“It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep forever.”
They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around Hellas Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics— because of the way they focused on others, the way they exalted people’s stories. Perhaps that was what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.
Some of Michel’s relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water— the sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste of his old beach swims.
Back on land they went out on drives. Once they went out to see the Pont du Gard, and there it was, same as ever, the Romans’ greatest work of art— an aqueduct: three tiers of stone, the thick lower arches foursquare in the river, proud of their two thousand years’ resistance to running water; lighter taller arches above, then the smallest on top of them. Form following function right into the heart of the beautiful— using stone to take water over water. The stone now pitted and honey blond, very Martian in every respect— it looked like Nadia’s Underhill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge of the Gard, in Provence; but now, to Michel, almost more Mars than France.
Maya loved its elegance. “See how human it is, Michel. This is what our Martian structures lack, they are too big. But this— this was built by human hands, with tools anyone could construct and use. Block and tackle and human math, and perhaps some horses. And not our teleoperated machines and their weird materials, doing things no one can understand or even see.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if we could build things by hand. Nadia should see this, she would love it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Michel was happy. They ate a picnic there. They visited the fountains of Aix-en-Provence. Went out to an overlook above the Grand Canyon of the Gard. Nosed around the street docks of Marseilles. Visited the Roman sites in Orange, and Nîmes. Drove past the drowned resorts of the Côte d’Azur. Walked out one evening to Michel’s ruined mas, and into the middle of the old olive grove.
And every night of these few precious days they returned to Arles, and ate in the hotel restaurant, or if it was warm out, under the plane trees in the sidewalk cafés; and then went up to their room and made love; and at dawn woke and made love again, or went down directly for fresh croissants and coffee. “It’s lovely,” Maya said, standing one blue evening in the tower of the arena, looking over the tile roofs of the town; she meant all of it, all of Provence. And Michel was happy.
But a call came on the wrist. Nirgal was sick, very sick; Sax, sounding shaken, had already gotten him off Earth, back into Martian g and a sterile environment, inside a ship in Terran orbit. “I’m afraid his immune system isn’t up to it, and the g doesn’t help. He’s got an infection, pulmonary edema, a very bad fever.”
“Allergic to Earth,” Maya said, her face grim. She made plans and ended the call with curt instructions to Sax to stay calm, then went to the room’s little closet and began to throw her clothes out onto the bed.
“Come on!” she cried when she saw Michel standing there. “We have to go!”
“We do?”
She waved him off, burrowed into the closet. “I’m going.” She threw handfuls of underwear into her suitcase, gave him a look. “It’s time to go anyway.”
“It is?”
She didn’t reply. She was tapping at her wristpad, asking the local Praxis team to arrange transport into space. There they would rendezvous with Sax and Nirgal. Her voice was cold, tense, businesslike. She had already forgotten Provence.
When she saw Michel still standing motionless, she exploded—”Oh come on, don’t be so theatrical about it! Just because we have to leave now doesn’t mean we won’t ever come back! We’re going to live a thousand years, you can come back all the time if you want, a hundred times, my God! Besides how is this place so much better than Mars? It looks just like Odessa to me, and you were happy there, weren’t you?”