The Martians(37)

He shook his head. “I think we can avoid it.”

“But how? Jackie would start a war just to keep her power.”

“Don't worry so much about Jackie. She doesn't matter. The system is so much bigger than her—”

“But what if the systems collide? We're living on borrowed time. The two worlds have very different interests now, and diverging more all the time. And then the people at the top will matter.”

He waggled a hand. “There are so many of them. We can tip the majority of them toward reasonable behavior.”

“Can we? Tell me how.”

“Well, we can always threaten them with the reds. There are still reds out there, plotting away. Trying to crash the terraforming any way they can. We can use that to our advantage.”

And so they talked politics, until the sky in the windows went gray, and the scattered birdsong became a chirping chorus. Maya kept drawing him out. Desmond knew all the factions on Mars very well, and had some good ideas. She found it extremely interesting. They plotted strategy. By breakfast time they had worked out a kind of plan to try when the time came. Desmond smiled at this. “After all these years, we still think we can save the world.”

“Well we can,” Maya said. “Or we could, if only they would do what we told them to.”

They woke Michel with the smell and crackle of frying bacon, and with Desmond singing some calypso tune into the bedroom. Maya felt warm, sleepy, hungry. Work would be hard that day but she didn't care.

6. Losing Him

Life went on. She lived with Michel, she worked, she loved, she coped with her health problems. Mostly she was content. But it was possible sometimes to regret that long-lost spark of true passion, unstable and wild though it had always been. Sometimes she knew she might have gotten more pure joy in life if John had lived, or Frank. Or if she had ever connected with Desmond as a partner—if, sometime when they were both free, they had committed to each other in some kind of intermittent monogamy, storklike, meeting after their travels and migrations year after year. A path not taken; and everything therefore different.

What happened instead was that life went on, and slowly, as the years passed, they drifted farther and farther apart; not because of any loss of feeling on either side, she felt, but just because they saw each other so seldom, and other people and other matters took up their thoughts. This was the way it happened; you lived and moved on, and the people closest to you did the same, and life drew you apart, somehow—jobs, partners, whatever— and after a while, when they were not there as part of daily life, as a physical presence, a body in the room, a voice saying new things, then it was possible to love them only as a certain kind of memory. It became the case that you used to love them, and only remembered that love, rather than felt it as you had when they were part of the texture of daily life. Only with your partner could you really keep on loving them, because it was only your partner you stayed with. And even with them it was possible to drift apart, into different sets of habits, different thoughts. If that was so with the person you slept with, how much more so with friends who had moved on too, and now lived on the other side of the world. So eventually you lost them, and there was no help for that. Only if you had been partnered with them. And you could only be partners with one person. If she and Desmond had ever joined each other in that way—who knew what would have happened. The banked coals of an old, distant friendship; when sparks might have flown forever, as from an open forge. She might have been able to make him quiver every time she touched him. She loved the memory of loving him so much that she sometimes thought it could have been that way.

And once in a very long while, she got inklings that Desmond felt somewhat the same; which was nice. One night, for instance, many years later, when Michel was out of town, Desmond came by in the early evening and rang the bell, and they went down together to the corniche and walked the seafront. It was lovely to be together again like that, Maya thought as they walked, alone and arm in arm, on the edge of her Hellas Sea, followed by dinner in a corner of one of the bistros, warming up and talking face-to-face over a table cluttered with glasses and plates. Such men she loved, such friends.

This time he was just passing through, and wanted to catch a sleeper train to Sabishii. So after dinner she walked with him up the staircase streets to the station, arm in arm, and as they approached the station he laughed and said, “I have to tell you my latest Maya dream.”

“Maya dream?”

“Yes. I have them every year or so. I dream about all of us, really. But this one was funny. I dreamed I was going to Underhill to attend some conference, on gift economies or something, and I got there and lo and behold you were there too, attending a hydrological conference. A coincidence. And not only that, but we were staying at the same hotel—”