The Martians

But every once in a while Maya would see a movement in the corner of her eye, and think of Desmond. His situation was worse than hers by far, and he never complained, did he? Not that she knew, anyway. She didn’t want to bother him to find out. If he came to her, fine; if not, he would be observing from his hideaway, would see what he saw. He would know what kind of trouble she was facing, and if he cared to speak to her, he would come to her.

And he did. Every once in a while she would retire to her cubicle in the quadrangle of barrel vaults, or then to the larger one out in the arcade that Nadia built, and there would come that scritch-tap-scritch which was their private signal, somehow, and she would open the door and there he was, small and black and buzzing with energy and talk, always in an undertone. They would share their news. Out in the greenhouse it was getting strange, he said; Hiroko’s polyandry was catching, and Elena and Rya were also enmeshed in multiple relationships, all of them becoming some kind of commune. Desmond obviously remained apart from them, even though these were his only associates. He liked to come by and tell Maya all about them; and so when she saw them in the ordinary course of life, looking innocuous, it brought a smile to her face. It taught her that she was not the only one having trouble managing her affairs; that everyone was becoming strange. Everyone but Desmond and her, or so it felt as they sat there in her cubicle, on the floor, talking over every one of their colleagues as if numbering rosary beads. And each time as their talk wound down she would find some reason to reach out and touch him, hold his shoulder, and he would clasp her arm in his vicelike grip, quivering with energy, as if his internal dynamo was spinning so fast he could barely hold himself together. And then he would be off. And the days after that would be easier. It was therapeutic, yes; it was what talks with Michel should have been but weren’t, Michel being both too familiar and too strange. Lost in his own problems. Or overwhelmed by everyone else’s. Once, 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 afterwards 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 goodbye. He hugged her and she held onto 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.

Afterwards 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.’

She laughed and squished him under her. ‘Flatterer. I take it your Hiroko doesn’t give you enough attention.’

He made a disgusted noise. ‘We’ll see how it goes in the outback.’

That made her sad. ‘I’m going to miss you,’ she said. ‘Things won’t be the same around here with you gone.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said intently, face nearly touching hers. I love you, Maya. You’ve been a friend to me, a good friend when I didn’t have any. When I really needed one. I’ll never forget that. I’ll come back and visit you whenever I can. I’m a very tenacious friend. You’ll find out it’s true.’

‘Good,’ she said, feeling better. Her stowaway came and went, it had always been that way; no different even if he left Underhill. Or so she could hope.

3. HELPING HER

So off the farm crew went, disappearing into the badlands of the back country. Good riddance, Maya thought, insular smug mystics that they were – a cult, disfiguring the first town on Mars. In public she feigned surprise and indignation along with all the rest, her response unnoticed.

But she really was surprised, and indignant, to find that Michel had disappeared with them. Desmond had never mentioned him to her in any way that would indicate that Michel had been part of the farm’s cult, and it seemed so unlike him that Maya could hardly believe it. But Michel was gone too. And with him gone, she had lost two of her best friends in the colony – even if Michel, always present, had been as unsatisfactory as Desmond in his occasional visits had been helpful; nevertheless she had felt close to Michel, as two maladjusted people in a community of the ordinary. As the melancholy client of the melancholy therapist. She missed him too, and was angry at him for leaving without a goodbye; she couldn’t help but contrast that to Desmond. And as time passed she felt stronger than ever the afterglow of making love with a man who liked her but did not ‘love’ her, i.e. want to possess her, in the way of Frank, or John.

So life went on, without friends. She broke up with Frank, then with John. Nadia despised her, which made Maya furious – to be dismissed by such a grub! and her sister at that. It was depressing. The whole damned situation was depressing; Tatiana killed by a fallen crane; everyone off in their own world.

And so no one welcomed the arrival of other colonists on Mars more than Maya. She was sick of the first hundred. Other settlements were established, and as soon as she could Maya left Underhill and struck out on her own, intending never to go back, any more than she would intentionally return to Russia. You can never go home, as the American saying had it. Which was true, though wrong as well.

She moved to Low Point, the deepest place on Mars, out near the middle of the Hellas Basin; which being the lowest would be the first place they would be able to breathe the new air generated by the terraforming effort. So they believed at the time, and believed themselves very forward-thinking for it! Fools that they were. And she fell in love with an engineer named Oleg, and they moved in together, in a set of rooms at the end of one of the long worm-tube modules. And years passed while she worked like a dog to build a city that would end up at the bottom of a sea.

And fell out of love to boot, even though Oleg was a good man, admirable in many ways, and he loved her like anything. It was her problem; but it was his heart that was going to get broken. So that for a long time she couldn’t do it, and that made her angry, and so she fought with him, until they were as miserable as two people could make each other.

And still he clung to her, even as over time she made him come to hate her. Hated her but loved her; in love, frightened, scared to death that she would leave him; and Maya more and more disgusted at his cowardice and reliance on her. That he could love such a monster as she had become filled her with contempt and pity, and she would walk the crowded tubes home, slowing with every step, dreading the horrible evening and night that lay before her every day.

