the conveyor. The story was that the freshly dug regolith at the bottom of the hole was the colour of gold: exposure to the atmosphere on its long journey up-slope turned it Mars red. She turned to better feel the shaper of the wind on every part of her body. This psuit so needed replacing. There was more to her shiver than just the caress of air in motion. Wind and words: they were the same stuff. If she threw big and fancy words, words that gave her joy and made her laugh from the shape they made from moving air, it was because they were living wind itself.
A shiver ran up through the catwalk grilles and railings and into Tash Gelem-Opunyo. The engineers were running up the traction generators; West Diggory shuddered and thrummed as the tokamaks drew resonances and steel harmonies from its girders and cantilevers. Tash’s molars ached, then there was a jolt that threw old and young alike off balance, grasping for handrails, stanchions, cables, each other. There was a immense shriek like the new moon being pulled live from the body of the world world being pulled. Shuddering creaks, each so loud Tash could hear them through her ear-protectors. Steel wheels turned, grinding on sand. West Diggory began to move. People waved their hands and cheered, the noise reduction circuits on the Common Channel stopped the din down to a surge of delighted giggling. The wheels, each taller than Tash, ground round, slow as growing. West Diggory, perched on its cantilevers, inched down its eighteen tracks, tentative as an old woman stepping from a diggler. This was motion on the glacial, the geological scale. It would take ten hours for West Diggory to make its scheduled descent into the Big Dig. You had to be sure to have eaten and drunk enough because it wasn’t safe to go inside. Tash had breakfasted lightly at the commons in the Raven Sorority, when the In-daughters lived together after they turned five. The semizoic fabric absorbed everything without stink or stain but it was far from cool to piss your suit. Unless you were up and out on a job. Then it was mandatory.
Music trilled on the common channel, a cheery little toe-tapper. Tash gritted her teeth. She knew what it heralded: the West Diggory Down. No one knew when where or who had started the tradition of the Moving Day dance: Tash suspected it was a joke that no one had recognised and so became literal. She slid behind a stanchion as her Raven sisters formed up and the boys up on the Lads Pavilion bowed and raised their hands. Slip away slip away before it starts. Up the steps and along the clattering catwalk to the Outermost Preview. From this distant perch, a birdcage of steel at the end of a slender pier, a lantern suspended over the sand, Tash surveyed all West Diggory, her domes and gantries and pods and tubes and flapping banners and her citizens—so few of them, Tash thought—formed up into lines and squares for the dance. She tuned out the Common Channel. Strange, them stepping gaily, hand in hand, up and down the lines, do-se-doh in psuits and facemasks and total silence. The olds seemed to enjoy it. They had no dignity. Look how fat some of them were in their psuits. Tash turned away from the rituals of West Diggory to the great, subtle slope of the Big Dig, following the lines of up the slope. She was on the edge of the age when you could leave West Diggory but she had heard that up there, beyond Mt. Incredible, the small world curved away so quickly in all directions that the horizon was only three kilometers distant. The Big Dig held different horizons. It was a huge cone sunk into the surface of a sphere. An alternative geometry worked here. The world didn’t curve away, it curved inwards, a circle over three hundred kilometres round where it met the surface of Mars. The world radiated outwards: Tash could follow the radiating spokes of the scooplines all the way of the edge of the world, and beyond, to the encircling ring-mountain of Mt. Incredible that reached the edge of space. Peering along the curve of the Big Dig through the dust haze constantly thrown up by the ceaseless excavating, she could just make out the sun-glitter from the gantries of North Cutter, like West Diggory, making its slow descent deeper into the pit. A flicker of thought would up the magnification on her visor and she would be able to look clear across eighty kilometres of airspace to A.R.E.A. and spy on whatever celebrations they held there, on the first and greatest of the Excavating Cities on Moving Day. Maybe she might see a girl like herself, balanced on some high and perilous perch, looking out across the bowl of the world.
