The Martians

1. Finding Him

After she saw the strange face through the bottle in the farm of the Ares, Maya couldn’t stop thinking of it. It frightened her, but she was no coward. And that had been a stranger, not one of the hundred. There on her ship.

And then she told John about it, and he believed her. He believed in her; and so she was going to have to track that stranger down.

She began by calling up the plans for the ship and studying them like she had never studied them before. It surprised her to find how many spaces it contained, how large their total volume. She had known the areas the way one knows a hotel or a ship or a plane, or one’s hometown for that matter—as a set of her life-routes, wound through the whole in an internal mental map, which itself could be called up sharply visible in her mind’s eye; but the rest was only vagueness, deduced, if she ever thought about it, from the parts she knew; but deduced wrongly, as she now found out.

Still, there was only so much livable space in the thing. The axis cylinders were not livable, by and large, and the eight toruses were, for the most part; but they were also very heavily traveled. Hiding would not be easy.

She had seen him in the farm. It seemed possible, even perhaps likely, that the man had allies in the farm crew, helping him to hide. A lone stowaway, unknown to anyone aboard, was difficult for her to believe in.

So she began in the farm.

Each torus was octagonal, made of eight American shuttle fuel canisters that had been boosted into orbit and coupled together. More bundled canisters formed the long axis that speared down the centers of the torus octagons, and the octagons were connected to the central axis by narrow spokelike passage tubes. The entire spacecraft spun on the long axis as it moved forward toward Mars, spinning at a speed that created a centrifugal force the equivalent of Martian gravity, at least for people walking on the floors set against the outside of the torus rings. The Coriolis force meant that if you walked against the rotation of the ship you felt you were leaning forward a little. The opposite effect, walking in the other direction, was somehow not so noticeable. You had to lean into reality to make progress.

The farm chamber filled torus F, the well-lit rows of vegetable and cereal lined out in a circular infinity. Above the ceilings and under the floors the supplies were kept. A lot of spaces to hide, in other words, when you got right down to searching for someone. Especially if you were trying to search in secret, which Maya most definitely was. She did it at night, after people were asleep. Here they were in space and yet people were still incredibly diurnal, regular as clockwork; indeed only clockwork kept them to it, but it was the clockwork of their own biology; and indicative of just how much of their animal natures they were carrying with them. But it gave Maya her opportunity.

She started in the chamber where she had seen the face, and made sure that no one ever saw her at work. So already she was a kind of ally of the man. She worked her way forward through the farm, row by row, storage compartment by storage compartment, tank by tank. No one there. She moved down the ship one torus to the storage tanks, and did the same. Days were passing, and Mars was the size of a coin ahead of them.

As her search progressed she realized how much all the chambers looked the same, no matter how they had been customized for use. They were living inside tanks of metal, and each tank resembled the others, much like the years of a life. Much like city life everywhere, she saw one day: room after room after room. Occasionally the great bubble chamber that was the sky. Human life, a matter of boxes. The escape from freedom.

She searched all the toruses and didn’t find him. She searched the axis tanks and didn’t find him.

He could have been in someone’s room, many of which were locked, as in any hotel. He could be in a place she hadn’t looked. He could be aware of her, and moving away from her as she searched.

She began again.

Time was running out. Mars was the size of an orange. A bruised and mottled orange. Soon they would arrive and go through aerobraking and orbit calming.

It was almost as if she were being watched. She had always felt observed somehow, as if she were living her life on an invisible stage, performing it for an invisible audience who followed her story with interest, and judged her. There had to be something that heard her endless train of thoughts, didn’t there?

But this was more physical than that. She went through the crowded days prepping for arrival, slipping off to make love with John, fencing with Frank to avoid doing the same with him, and all the while feeling there was an eye on her, somewhere. She had learned that no matter where she was, she was in a tank filled with objects, and had trained herself to see the things filling the tank against the Platonic form of the tank itself, looking for discrepancies like false walls or floors, and finding some. Jumping around occasionally. But never catching that eye.

One night she came out of John’s room and felt she was alone. Immediately she returned to the farm and went from its ceiling up to the axis tanks. Above the ceiling, under the low curve of the inner tank wall, was a storage chamber with a back wall that was too close to be the true end of the tank. She had seen that while eating breakfast one morning, without thinking about anything at all. Now she pulled away a stack of boxes set against this false wall, and saw the whole wall was a door, with a handle.

