She watched the end of dusk turn the town a deep dark orange, then a glowing color like light shining through a brown bottle. Hell’s Gate indeed. She shivered, got up, stepped unsteadily down the stairs into the harborside district, where the restaurants ringing the quays were bright moth-flittering globes of tavern light. The bridge loomed overhead like a negative Milky Way. Maya walked behind the docks, toward the marina.
There was Jackie, walking toward her. There were some aides following some way back, but in front it was just Jackie, coming toward her unseeing; then seeing. At the sight of Maya a corner of her mouth tightened, no more, but it was enough to allow Maya to see that Jackie was, what, ninety years old? A hundred? She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now. No sailboard would keep you up with that wave, not even a birdsuit allowing you to air-surf the wave in pelican style, like Zo. Ah, that was it; it was Zo’s death she saw on Jackie’s face. Jackie had tried her best to ignore it, to let it run off her like water off a duck’s back. But it hadn’t worked, and now she stood in Hell’s Gate over star-smeared water, an old woman.
Maya, shocked by the intensity of this vision, stopped. Jackie stopped. In the distance the clack of dishes, the loud burble of restaurant conversations. The two women looked at each other. This was not something Maya could remember doing with Jackie— this fundamental act of acknowledgment, meeting the other’s eye. Yes, you are real; I am real. Here we are, the both of us. Big sheets of glass, cracking inside. Something freer, Maya turned and walked away.
Michel found them a passenger schooner, going to Odessa by way of Minus One Island. The boat’s crew told them that Nirgal was expected to be on the island for a race, news which made Maya happy. It was always good to see Nirgal, and this time she needed his help as well. And she wanted to see Minus One; the last time she had been there it had not been an island at all, just a weather station and airstrip on a bump in the basin floor.Their ship was a long low schooner, with five bird’s-wing mast sails. Once beyond the end of the jetty the mast sails extruded their taut triangular expanses, and then, as the wind was from behind, the crew set a big blue kite spinnaker out front. After that the ship leaped into the clear blue swells, knocking up sheets of spray with every slam into an oncoming wave. After the confinement of the Grand Canal’s black banks it felt wonderful to be out on the sea, with the wind in her face and the waves coursing by— it blew all the confusion of Hell’s Gate out of her head— Jackie forgotten— the previous month now understood to be a kind of malignant carnival that she would never have to revisit— she would never return there— the open sea for her, and a life in the wind! “Oh Michel, this is the life for me.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
And at the end of the voyage they were to settle in Odessa, now a seaside town like Hell’s Gate. Living there they could sail out any day they wanted when the weather was nice, and it would be just like this, windy and sunny. Bright moments in time, the living present which was the only reality they ever had; the future a vision, the past a nightmare— or vice versa— anyway only here in the moment could one feel the wind, and marvel at the waves, so big and sloppy! Maya pointed at one blue hillside rolling by in a long irregular fluctuating line, and Michel laughed out loud; they watched more closely, laughed harder; not in years had Maya felt so strongly the sense of being on a different world, these waves just didn’t act right, they flew around and fell over and bulged and wriggled all over their surfaces much more than the admittedly stiff breeze could justify, it looked odd; it was alien. Ah Mars, Mars, Mars!
The seas were always high, the crew told them, on the Hellas Sea. The absence of tides made no difference— what mattered most when it came to waves was gravity, and the strength of the wind. Hearing that as she looked out at the heaving blue plain, Maya’s spirits bounced up in the same wild way. Her g was light, and the winds were strong in her. She was a Martian, one of the first Martians, and she had surveyed this basin in the beginning, helped to fill it with water, helped to build the harbors and put free sailors at sea on it; now she sailed over it herself, and if she never did anything again but sail over it, that would be enough.
And so they sailed, and Maya stood in the bow near the bowsprit, hand on the rail to steady her, feeling the wind and the spray. Michel came and stood with her.