Out
A series about Mars
by Daniel
E. Machado
Chapter 29
"We’re gonna get in trouble." Roselene
tells the girl standing next to her as the tall dark elevator doors slide
open with a hush.
"No we won’t."
Since time immemorial little girls have spoken these
same two statements, and both have at one time or another been absolutely
correct. At the moment Roselene is banking hard on the former line or reasoning,.
Her new friend Kara the latter.
"My daddy works up here." Kara tells
her through the tangled mass of red curls framing the girl’s round freckled
smile. "He lets me come up here all the time."
"Yah, but we’re supposed to be back
down in the play-park." Roselene looks around for a public input and failing
to locate one of these ever-present all-seeing eyes repeats herself with
a lingering sigh. "We’re going to get in trouble."
"Oh, don’t be silly." Kara reassures.
Being one whole M older than Roselene, and born here on Mars of corporate
parents, Kara treats Atlantis Tower as if it’s her own personal playground.
Roselene still finds the whole place extremely intimidating. "If they thought
we were doing something wrong they’d call and tell us."
"Yah, but I don’t see any inputs up
here." Roselene isn’t quite sure which she finds more disturbing; that
they might be somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, or that they weren’t
being watched. This place certainly isn’t like the Flying Jib. Every inch
of the ship was completely archived, and most of its areas locked and restricted.
"Sure there are." Kara reassures her
with a quick glance around. "Somewhere." When Roselene’s friend can’t find
one either she just shrugs. "Besides, everything you got on you has angel-trackers
in them. They know where we are."
Already several steps out into the
open expanse of floor Kara looks back at Roselene with an ever widening
grin as her footsteps grow quicker toward the tower section’s outer transparent
wall. Just beyond her fast retreating friend Roselene stares up into a
bright shimmering wall of clouded pinkish blue sky. With the tower's main
structure complete, and the first of the four foundation habitats sealed
and pressurized, the task of encasing the tower's exterior with a shell
of habitat structures has begun. Like s series of wide flat rings affixed
to an upright cylinder, each level's floor extends another one hundred
meters out from the tower's outer wall, each floor fifty meters above the
next. Sealed with walls of monofilament reinforced transparent cerametal
the resulting spaces are both cavernous and exposed. The room echoes in
Roselene’s ears like being in some enormous box with one entire wall made
up
of bright Martian sky. This section had recently been sealed and allocated
heat and atmosphere, but no one's moved in yet. Not even the interior living
structures. The vast curve and angled cavern stands vacant, every sound
echoed back fully amplified against the room’s transparent convex wall.
"Come on!" Kara’s shout echoes through
the room like thunder, her word's reflected and focused. "Come here! You
gotta see this."
Following as quickly as she dare,
more out of fear of being left alone in this strange place than anything
else, Roselene’s panic climbs as her own echoed footsteps add their own
strangeness to this frightfully vacant room.
"Look!" Standing at what seems to
be the floor’s edge Kara points outside. With slowing steps Roselene nears
her friend, looking out as she watches the strange Martian horizon slowly
creep into view. Mars always looks too small to her. Too close. And it
curves too much. It isn’t until Roselene steps up the outer wall that she
begins to see the wide water filled crater on which Atlantis Tower had
been built. The crater's vast and almost perfectly round lake had been
pumped up from the North Martian Sea far below.
"Isn’t this just all?" Kara giggles
excited. "Just totally all!"
"Yah." Roselene whispers. "What are
those?"
"What?"
"Those little thingies over there
out in the middle of the water."
"Those are some sub." Kara tells her
with the authority of age and experience.
"Where they going?"
"I don’t know." She shrugs. "They
got these shrimp and algae feeder thingies down on the bottom of the crater.
And, that over there." Kara presses her index finger to the cold clear
cerametal, pointing across the lake to a tall gray structure set into a
jagged split in the crater's far wall. "That’s the lake's main pump station
and sub locks."
"Sub what?" Roselene’s face scrunches
up into a lopsided squint.
"A sub lock. It’s kind of like this
elevator thingy for subs. It takes subs down to the sea out there." She
points out a little higher.
"And then back up again?"
"Uh huh." Kara nods.
Above the crater's edge the North
Martian Sea's arched horizon sweeps away, now dotted with forested islands
where newly teraformed mountains had once stood. As Roselene’s eyes slide
across the vast Martian vista her gaze becomes distracted by the vast room’s
coated gray cement walls and bare metal duct-work.
"What’s this place supposed to be?"
"I don’t know. I think my dad said
it was supposed to be some sort of office complex or something."
Roselene isn’t quite sure which she
finds more fascinating; the gigantic enclosed space, or the vast Martian
landscape outside. Off to the edge of her view, where the exterior wall
curves and distorts the pinkish Martian sky, Roselene notices a low-slung
cloud sweeping up into the dark forest green of Martian redwoods.
"What’s that over there?" She points
out at a slow rolling cloud. "And all those trees?"
"That’s ‘Lantis Tower's vapor cloud."
Kara explains "You know, like from all the water they pump in up at the
top."
Even after having it explained to
her by both her mother and Fred, Roselene still finds the notion of spraying
water in at the top of some giant tube and letting it all fall down to
the bottom to make both electricity and a huge teraforming vapor clouds
just a bit… well, silly.
A cloud factory that makes ‘lectricity.
She grins to herself.
"Does that cloud really make ‘lectricity?"
"I do know." Her older friend shrugs.
