Blue Mars(274)
They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to say Here we are— the others are away tonight— otherwise everything is the same. An ordinary night in Underhill. Talk about work, the various sites— food— the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the others— just as always.
But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a ProvenÃsect;al stew that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a problem.
Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at once— and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, even while speaking— under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said:
“Where are you going after this?”
“Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues invited me to, to, to— to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me, for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse— on Chryse Gulf.”
“Ah.”
Terrible silence, despite all the noise.
“Can I come with you?”
Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”
• • •
And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya’s tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.
Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds— and that too was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.
They sailed out of the Florentine on a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quantity of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally—“Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to sail.”
“So I am.”
Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most general command; he could say for instance “Go to Rhodos,” and there would be nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to another time, and made his way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.
“Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”
“So it is.”
The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci Island still visible over the water, though they weren’t more than twenty kilometers away. There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very fast; it hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls had underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike shapes, which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts kept the windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from driving too far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their unfurled mast sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it like an iceboat over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the wind itself. Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage of the hulls were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder and the outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight. He saw the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated horizon no more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was clutching the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their wake. Sax said, “Have you been at sea before?” meaning, entirely out of the sight of land.