Kim Robinson - Red Mars

“Marxists are Hegelian, sir.”

“Shut up,” Frank snarled, and broke the connection.

Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mouth. Even now, when it was just what they needed, when it was the only thing that would save them.

Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him a hug. He endured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauve sky. He couldn’t meet her eye. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it.”

“For an hour.” After which the emigrants would disappear as before. It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

He hurried off to the mesa offices. Maya came along and chattered at him as he checked into one of the yellow-walled rooms on the fourth floor. Bamboo furniture, flowery sheets and couch cushions. Maya was full of plans, cheery, pleased with him. She was pleased with him! He crushed his teeth together until they hurt. Bruxism was giving him headaches and all kinds of facial pain, wearing through his crowns and the cartilage in his jaw joints.

Finally he stood and walked to the door. “I have to go for a walk,” he said. As he left he saw her face in his peripheral vision: hurt surprise. As usual.

He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flying. On the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk café, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.

Suddenly Maya was standing before him.

“What do you mean by this?” she said. She gestured at the table, at his own annoyed scowl. “What is wrong now?”

He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her, then back down at the cup. It was impossible. A sentence was pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighted: I illed John.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “What do you mean?”

The corners of her mouth tightened, making her glare look contemptuous and her face old. Nearly eighty now. They were too old for this. After a long silence she sat down across from him.

“Look,” she said slowly. “I don’t care what happened in the past.” She stopped speaking, and he risked a glance at her; she was staring down, looking inward. “What happened in the Ares , I mean, or in Underhill. Or any of it.”

His heart beat inside him like a child trying to escape. His lungs were cold. She was still talking, but he hadn’t caught it. Did she know? Did she know what he had done in Nicosia? It was impossible, or she would not have been here (would she?); but she ought to have known.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

He hadn’t heard what she was referring to. He continued to stare at his coffee cup, and suddenly she slapped it away with the back of her hand. It clattered under a nearby table and broke. The white ceramic semicircle of the handle spun on the ground.

“I said do you understand ?”

Paralyzed, he continued to stare at the empty tabletop. Overlapping rings of brown coffee stains. Maya leaned forward and put her face in her hands. She was hunched tight over her stomach, not breathing.

Finally she breathed, pulled her head up. “No,” she said, so quietly that at first he assumed she was addressing herself. “Don’t speak of it. You think I care, and so you do all this. As if I would care more about then than now.” She looked up at him and caught his gaze. “It was thirty years ago,” she said. “Over thirty-five since we met, and thirty since all that happened. I am not that Maya Katarina Toitovna. I don’t know her, I don’t know what she thought or felt, or why. That was a different world, another life. It doesn’t matter to me now. I have no feeling for it. Now I am here, and this is me.” She poked herself between the breasts with a thumb. “And look; I love you.”

She let the silence stretch, her last words drifting out like ripples on a pond. He couldn’t stop looking at her; then he pulled his gaze away, he glared up at the faint twilight stars overhead, let their position seep into his memory. When she said I love you, Orion stood tall in the southern sky. The metal chair under you was hard. Your feet were cold.

“I don’t want to think about anything but that,” she said.

She didn’t know; and he did. But everyone has to assume their past somehow. They were nearly eighty years old, and healthy. There were people who were now 110 years old, healthy, vigorous, strong. Who knew how long it would last? They were going to have a lot of past to assume. And as it went on, and those years of their youth receded into the distant past, all those searing passions that had cut so deep. . could they really be only scars? Weren’t they crippling wounds, a thousand amputations?

But it wasn’t a physical thing. Amputations, castrations, hollowing out; they were all in the imagination. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. .

“The brain is a funny animal,” he muttered.

She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn’t know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right. Did that Maya down at the deepest level know or not know, remember or forget, swear vengeance or forgive? There was no way of telling, he could never be sure. It was impossible.

And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finger. If he didn’t at least pretend to believe her, what then? What then? How could he shatter her like that? She would hate him for it— for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so. . one had to go on, to act.

He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleoperation. He was a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamiliar: lift, quick modulate! To the left, hold; return, hold; steady. Down gently. Gently gently onto the back of her hand. Clasp, very gently. Her hand was really very cold; and so was his.

She looked wanly at him.

“Let’s—” He had to clear his throat. “Let’s go back to our rooms.”

For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distance. Teleoperation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air, but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.

Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of U.N. security police to go there; and ten men arrested 500, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city. Its transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently, it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had existed for several years, scattered planetwide.