Blue Mars(271)

He was back outside, looking for the Coyote. Not an easy task, ever. What did Desmond recall of Underhill— hiding, whispers, the lost farm crew, then the lost colony, slipping away with them— out there driving around Mars in disguised boulder cars, being loved by Hiroko, flying over the night surface in a stealthed plane, playing the demimonde, knitting the underground together— Sax could almost remember it himself, it was so vivid to him. Telepathic transfer of all their stories to all of them; one hundred squared, in the square of barrel vaults. No. That would be too much. Just the imagination of someone else’s reality was stunning enough, was all the telepathy one required or could handle.

But where had Desmond gone? Hopeless. One could never find Coyote; one only waited for him to find you. He would show up when he chose. For now, out northwest of the pyramids and the Alchemist’s Quarter, there was a very ancient lander skeleton, probably from the original pre-landing-equipment drop, its metal stripped of paint and encrusted with salt. The beginning of their hopes, now a skeleton of old metal, nothing really. Hiroko had helped him unload this one.

Back into the Alchemist’s Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank God for Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit bulldozer to run.

But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, slowly, gasping.

“Ann? Ann?”

She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. “I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the— the beauty until it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined— and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.

But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry— his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so— just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal— which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together— I mean one after the next— but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean— you know how it was then— that Russian couple had fought and been sent home— we all hid everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not ever. And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the . . .” He waved at the blue sky.

“I remember,” she said.

She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn’t get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

“Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said, frowning. “It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might become . . . but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still”— sharp laugh—”no. It was you. You didn’t— it wasn’t your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn’t mine either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn’t. And then I forgot about it.”