Blue Mars(269)

Wandering in the Alchemist’s Quarter. He came on Vasili again, sitting in the dust with the tears running down his face. The two of them had botched the Underhill algae experiment together, right there inside this very building, but Sax doubted very much that this was what Vasili was crying about. Something from the many years he had worked for UNOMA, perhaps, or something else— no way to know— well, he could ask— but wandering around Underhill seeing faces, and then remembering in a rush everything about them that one knew, was not a situation conducive to follow-up inquiries. No— walk on, leave Vasili to his own past. Sax did not want to know what Vasili regretted. Besides, halfway to the horizon to the north a figure was striding away alone— Ann. Odd to see her head free of a helmet, white hair coursing back in the wind. It was enough to stop the flow of memories— but then he had seen her that way before, in Wright Valley, yes, her hair light then too, dishwater blond they called that color, not very generously. So dangerous to develop any bond under the watchful eyes of the psychologists. They were there on business, under pressure, there was no room for personal relations which were dangerous indeed, as Natasha and Sergei had proved. But still it happened. Vlad and Ursula became a couple, solid, stable; and same with Hiroko and Iwao, Nadia and Arkady. But the danger, the risk. Ann had looked at him across the lab table, eating lunch, and there was something in her eye, some regard— he didn’t know, he couldn’t read people. They were all such mysteries. The day he got his letter of acceptance, selection to the First Hundred, he had felt so sad; why was that? No way of knowing. But now he saw that letter in the fax box, the maple tree outside the window; he had called Ann to see if she had been included— she had, a bit of a surprise, her such a loner, but he had been a bit happier, but still— sad. The maple had been red-leafed; autumn in Princeton, traditionally a melancholy time, but that hadn’t been it, not at all. Just sad. As if accomplishment were nothing but a certain number of the body’s three billion heartbeats passed. And now it was ten billion, and counting. No, there was no explanation. People were mysteries. So when Ann had said, “Do you want to hike out to Lookout Point?” in that dry valley lab, he had agreed instantly, without a stammer. And without really arranging to, they had walked out separately; she had left the camp and hiked out to Lookout Point, and he had followed, and out there— oh yes— looking down at the cluster of huts and the greenhouse dome, a kind of proto-Underhill, he had taken her gloved hand in his, as they sat side by side arguing over terraforming in a perfectly friendly way, no stakes involved. And she had pulled her hand away as if shocked, and shuddered (it was very cold, for Terra anyway) and he had stammered just as badly as he had after his stroke. A limbic hemorrhage, killing on the spot certain elements, certain hopes, yearnings. Love dead. And he had harried her ever since. Not that these events functioned as proper causal explanations, no matter what Michel would have said! But the Antarctic cold of that walk back to the base. Even in the eidetic clarity of his current power of recollection he could not see much of that walk. Distracted. Why, why had he repelled her so? Little man. White lab coat. There was no reason. But it had happened. And left its mark forever. And even Michel had never known.

Repression. Thinking of Michel made him think of Maya. Ann was on the horizon now, he would never catch her; he wasn’t sure he wanted to at that moment, still stunned by this so-surprising, so-painful memory. He went looking for Maya. Past where Arkady had laughed at their tawdriness when he came down from Phobos, past Hiroko’s greenhouse where she had seduced him with her impersonal friendliness, like primates on the savanna, the alpha female grabbing one male among the others, an alpha, a beta, or that class of could-be-alpha-but-not-interested which struck him as the only decent way to behave; past the trailer park where they had all slept on the floor together, a family. With Desmond in a closet somewhere. Desmond had promised to show them how he had lived then, all his hiding places. Jumble of Desmond images, the flight over the burning canal, then the flight over burning Kasei, the fear in Kasei as the security people strapped him into their insane device; that had been the end of Saxifrage Russell. Now he was something else, and Ann was Counter-Ann, also the third woman that was neither Ann nor Counter-Ann. He could perhaps speak to her on that basis: as two strangers, meeting. Rather than the two who had met in the Antarctic.

Maya was sitting in the barrel-vault kitchen, waiting for a big teapot to boil. She was making tea for them.