The figures on the platforms and terraces broke apart, bowed to each other, lost all pattern and rhythm and became random again. Moving Day Down was over for another half-year. Tash flicked on the Common Channel. Tash liked to be apart, different, a girl of words and wit, but she also loved to be immersed in West Diggory’s never-ending babble of chat and gossip and jokes and family news. Together, the Excavating Cities had a population of less than two thousand humans. Small, complex societies, isolated from the rest of the planet, gush words like springs, like torrents and floods. The river of words, the only river that Mars knew. Tash’s psuit circuitry was smart enough to adjust the voices so that they spoke at the volume and distance they would have in atmosphere. Undifferentiated, the flood of West Diggory voices would have overwhelmed her so the wall of voices did not overwhelm her. She turned her head this way, that way. Eavesdropping. There was Leyta Soshinwe-Opunyo, Queen-beeing again. Tash had seen pictures of bees like she had seen birds. On Arrival Day, when the Excavating Cities finally reached the bottom of the Big Dig, there would be birds, and bees, and even spiders. There was Great-Out-Aunt Yoto, seeming enthusiastic but always seasoned with a pinch of criticism—
Big Dig Figs:
Population: one thousand eight hundred and thirty three, divided between the four Excavating Cities of (clockwise) Southdelving, West Diggory, North Cutter and A.R.E.A (Ares Re-engineering of Environment and Atmosphere). Total Martian population: five thousand two hundred and seventeen.
Elevation: at the digging head as of Martian Year 112, Janulum 1: minus twenty three kilometres below Martian Mean Gravity Surface (no sea level). Same date, highest point of Mt. Impossible: 15 kilometres above MGS.
Diameter of the Big Dig at Martian MGS: Five hundred and sixteen kilometres.
Circumference of the Big Dig at Martian MGS: One thousand six hundred and twenty two kilometres.
Angle of Big Dig Excavation Surface: 5:754 degrees. That’s pretty gentle. The Scoopline can’t handle more than an eight degree slope. To the casual human eye—one that hasn’t grown up inside the gentle dish of the Big Dig, that would look almost flat. But it’s not flat. That’s why it’s the key figure: those 5:75 degrees are going to make Mars habitable.
Date of commencement of the Big Dig: AlterMarch 23rd, Martian Year 70. Two thirty in the afternoon, on schedule, the scooplines excavated and the bucket teeth took their first bites of Isidis Planitia.
Volume of the Big Dig: as of above date: one million, eight hundred and thirteen thousand cubic kilometres. All piled up neatly into Mt. Impossible, the ring-shaped mountain that surrounds the Big Dig like the wall of an old impact crater. Not entirely surrounds. Mt. Impossible has been constructed with four huge valleys: Windrush, Zephyr, Cyroco and Storm of the Black Plums: howling wind-haunted, storm-scoured canyons: that same wind singing over the tombs of the Diggers who have died in the course of the great excavation, unfailingly stirring the flags and streamers of the mobile cities far below.
Total mass of Martian surface excavated in the Big Dig to date: 7.1 ? 1015 tons.
Big Dig Figs and Facts. The numbers that shape Tash’s world.
Tash was in the Orangery when the call came down through the rows of breadfruit trees. Like the Moving Day dance, the name was generally considered another joke that had run away and taken up residence in the ventilators and crawlspaces and power conduits of the Excavating City, as this baroque glass dome had never grown oranges. The rows of breadfruit and plantains and bananas and other high-carbo staples gave camouflage and opportunity for West Diggory’s young people to meet and talk and scheme and flirt.
“Milaba wants to see Tash, pass it on.”
“Sweto, tell Chunye that Milaba wants to see Tash.”
“Qori, have you see Tash?”
“I think she was down in the plantains, but she might have moved on to the breadfruit.”
“Well tell her Milaba wants to see her.”
By leaps and misunderstandings, by staggers and misapprehensions, by devious spirals of who liked who and who was talking to who and who wasn’t and who was hooking with who and who had finished with who, the message spiralled in along the web of leaf-mould smelling plants to Tash, spraying the breadfruit. A simple call, a
