“Beautiful, isn't it?” Roger says.
Eileen shakes her head, looking down. She is bitterly cold, and the wind whistles through the broken branches and the grain of the wood. “It's dead, Roger.”
“What's that?”
“'The darkness grew apace,'” she mutters, looking away from him. “'A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east.'”
“What's that you say?”
“The Time Machine,” she explains. “The end of the world. 'It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.'”
“Ah,” Roger says, and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Still the English major.” He smiles. “All these years pass and we're still just what we always were. You're an English major from the University of Mars.”
“Yes.” A gust seems to blow through her chest, as if the wind had suddenly struck her from an unexpected quarter. “But it's all over now, don't you see? It's all dead"—she gestures—"everything we tried to do!” A desolate plateau over an ice sea, a forest of dead trees; all their efforts gone to waste.
“Not so,” Roger says, and points up the hill. Freya and Jean-Claude are wandering down through the dead forest, stopping to inspect certain trees, running their hands over the icy spiral grain of the wood, moving on to the next magnificent corpse.
Roger calls to them, and they approach together. Roger says under his breath to Eileen, “Now listen, Eileen, listen to what they say. Just watch them and listen.”
The youngsters join them, shaking their heads and babbling at the sight of the broken-limbed forest. “It's so beautiful!” Freya says. “So pure!”
“Look,” Roger interrupts, “don't you worry everything will all go away, just like this forest here? Mars become unlivable? Don't you believe in the crash?”
Startled, the two stare at him. Freya shakes her head like a dog shedding water. Jean-Claude points west, to the vast sheet of ice sea spread below them. “It never goes backward,” he says, halting for words. “You see all that water out there, and the sun in the sky. And Mars, the most beautiful planet in the world.”
“But the crash, Jean-Claude. The crash.”
“We don't call it that. It is a long winter only. Things are living under the snow, waiting for the next spring.”
“There hasn't been a spring in thirty years! You've never seen a spring in your life!”
“Spring is Ls zero, yes? Every year spring comes.”
“Colder and colder.”
“We will warm things up again.”
“But it could take thousands of years!” Roger exclaims, enjoying the act of provocation. He sounds like all the people in Burroughs, Eileen thinks, like Eileen herself when she is feeling the despair of the crash.
“I don't care,” Freya says.
“But that means you'll never see any change at all. Even with really long lives you'll never see it.”
Jean-Claude shrugs. “It's the work that matters, not the end of work. Why be so focused on the end? All it means is you are over. Better to be in the middle of things, or at the beginning, when all the work remains to be done, and it could turn out any way.”
“It could fail,” Roger insists. “It could get colder, the atmosphere could freeze out, everything in the world could die like these trees here. Nothing left alive at all.”
Freya turns her head away, put off by this. Jean-Claude sees her and for the first time he seems annoyed. They don't quite understand what Roger has been doing, and now they are tired of it. Jean-Claude gestures at the stark landscape: “Say what you like,” he says. “Say it will all go crash, say everything alive now will die, say the planet will stay frozen for thousands of years—say the stars will fall from the sky! But there will be life on Mars.”
If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems
If Wang Wei lived on Mars, we'd spend more time outdoors
1. Visiting
2. After a Move
3. Canyon Color
4. Vastitas Borealis
5. Night Song
6. Desolation
7. Another Night Song
8. Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
1. What's in My Pocket
2. In the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth
3. Reading Emerson's Journal
4. The Walkman
5. Dreams Are Real
6. Seen While Running
9. Crossing Mather Pass
10. Night in the Mountains
1. Camp
2. The Ground
3. Writing by Starlight
11. Invisible Owls
12. Tenzing
13. A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy
14. The Reds' Lament
15. Two Years
16. I Say Good-bye to Mars