The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.
Maya walked slowly toward an outcropping perhaps a kilometer away. There was something growing in the cracks underfoot, lichen or piggyback moss, its greens all black. She stepped on rocks where she could. Plants had it hard enough on Mars without being stepped on as well. All living things. The chill of the twilight seeped into her, until she could feel the X of the heating filaments in her pants against her knees as she walked. She stumbled and blinked to clear her vision. The sky was full of blurry stars. Somewhere north, in the Aureum Chaos, the body of Frank Chalmers lay in a wash of ice and sediments, his walker for a coffin. Killed while saving the rest of them from being swept away. Though he would have scorned such a description with all his heart. An accident of timing, he would insist, nothing more. The result of having more energy than anyone else, energy fueled by his anger— at her, at John, at UNOMA and all the powers of Earth. At his wife. At his father. At his mother, and himself. At everything. The angry man; the angriest man who had ever lived. And her lover. And the murderer of her other lover, the great love of her life, John Boone, who might have saved them all. Who would have been her partner forever.
And she had set them on each other.
Now the sky was starry black, with no more than a dark purple band left on the western skyline. Her tears were gone, along with her feelings; nothing left but the black world and a slash of purple bitterness, like a wound bleeding into the night.
Some things you must forget. Shikata ga naiBack in Odessa Maya did the only thing she could with what she had learned, and forgot it, throwing herself into the work of the Hellas project, spending long hours at the office poring over reports, and assigning crews to the various drilling and construction sites. With the discovery of the Western Aquifer the dowsing expeditions lost their urgency, and more emphasis was placed on tapping and pumping the aquifers already found, and constructing the infrastructure of the rim settlements. So drillers followed dowsers, and pipeline crews went out after the drillers, and tent teams were out all around the piste, and up the Reull canyon above Harmakhis, helping the Sufis deal with a badly fretted canyon wall. New emigrants were arriving at a spaceport built between Dao and Harmakhis, and moving into upper Dao, and helping to transform Harmakhis-Reull, and also settling the other new tent towns around the rim. It was a massive exercise in logistics, and in almost every respect it conformed to Maya’s old dream of development for Hellas. But now that it was actually happening, she felt extremely jangly and odd; she was no longer sure what she wanted for Hellas, or for Mars, or herself. Often she felt at the mercy of her mood swings, and in the months after the visit to Zeyk and Nazik (though she did not make this correlation) they were especially violent, an irregular oscillation from elation to despair, with the equinox time in the middle wrecked by the knowledge that she was either on her way up or down.
She was often hard on Michel in these months, often annoyed by his composure, by the way he seemed so at peace with himself, humming along through his life as if his years with Hiroko had answered all his questions. “It’s your fault,” she told him, pushing to get a reaction. “When I needed you, you were gone. You weren’t doing your job.”
Michel would ignore that, would soothe and soothe until it made her angry. He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn’t make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one’s lover was also one’s therapist— how that objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job— it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control. That had to be disproved. And so (forgetting to forget): “I killed them both! I snared them and played them against each other, to increase my own power. I did it on purpose and you were no help at all! It was your fault too!”
He muttered something, beginning to get worried, as he could see what was coming, like one of the frequent storms that blew over the Hellespontus into the basin, and she laughed and slapped him hard in the face, punching him as he retreated, shouting “Come on, you coward, stand up for yourself!” until he ran out onto the balcony and held the door shut with the heel of his foot, staring over the trees of the park and cursing out loud in French while she battered the door. Once she even broke one of the panes and showered glass over his back, and he yanked the door open, still cursing in French as he shoved by her and out the door, out of the building.