The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So she and Michel became partners, their love, begun in the dark of Antarctica, forged in the crucible of that storm, in the rescue of Sax and her murder of Phyllis. They hid back in Zygote, now a terrible confinement to Maya. Michel helped Sax regain his speech, and Maya did what she could too. She worked on the idea of the revolution, with Nadia and Nirgal, Michel and even Hiroko. She lived her life; and from time to time they saw Desmond on one of his pass-throughs. But of course it was not quite the same, even though she loved seeing him as much as ever. He watched her with Michel very fondly; a friendly look, exactly, like one who enjoyed seeing her happy at last. There was something in that she did not like; some smugness; the friend who knew better, perhaps.

  In any case, things changed. They drifted apart. They were still friends, but it was a more distant thing. It was inevitable. So much of her life was caught up in Michel, and in the revolution.

  Still, when the Coyote appeared out of nowhere, it made her smile. And when they heard of the attack on Sabishii, and the disappearance of the whole lost colony's membership, it had been a different kind of pleasure to see Desmond again, coming through and telling them what he had seen—relief; a negative pleasure; the removal of great fear. She had thought he too had been killed in the attack.

  He was shaken, and needed her comfort—took it—was comforted—unlike Michel, who remained remote from her throughout this disaster, withdrawn into his own world of grief. Desmond was not like that; she could comfort him, wipe the tears from his narrow stubbly cheeks. Thus, by being comforted, by making it seem possible, he comforted her too. Looking at the two bereaved lovers of Hiroko, so different, she thought to herself, True friends can help each other when the time comes. And take help too. It's what friends are for.

  And so Maya lived with Michel in Odessa, and they were partners—as married as anyone—for decade after decade of their unnaturally extended lives. But often it seemed to Maya that they were more friends than lovers, not “in love” in the way that she dimly remembered being with John, or Frank, or even Oleg. Or—when Coyote came through and she saw his face at the door—the memory sometimes came to her of that shocking encounter with her stowaway on the Ares, her discovery of him in the storage attic, their first conversation—making love before he took off with Hiroko's group, and the few times after that—yes, she had loved him too, no doubt about it. But now they were just friends, and he and Michel like brothers. It was good to have such a family of the remaining First Hundred, the first hundred and one, with all that had happened between them, twining together to make the familial bond. As the years passed it became more and more of a comfort to her. And as the second revolution approached, like a storm they could do nothing to avoid, she needed them more than ever.

  Some nights, as the crises intensified and she had trouble sleeping, she read about Frank. There was a mystery at the center of him that resisted any final summation. In her mind he kept slipping away. For years she had been afraid to think about him, and then after Michel had advised her to face her fear, actually to research the matter, she had read as much about him as anyone could; and all it had done was confuse her memories with other people's speculations. Now she read in the hope of finding some account that would resemble what she ever less certainly remembered, to reinforce her own memory. It did not work, but it seemed as if it should, and so she went back to it from time to time, the way one will push a sore tooth with a tongue to confirm that it is still sore.

  One night when Desmond was there staying with them, she had a dream about Frank, and then she got up and went out to read about him, feeling curious yet again. Desmond was asleep on a couch in the study. The book she was reading suddenly took up the matter of John's assassination, and she groaned at the memory of that awful night, reduced now in her mind to a few blurred images (standing under a streetlight with Frank, passing a body on the grass, holding John's head in her hands, sitting in a clinic) all now overlaid by the countless stories she had heard since.

  Desmond, disturbed by dreams of his own, groaned and staggered out and passed her on the way to the bathroom. He too had been in Nicosia that night, she recalled suddenly. Or so one of the accounts had said. She looked in the book's index; no mention of him. But some accounts had him there that night, she was sure of it.

  When he came back out, she steeled herself and asked him. “Desmond—were you in Nicosia the night John was killed?”

  He stopped and looked down at her, his face a blank—an uncharacteristic, too-careful blank. He was thinking fast, she thought.

  “Yes. I was.” He shook his head, grimaced. “A bad night.”

  “What happened?” she said, sitting up straight, boring into him with her gaze. “What happened?” Then: “Did Frank do it, like they say he did?”

  Again he looked at her, and again she thought she saw his mind racing, in there behind his eyes. What had he seen? What could he recall?

  Slowly he said, “I don't think Frank did it.” Then: “I saw him up in that triangular park, right around the time they must have attacked John.”

  “But Selim and he . . .”

