“Good,” he said emphatically. “I agree. We need this.”
She regarded him. “Will you come to Hellas Basin with me?”
And he smiled, a spontaneous grin of pure pleasure. Of delight that she had asked! It pierced her heart to see it.
“Yes,” he said. “I have some business to finish here, but I can do that quickly. Just a few weeks.” And he smiled again. He loved her, she saw; not just as a friend or therapist, but as a lover too. And yet with a certain kind of distance, a Michel distance, some kind of therapist thing. So that she could still breathe. Be loved and still breathe. Still have a friend.
“So you can still stand to be with me, even though I look like this.”
“Oh Maya.” He laughed. “Yes, you are still beautiful, if you want to know. Which you still do, thank God.” He gave her a hug, pulled back and inspected her. “It is a trifle austere. But it will do.”
She pushed him away. “And no one will recognize me.”
“No one who doesn’t know you.” He stood. “Come on, are you hungry?”
“Yes. Let me change clothes.”
He sat on the bed and watched her as she did, soaking her up, the old goat. Her body was still a human body, amazingly enough, demonstrably female even at this ridiculous posthumous age. She could walk over and squash a breast into his face and he would suckle it like a child. Instead she dressed, feeling her spirits scrape off the bottom and begin their rise; the best moment in the whole sine wave, like the winter solstice for the paleolithics, the moment of relief when you know the sun will come back again, someday. “This is good,” Michel said. “We need you to lead again, Maya. You have the authority, you see. The natural authority. And it’s good to spread the work around, and for you to concentrate on Hellas. A very good plan. But you know— it will take more than anger.”
She pulled a sweater over her head (her scalp felt funny, bare and raw), then looked at him, surprised. He raised a finger admonishingly. “Your anger will help, but it can’t be everything. Frank was nothing but anger, remember? And you see where it got him. You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.”
“Yes yes,” she said, suddenly irritated. “I love you, but shut up now.” She lifted her chin imperiously. “Let’s go eat.”
The train from Sabishii out to the Burroughs-Hellas piste was only four cars long, a little locomotive and three passenger cars, none more than half full. Maya walked through them to the last seats of the final car; people glanced at her, but only briefly. No one seemed perturbed by her lack of hair. There were a lot of vulture women on Mars after all, even some on this very train, also wearing work jumpers of cobalt or rust or light green, also old and UV-weathered: a kind of cliché, the ancient Mars veterans, here from the beginning, seen it all, ready to bore you to tears with tales of dust storms and stuck lock doors.Well, it was just as well. It would not have done to have people nudging each other and exclaiming There’s Toitovna! Still she could not help sitting down feeling ugly and forgotten. Which was stupid. She needed to be forgotten. And ugliness helped that; the world wants to forget the ugly.
She plumped into her seat and stared forward. Apparently Sabishii had been visited by a contingent of Terran Japanese tourists, all of them clustered in facing seats at the front of the car, chattering and looking around with their vid spectacles, no doubt recording every minute of their life movies, recordings that no one would ever watch.
The train slid gently forward and they were off. Sabishii was still a small tent town in the hills, but the hummocky land between the town and the main piste was studded with carved peak boulders, and small shelters cut into the cliffs. All north-facing slopes were caked with the snow of the autumn’s first storms, and the sun bounced in blinding flashes off slick mirrors of ice as they floated by frozen ponds. The low dark shrubs were all based on ancestors from Hokkaido, and the vegetation gave the land a spiky black-green texture; it was a collection of bonsai gardens, each of them an island separated by a harsh sea of broken rock.
The Japanese tourists naturally found this landscape enchanting. Although possibly they were from Burroughs, new emigrants down to visit the Japanese first landing site, as if making a trip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Or perhaps they were natives, and had never seen Japan. She would be able to tell when she saw them walk; but it didn’t matter.
The piste ran just north of Jarry-Desloges Crater, which from outside appeared to be a big round mesa. The apron was a broad fan of snowy debris, dotted with ground-hugging trees and a pie-bald array of dark greens and bright lichen and alpine flowers and heather, each species with its signature color, and the whole field starred by the scattering of erratic boulders that had fallen back from the sky when the crater was formed. The effect was of a field of redrock, being drowned from below by a rainbow tide.