So he paid attention, and tried to think about what he was saying. Maya, it turned out, was on the same afternoon panel as he. A bunch of Mars veterans on stage, speaking about their experiences, and what they thought ought to be done. Maya spoke of living on the edge, looking back; the perspective it gave one. How things appeared in their proper proportions, so that it was obvious that a stable permaculture was the most important thing society could work for now.
Someone from the audience asked if they thought the original Russian/American plan to send one hundred permanent colonists might have been, in retrospect, the best way to go.
From down the line of speakers Maya leaned forward to look at him. Apparently he was the obvious one to answer.
He leaned toward his mike.
“Anything can happen in any situation,” he said, thinking hard. “A Mars colony in the 2020s might have become . . . all that we hoped for it. But . . .”
He shook his head, not knowing how to continue. But I lost my nerve. I lost in love. I lost all hope.
“But the odds were against it. Conditions would have been too hard to endure over the long haul. The hundred would have been condemned to . . .”
“Condemned to freedom,” Maya said into her mike.
Michel looked down the line at her, shocked, feeling the desperation grow in him. “Freedom, yes, but in a box. Freedom in a jail. On a rock world, without an atmosphere. Physically it would have been too hard. Life in a box is life in a prison, even if it is a prison of one's own devise. No, we would have gone mad. Many who go there come back damaged for life. They exhibit symptoms of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder.”
“But you said anything could happen,” said the person in the audience.
“Yes, it's true. It could have developed. But who can say. What if is never a question with an answer. Looking at the evidence, I said then that it was a project in big trouble. Now we should look at the current situation. We have moved incrementally on Mars, taken things in their proper sequence. The infrastructure is now there in place to start making it an easier place to live. Perhaps now is the time for permanent settlers.”
And thankfully others took up this thread, and he was off the hook, released from their interrogation.
Except that night, over dinner, Maya watched him closely. And at one point the panel of the afternoon came up.
“I didn't know what to say,” Michel confessed.
“The past,” Maya said dismissively. She waved the whole idea of the past away with a single flick of the hand. A weight came off Michel's stomach. She did not appear to hold it against him.
They had a wonderful evening.
And the next day they walked the beaches near Nice, the little ones Michel knew from his youth, and on one Maya stripped to her underwear and ran out into the Mediterranean, an old woman with magnificent carriage, rangy shoulders, long legs—this was what science had done for them, giving them these extra years of health when by all rights they should be long dead. They should be dead and gone for decades and yet here they were, out in the sun, catching waves, vigorous and strong, not even bent by the years. In their bodies in any case. And as she staggered out of the surf, dripping, wet and sleek as a dolphin, Maya tilted back her head and laughed out loud. She made the brown young women sunning on the sand look like five-year-olds.
And that evening they ditched the conference, and Michel drove them to a restaurant he knew in Marseilles, overlooking the industrial harbor. They had a wonderful time. And arriving back at the conference hotel, late, Maya took him by the hand and pulled him along with her to her room, and they kissed like twenty-year-olds, blood turned to fire, and fell on her bed.
Michel woke just before dawn and looked at his lover's face. Sleep made even the old hawk girlish. A beauty. It was character that created beauty—intelligence, and nerve, and the power to feel deeply, to love. Courage was beauty, that was all there was to it. And so age only added to beauty in the end.
This made him happy—to see into the heart of things, to be so there, in reality, in such a gray dawn. But happier still was some feeling of relief he couldn't quite define. He considered it, watching her breathe. If she was in bed with him—had made love with him, passionately and with great good humor—then she must not bear him any grudge for advising against the Mars project, so many years before. Wasn't that right? At the time she had wanted to go, he knew that. So . . . So she must have forgiven him. The past, she had said, dismissing it all. The present was what counted to her, the moment we call now, in which anything could happen.
She woke and they got up, and went down to breakfast, and Michel felt a most curious sensation: It was as if he were walking in Martian g. His body was light, floating ever so slightly, feet just padding the floor. Walking on air! He laughed to feel such a cliché come true, right there in his own body, in this very moment. And he suddenly knew he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, no matter what happened, no matter if he lived a thousand years. Make this your last thought when you die, he told himself, and you'll be happy even then, to know that you once had such a moment. The balance will be even and more than even.