"Sure it does." Fred’s voice startles
them up from behind. Hearts in throats, both girls screech out a high-pitched
squeal that echoes back from the cavernous enclosure to startle them both
all over again. Grabbing for each other Roselene pulls Kara in front of
her for protection, something Kara herself would have done to Roselene
were she capable of thought.
"Whoa!" Fred waves reassuring fingers
out in front of him, grinning at the girl’s painful expressions of terror
and absolute guilt. "Sorry, Shorty. Relax."
"Fre-ed!" A fist down onto her hip,
just like her mother. Roselene’s fear quickly leaps anger. "You scared
us! And don’t call me that!"
"As you wish, Princess." Fred bows.
From Kara’s perspective Fred seems to be placating, but Roselene understands
Fred’s sarcasm. When her cousin says "as you wish", what he really means
is "not in front of company". Noticing Roselene’s return to guilt, Fred
thinks not to make such a big a deal of this. Limited unauthorized exploration
is a healthy sign of social independence. A trait to be generally encouraged
by any frontier society.
"Wow!" Pretending to ignore the girls
Fred smiles out over the now darkening Martian horizon. "That’s really
quite a view." Then with a smiling glance down at Roselene’s new
friend. "You say your father works up here?"
"Uh huh." Kara nods. "He’s a structural
engineer. He does all that stuff up there." The girl points up at the cantilevered
wedges of angled metal jutting out in support of the vault's distant ceiling.
"And the outer wall too."
"Well, Kara. Your father must be a
very important person. In order to build anything you have to start off
with a good foundation, and your father builds the things that everyone
else builds on top of. Your father must be a very important person indeed."
Glancing away from the vast Martian skyscape Fred notices a small pridefull
smirk the girl’s round freckled face.
"He’s up on the next level." She chirps.
"He works outside in an e-suit. I get to go out with him sometimes. I’m
already big enough for a double-oh suit now."
"Really" Fred questions with a serious
note. "You don’t look like you’re thirty-five kilos yet."
"Am so." The girl insists with indignant
pride. "Thirty-one-point-seven this morning."
"Cousin Fred?" Roselene asks stepping
a bit closer to the transparent wall. Despite her startle by him she’s
feeling much better now that Fred is here. "How come there’s so many trees
out there? I didn’t think Mars was supposed to have trees."
"Sure it is. Not everywhere of course,
but Mars has lots of trees. Around here they mostly grow these redwoods
over here."
"Like the trees up in Sequoia?" Roselene
just barely remembers the day-trip she and her mother took up to see the
big tall trees, but she’s seen the holos of the trip lots of times. Grandma
Meg even keeps this really big big holo that she keeps hanging in her front
room of Roselene and her mommy standing up inside this really big hole
in one of the trees there. "I went with my mommy there once."
"Well, they’re sort of like those
trees." Smiling down a his tiny cousin Fred notices a slight scowl of envy
touch Kara’s face. To locals the Sequoia Forest is like the Holy Grail
and Eden all rolled up into one. Even corporate kids like Kara seem to
sense the forest's primordial magic. "The trees here were originally developed
from Pacific Sequoias, but now these trees are different inside. They couldn’t
really live in on the Earth anymore."
"How come?" Roselene take Fred’s hand,
her eyes still straining to see the distorted cloud forest.
"Well, for one thing, they would try
to grow too tall and fall over in Earth’s strong gravity. They’re about
three times as tall as a regular sequoia and soak up about a hundred time
as much CO2, some of which it converts into heat."
"How?" Roselene looks up at him.
"I know how." Kara tells them with
a touch of knowful pride. "The trees mix up the minerals from out of the
ground and they make slow reactions inside. They showed us once in lab
class. It’s easy."
"Yah." Fred laughs. "If you’ve got
a thumb. But the tree has to do it the hard way."
"How?" Roselene insists.
"Genetics." Fred looks down at the
child. "Genetics and lots and lots of water. That’s why they grow so well
in the tower's vapor cloud. No one has to pump water up from the sea, like
before the floods."
"How big is it?" Roselene steps closer
to the exterior wall, still holding tight to Fred’s hand.
"Kara?" Fred looks down at the girl,
differing to her as tour guide.
"About eight kilometers wide and about
a hundred kilometers long."
"Which one? The cloud or the forest?"
"Both." Kara smiles up for confirmation
at Fred. "The forest is just a little bit smaller that the cloud, but they’re
both just about the same I think."
"That’s right." Fred nods assurance.
"The trees grow wherever there’s water, and the warmth from the trees helps
the vapor cloud expand. Soon the forest and cloud both grow wider and longer
every year."
"Wow." Roselene leans closer to what
seems like nothing more than a thin sheet of curved glass.
"Wow is right." Fred confirms with
a squeeze of the little girl’s hand. "You see that out there?"
"Where?" Roselene follows Fred’s finger
out onto the crater lake below.
"Right there. That little patch of
gray under the water." Fred looks down at Roselene’s tiny face squinting
hard in earnest search. "Right out there where that tiny little sub is
just going down."
Following his finger Roselene finds
the tiny submarine as it lowers into the lake. There, just below the lake's
surface, she finally finds the slight gray brightness in the crater's dark
algae covered floor.
"I see it. What is it?"
"That’s where your mother’s working
right now."
"Cool." Kara gushes.
"All cool." Fred agrees. "Ever been
down in a sub?"
"Uh uh." Kara wags her head. "But,
some day I will."
"Maybe some day Roselene’s mother
might take you guys both down." Fred smiles. "I heard they sometimes do
educational outings."
"They do!" Kara quickly agrees. "That’s
how I got to go outside with my daddy."
"Well then, there you go." Fred smiles
down at the girl with a quick little wink.