Kim Robinson - The Martians

The more she learned to talk the more she challenged the rules. NO was her first word and her favorite for years. She said it with immense conviction. The trick questions got the biggest NOs of all. Will you get out of the bath? No. Don’t you want to get to read a book? No. Don’t you want to have dessert? No. Do you like to say no? NO.

She picked up language so fast I couldn’t really remember how it happened. For a few months it was just a few words, then all of a sudden she could say whatever she wanted. That made her more relaxed in some ways. Her good moods were really good, and lasted longer. She was so cute you could hardly stand it. It has to be some kind of evolutionary mechanism to keep you from killing them. She was always on the move, jumping around, looking to do something or go somewhere. She developed a passion for trams and trucks, and would cry out, “Tram!” or “Truck!” Once I was out by myself and I saw a truck and said, “Oooh, big truck,” and the people sitting around me on the tram looked at me.

But she still had a hell of a temper. And now when she got mad she would chew you out as well as hit you and throw things at you. You had to laugh at how basic she was. She said the meanest things she could think of. “Go ’way!” “I don’t like you!” “You’re not my friend!” “You’re not my mom!” “You’re nothing!” “I don’t love you anymore!” “I hate you!” “You’re dead!” “Go ’way!”

In public this could be embarrassing. Often when I took her out she would look at someone nearby and announce loudly, “I don’t like that guy.” And sometimes add, “Go ’way!”

“Be polite Zo,” I would say, with an apologetic look, trying to convey that she did this to everyone. “That’s not nice.”

After that infancy when she hit the so-called terrible twos it was kind of hard to tell the difference. Though it did get worse in some ways. At times it was almost impossible to deal with her. It was like living with a psychotic. Every day was a complete roller coaster, with several great highs and just as many shrieking tantrums. Everything you told her to do she would stop and decide whether she wanted to obey or not, and usually the very idea of being told what to do would offend her, and she would opt for defiance just on principle. Often she would do the opposite of what she was told to do. I had to be ready for that or it was trouble. I had to decide whether it was worth it to tell her not to do something—if it really mattered. If it did then I had to be prepared for the whole melodrama. Once I said, “Zo, don’t bang that mug on the table,” and she slammed it down before I could get to her and it broke the mug and the tabletop, which was glass. She was round-eyed but unrepentant. Angry at me, as if I had tricked her. She also wanted to break a few more to see how it worked.

All these intensities were constant and across the board, and so she could be a joy when she was in a good mood. We explored Mars like John in the beginning. I never felt more strongly that I was in the presence of mental brilliance than when I was with her, out walking together on the moors or in the streets of a town, when she was about three—not even with Sax or Vlad or Bao Shuyo. The sense that here was someone intently observing the world and then putting things together faster than I could ever dream of doing. She laughed at things all the time, often for reasons I couldn’t see, and when she laughed she was so beautiful. At all times she was an exceptionally good-looking child, but when she laughed there was a physical beauty that along with the innocence was heart-stopping to see. How we manage to ruin that quality is humanity’s great crime, repeated over and over.

Anyway, that beauty and laughter made all the temper tantrums a lot easier for me, sure. You couldn’t help but love her, she was so passionate. When she blew up and hit the deck screaming and pounding and thrashing on the floor I would think, Oh well, that’s just Zo. No need to take it personally. Not even the I hate you Moms—they weren’t personal either, not really. It was just she was passionate. I loved her so much.

Which only made it worse seeing Nirgal. What a contrast—week after week taking care of Zo, exhausted a lot of the time, and then he would drop by, just as airy and vague and agreeable as ever—everyone’s friend, mild and somewhat removed. Like Hiroko a bit. And yes he was Zo’s father, I admit it now, but who could imagine that she had anything to do with him, so blithe and smooth he was, all his life. He may be the Great Martian, everyone seems to think so, but he was nothing to her I tell you. One time he came by and everyone was fawning over him as usual, drawn to him as if to some kind of magic mirror, and Zo took one look at him and turned to me and said, “I don’t like that guy.”

“Zo.”

A daring glance at him: “Go ’way!”

“Zo! Be nice!” I looked at him. “She does this with everybody.”

Immediately she ran to Charlotte and hugged her legs, glancing at me. Everyone laughed and she glowered, not expecting that.

“Okay,” I said, “she does it with fifty percent of everybody, and hugs the other half. But which half you’re in keeps changing.”

Nirgal nodded and smiled at her, but he still looked startled when she loudly insisted, “I don’t like that guy!”

“Zo, stop it! Be polite.”

And eventually, I mean over years, she did get a bit more polite. Eventually the world wears you down, you get a veneer of civilization over your real self. But how I loved her when she was a little animal and you saw just what she was really like. How I loved her. These days we get together for lunch and she is the most arrogant supercilious young woman you can imagine, completely full of herself, condescending to me from an enormous height, and I just look at her and laugh, thinking, You think you’re so tough—you should have seen yourself when you were two.

Once during one of his long runs across the land, after he had given up looking for Hiroko but before he had stopped the movement of the search, Nirgal crossed the great dark forest of Cimmeria, south of Elysium. In the forest it was slow going. The trees were tall fir and linden trees, with a dense understory of Hokkaido pine and birch. The sun lanced through the thick roof of the canopy in bright pencils of light, which struck pads of dark moss, curled ferns, wild onions, and mats of electric green lichen. In those shadows and through the myriad parallel shafts of buttery light he ran slowly for day after day, lost but unconcerned, as a general western push would eventually lead him out of the forest to some point on the Great Canal. The forest silence was broken only by the chirps of birds, the deep soughing chorus of wind in the pine needles above, and twice the distant yodeling of coyotes, or wolves. Once something big that he never saw crashed away through brush. He had been running for sixty days straight.

Low crater rings were the only relief, all softened and buried under trees, leaf mats, humus, and rocky carpets of moss. Most of the craters were rimless, so that jogging along he would come on the arc of a sunken round room, and through branches spy a little round meadow, or a shallow round lake, infilling with meadow from the sides. Usually he circled them and continued on his way. But in one little sunken meadow there stood the ruins of a white-stone temple.

He dropped down the gentle slope of the depression, approached at a walk, feeling hesitant. The stone of the temple was alabaster, and very white. It reminded him of the white-stone village in Medusa Fossa. It looked Greek, though it was round. Twelve slender white Ionic pillars, made of stacked drums of stone, set around the flat base like the points of a clock. No roof, which made it look even more like a Greek ruin, or a British henge. Lichen was growing in the cracks of its base.