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Green Mars(85)

By:Kim Stanley Robinson


So their first night back in Burroughs, when his wrist beeped and Phyllis appeared to ask him out to dinner, he agreed and ended the call, and muttered to himself uneasily. It was going to be awkward.

They went out to a patio restaurant that Phyllis knew of on Ellis Butte, west of Hunt Mesa. Because of Phyllis they were seated at a corner table, with a view over the high district between Ellis and Table Mountain, where the woods of Princess Park were ringed by new mansions. Across the park Table Mountain was so glass-walled that it looked like a giant hotel, and the more distant mesas were not much less gaudy.

Waiters and waitresses brought by a carafe of wine, and then dinner, interrupting Phyllis’s chatter, which was mostly about the new construction on Tharsis. But she seemed very willing to talk with the waiters and waitresses, signing napkins for them, and asking where they were from, how long they had been on Mars, and so forth. Sax ate steadily and watched Phyllis, and Burroughs, waiting for the meal to come to an end. It seemed to go on for hours.

But finally they were done, and taking the elevator ride to the valley floor. The elevator brought back memories of their first night together, which made Sax acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps Phyllis felt the same way, for she moved to the other side of the car, and the long descent passed in silence.

And then on the streetgrass of the boulevard she pecked him on the cheek with a swift hard hug, and said, “It’s been a lovely evening, Stephen, and a lovely time out at Arena as well, I’ll never forget our little adventure under the glacier. But now I have to get back up to Sheffield and deal with everything that’s been piling up, you know. I hope you’ll come visit me if you’re ever up there.”

Sax struggled to control his face, trying to figure out how Stephen would feel and what he would say. Phyllis was a vain woman, and it was possible she would forget the entire affair faster if she was avoiding thought about the hurt she had caused someone by dropping him, rather than brooding over why he had seemed so relieved. So he tried to locate the minority voice inside him that was offended to be treated in such a manner. He tightened the corners of his mouth, and looked down to the side. “Ah,” he said.

Phyllis laughed like a girl, and caught him up in an affectionate hug. “Come on,” she admonished him. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it? And we’ll see each other again when I visit Burroughs, or if you ever come up to Sheffield. Meanwhile, what else can we do? Don’t be sad.”

Sax shrugged. This made such sense that it was hard to imagine any but the most lovelorn suitor objecting, and he had never pretended to be that. They were both over a hundred, after all. “I know,” he said, and gave her a nervous, rueful smile. “I’m just sorry the time has come.”

“I know.” She kissed him again. “Me too. But we’ll meet again, and then we’ll see.”

He nodded, looking down again, feeling a new appreciation for the difficulties actors faced. What to do?

But with a brisk good-bye she was off. Sax said his own goodbye to a look over the shoulder, a quick wave.



• • •

He walked across Great Escarpment Boulevard, toward Hunt Mesa. So that was that. Easier than he had thought it would be, certainly. In fact, extremely convenient. But a part of him was still irritated. He looked at his reflection in the shop windows he passed on the lower floors of Hunt. A raffish old geezer; handsome? Well, whatever that meant. Handsome for some women, sometimes. Picked up by one and used as a bed partner for a few weeks, then tossed aside when it was time to move on. Presumably it had happened to many another through the years, more often to women than to men, no doubt, given the inequalities of culture and reproduction. But now, with reproduction out of the picture, and the culture in pieces. . . . She really was rather awful. But then again he had no right to complain; he had agreed to it without conditions, and had lied to her from the very start, not only about who he was, but about how he felt toward her. And now he was free of it, and all that it implied. And all that it threatened.

Feeling a kind of nitrous oxide lift, he walked up Hunt’s huge atrium staircase to his floor, and down the hall to his little apartment.



• • •

Late that winter, for a couple of weeks in 2 February, the annual conference on the terraforming project took place in Burroughs. It was the tenth such conference, titled by the organizers “M-38: New Results and New Directions,” and it would be attended by scientists from all over Mars, nearly three thousand of them all told. The meetings were held in the big conference center in Table Mountain, while the visiting scientists stayed in hotels all over the city.