We sealed our suits and climbed down from the cabin. Charles palmed the lock port and turned to face me. “I haven’t been here since the codes were changed. Hope I’ve been logged on the old general Klein net.”
“You didn’t check?” I asked, alarmed.
“Joking,” he said. The lock opened, and we stepped in.
Over the years, the arbeiters had repaired themselves into ugly lumps. They reminded me of dutiful little hunchbacks, moving obsequiously out of our way as we explored the narrow tunnels leading to the main living quarters. “I’ve never seen arbeiters this old,” I said.
“Waste not, want not. Klein’s a thrifty family. They took the best machines with them and left a skeleton crew, just enough to tend the water.”
“Poor things,” I said dubiously.
“Voila,” Charles announced, opening the door to the main quarters. Beyond lay a madman’s idea of order, air mattresses piled into a kind of shelter in one corner, sheets covering a table as if it were a bed, decayed equipment lovingly stacked in the middle of the floor for human attention, smelling of iodine. The machines had been bored. A large arbeiter, about a meter tall and half as wide, a big barrel of a machine with prominent arms, stood proudly in the middle of its domain. “Welcome,” it greeted in a scratchy voice. “There have been no guests at this estate for four years. How may we serve you?”
Charles laughed.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll hurt its feelings.”
The arbeiter hummed constantly, a sign of imminent collapse. “This unit will require replacements, if any are available,” it told us after a moment of introspective quiet.
“You’ll have to make do,” Charles said. “What we need is a place fit for habitation, by two humans… separate quarters, as soon as possible.”
“This is not adequate?” the arbeiter asked with mechanical dismay.
“Close, but it needs a little rearrangement.”
We couldn’t help giggling.
The arbeiter considered us with that peculiar way older machines have of seeming balky and sentient when in fact they are merely slow. “Arrangements will be made. I beg your pardon, but this unit will require replacement parts and nano recharge, if that is possible.”
Four hours later, with the living quarters in reasonable shape and our provisions for several days stored and logged in with the arbeiters, Charles and I stopped our rushing about and faced each other. Charles glanced away first, pretending to critically examine the interior furnishings. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Well, it’s not luxury.”
“I didn’t expect it to be.”
“I came here once when I was ten, with my dad,” Charles said, rubbing his hands nervously on his pants. “A kind of getaway for a couple of days while traveling from Amnesia to Jefferson , through Durrey… Klein holdings intrude into the old Erskine BM lands here. I don’t know how that happened.”
Another moment of uneasy silence. Clearly, Charles did not know how to begin, nor what was expected; neither did I, but as the female in this pairing, it was not my responsibility to initiate, and I did not want to try.
“Shall we see the winery?” he inquired suddenly, holding out his hand.
I took the hand and we began our formal tour of Trés Haut Médoc.
Charles was disarmingly nervous. Disarming, because I had to say little and do nothing but follow him; he gave a gentle, constant commentary on things Martian, most of which I knew. His voice was soothing even as he ran through technical details. In time, I listened more to the tone than the content, enjoying the masculine music of fact laid upon fact, an architecture to shield us for the moment against being alone together.
Ninety percent or more of any Martian station lay underground. Pressurization requirements and protection against radiation flux through the thin atmosphere made this the most economical method of construction. Some attempts had been made in the first ten years to push high-rises and multi-story uplooks through the dirt, but Mars had been settled on a shoestring. Buried or bermed construction was much cheaper. Heat exchangers, sensors, pokeups, entrances and exits, a few low buildings, broke the surface, but even now we remained, by and large, troglodytes.
Half of the aquifers on Mars were solid — mineral aquifers — and half liquid. Solid aquifers came in many varieties. Some were permafrosts and heaves, which produced hummocky terrain. Some ice domes on Mars were ten kilometers across, but nearly all heaves had long since lost the water that produced them. The evaporated water either re-condensed at the poles, or was lost across the ages to space. The thin atmosphere was nearly moisture-free.
Trés Haut Médoc sat half a kilometer above a liquid flow, probably the same flow that supplied Durrey. Water seeped through the limestone and pooled in deeper fissures and caves extending as much as ten kilometers below the karst.
Our first stop was the pumping station. The pump, a massive cluster of steel-blue cylinders and spheres melded together like an abstract sculpture, had been working steadily for fifteen Martian years. It extracted its own fuel, deuterium, from the water it pulled out of the ground.
“We hooked this up to the Durrey pipes about nineteen years ago, Earth years,” Charles explained, walking around the pump. “Just after the winery shut down and the station was automated and evacuated. A source of revenue to offset our failure.” Our footsteps echoed hollow on the frosted stone floor. Air whispered through wall-mounted vents, cool and tangy-musty. “It’s the station’s only reason to exist now. Durrey wants it, pays for it, so we keep the pump going. While I’m here, I’ll justify our visit by filing a report…”
“And get some replacement arbeiters,” I suggested.
“Maybe. The folks who set up the winery were a California family… Or were they Australian? I forget now.”
“Big difference,” I suggested.
“Not really. I know a lot of Australians and Californians now. Except for accent, they’re pretty alike. My own family is from New Zealand , actually. How about yours?”
“I’m not sure. German/Indian, I think.”
“That explains your lovely skin,” Charles said.
“I don’t pay much attention to heritage.”
Charles led me into the water-settling chambers. The dark pools sat still as glass in their quarried limestone basins, filling two chambers each a hectare in extent and ten meters deep. Somewhere beneath our feet, transfer pumps thumped faintly, sending the water to Durrey’s buried pipelines. I breathed in the cold moist air, touched the damp limestone walls.
“Like old bones, that rock,” Charles said.
“Right. Sea bottoms.”
“Half our towns and stations couldn’t exist without limestone flats.”
“Why didn’t it get turned into marble or something?” I asked, partly to demonstrate I was not totally ignorant of areology.
Charles shook his head. “No major areological activity for the past billion years. Marble takes heat and pressure to form. Mars is asleep. It can’t do the job any more.”
“Oh.” I had not demonstrated anything except my ignorance. Still, that didn’t bother me; I was giving Charles every chance to show off, just to see who he really was, what kind of man I had chosen to spend a few days with, alone.
We took a bridge over the farthest pool and down a sloping tunnel. The next chamber held row upon row of corrugated mirror-bright stainless-steel tanks wrapped in coils of orange ceramic pipes. Here the musty-tangy smell was almost overpowering. It stimulated something like racial memory, and I thought of cool dank root cellars on warm summer days, filled with sweet-smelling wooden crates of apples and potatoes, hard-packed dirt floors…