No contraception, I speculate? In this day, I find that hard to believe—but she is studying at Jovis Tholis on Mars, I remind myself, in the middle of the New Reformation.
A certain hardness comes over her face. “You want to know? I spoke literal truth. Abstinence has nothing to do with it. I was mutilated so I cannot enjoy what most women can enjoy. So I hike across glaciers and climb mountains instead,” she smiles wryly. “That is how I get high. Try to understand. I am not Kenyan by birth. Kenya is a civilized nation.”
I have it then. Female circumcision. Back on Earth, the villages all have nice premanufactured houses, with bathrooms, electricity, diagnostic comm ports, and regular food deliveries. But here and there, otherwise gentle people protect primitive cultures from “western interference,” and so we still permit this to be done to children.
“How old were you?”
“Ten. They were very thorough. But in a few years, doctors will be able to fix it, I think. Regenerate the tissue that was taken from me. That’s a spin-off from the interstellar project. They needed to solve tissue regeneration to do cold sleep reliably. For now, I must enjoy giving and being enjoyed while I fantasize what it might really be like.”
What can one say? I take her hand and she squeezes it.
“Oh, yes.” Her voice is low and throaty. “They mutilated me, they tried to keep me barefoot and stupid to carry on their primitive culture. They even tried to keep me from school. But they could not shut off my mind. And here I am, yes, here I am where they thought I could never go doing what they thought to keep from me forever. So I am a space person now, part of another tribe.”
Eloni and I are both, I realize, refugees from cultures that do not want who we are. Hers a primitive one, mine too sophisticated to see itself. I only want to hold her, smother her hurt, and bring a smile to her face. I try to kiss her.
She holds me off. “Someday I have to go back there and try to change what the people do to each other there. I cannot be a space person forever. Do you understand?” She buries her face in my shoulder. “For now. Just for now.”
I understand. This is for now—and whatever our feelings for each other now, our destinies lie in different directions. I nod and she is in my arms. Our lips touch again and the future vanishes. “What do you do want me to do?” I ask.
In answer, she releases the seal of my tight suit.
We remove each other’s remaining clothes and slip into my sleep sack. She wriggles against me and we do kiss, and our hands do stroke and caress, and begin to defy the cold dead gray cruelty outside our bubble with yet another act of life.
But there really isn’t very much room and we are both very tired. So, in each other’s arms, we fall asleep, content with a mostly symbolic defiance.
The remaining walk toward the center of Chao Meng Fu is two by two, the time filled mostly with conversations that share what we are and what we know, but sometimes with those comfortable silences in which your mind digests what you have learned, playing this way and that with it. There are more crevasses to cross, but we do so expeditiously.
During one of these crossings, I say, “On belay, Dr. Lotati.”
“Climbing. Wojciech, call me Emilio, it’s quicker.”
A small thing, but it suggests to me a future more interesting than correcting undergraduate papers.
Juanita suggests we share a piece of music for our final approach to the central depot. It is by a twentieth-century composer named Alan Hovhaness, a symphony called “City of Light.” She says it is his symphony number twenty-two.
“Twenty-two?” I ask. “Did I hear you right? I know Haydn wrote over a hundred, but that was when they were short and highly formatted. Beethoven wrote only nine. Tchaikovsky, six. I thought they’d pretty much stopped doing symphonies by the twenty-first century.” Juanita laughed. “We geologists call Hovhaness our patron composer because he actually wrote a symphony about a volcano—and that was number fifty. By the mid-twenty-first century, they were calling him ‘the American Haydn.’ Now let’s just listen.”
As we approach the brilliant peaks of the Chao Meng Fu central crown—great massive round Sun-gilded domes that speak of power and eternity—I am incapable of understanding why I once thought of this expedition as a stunt. I feel like a piece of steel, bent, hammered, bent and hammered again in the fire with greater strength and balance than I have ever known before.
It is a feeling I want to have again, if I must pursue it to the ends of the Solar System. Perhaps I am not in a class with Ed Blake and perhaps any fantasies I had of a match with Randi must remain fantasies, but I have found in my own backyard a delicate and precious union with Eloni and a friend and colleague in Juanita. And I think I have succeeded in my main objective—I have, I think, the friendship and respect of the people who could bring me out to the frontier which calls my spirit.
As I walk I feel the voices of a more broad-shouldered century calling me; Stanley, Peary, Scott, Teddy Roosevelt, and among poets, of course, Kipling. As I trudge, I amuse myself with a doggereclass="underline" Perhaps those prudent people—
Not prize material, perhaps, but sums my experience, and in my present state of deranged ecstasy, I am no critic!
And if my words fail you—as they fail many others of highly educated tastes—then listen to the finale of Hovhaness’ symphony. For if you cannot understand after hearing that, you have left the human race. What I learned, in the crossing of Chao Meng Fu, was that such things still can be, in any age, for anyone who will do them.