Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

      So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of moderation. And the orbital eccentricity caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194. Spring fifty-one days longer than autumn! Some claimed this alone made it worth settling in the north.

      In any case, in the north they were; and spring had arrived. The days got longer by a little bit every day and the work went on. The area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks; they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directions: the alchemists’ quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the biomed center to the south.

      Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent habitat. The nightly conferences there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for help. There were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis’s prospecting unit, even Ann. One night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia’s, and invited her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the southwest. Obviously Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia declined. “I’ve got too much work to do, you know.” And seeing Ann’s disappointment: “Maybe next trip.”

      And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of a new wing. Arkady had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by the square. “That’s where those magnesium beams will come in handy,” Nadia said. “If only we could make stronger glass panes …”

      They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from Hebes. Everyone spent that evening looking at their videotapes. These showed the expedition’s rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Strange little meter-high cliffs finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.