Free Green mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

stop at last, and look over the road’s edge, down into blackness. Coyote stood right on the edge, which made Nirgal nervous. He got on his hands and knees to look over. No sign of a bottom; they might as well have been looking into the center of the planet. “Twenty kilometers,” Coyote said over the intercom. He held a hand out over the edge, and Nirgal did too. He could.feel the updraft. “Okay, let’s see if we can get the robots going.” And they hiked back up the road.
    Coyote had spent many of their daytime hours studying old programs on his AI, and now, with the hydrogen peroxide from their trailer pumped into two of the robot behemoths in the parking lot, he plugged into their control panels and went at it. When he was done he was satisfied they would perform as required at the bottom of the mohole, and they watched the two, with wheels four times as tall as Coyote’s car, roll off down the curving road.
    “All right,” Coyote said, cheering up again. “They’ll use their solar-panel power to process their own peroxide explosives, and their own fuel as well, and go at it slow and steady until maybe they hit something hot. We just may have started a volcano!”
    “Is that good?”
    Coyote laughed wildly. “I don’t know! But no one’s ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it.”
     
    They returned to their scheduled travel, among sanctuaries both hidden and open, and Coyote went around saying, “We started up Rayleigh mohole last week, have you seen a volcano yet?”
    No one had seen it. Rayleigh seemed to be behaving much as before, its thermal plume undisturbed. “Well, maybe it didn’t work,” Coyote would say. “Maybe it will take some time. On the other hand if that mohole was now floored with molten lava, how would you be able to tell?”
    “We could tell,” people said. And some added: “Why would you do something as stupid as that? You might as well call up the Transitional Authority and tell them to come down here to look for us.”
    So Coyote stopped bringing it up. They rolled on from sanctuary to sanctuary: Mauss Hyde, Gramsci, Overhangs, Christianopolis. ... At each stop Nirgal was made welcome, and often people knew of him in advance, by reputation. Nirgal was very surprised by the variety and number of sanctuaries, forming together their strange world, half secret and half exposed. And if this world was only a small part of Martian civilization as a whole, what must the surface cities of the north be like? It was beyond his grasp—although it did seem to him that as the marvels of the journey continued, one after the next, his grasp was getting a bit larger. You couldn’t just explode from amazement, after all.
    “Well,” Coyote would say as they drove (he had taught Nirgal how), “we may have started a volcano and we may not have. But it was a new idea in any case. That’s one of the greatest things about this, boy, this whole Martian project. It’s all new.”
    They headed south again, until the ghostly wall of the polar cap loomed over the horizon. Soon they would be home again.
    Nirgal thought of all the sanctuaries they had visited. “Do you really think we’ll have to hide forever, Desmond?”
    “Desmond? Desmond? Who’s this Desmond?” Coyote blew out his lips. “Oh, boy, I don’t know..No one can know for sure. The people hiding out here were shoved out at a strange time, when their way of life was threatened, and I’m not so sure it’s that way anymore in the surface cities they’re building in the north. The bosses on Earth learned their lesson, maybe, and people up there are more comfortable. Or maybe it’s just that the elevator hasn’t been replaced yet.”
    “So there might not be another revolution?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Or not until there’s another space elevator?”
    “I don’t know! But the elevator’s coming, and they’re building some big new mirrors out there, you can see them shining at night sometimes, or