“Really!”
“Yes, well, they’re small. But hike down the western edge about three kilometers, have you done that yet? You’ll see. Alpine meadows and krummholz too. It hasn’t been that difficult. We planted trees without even altering them very much, because a lot of spruce and pine species turned out to have temperature tolerances much lower than they needed in their Terran habitats.”
“That’s peculiar.”
“A holdover from the Ice Ages, I guess. But now it’s coming in handy.”
“Interesting,” Sax said.
And he spent the rest of that day staring into the microscopes without seeing a thing, lost in thought. Life is so much spirit, Hiroko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of living things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas. A striving toward pattern: it made him so curious.
• • •
When dawn arrived the next day he woke up in Phyllis’s bed, with Phyllis tangled in the sheets beside him. After dinner the whole group had retired to the observation room, as was becoming habitual, and Sax had continued the conversation with Claire and Jessica and Berkina, and Jessica had been very friendly to him, as was her wont, and Phyllis had seen this, and had followed him to the bathrooms by the elevator, and pounced on him with that shocking seductive embrace of hers, and they had ended up going down to the dorm floor, and to her room. And although Sax had felt uncomfortable about disappearing without saying good-night to the others, he had made love to her passionately enough.
Now, looking at her, he remembered their precipitate departure with distaste. It did not take any more than the most simple-minded sociobiology to explain such behavior: competition for mates, a very basic animal activity. Of course Sax had never been the subject of such competition before, but there was nothing to pride oneself on in this sudden manifestation; clearly it was happening because of Vlad’s cosmetic surgery, which through some chance had rearranged his face into a configuration appealing to women. Although why one arrangement of facial features should be more attractive than another was a total mystery to him. He had heard sociobiological explanations of sexual attractiveness before, and he could see that some of them might have some validity: a man would look for a mate with wide hips to be able safely to give birth to his children, with significant breasts in order to feed his children, etc.; a woman would look for a strong man to feed her children and to father strong children, etc., etc. That made a kind of sense; but none of it had anything to do with facial features. For them, sociobiological explanations got pretty tenuous: wide-set eyes for good eyesight, good teeth to aid health, a prominent nose to avoid getting colds— no. It just wasn’t as sensible as that. It was a matter of chance configurations, somehow appealing to the eye. An aesthetic judgment in which tiny nonfunctional features could make a great difference, which indicated that practical concerns were not a factor. A case in point was a pair of twin sisters with whom Sax had gone to high school— they had been identical twins, and had looked very much alike, and yet somehow one had been plain while the other had been beautiful. No, it was a matter of millimeters of flesh and bone and cartilage, accidentally falling into patterns that pleased or did not. So Vlad had made some alterations to his face, and now women were competing for his attentions, though he was the same person he had always been. A person Phyllis had never shown the slightest interest in before, when he had looked the way nature had made him. It was hard not to be somewhat cynical about it. To be wanted, yes; but wanted for trivialities. . . .
He got out of bed and suited up in one of the latest lightweight suits, so much more comfortable than the old stretch-fabric walkers; one had to insulate against the subfreezing temperatures, and wear a helmet and airtank of course, but there was no longer any need to provide pressure to avoid bruising of the skin. Even 160 millibars was enough for that, and so now it was only a matter of warm clothing and boots, and the helmet. So it only took a few minutes to dress, and then he was out to the glacier again.
He crunched over the hoarfrost on the main flagged trail across the river of ice, and then wound downstream on the western bank, passing the little millefleur fellfields, coated with frost that was already beginning to melt in the light. He came to a place where the glacier dropped down a small escarpment, in a short crazed icefall; it also took a few degrees’ turn to the left, following its bordering ribs. Suddenly a loud creak filled the air, followed by a low-frequency boom that vibrated in his stomach. The ice was moving. He stopped, listening. He heard the distant bell-sound of an under-ice stream. He hiked on, feeling lighter and happier with every step. The morning light was very clear, the steam on the ice like white smoke.