Green Mars(213)

But usually he just waited until she collapsed and started to cry, and then he came back in and spoke in English, which marked the return of his composure. And with only a slightly disgusted air he would return to the intolerable therapy again. “Look,” he would say, “we were all under great pressure then, whether we could tell it or not. It was an extremely artificial situation, and dangerous as well— if we had failed in any number of different ways, we all could have died. We had to succeed. Some of us dealt with the pressure better than others. I did not do so well, and neither did you. But here we are now. And the pressures are still there, some different, some the same. But we are doing better at dealing with them, if you ask me. Most of the time.”

And then he would leave and go out to a café on the corniche, and nurse a cassis for an hour or two, drawing sketches of faces in his lectern, mordant caricatures that he erased at the moment of completion. She knew this because some nights she would go out and find him, and sit by him in silence with her glass of vodka, apologizing with the set of her shoulders. How to tell him that it helped her to fight now and then, that it started her on the upward curve again— tell him without causing that sardonic little shrug of his, melancholy and oppressed? Besides, he knew. He knew and he forgave. “You loved them both,” he would say, “but in different ways. And there were things you didn’t like about them as well. Besides, whatever you did, you can’t take responsibility for their actions. They chose to do what they did, and you were only one factor.”

It helped her to hear that. And it helped her to fight. It would be all right; she would feel better, for a few weeks or days at least. The past was so shot full of holes anyway, a ragged collection of images— eventually she would forget for real, surely. Although the memories that held the firmest seemed to stick because of a glue made of pain, and remorse. So it might take a while to forget them, even though they were so corrosive, so painful, so useless. Useless! Useless. Better to focus on the present.



• • •

Thinking that one afternoon, in the apartment by herself, she stared for a long time at the photo of the young Frank by the sink— thinking that she would take it down, and throw it away. A murderer. Focus on the present. But she too was a murderer. And also the one who had driven him to murder. If one ever drove anyone to anything. In any case he was her companion in that, somehow. So after a long time thinking about it, she decided to leave the photo up.

Over the months, however, and the long rhythms of the time-slipped days and the six-month seasons, the photo became little more than part of the decor, like the rack of tongs and wooden paddles, or the hanging row of copper-bottomed pots and pans, or the little sailing-ship salt and pepper shakers. Part of the stage set for this act of the play, as she sometimes thought of it, which however permanent it seemed would be struck at some point— would disappear utterly, as all the previous sets had disappeared, while she passed through to the next reincarnation. Or not.

So the weeks passed and then the months, twenty-four per year. The first of the month would fall on a Monday for so many months in a row that it would seem fixed forever; then a third of a Martian year would have passed, and a new season finally have made its appearance, and a twenty-seven-day month would pass and suddenly the first would be on a Sunday, and after a while that too would begin to seem the eternal norm, for month after month. And this went on and on; the long Martian years made their slow wheel. Out around Hellas, they seemed to have discovered most of the significant aquifers, and the effort shifted entirely to mining and piping. The Swiss had recently developed what they called a walking pipeline, made specifically for the work in Hellas, and up on Vastitas Borealis. These contraptions rolled over the landscape, distributing the groundwater evenly over the land, so that they could cover the basin floor without creating mountains of ice directly outside the ends of fixed pipelines, as they had tended to before.

Maya went out with Diana to look at one of these pipes in action. Seen from a dirigible floating overhead, they looked remarkably like a garden hose lying on the ground, snaking back and forth under the high pressure of the spurting water.

Down on the ground it was more impressive, even bizarre; the pipeline was huge, and it rolled majestically over layers of smooth ice already deposited, held a couple of meters over the ice on squat pylons that ended in big pontoon skis. The pipeline moved at several kilometers an hour, pushed by the pressure of the water spewing out of its nozzle, which pointed at various angles set by computer. When the pipeline had skiied out to the end of its arc, motors would turn the nozzle, and the pipeline would slow down, stop, and reverse direction.