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “No one knows what went on between those two, Maya. That's all just talk. No one can ever know what other people really said to each other. They make that stuff up. And it doesn't matter what people say to each other either. Not compared to what they do. Even if Frank took this Arab and said, 'Kill John, I want you to do it, kill him kill him'—even if he said that, which I doubt very much, because Frank was never that straightforward, you have to admit"—he waited for her to nod and force a smile—"even so, if this Selim then went off and killed John, got his friends to help him, then it was still their doing, you know? The people who do the deed are the ones responsible, if you ask me. All this stuff about following orders, or he made me do it or whatnot, all that is so much bullshit, it's just excuses.”

  “So if Hitler never killed anyone himself . . .”

  “Then he's not as guilty as the guys in the camps, pulling the triggers and turning on the gas! That's right! He was just a crazy old fuck. But they were murderers. And there were a lot more of them than there were of him. Sad when you think of it that way.”

  “Yes.” So sad it could hardly bear thinking about.

  “But look, Nicosia was complicated. A lot of people were fighting that night. Arab factions were fighting each other, Arabs were fighting Swiss, construction crews were fighting other crews. People say, 'Oh that Frank Chalmers started it all, started the riots as a cover for his arranging the murder of John Boone'—give me a break! They just want to make it simple, they want a simple story, do you understand? They pin blame on a single person because then it makes a simple story. And they can only handle simple stories. Because then only one person has to be responsible, rather than all the people who were fighting that night.”

  She nodded, feeling heartened all of a sudden. “It's true. So—I mean—we were there too. So we were part of it too.”

  He nodded, grimacing again. He came over and sat on the couch beside her, put his head in his hands. “I think about that,” he said, muffled at the floor, “sometimes. I was sneaking around town in my usual way, having a high old time. It was like carnival back home in Trinidad, I thought. Everyone dancing to the music and wearing masks. I had a red mask, a monster face, and I could go anywhere I wanted. I saw John, I saw Frank. I saw you talking to Frank, in that park—you were wearing a white mask, you looked beautiful. I saw Sax down in the medina. And John was partying as usual. I—if only I had known he was in trouble, ahhh. . . . I mean, I had no idea that anyone was out for him. If I had only guessed, I might have been able to pull him aside and tell him to get out of the way of it. I had introduced myself to him at that party up on Olympus, just a little before that. He was happy to see me. He had found out about Hiroko and Kasei, you know. He would have listened to me, I think. But I didn't know.”

  Maya laid her hand on his thigh. “None of us knew.”

&n
bsp; “No.”

  “Except,” she said, “maybe Frank.”

  Desmond sighed. “Maybe. But maybe not. And if he did know, then that would be bad, sure. But if I know him, he would have paid for it later, in his mind. Because those two were close. It would be like killing your brother. People pay in their mind, I believe that. So . . .” He shook his head to get out of that train of thought, glanced at her. “No need to worry about it now, Maya. They're both gone now.”

  “Yes.”

  “They're gone and we're here.” Gesturing around to include Michel, or all of them in Odessa. “It's the living who matter. It's life that matters.”

  “Yes. It's life that matters.”

  He staggered up, went back into the study. “G'night.”

  “Good night.” And she put the book down on the floor and slept.

  4. The Years

  In the years that followed she seldom thought of Frank again. He had been laid to rest, or else lost in the tumult of those times. The years flowed by like water downriver. Maya imagined Terran lives were like Terran rivers, fast and wild at their starts in the mountains, strong and full across the prairies, slow and meandering near the sea; while on Mars their lives resembled the abrupt jumbled paths of the streams they were only now creating—falling off scarps, disappearing in potholes, getting pumped up to unexpected new elevations great distances away.

  Thus she rode out the tense approach to the second revolution, and took that drop with everyone else, then made the trip back to Earth. Thinking of her youth there was like trying to remember an earlier incarnation. She worked with Nirgal and the Terrans, visited Michel in Provence, and returned to Mars seeing both men better than she ever had before. She settled with Michel in Sabishii, and helped Nadia get the government going, when she could do it without Nadia seeing what she was doing. She knew the look she would get if she tried to intervene directly. So she stayed in Sabishii, and life quieted down a bit, or at least fell into a more predictable pattern: Michel had his practice and some work at the university, while Maya worked for the Tyrrhena Massif Water Project, and occasionally taught in the town's schools. She very seldom saw Desmond or thought of him much, and indeed she and Michel ran into the other old ones far less often than they ever had before. Their circle of acquaintances was largely that of their work places, and the neighborhood they lived in—new, like everything else in the second Sabishii. They lived in a third-floor apartment in a big hollow apartment block with a very nice park courtyard, and on evenings warm enough they often ate down at tables in the courtyard and talked with their neighbors, played games, read, did handwork. It was a real community, and sometimes Maya would look around her at the people in it and think that here was a historical reality that would not ever be recorded in any way: a good solid neighborhood, with everyone doing their work and having their families together as some kind of shared collective project, in which an individual family made sense as part of a larger whole that was not easy to characterize. Whole decades slipped by in this anonymous goodness, and very rarely did the ghosts of her previous incarnations come back to haunt her. Nor her old friends either.