It was locked.

She leaned back, thought about it. She rapped lightly on the door, three times.

“Roko?” said a hoarse voice from within.

Maya said nothing. Her heart was beating hard and fast. The handle turned and she snatched it and yanked the door open, pulling out a thin brown arm. She let go of the door and grabbed the arm harder than the door; instantly she was yanked back into the tiny closet, and seized by hands with a talon grip.

“Stop it!” she cried, and as the man was trying to flee under her arm, she crashed down onto him, hitting boxes and insulation padding hard, but staying latched to a wrist. She sat on him with all her force, as if pinning an enraged child. “Stop it! I know you’re here.”

He gave up trying to escape.

They both shifted to get more comfortable, and she lessened her grip on the man’s arm, but still held on, not trusting him not to bolt. A small wiry black man, thin face bent or asymmetrical somehow, big brown eyes as frightened as a deer’s. Thin wrist, but forearm muscles like rocks under the skin. He was quivering in her grip. Years later when she remembered their first meeting, what she remembered was his flesh trembling in her grip, trembling like a frightened fawn.

Fiercely she said, “What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I’m going to tell everyone about you? Or send you home? Do you think I’m that kind of person?”

He shook his head, face averted, but glancing at her with a new surmise.

“No,” he said, in almost a whisper. “I know you’re not. But I been so afraid.”

“Not necessary with me,” she said. Impulsively she reached out with her free hand and touched the side of his head. He shivered like a horse. Body like a bantamweight wrestler. An animal, moving involuntarily at the touch of another animal. Starved for touch, perhaps. She moved back away from him, let go of his arm, sat with her back leaning against the padding on the wall, watching him. An odd face somehow, narrow and triangular, with that asymmetry. Like pictures in magazines of Rastafarians from Jamaica. From below wafted the smell of the farm. He had no smell as far as she could tell, or else just more of the farm.

“So who’s helping you?” she said. “Hiroko?”

His eyebrows shot up. After a moment’s hesitation: “Yeah. Of course. Hiroko Ai, God damn her. My boss.”

“Your mistress.”

“My owner.”

“Your lover.”

Disconcerted, he looked down at his hands, bigger than his body seemed to need. “Me and half the farm team,” he said with a bitter little smile. “All of us wrapped around her little finger. And me living in a crawl space, for Christ’s sake.”

“To get to Mars.”

“To get to Mars,” he repeated bitterly. “To be with her, you mean. Crazy man that I am, damn fool idiot crazy man.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tobago. Trinidad Tobago, do you know it?”

“Caribbean? I visited Barbados once.”

“Like that, yeah.”

“But now Mars.”

“Someday.”

“We’re almost there,” she said. “I was afraid we would get there before I found you.”

“Hmph,” he said, looking up at her briefly, thinking this over. “Well. Now I not in such a hurry to get there.” He looked up again, with a shy smile.

She laughed.

She asked him more questions, and he replied, and asked more of his own. He was funny—like John in that—only sharper-edged than John. A bitterness there; and interesting, she suddenly realized, just as someone new, someone she didn’t already know all too well. You got to watch out for Hiroko, he warned her at one point. “Hiroko, Phyllis, Arkady—they be trouble. Them and Frank, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s quite a crew you have,” he replied slyly, observing her.

“Yes.” She rolled her eyes; what could one say?

He grinned. “You won’t tell them about me?”

“No.”

“Thanks.” Now it was him holding her by the wrist. “I’ll help you, I swear. I’ll be your friend.” Staring her right in the eye, for the first time.

“And I’ll be yours,” she said, feeling touched, then suddenly happy. “I’ll help you too.”

“We’ll help each other. There’ll be the hundred and all their jostle, and then you and me, helping each other.”

She nodded, liking the idea. “Friends.”

She freed her arm, and with a brief squeeze of his shoulder got up to leave. He still trembled slightly under her hand.

“Wait—what’s your name?”

“Desmond.”

