And yet Michel was behaving as if nothing were abnormal, as if he were not the psychological officer for the colony. He spent a lot of time watching French TV. When Nadia asked him about Frank and John, he only looked blankly at her.
They had been on Mars for 420 days, and the first seconds of their universe were past. They no longer gathered to plot the next days’ work, or discuss what they were doing. “Too busy,” people said to Nadia when she asked. “Well, it’s too involved to describe, you know, it’d put you to sleep. It does me.” And so on.
And then at odd moments she would see in her mind’s eye the black dunes, the white ice, the silhouetted figures against a sunset sky. She would shiver and come to with a sigh. Ann had already arranged another trip and was gone, this time south to the northernmost arms of great Valles Marineris, to see more unimaginable marvels. But Nadia was needed at base camp, whether she wanted to be out with Ann in the canyons or not. Maya complained about how much Ann was away. “It’s clear she and Simon have started something and are just out there having a honeymoon while we slave away in here.” That was Maya’s way of looking at things, that would be what it would take to make Maya as happy as Ann sounded in her calls. But Ann was in the canyons, and that was all that was needed to make her sound that way. If she and Simon had started something it would only be a natural extension of that, and Nadia hoped it was true, she knew that Simon loved Ann, and she had felt the presence of an immense solitude in Ann, something that needed a human contact. If only she could join them again!
But she had to work. So she worked, she bossed people around the construction sites, she stalked the building sites and snapped at her friends’ sloppy work. Her injured hand had regained some strength during the trip, so she was able to drive tractors and bulldozers again; she spent long days doing that, but it just wasn’t the same anymore.
• • •
At Ls = 208° Arkady came down to Mars for the first time. Nadia went out to the new spaceport and stood on the edge of the broad expanse of dusty cement to watch the arrival, hopping from foot to foot. The burnt sienna cement was already marked by the yellow and black stains of earlier landings. Arkady’s pod appeared in the pink sky, a white dot and then a yellow flame like an inverted gas burnoff stack. Eventually it resolved into a geodesic hemisphere with rockets and legs below, drifting down on a column of fire, and landing with unearthly delicacy right on the centerpoint dot. Arkady had been working on the descent program, apparently with good results.
He climbed out of the lander’s hatch about twenty minutes later, and stood upright on the top step, looking around. He descended the staircase confidently, and once on the ground bounced experimentally on the tips of his toes, took a few steps, then spun around, arms wide. Nadia had a sudden sharp memory of how it had felt, that hollow sensation. Then he fell over. She hurried over to him, and he saw her and stood and made straight for her and tripped again across the rough Portland cement. She helped pull him back to his feet, and they met in a hug and staggered, him in a big pressurized suit, her in a walker. His hairy face looked shockingly real through their faceplates; the video had made her forget the third dimension and all the rest that made reality so vivid, so real. He banged his faceplate lightly against hers, grinning his wild grin. She could feel the stretch of a similar smile on her face.
He pointed at his wrist console and switched to their private band, 4224, and she did the same.
“Welcome to Mars.”
Alex and Janet and Roger had come down with Arkady, and when they were all out of the lander they climbed into the open carriage of one of the Model Ts, and Nadia drove them back to base, over the wide paved road at first, and then shortcutting through the Alchemists’ Quarter. She told them about each building they passed, aware that they already recognized them all. Suddenly she was nervous, remembering what it had looked like to her after the trip to the pole. They stopped at the garage lock and she led them inside. There it was another family reunion .
Later that day Nadia led Arkady around the square of vaulted chambers, through door after door, room after furnished room, all twenty-four of them, and then out into the atrium. The sky was a ruby color through the glass panels, and the magnesium struts gleamed like tarnished silver.
“Well?” Nadia said at last, unable to stop herself: “What do you think?”
Arkady laughed and gave her a hug. He was still in his spacesuit, his head looking small in the open neck hole; he felt padded and bulky, and she wanted him out of it.
“Well, some of it is good and some of it is bad. But why is it so ugly? Why is it so sad?”