Blue Mars (87 page)

She laughed. He grabbed the cockpit handrail, pulled himself up to
her side. He saw immediately what she meant; the wind was strong, perhaps
sixty-five kilometers per hour, and the whine in the boat’s minimal rigging was
loud and sustained. There were whitecaps everywhere on the blue sea, and the
sound of the wind coursing through all that broken water was very unlike what
it would be pouring over rock—there it would be a high keening shriek—here,
among the trillions of bursting bubbles, it was a deep solid roar. Every wave
was whitecapped, and the great hills of the ground swells were obscured by foam
flying off the crests and rolling in the troughs. The sky was a dirty opaque
raw umber, very ominous looking, the sun a dim old coin, everything else dark,
as if in shadow, though there were no clouds. Fines in the air: a dust storm.
And now the waves were picking up, so that they spent many long seconds shooting
up the side of one, then almost as many schussing down into the trough of the
next one. Up and down in a long rhythm. The positive interference Ann had
spoken of made some waves doubly big. The water not foaming was turning the
color of the sky, brownish and dull, dark, though there was still not a cloud
to be seen—only this ominous color of the sky; not the old pink, but more like
the dust-choked air of the Great Storm. The whitecaps ceased in their area and
the sound of water against the boat grew louder, a slushy rumble; the sea here
was coated with frazil ice, or the thicker elastic layer of ice crystals called
nilas. Then the whitecaps returned, twice as thick as before.

Sax climbed down into the cockpit and checked the weather report
on the AI. A katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf.
A howler, as the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them.

732 Blue Mars

But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was
still a fairly local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a
roller-coaster ride, shimmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down
on the huge groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being
knocked over by the wind, but the boat’s skittering flights up and down showed
that they underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had
contracted almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned
over to check the AI more closely; the volume knob on the beeper was turned all
the way down. So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.

A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers
away didn’t help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in
all the years of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through
some invisible fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken
pancake ice of a sea surface that had been about to freeze over in the night;
difficult to spot in all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger
chunk, bergy bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse
Strait on a current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee
shore of the southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for
that matter.

They were forced to cover the cockpit with its clear shell,
rolling up out of the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof
cover they were immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a
true howler, Kasei Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast
of air; the AI listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180
and 220 kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as
they crossed the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160
kilometers an hour at the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating
now, crests flattened by gusts, torn apart. The ship was shutting down in
response to all that, mast retracting, cockpit covered, hatches battening; then
the sea anchor went out, a tube of material like a wind sock, dragging
underwater upwind of them, slowing their drift to leeward, and mitigating the
jarring impacts against small icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they
all clustered against the lee shore. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was
the brash ice and bergy bergs that were floating downwind faster than they
were, and knocking against the windward hull, even as the leeward hull still
slammed against a thickening ice mass. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in
effect the boat was becoming a kind of submarine, lying at the surface and just
under it. The strength of the materials of the boat could sustain any shock
that even a howler and a lee shore of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could
sustain forces several magnitudes stronger. But the weak point, as Sax
reflected as he was thrown hard against his seat belt and shoulder harness,
holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, was their bodies. The catamaran
lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening swoop, crashed to a halt against a
big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into the restraints. It seemed they might
be in danger of being shaken to death, an unpleasant way to go, as he was
beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged by seat belts; but if they
freed themselves they would be flung around the cockpit, into each other or
into something sharp, until something broke or burst. No. It was not a tenable
situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen on his bed’s frame would be
gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck the ice mass were so abrupt
that he doubted being horizontal would help much.

“I’m going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay,” he
shouted in Ann’s ear. She nodded that she had heard. He shouted the instruction
right into the AI’s pickup, and the computer heard and understood, which was
good, as it would have been hard to type accurately with the boat soaring and
plunging and shuddering as it slammed into the ice. In all that jarring it was
not possible to feel the boat’s engine, which had been running all along, but a
slight change in their angle to the groundswell convinced him that it was
pushing harder as the AI tried to get them farther west.

