Also she became more and more ruthless. From time to time she felt freshly how power could corrupt, felt it as a slight nausea within her. But she was getting habituated. She clashed often with Ariadne, and when she recalled the remorse she had felt after her first wrangle with the young Minoan, it seemed to her ridiculously overfastidious; she was far tougher than that every day now on people who crossed her, she showed the knives in meeting after meeting, in calculated microbursts of brutality that put people in line very effectively indeed. In fact the more she allowed herself to release little outbursts of fury and scorn, the more certainly she could control them and put them to some use. She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive. Power was powerful, in more ways than one. And now Nadia felt very little remorse about that; they deserved a pop on the nose, generally; they had thought they were going to get a harmless old babushka to sit in the big chair while they worked their games on each other, but the big chair was the power seat, and she was damned if she was going to go through all this shit and not use some of that power to try to get what she wanted.
And so less and less often did she feel how ugly it was. Once when she did, after a particularly hard-nosed day, she thumped down in a chair and almost cried, sick with disgust. Only seven months of her three m-years had passed. What would she become by the time her stint was done? Already she was used to power; by then she might even like it.
Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast table. “Well,” he said once, after she explained what was bothering her, “power is power.” He was thinking hard. “You’re the first president of Mars. So in a way you define the office. Maybe you should declare you’re only going to work the one month and not the two months, and delegate the two months to your staff. Something like that.”
She stared at him, mouth full of toast.
Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again, joining a caravan of people working their way from crater to crater, installing drainage systems. Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter of picking the right angle to emerge from the crater apron, and then setting the robots to work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Agassiz, Heaviside, Bianchini, Lau, Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier, Suess… they plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones, although the craters were taking on names even faster than they drilled them: 85 South, Too Dark, Fool’s Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole, Proudhon, Bellamy, Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon. The migration from one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around the south polar cap during the underground years; except now everything was out in the open, and through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team luxuriated in the sun, in the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled across rough frozen bogs brilliant with sunny meltwater and meadow grass, and always of course they crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into the light, ring after ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid watershed pipes, and attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators whenever the rock had any gas feedstocks in it.
But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia meant. She missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been hand labor, but one’s touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and the repeated gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level of engagement than this “work,” which consisted of talking to AIs and then walking around and watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot diggers, city-block-sized mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth that grew back like sharks’ teeth — everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys stronger than the elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself. It just wasn’t what she had in mind.
Try again. She went through another cycle; return to Sheffield, engagement in the council work, increasing disgust, merging with despair; look around for anything to get her out of it; notice some likely project and seize on it. Run off to check it out. Like Art had said, she could call her own shots. There was that in power too.
The next time out it was soil that drew her. “Air, water, earth,” Art said. “Next it’ll be forest fires, eh?”
But she had heard that there were scientists in Bogdanov Vishniac trying to manufacture soil, and this interested her. So off she went, flying south to Vishniac, where she had not been for years. Art accompanied her. “It’ll be interesting to see how the old underground cities adapt, now that there’s no need to hide.”
“I don’t see why anyone stays down here, to tell you the truth,” Nadia said as they flew down into the rugged southern polar region. “They’re so far south their winters last forever. Six months with no sun at all. Who would stay?”
“Siberians.”
“No Siberian in his right mind would move here. They know better.”
“Laplanders, then. Inuit. People who like the poles.”
“I suppose.”
As it turned out, no one in Bogdanov Vishniac seemed to mind the winters. They had redistributed their mohole mound in a ring around the mohole itself, creating an immense circular amphitheater facing down into the hole. This terraced amphitheater was to be the surface Vishniac. In the summers it would be a green oasis, and in the dark winters a white oasis; they planned to illuminate it with hundreds of brilliant streetlights, giving themselves a stage set day, in a town contemplating itself across a round gap in things, or from the upper wall looking out at the frosted chaos of the polar highlands. No, they were going to stay, no question of it. It was their place.
Nadia was greeted at the airport as a special guest, as always when she stayed with Bogdanovists. Before joining them this had struck her as ridiculous, and even a bit offensive: girlfriend of The Founder! But now she accepted their offer of a guest suite located on the lip of the mohole, with a slightly overhanging window that gave one a view straight down for eighteen kilometers. The lights on the mohole’s bottom looked like stars seen through the planet.
Art was petrified, not at the sight but at the very thought of the sight, and he would not go near that half of the room. Nadia laughed at him, and then when she was done looking, closed the drapes.
The next day she went out to visit the soil scientists, who were happy at her interest. They wanted to be able to feed themselves, and as more and more settlers moved south, this was going to be impossible without more soil. But they were finding that manufacturing soil was one of the most difficult technical feats they had ever undertaken. Nadia was surprised to hear this — these were the Vishniac labs, after all, world leaders in technologically supported ecologies, having lived for decades hidden in a mohole. And top-soil was, well, soil. Dirt with additives, presumably, and additives one could add.