No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.
Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.
A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.
Everything looks so fine from up here.
Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.
Or not enough.
It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.
What do you mean?
Games don’t mean anything.
Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.
John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.
Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.
A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.
I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?
No.
Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur. . . talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white-blond hair, her fashion-magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resumé, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.
That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.
Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.
That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.
Can we? Can we?
You just wait and see.
• • •
He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower— already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.
After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?
That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said, “She loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.
She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.
Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself— was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love.. . . The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet. . . that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?
Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.