Down near the point of the Sinai Peninsula, on the southern side,
a large inundated crater called Arigato made a round bay. The entrance of the
bay was about sixty degrees of the circle of the crater, facing southwest. The
wind and waves were both also from the southwest; so the mouth of the bay,
quite shallow, as-it was a low part of the old crater rim, was bound to be
broken water, a difficult crossing no doubt. But once inside the bay the
groundswell would be cut off by that same rim, and both waves and wind much
reduced, especially when they got behind the western cape of the bay. There
they would wait out the howler, and be on their way again when it was done. In
theory it was an excellent plan, although Sax worried about conditions in the
mouth of the bay; the chart showed it was only ten meters deep, which was
certain to cause the groundswells to break. On the other hand, in a boat that
became a kind of submarine (and yet drawing less than two meters of water for
all that) negotiating broken surf might not be much of a problem; just go with
it. The AI appeared to consider his instructions within the realm of the
possible. And indeed the boat had pulled in the sea anchor, and with its
powerful little engines was making its way across the wind and waves toward the
bay, which was not visible; nothing of the lee shore could be seen through the
dirty air.

So they held to the cockpit railings and waited out the reach,
speechless; there was little to say, and the booming howl of the howler made it
difficult to communicate. Sax’s hands and arms got very tired from holding on,
but there was no help for that except to abandon the cockpit and go below and
strap himself into his bed, which he did not want to do. Despite the
discomfort, and the nagging worry about the bay entrance, it was an
extraordinary experience to watch the wind pulverize the surface of the water
the way it was.

A short while later (though the AI indicated it had been
seventy-two minutes), he caught sight of land, a dark ridge over the whitecaps
to the lee side of them. Seeing it meant they were probably too close to it,
but there ahead it disappeared, and reappeared farther west: the entrance to
Ari-gato Bay. The tiller shifted against his knee, and he noted a change in the
boat’s direction. For the first time he could hear the hum of the little
engines at the sterns of the two hulls. The jarring against the ice got
rougher, and they had to hold on tight. Now the groundswells were getting
taller, their crests torn off, but the bulk of every wave remaining, its face
surging up as it encountered the sea bottom. And now he could see in the foam
rolling over the water ice chunks, and larger bergy bits—clear, blue, jade,
aquamarine—pitted, rough, glassy. A great deal of ice must have been driven
against the lee shore ahead of them. If the bay mouth was choked with ice, and
waves were breaking over the bar nevertheless, it would be a nasty passage
indeed. And yet that looked like what the situation would be. He shouted a
question or two at the AI, but its replies were unsatisfactory. It seemed to be
saying that the boat could sustain any shocks the situation could inflict, but
that the engines could not dnve it through pack ice. And in fact the ice was
thickening rapidly; they seemed in the process of being enveloped by a loose
mass of bergy bits, driven onshore by the wind from all over the gulf. Their
grinding and knocking was now a big component of the overwhelming noise of the
storm. Indeed it looked like it would now be difficult to motor out of the
situation, straight offshore into the wind and waves and out to sea. Not that
he really wanted to be out there, tossed up and down on waves that were growing
ever larger and more unruly; capsizing would be a very real possibility; but
because of the unexpected density of ice inshore, it was beginning to look like
getting offshore had been their better option. Now closed to them. They were in
for a hard pummeling.

Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the
cockpit rail for dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax’s mind satisfaction:
she showed no inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so
that she could shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.

“We can’t stay here!” she shouted. “When we tire—the impacts are
going to tear us up—ah!—like dolls!”

“We can strap ourselves to our beds,” Sax shouted.

She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints
might not be any better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem
of getting secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind
was— shrieking wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger
and larger; when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve
heart-stopping seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there
they saw chunks of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the
flying foam to crash down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the
boat’s hulls and decking, and even the clear thin cockpit shell, with a force
they could feel all through their bodies.

Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann’s ear. “I believe this is
one of those situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!”

“... lifeboat?” Ann said.

Sax nodded. “The boat is its own lifeboat!” he shouted. “It
flies!”

“What do you mean?”

“It flies!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No! It becomes a—a blimp!” He leaned over and put his mouth right
to her ear. “The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the cockpit empty their
ballast. They fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They
told me about it back in Da Vinci, but I’ve never seen it! I didn’t think we’d
be using it!” The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da
Vinci, quite pleased with themselves at the new craft’s versatility. But the
ice packing against the lee shore made that option unavailable to them,
something that Sax did not regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going
down in the boat didn’t appeal to him.

Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. “Do you know
how to fly it!” she shouted.

“No!”

Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it
into the air. Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the
right toggles. He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then
leaned forward to shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and
mouth hard, and then he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of
his nose like water from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he
grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked,
tasting his blood. “I love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.

“How do we launch it?” Ann cried.

He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the
emergency board under a protective bar.

If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring
about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course,
there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply
blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly
stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably,
and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the
ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this
through herself. Still—whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the
bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary
thing, one way or the other.