“No, I'm Desmond. But Coyote is a damn good legend, yes. Very helpful.”
The lost colony was doing fine. Michel was prospering. They lived in shelters in the Aureum Chaos, for the most part, and made excursions in rovers disguised to look like boulders, completely insulated so that they had no heat signal. “The land is falling down so fast with this hydration, that a new boulder in a satellite photo is the most ordinary thing in the world. So I get around a lot now.”
“And Hiroko?”
He shrugged. “I don't know.” He stared out the window for a long time. “She's Hiroko, that's all. Making herself pregnant all the time, having kids. She's crazy. But, you know. I like being with her. We still get along. I still love her.”
“And her?”
“Oh she loves everything.”
They laughed.
“What about you?”
“Oh,” Maya said, stomach falling. Then it was all pouring out, in a way she hadn't been able to say to anyone else: Oleg, his pitiful clinging, his noble suffering, how much she hated it, how she somehow could not make herself leave.
Sunset stretched over the land and their silence.
“That sounds bad,” he said finally.
“Yes. I don't know what to do.”
“Sounds to me like you do know what to do, but you aren't doing it.”
“Well,” she said, reluctant to say it out loud.
“Look,” he said, “it's love that matters. You have to go for love, whatever it takes. Pity is useless. A very corrosive thing.”
“False love.”
“No not false, but a kind of replacement for love. Or when it is . . . I mean, love and pity together, that's compassion, I suppose. Something like Hiroko, and we need that. But pity without love, or instead of love, is a damn sorry thing. I been there and I know.”
When darkness fell and the stars blazed in the black sky, he gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek, intending only to leave, but she grabbed him, and then they fell into it and made love so passionately, out there alone together in a rover, that she could hardly believe it; it was like waking up after many years of sleep. Just to be off in their solitude; she laughed, she cried, she whooped, she moaned loudly when she came. Rhythmic shouts of freedom.
“Drop by whenever you like,” she joked when he was finally off. They laughed and then he was off into the night, not looking back.
She drove slowly back to Low Point, feeling warm. She had been visited by the Coyote, her stowaway, her friend.
That night, and for many nights after that, she sat in her little living room with Oleg, knowing she was going to leave him. They ate their dinner, and then she sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall, as she always did, while they watched the news on Mangalavid, drinking from little cups of ouzo or cognac. Huge cloudy feelings stuffed her chest—this was her life after all, these habitual evenings with Oleg, week after week the same, for year after year; and soon to end forever. Their relationship had gone bad but he was not a bad man, and after all, they had had their good times together—almost five years now, a whole life, all set in its shared ways. Soon to be smashed and gone. And she felt full of grief, for Oleg and for her too—for simply the passing of time, and the crash and dispersal of one life after another. Why, Underhill itself was gone forever! It was hard to believe. And sitting there in the little world she had made with Oleg, and was soon to unmake, she felt the stab of time like she never had before. Even if she didn't leave him, it would still go smash eventually—so that there was no evening ever when one should not feel this same melancholy, a kind of nostalgia for the present itself, slipping away like water down the drain.
For many years after she remembered so clearly that odd painful time, as one of those periods when she had in some way stepped out of herself and looked at her life from the outside. It was curious how terribly significant certain quiet moments could be, how she felt these charged moments, as in the eye of the storm, so much more than she did the events of the storm itself, when things happened so fast that she lived almost unconsciously.
So she and John got the treatment together, and renewed their partnership, better than ever. Then he was murdered, and the revolution came, and failed; and she flew through all of it as in a dream, in a nightmare in which one of the worst aspects was her inability in the rush of events to feel things properly. She did her best to join Frank and help stop the chaos from coming, and it came anyway. And Desmond appeared out of the smoke of battle and saved them from the fall of Cairo, and she was reunited with Michel and they made their desperate drive down Marineris, and Frank drowned, and they escaped to the ice refuge in the far south—all reeling by so fast that Maya scarcely comprehended it. Only afterward, in the long twilight of Hiroko's refuge, did it all fall on her—grief, rage—sorrow. Not only that all these disasters had happened, but that they too were now gone. Times she had been so alive she had not even known it!—but gone, and there only in memory. She felt things only afterward, when they could not do her any good.