The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious as to their reaction. “You’ll have to do something about this,” one of their guides noted.
“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do something about it, if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just a couple of old issei.”
Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But you’re right, we will be watching, and talking with the other townships about how to respond. We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”
Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found he wanted to talk to Maya.
The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.
• • •
Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked like a good life. But something about . . . he chased the thought, and then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-outs these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?
He said, “Sometimes I regret— when I see those seafarers, and the lives they lead— it seems ironic that we— that we stand on the brink of a— of a kind of golden age—” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “— which will only come to pass when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives, and then we have to die before it will come.”
“Like Moses outside Israel.”
“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old stories—” Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s— it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”
Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”
“True.”
And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.
• • •
They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit, and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder about the possibility of some kind of browns.”
Ann glanced at him. “And where’s the red in it?”
“Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land untouched. The areophany.”
“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis.”
“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds.”
“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.
Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.