  5. Helping Him

  Then many years after that, when Maya was beginning to have trouble with her extended déjà vus and other “mental events,” as Michel called them, Desmond dropped by late at night, after the timeslip when no one else would have thought to visit.

  Michel was already asleep, and Maya up reading. She gave Desmond a hug and brought him into the kitchen and sat him down while she got water on the stove for tea. He had been trembling when she hugged him. “What's wrong?” she asked.

  He flinched. “Oh, Maya.”

  “What is it!”

  He shrugged. “I visited Sax in Da Vinci, and Nirgal was there staying with him. His place up in the hills was covered by dust, did you hear?”

  “Yes. Too bad.”

  “Yeah. But anyway they started talking about Hiroko. As if she was still alive. Sax even claimed to have seen her once, out in a storm. And I—I got so angry, Maya! I could have killed them!”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because she's dead. Because she's dead and they refuse to face it. Just because they never saw the bodies, they make up all these stories.”

  “They're not the only ones.”

  “No. But they believe the stories, just because they want to. As if believing makes it true.”

  “And doesn't it?” she said, pouring out the water into cups.

  “No. It doesn't. She's dead. The whole farm crew. All of them were killed.” And he put his head down on the kitchen table and began to weep.

  Surprised, Maya moved around to his side of the table, sat beside him. She put a hand on his back. Again he was trembling, but it wasn't the same. She reached out and pulled her teacup across the table, closer to her. She sipped from it. His spasming ribs calmed down.

  “It's cruel,” she said. “The, the disappearing. When you never see the bodies, you don't know what to think. You're stuck in limbo.”

  He straightened up, nodded. He sipped his tea.

  “You never saw Frank's body,” he said. “But you don't go around telling people you think he might still be alive.”

  “No,” she said, and waved a hand. “But that flood . . .”

  He nodded.

  “The farm crew, though. You can see why people indulge themselves. They could have escaped, after all. Theoretically.”

  He nodded. “But they were behind me in the maze. I only just got out in time. And then I hung around for days, and they didn't come out. They didn't make it.” He shuddered convulsively. A great deal of nervous energy, she thought, in that wiry little body. “No. They were caught and killed. If they had gotten out, I would have seen them. Or she would have contacted me. She was cruel, but not that cruel. She would have let me know by now.” His face was twisted: grief, anger. He was still angry at her, she saw. It reminded her of Frank. She had been angry at him for years after his death. Wondering if he had killed John. Desmond had talked to her about that, many years before. She recalled: Desmond had been trying to figure out how to comfort her, that night. He had been lying, perhaps. If he knew a different truth, if he had seen Frank put a knife in John, would he have told her, that night? No.

  Now she tried to figure out what would help him to think about Hiroko. She sipped her tea in the timeslip silence, and he did too.

  “She loved you,” she said.

  He looked at her, surprised. Finally he nodded.

  “She would have let you know if she was still around, like you say.”

  “I think so.”

  “So probably she is dead. But Nirgal and Sax—Michel too, for that matter—”

  “Michel too?”

  “Half the time, anyway. Half the time he thinks it is just compensation, a myth that helps them. The other half he's convinced they're out there. But if it helps them, you know . . .”

  He sighed. “I suppose.”

  She thought some more. “You love her still.”

  “I do.”

  “Well. That's life too. Of a sort. Movement of, you know—Hiroko structures. In your mind. Quantum jumps, as Michel says. Which is all we ever are anyway. Right?”

  Desmond regarded the scarred and wrinkled back of his hand. “I don't know. I think we are maybe more than that.”

  “Well. Whatever. It's life that matters, isn't that what you told me one time?”

  “Did I?”

  “I think so. It seems like you did. A good working principle, anyway, whoever said it.”

  He nodded. They sipped tea, their reflections transparent in the black windows. A bird in the sycamore outside broke the night silence.

  “I worry that another bad time may be coming,” Maya said, to change the subject. “I don't think Earth will let us get away with the immigration controls much longer. They'll break them and Free Mars will protest, and we'll be at war before you know it.”

  He shook his head. “I th
ink 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.