Nirgal said, “Ever hear anything of Hiroko?”
They looked at each other. Nirgal had no idea what their glances meant, but there was quite a silent conversation going on between them.
“No. Hiroko . . . she disappeared so long ago. We never heard from her again. But she’s your mother, no?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t hear from her?”
“No. She disappeared in Sabishii. When UNTA burned it down.” Reminding them. “Some say she was killed then. Others say that she got away with Iwao and Gene and Rya and the rest of them. Lately I heard they may have come to Elysium. Or to somewhere near here.”
They frowned. “I’ve never heard that, have you?”
“No. But they wouldn’t have told us, would they.”
“No.”
“But you’ve seen nothing out here,” Nirgal said. “No settlements or camps?”
“No. Well . . .”
“There are settlements all over. But they all come into town. They’re all natives like you. A few Kurds.”
“No one unusual.”
“And so all the settlements are accounted for, you think?”
“I think so.”
“I think so.”
Nirgal considered it. These were two of only a few, maybe a half dozen, of the First Hundred who had sided with the UNTA all the way. Would Hiroko reveal herself to them? Would she try to hide from them? If they knew of her presence, would they tell him?
But they didn’t know. He sat there in the big comfortable armchair, falling asleep. There was nothing to know.
Around him the two wizened old men moved quietly about the dim room. Old turtleheads, deep in their dark cave. But they had loved Phyllis. Both of them. As friends. Or maybe it hadn’t been like that. Maybe it hadn’t been that simple. However it had happened, they were the partners now. Maybe they had always been the partners. In the First Hundred that might have been a difficulty. Phyllis of course seemed an unlikely refuge. All the better perhaps. Who knew what had happened in the beginning. The past was a mystery. Even to those who had been there and lived it. And of course even at the time none of it had made sense, not the kind of sense people talked about afterward. Now they puttered about in the dusk. He felt the exhaustion of his long run take hold of him.
Let him sleep.
We should tell him.
No.
Why not?
There’s no need. Everyone will find out soon enough.
When things start dying. Phyllis wouldn’t have wanted that.
But they killed her. So they don’t have her here to save them.
So they get what they deserve? Everything dying?
Everything won’t die.
It will if it works the way they want. She wouldn’t have wanted that.
We had no choice. You know that. They would have killed us.
Would they? I’m not so sure. I think you wanted it. They kill Phyllis, and so we—
We had no choice I say! Come on. They could have gotten the locations from the records. And who’s to say they aren’t right anyway.
Revenge.
Okay, revenge. Say it was. Serves them right. This was never their planet.
Much later Nirgal found himself suddenly awake, and cold. Neck sore from being bent in the big armchair. The old men were slumped at the kitchen table over books, as still as wax figurines. One of them was asleep, dreaming the other’s dream. The other watched it in the air. Their fire had banked to gray coals. Nirgal whispered that he had to leave. He got up and walked out into a frigid predawn, walked for a while and then ran again through the dark trees, running as if to escape something.
Chapter 17
Saving Noctis Dam
The Noctis Dam was not a good idea in any case, and then unfortunately they botched the engineering as well. They placed the dam in the mouth of the southernmost Noctis canyon, where the rim is a basalt cap resting on old sandstone. Naturally as soon as the reservoir filled the sandstone began to saturate, which weakened the dam foundations. Then the only emergency runoff as designed was a big glory hole that ran water down through a tunnel in the rock on the side, letting it out into the headwaters of the Ius River below. They lined the tunnel with concrete, of course, but it was sandstone behind that. Thus when the weather became more violent and we saw the first superstorms, the dam was not designed to handle such runoffs. The reservoir level would rise very fast. One of the very first times that happened I was there to see it, and it was a daunting thing to witness. We opened the glory hole the moment rain was forecast, but it seemed to make little difference. And this time the rock behind the concrete was so weakened by seepage that the cavitation ripped the concrete right out of there, apparently. All the instrument readings for the tunnel went dead, and then we saw the concrete being shot out of the hole at the bottom into the shallows of the headwaters; sometimes after a minute or two of complete blockage, so that house-sized chunks of concrete went flying hundreds of meters, as out of a cannon. A very disturbing sight for all of us.
Of course the water going down the tunnel would immediately begin to rip the sandstone out of the hole, and soon enough there would be no rim underneath us left to hold up the south side of the dam.
Thus we had no choice but to close the glory hole from the top; indeed we were happy that the option still existed. But after that we had no other way to release water from the reservoir. And it was still raining harder than we had ever seen, as if the clouds had been seeded; and Noctis Labyrinthus is an extremely big watershed, even just the southernmost quadrant of it, which was what drained into the reservoir.
So the reservoir level rose, two meters in an hour, then three. At that rate we had only a few more hours before it reached the top of the dam and started pouring over, and then inevitably the top would tear somewhere, and without further ado the entire dam, all 330 vertical meters of it, would peel down, probably in a single collapse. The rim walls just behind the dam were very likely to go as well. More importantly, the resulting flood would certainly sweep away all the canyon-floor settlements in Oudemans Crater and upper Marineris, perhaps all the way down to Melas Chasma.
For some time after we closed the glory hole we were at a loss concerning what next to do. Mary of course called emergency services in Cairo, and told them to warn the people down in Oudemans and in Ius Chasma to get out of the crater and canyon, or at least as high on their walls as they could, as there was no quick way for great numbers of people to get out of that deep crater and gorge. But beyond that it was not clear what we could do. We hastened back and forth between the command center and the dam, looking at the water rising, then walking back up to the command center to check the weather reports, all the while in a terrific downpour. The reports gave us reason to hope that the rain might soon stop—it already had upstream in the watershed, and farther west. And the last squall had consisted mostly of hail—hail the size of oranges, which drove us to the shelter of the center, but had the advantage of staying where it was on the ground upstream, at least until it melted. So that too gave us some hope.
Nevertheless, the upstream flow readings coming in to the center made it clear that the lake was going to rise higher than the dam, by what the AI said would be two or three meters. Some rough calculations led me to the conclusion that the overflow would probably be more than the lip of the dam could tolerate. I informed the others of this unhappy conclusion.
“Three meters!” Mary said at last, and expressed the wish that the dam were just four meters higher. Certainly that would have helped.
Without really considering it, I said, “Perhaps we can make it four meters higher.”