Then one day, out in a rover on the great flat plains of western Hellas, a suited figure stepped from behind a boulder knot and waved her down. It was Desmond. He got in her rover lock, vacuumed the outside of his suit free of dust, took off his helmet, came into the main compartment. ‘Hi!’

She almost crushed him with her hug. ‘What’s up?’

‘I wanted to say hi, that’s all.’

They sat in her rover and talked through the afternoon, holding hands or at least touching each other always, watching the shadow of the boulder knot lengthen over the empty ochre expanse.

‘Are you this Coyote they talk about?’

‘Yes.’ His crack-jawed grin. It was good to see him!

‘I thought so, I was sure of it! So now you are a legend.’

‘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 of 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 afterwards, 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 afterwards, when they could not do her any good.

Years of grieving passed in Zygote, like hibernation. Maya taught the kids and ignored Hiroko and the rest of the adults. Among them, Sax’s flat manner was the least irritating to her. So she lived in a circular bamboo top room and taught the young brood of ectogenes with Sax, and kept to herself.

But the Coyote dropped by from time to time, and so she at least had someone to talk to. When he showed up she smiled, and some parts of her that were shut off turned on, and they took walks along the little lakeshore opposite Hiroko’s grove, to the Rickover and back, crunching over the frosty dune grass. He told her stories from the rest of the underground, she told him about the kids, and the survivors of the First Hundred. It was their own private world. Mostly they did not sleep together, but once or twice they did – just following the flow of their feelings, their friendship, which mattered more than any physical coupling. Afterwards he took off without goodbyes to anyone else.

Once he shook his head: ‘You need more than this, Maya; the big world is still out there. All of it waiting for you before it can make its next move, I judge.’

‘It can wait a while longer then.’

Another time: ‘Why aren’t you hooked up with a man?’

‘Who?’

‘That’s for you to say.’

‘Indeed.’

He dropped the subject. He never intruded, that was part of the friendship.

Then Sax left for what Desmond called the demimonde, which made Maya restless, and unexpectedly sad. She had thought Sax enjoyed her company as the other main teacher of the kids. Though of course it was hard to tell with him. But to have his face surgically altered, in order to move out of Zygote to the north; it felt like a kind of rebuke. Not only to be such a small factor in his plans, but then to be staying behind herself, in their little refuge, when the world was still out there, changing every day. And then she missed him too, his flat affect and his peculiar thought, like that of a large brilliant toddler, or a member of some other primate species, cousin to theirs: Homo scientificus. She missed him. And it began to feel like it was time for her to thaw, end her hibernation, and start another life.

Desmond helped with that. He came by after an unusually long time away, and asked Maya to go back out with him. ‘There’s a man from Praxis here on planet I want to talk to. Nirgal thinks he’s the something or other, the messenger, but I don’t know.’

‘Sure,’ Maya said, pleased to be asked.

Half an hour’s packing and she was ready to leave forever. She went to Nadia and told her to tell the others she was off, and Nadia nodded and said ‘Good, good, you need to get out,’ always the critical sister.

‘Yes yes,’ Maya said sharply, and she was off to the garage when she saw Michel going out to the dunes, and called to him. He had left Underhill without saying goodbye and it had bothered her ever since, and she wouldn’t do the same to him. She walked out to the first ridge of dune sand.

‘I’m going with Coyote.’

‘Not you too! Will you come back?’

‘We’ll see.’

He regarded her face closely. ‘Well, good.’

‘You should get out too.’

‘Yes … perhaps now I will.’ He was serious, even grave, watching her so closely. Maybe it was Michel Desmond had been referring to, she thought. ‘Do you think it’s time?’ he asked.

‘Time for?’

‘For us? For us to be out there?’

‘Yes,’ she ventured.

Then she was off, skulking north with the Coyote, to the equator west of Tharsis, following canyon walls and threading boulder plains. It was great to see the land again, but she didn’t like the skulking. They ducked under the fallen elevator cable in a glaciated region midway up west Tharsis, and followed the cable downhill west for two days. They came on a giant moving building that was running over the cable, processing it for little cars running back up tracks to Sheffield, and Desmond said, ‘Look, he’s out in a field car, let’s follow.’ Maya watched as Coyote disabled the poor man’s door to the building while he was out on a drive, and then stood by Coyote cautiously, ready for anything, as Coyote approached the man pounding fearfully on the door, and made his farcical greeting:

‘Welcome to Mars!’

Indeed. One look at the man and Maya knew he knew just who they were, and had been sent out to contact them, and learn what he could and report back to his masters on Earth.

‘He’s a spy,’ she said to Desmond when they were alone.

‘He’s a messenger.’

‘You don’t know that!’

‘Okay, okay. But be careful with him. Don’t be rude.’

But then they heard that Sax had been captured. Caution was thrown to the winds – and did not come back, in Maya’s life, for many years.

Desmond turned into a different version of himself, ferociously focused on rescuing Sax; this was the kind of friend he was, and he loved Sax as much as any of them. Maya watched him with something like fear. Then Michel and Nirgal joined them on their way to Kasei, and without a glance at her Desmond assigned her to Michel’s car, in the western arm of their attack on the security compound. And she saw that she had been right; it was Michel whom Desmond had meant for her.

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