and they did not persist for long. Nadia liked the idea, and in her mind she sang some of her old favorites many times: “Hello Central Give Me Dr. Jazz,” “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Over and over and over.
The longer the night went on, the better her mood became; it was beginning to seem like the plan was going to work. They were not passing hundreds of prostrate people—although the word from the cars was that a fair number of the young natives appeared to have blown it and gone out too fast, and were now requiring assistance. Everyone had gone from 500 millibars to 340, which was the equivalent of going from 4,000 meters altitude on Earth to 6,500 meters, not an inconsiderable jump even with the higher percentage of oxygen in the Martian air to mitigate the effects; thus people were coming down with altitude sickness. Altitude sickness tended to strike the young a bit more than the old anyway, and many of the natives had taken off very enthusiastically. So some were paying for it now, with headaches and nausea felling quite a few. But the cars reported success so far taking in the ones on the edge of vomiting, and escorting the rest. And the rear of the column was keeping a steady pace.
So Nadia trudged on, sometimes hand in hand with Maya or Art, sometimes in her own world, her mind wandering in the biting cold, remembering odd shards of the past. She remembered some of the other dangerous cold walks she had taken over the surface of this world of hers: out in the great storm with John at Rabe Crater . . . searching for the transponder with Arkady . . . following Frank down into Noctis Labyrinthus, on the night they escaped from the assault on Cairo. . . . On that night too she had fallen into an odd bleak cheerfulness—response to a freeing from responsibility, perhaps, to becoming no more than a foot soldier, following someone else’s lead. Sixty-one had been such a disaster. This revolution too could devolve into chaos—indeed it had. No one in control. But there were still voices coming in over her wrist, from everywhere. And no one was going to strafe them from space. The most intransigent elements of the Transitional Authority had probably been killed outright, in Kasei Vallis—an aspect of Art’s “integrated pest management” that was no joke. And the rest of UNTA was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They were incapable, as anyone would be, of controlling a whole planet of dissidents. Or too intimidated to try.
So they had managed to do it differently this time. Or else conditions on Earth had simply changed, and all the various phenomena of Martian history were only distorted reflections of those changes. Quite possible. A troubling thought, when considering the future. But that was for later. They w
ould face all that when they came to it. Now they only had to worry about getting to Libya Station. The sheer physicality of the problem, and of the solution to the problem, pleased her immensely. Finally something she could get her hands on. Walk. Breathe the frigid air. Try to warm her lungs from the rest of her, from the heart—something like Nirgal’s uncanny heat redistribution, if only she could!
It began to seem like she could actually catch little bursts of sleep while still walking. She worried it was CO2 poisoning, but continued to blink out from time to time. Her throat was very sore. The tail end of the column was slowing down, and rovers were now driving back to it and picking up all the people who were exhausted, and driving them up the slope to Libya Station, where they would drop them off, and return for another load. A lot more people were beginning to suffer altitude sickness, and the Reds were telling victims over the wrist how to pull off their masks and vomit, and then get the masks back on before breathing again. A difficult unpleasant operation at best, and many people were suffering CO2 poisoning as well as altitude sickness. Still, they were closing on their destination. The wrist images from Libya Station looked like the inside of a Tokyo subway station at rush hour, but trains were arriving and departing on a regular basis, so it looked like there was going to be room for the later arrivals.
A rover rolled up beside them, and asked them if they wanted a lift. Maya said, “Get out of here! What’s the matter, can’t you see? Go help those people up there, come on, stop wasting our time!”
The driver took off quickly to avoid more castigation. Maya said hoarsely, “To hell with that. I’m a hundred and forty-three years old, and I’ll be damned if I don’t walk the whole way. Let’s pick up the pace a little.”
They kept the same pace. They kept at the back of the column, watching the parade of lights bobbing in the haze ahead of them. Nadia’s eyes had hurt for several hours, but now they were getting really painful, the numbness of the cold no longer a help, apparently; they were very, very dry, and sandy in their sockets. It stung to blink. Goggles with the masks would have been a good idea.