Kim Robinson - Red Mars

But apparently John preferred to work through UNOMA and governments. And this was just one of the many basic political disagreements which were beginning to infect their personal life, to the point that they were fighting pretty frequently about other things, things that didn’t matter, things about which they had never fought before.

Watching her Michel almost said, John wants you irritated with him. He wasn’t sure what John would say to that. Maya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and her broad rangy shoulders. She would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with him. It was as if she had taken off her clothes. People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life. Although it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions. He recalled the way she looked swimming in the pool, doing the backstroke in a blue bathing suit cut high over the hipbones. A Mediterranean image: he was floating in the water at Villefranche, everything flooded with sunset’s amber light, and he was looking in at the beach where men and women were walking, naked except for the neon triangles of cache-sexe bathing suits— brown-skinned bare-breasted women, walking in pairs like dancers in the sunlight— then dolphins sliced out of the water between him and the beach, their sleek black bodies rounded like the women’s—

But now Maya was talking about Frank. Frank, who had a sixth sense for trouble between John and Maya (six would not be necessary), and who came running to Maya every time he felt the signs, to walk with her and talk about his vision of Mars, which was progressive, exciting, ambitious, everything that John’s was not. “Frank is so much more dynamic than John these days, I don’t know why.”

“Because he agrees with you,” Michel said.

Maya shrugged. “Perhaps that’s all I mean. But we have a chance to build a whole civilization here, we do. But John is so. .”

Big sigh. “And yet I love him, I really do. But. .”

She talked for a while about their past, how their courtship had saved the voyage out from anarchy (or at least ennui), how John’s easygoing stability had been so good for her. How you could count on him. How impressed she had been by his fame, how she had felt that the liaison made her part of world history forever. But now she understood that she herself was going to be part of world history anyway; all of them in the first hundred were. Her voice rose, became faster and more vehement: “I don’t need John for that now, I only need him for how I feel about him, but now we don’t agree on anything and we’re not very much alike, and Frank who has been so careful to hold back no matter what, we agree about almost everything and I’ve been so enthusiastic about that part that I’ve given him the wrong signal again, so he did it again, yesterday in the pool he— he held me, you know, took my arms in his hands—” she crossed her arms and clasped her biceps in her hands—”and asked me to leave John for him, which I would never do, and he was shaking , and I said I couldn’t but I was shaking too.” So later she had been on edge, and had started a fight with John, started it so flagrantly that he had gotten truly angry and had left and taken a rover out to Nadia’s arcade, and spent the night there with the construction team; and Frank had come to talk to her again, and when she had (just barely) put him off, Frank had declared he was going to live with the European settlement on the other side of the planet, he who was the colony’s driving force! “And he’ll really do it, he’s not one to threaten. He’s been learning German the way he does, languages are nothing to Frank.”

Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It was difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recognition. So it was hard to care. What about his troubles? They went much, much deeper; but no one ever listened to him. He walked back and forth in front of the window, reassuring her with the usual questions and comments. The greenery in the atrium was refreshing, it could have been a courtyard in Arles or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon’s narrow plane tree-shaded plaza near the Pope’s palace, the plaza and its café tables which in the summer just after sunset had just the color of Mars. Taste of olive and red wine. .

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. Standard part of therapy hour. They crossed the atrium and went to the kitchens, so Michel could eat a breakfast which he forgot even as he swallowed; we should call eating forgetting, he thought as they walked around the hall to the locks. They put on suits— Maya entering a change room to get her unders on— then checked them and went in the lock and depressurized it and then opened the big outer door and stepped outside.

The diamond chill. For a while they stayed on the sidewalks circling Underhill, taking a tour of the dump and its great salt pyramids. “Do you think they’ll ever find a use for all this salt?” he said.

“Sax is still working on it.”

From time to time Maya went on talking about John and Frank. Michel asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in the way a Maya program would have answered. Their voices right in each other’s ears, the intimacy of the intercom.

They came to the lichen farm, and Michel stopped to gaze over the trays, to soak in their intense living color. Black snow algae, and then thick mats of too lichen, in which the algae symbiote was a blue-green strain that Vlad had just gotten to grow alone; red lichen, which seemed not to be doing well. Superfluous in any case. Yellow lichen, olive lichen, a lichen that looked exactly like battleship paint. Flaky white and lime-green lichen— living green! It pulsed in the eye, a rich and improbable desert flower. He had heard Hiroko, looking down at such a growth, say “This is viriditas ,” which was Latin for “greening power.” The word had been coined by a Christian mystic of the Middle Ages, a woman named Hildegard. Viriditas , now adapting to conditions here, and spreading slowly over the lowlands of the northern hemisphere. In the southern summers it did even better; one day it had reached 285 degrees Kelvin, a record high by twelve degrees. The world was changing, Maya remarked as they walked by the flats. “Yes,” Michel said, and could not help adding, “Only three hundred years before we reach livable temperatures.”

Maya laughed. She was feeling better. Soon she would be back on level, or at least crossing through that zone on the way to euphoria. Maya was labile. Stability-lability was the most recent characteristic Michel had been studying in the first hundred; Maya represented the labile extreme.

“Let’s drive out and see the arcade,” she said. Michel agreed, wondering what might happen if they ran into John. They went to the parking lot and checked out a roadrunner. Michel drove the little jeep and listened to Maya talk. Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or— was this better or worse? — as if you were engaged in telepathy.

The cement road was smooth, and he drove at the roadrunner’s top speed of sixty kph. He could just feel the rush of thin air against his faceplate. All that CO2 that Sax so wanted to scrub from the atmosphere. Sax would need powerful scrubbers, even more powerful than the lichens; he needed forests, enormous multilayered halophilic rain forests, trapping enormous loads of carbon in wood, leaves, mulch, peat. He needed peat bogs a hundred meters deep, rain forests a hundred meters tall. He had said as much. It marked Ann’s face just to hear the sound of his voice.