She did, however, get a chance to have a long talk with Nirgal, on the train ride back to Odessa. She told him about Charlotte and Ariadne and their concerns, and he nodded and told her about some of his adventures in the outback, many illustrating progress in assimilation. “We’ll win in the end,” he predicted. “Mars right now is the battleground of past and future, and the past has its power, but the future is where we’re all going. There’s a kind of inexorable power in it, like a vacuum pull forward. These days I can almost feel it.” And he looked happy.
Then he pulled their bags off the overhead racks, he kissed her cheek. He was thin and hard, slipping away from her. “We’ll keep working on it, yes? I’ll come visit you and Michel in Odessa. I love you.”
• • •
Which made her feel better, of course. No peak experience; but a train trip with Nirgal, a chance to talk with that most elusive native, that most beloved son.
After her return from the mountain, however, she continued to be subject to her array of “mental events,” as Michel called them. He got more worried every time one of them happened. They were beginning to scare him, Maya saw, even though he tried to hide it. And no wonder. These “events,” and others like them, were happening to a lot of his aged clients. The gerontological treatments could not seem to help people’s memories hold on to their ever-lengthening pasts. And as their pasts slipped away, year by year, and their memories weakened, the incidence of “events” grew ever higher, until some people even had to be institutionalized.
Or, alternatively, they died. The First Settlers’ Institute that Michel continued to work with had a smaller group of subjects every year. Even Vlad died, one year. After that Marina and Ursula moved from Acheron to Odessa. Nadia and Art had already moved to west Odessa, after their daughter Nikki had grown up and moved there. Even Sax Russell took an apartment in town, though he spent most of the year in Da Vinci still.
For Maya these moves were both good and bad. Good because she loved all these people, and it felt like they were clustering around her, which pleased her vanity. And it was a great pleasure to see their faces. So she helped Marina, for instance, to help Ursula to deal with Vlad’s loss. It seemed that Ursula and Vlad had been the true couple, in some sense— though Marina and Ursula . . . well, there were no terms for the three points of a ménage à trois, no matter how it was constituted. Anyway Marina and Ursula were now the remainder, a couple very close in their grieving, otherwise much like the young native same-sex couples one saw in Odessa, men arm in arm on the street (a comforting sight), women hand in hand.
So she was happy to see the two of them, or Nadia, or any of the rest of the old gang. But she couldn’t always remember the incidents they discussed as if unforgettable, and this was irritating. Another kind of jamais vu; her own life. No, it was better to focus on the moment, to go down and work on water, or the lighting for the current play, or sit chatting in the bars with new friends from work, or with complete strangers. Waiting for that enlightenment to someday come. . . .
Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus— Terran nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”
“What? No— oh no.”
“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”
“Oh my God.”
Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining First Hundred— lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy smile . . . no. She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.
“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.
He sighed. “Maybe.”
Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to Lasswitz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Montes without disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn’t been able to revive him.