The Martians(29)

Or overwhelmed by everyone else's. One time, out walking with him to the salt pyramids they were constructing, he said something about the growing oddity of the farm team, and Maya pricked up her ears, thinking, If only you knew. But then he went on: “Frank is thinking they may have to be investigated by some kind of formal, I don't know, tribunal. Apparently material has gone missing, equipment, supplies, I don't know. They can't account for their hours properly to him, and people back in Houston are beginning to ask questions. Frank says some down there are even talking about sending up a ship to evacuate anyone who has been actively stealing things. I don't think that would do anyone any good, things are tenuous enough as it is. But Frank, well, you know Frank. He doesn't like it when there are things going on outside his control.”

“Tell me about it,” Maya muttered, pretending to worry only about Frank. And you could pretend anything with Michel, he was oblivious, more and more lost in his own world.

But afterward it was Desmond she worried about. The farm team she didn't care about at all, serve them right to be busted and sent home, Hiroko especially, but really all of them, they were so self-righteous and self-absorbed, a clique in a village too small to have cliques; but of course cliques only ever existed in contexts too small for them.

But if they did get rousted as they deserved, Desmond would be in trouble.

She did not know where he hid, or how to contact him. But from her conversations with Frank about Underhill affairs she judged that the problem of dealing with the farm team was going to develop slowly; so instead of searching for Desmond, as she had in the Ares, she merely walked around in the greenhouse late in the night, when she normally would not have, asking Iwao questions about things she would not usually show an interest in; and a few nights later she heard the scritch-tap-scritch at her door, and she rushed to let him in, realizing from his initial downcast glance that she was wearing only a shirt and underwear. But this had happened before; they were friends. She locked the door and sat down on the floor next to him, and told him what she had heard. “Are they really taking things?”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

“But why?”

“Well, to have things that are their own. To be able to go out and explore different parts of Mars, and have things to keep their trips under the radar.”

“Are they doing that?”

“Yeah. I've been out myself. You know, they say it's just a trip to Hebes Chasma, and then they get over the horizon and set off to the east, mostly. Into the chaos. It's beautiful, Maya, really beautiful. I mean maybe it's just because I been cooped up so long, but I love being out there, I love it. It's what I came for, here at last. In my life. I have a hard time convincing myself to come back.”

Maya looked at him closely, thinking it over. “Maybe that's what you all ought to do.”

“What?”

“Take off.”

“Where would I go?”

“Not just you—all of you. Hiroko's whole group. Take off and start your own colony. Go off where Frank and the rest of the police couldn't find you. Otherwise you may get busted and sent home.” She told him what she had heard from Michel.

“Hmm.”

“Could you do it, do you think? Hide them all, like you've hidden yourself?”

“Maybe. There's some cave systems in the chaoses east of here, you wouldn't believe what I've seen.” He thought it over. “We'd need all the basics. And we'd have to disguise our thermal signal. Send it down into the permafrost, melt our water for us. Yeah, I suppose it could be worked out. Hiroko has been thinking about it already.”

“You should tell her to hurry up then. Before she gets busted.”

“Okay, I will. Thanks, Maya.”

And the next time he dropped by in the middle of the night, it was to say good-bye. He hugged her and she held on to him, clutching. Then she pulled him onto her, and instantaneously, without any transition, they were getting their clothes off and making love. She rolled over onto him, shocked at how slight he was, and he flexed up to clasp her and they were off into that other world of sex, a wild pleasure. She did not have to play it safe with this man, who was the perfect outsider, an outlaw, her stowaway, and at this hard point in her life, one of her only real friends. Sex as an expression of friendship; it had happened to her before, a few times when she was young, but she had forgotten how much fun it could be, how friendly and pure, neither romantic nor anonymous.

Afterward she observed, “It's been a while.”

He rolled his eyes, leaned up to gnaw on her collarbone. “Years since a time like that,” he said happily. “Since I was about fifteen, I think.”