2. Helping Him

Thus in Underhill Maya always knew her stowaway Desmond was out there in the farm, getting by in circumstances almost as prisonlike as those he had suffered on the Ares. For days and months at a time she forgot this as she mangled her relationships with John and Frank, irritating Nadia and Michel, who were both nearly worthless to her, and irritating herself just as often or more—feeling incompetent and depressed, she didn’t know why—having difficulty adjusting to life on Mars, no doubt. It was miserable in a lot of ways, to be cooped up in the trailers and then the quadrangle, with only each other. It wasn’t that much different from the Ares, to tell the truth.

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 somehow, even though they 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 viselike 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. One time, 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 afterward 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 good-bye. He hugged her and she held on to 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.

Afterward 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 backcountry. Good riddance, Maya thought, insulate 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 good-bye; 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 her Desmond. He got in her rover lock, vacuumed the outside of his suit free of dust, took off his helmet, came in 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 ocher 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 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 afterward, 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 afterward, 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. Afterward he took off without good-byes 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 good-bye 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.

Which made her think. Indeed Michel was very close to her heart—her closest friend in some ways, from the days in Antarctica on. Someday she would have to forgive him for leaving Underhill without telling her. He was the man she trusted, after all. And loved—so much that Desmond had seen it. Of course what Michel thought was beyond her telling.

But she could find out. And did; and there in that boulder car, waiting for Desmond’s windstorm, she held Michel in her arms and squeezed him so hard she worried for his ribs. “My friend.”

“Yes.”

“The one who understands me.”

“Yes?”

Then the wind came down. They staggered into Kasei on their Ariadne thread, forced their way into the depths of the stronghold, and at every step of the way Maya became more frightened and angry—frightened for her life—angry that there was such a place on Mars, and such people to make it, disgusting despicable cowards and tyrants, who had killed John, killed Frank, killed Sasha in Cairo, in desperate circumstances very like these—she could be dead on the ground bleeding at the ears like Sasha at any moment, among these bastards who had killed all those innocents in ’61, the forces of repression there and now here in the concrete walls, all in an ear-shattering boom and shriek that added to her fury—so that when she saw Sax wired onto the rack she tore him loose with a scream, and when she saw that Phyllis Boyle was there, as one of the torturers, she snapped and threw one of the explosive charges into the chamber; a murderous impulse, but never had she been so angry, it was like being outside oneself entirely. She wanted to kill somebody and Phyllis was the one.

Then afterward when they regained the cars, and met with the others south of Kasei, Spencer defended Phyllis and shouted at Maya, accused her of cold-blooded murder, and shocked by his assertion of Phyllis’s innocence, she only had the instinct to shout back at him, to hide her shock and defend herself—but feeling like a murderer there in front of them all. “I killed Phyllis,” she said to Desmond when he joined them, and they had all stared at her, all those men, as if she were a Medean horror—all but Desmond, who stepped to her side and kissed her cheek, something he had never before done in front of other people. “You did good,” he declared, with a hand’s electric touch to the arm. “You saved Sax.”

Only Desmond. Though to be fair Michel had been stunned by a blow to the head, and was not himself. Later he too defended her action against Spencer’s remonstrations. She nodded and huddled in his arms, frightened for him, vastly relieved when he returned to normal; holding him as he held her, with the clutch of people who had looked over the edge together. Her Michel.

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.”

“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 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—”

“A hotel in Underhill?”

“In my dream it was a city like any other, with skyscrapers and a lot of hotels. A conference center or something like that. So anyway, not only were we both staying at the same hotel, but they had made a mistake and booked us into the same room. We were happy to see each other in the lobby, because we hadn’t known we were both going to be in town, but we didn’t discover we were accidentally put in the same room until we were up there in the hall, looking at our key tabs. And so, being responsible people, we went back down to the desk to explain the error—”

Maya snorted at this, feeling her arm tighten reflexively on his, and he grinned and waved her off with his other hand—

“But then when we got to the desk, the night clerk gave us the same look you’re giving me now, and he said, ‘Listen you two, I am Cupid, the god of love, and I made that mistake on purpose, to give you two a chance to be together without having planned it, so get back up there and have fun, and don’t try to cross me anymore!’ ”

Maya was laughing out loud, and Desmond laughed too.

“A great dream,” Maya said, and stopped him and held his hands. “And then?”

“Ah, well, then I woke up! I was laughing too hard, just like now. I said, No, no, don’t wake up yet! The good part is coming!”

She laughed and squeezed his hands. “No. The good part had already happened.”

He nodded and they hugged each other. Then his train pulled in and he was off.