And yet at the same time no one knew what to do with the added years. An incomprehensible gift. It baffled one's sense of meaning, for the rest of the world's troubles did not go away. On the contrary, the immediate practical problems of the increased longevity were vicious—more people, more hunger, more jealousy, more war, more unnecessary premature death. The ingenuity of death seemed to be matching the life sciences stroke for stroke, as in some titanic hand-to-hand combat, so that it sometimes seemed to Michel, as he averted his eyes from the headlines, that they added years to their lives only to have more people to kill or render miserable. Famines were killing off millions in the “underdeveloped” world, while at the same time, on the same planet, near-immortals were sporting in their Xanadus.
Perhaps an international village on Mars could have made it clearer to all that they were a single culture on a single world. The sufferings of any individual Martian settler would have been inconsequential in comparison to the benefits of this great lesson. The project would have justified it. They would have been like cathedral builders, doing hard, life-eating, useless work, in order to make something beautiful that said, We are all one. And some of them certainly would have loved that work, and the life it brought, because of that very statement. That goal—the sheer act of sacrifice for others, of work for the good of later generations. So that people on Earth could look up at night and say, That too is what we are—not just the horrific headlines, but a living world in the sky. A project in history.
So Michel was uneasy when the red star shone in the sky, and his life in the decades after his return from Mars was troubled at best. He moved around Provence restlessly, and even around the rest of France and the Francophone world. Trying to catch hold somewhere, but always slipping off, and returning to Provence. That was home. But still he was not comfortable, there or anywhere.
He worked as a therapist, and felt like a fraud; the doctor was sick. But he knew no other trade. And so he talked to unhappy people, and kept them company, and that was how he made his living. And tried to avoid the headlines. And never looked up at night.
Then one year in the fall a big transnational meeting on space habitation took place in Nice, sponsored in part by the French space program, and as someone who had been there and studied the issues, Michel was invited to speak. As it was only a few kilometers from his apartment, and as something kept drawing him back to the idea, no matter how he resisted it—out of guilt, pride, compulsion, responsibility—who knew; who could know?—he agreed to attend. It was the centennial of their winter in Antarctica.
Then he ignored the thing, displeased with himself for agreeing to go, perhaps even somewhat afraid. And so ignored all the information that came in the mail about it. So that he drove down to the conference one morning, aware only that he would be speaking on a panel that afternoon—and there was Maya Toitovna, standing in the hall, talking to a circle of admirers.
She saw him and frowned slightly; then her eyebrows shot up, and with fingers splayed like wingtip feathers she touched the upper arm of the man next to her, excusing herself from the circle. And then she was standing before him, shaking his hand. “I am Toitovna, do you remember me?”
“Please, Maya,” he said painfully.
She smiled briefly and gave him a hug. Held him at arm's distance. “You've aged well,” she decided. “You look good.”
“You too.”
She waved him off, but it was true. She was silver-haired, her face harshly lined, big gray eyes as clear and intent as ever. A beauty, as always. Even with Tatiana around to obscure the matter, she had always been the most beautiful woman in his life, the most magnificent.
They talked standing there, looking at each other. They were old now, well into their second centuries. Michel had to work to remember his English, and to a lesser extent so did she; and he had to work to remember the tricks of her harsh accent. It turned out she too had been to Mars; she had spent six years there, during the worst of the troubles in the 2060s. She shrugged as she remembered: “It was hard to enjoy it with so much bad happening down here.”
Heart beating hard, Michel suggested meeting for dinner. “Yes, good,” she said.
The conference was transformed. Michel watched the people there freshly; most much younger than he and Maya, eager to get out into space, to live on the moon, on Mars, the Jovian moons—everywhere. Anywhere but Earth. The escapism inherent in their desire was obvious to Michel, but he ignored it, tried to see it their way, tried to temper his statements and responses to match their desire. Without desire who could live? Mars for these people was not a place, not even a destination, but a lens through which to focus their lives. That being the case he did not care to take his usual disparaging position on the issue, now in any case a century old, and perhaps inadequate to the new moment. The world was falling apart; Mars helped people see that. An escape, yes, perhaps; but also a lens. He could help, if he worked at it, to sharpen the focus that the lens gave, perhaps. Or point it at certain things.