“Why not?” I said. “When our lives are straightened out.”
He held onto my hand a little longer and I gently removed it. “I’d like to see you before that,” he said. “For me, at least, that might be a long way off.”
“All right,” I said, squeezing through the door. I didn’t commit myself to when. I was in no mood to establish a relationship.
My father forgave me. Mother secretly admired all that I had done, I think — and they personally footed the bill for expensive autoclasses, to keep me up-to-date on my studies. They could have charged it to the BM education expenses, as part of the larger Goback revival. Father was a firm believer in BM rule, but too honorable to squeeze BM-appropriated guvvie funds, or take the victor’s advantage.
When next I saw Connor, it was on General Solar LitVid. She was on the long dive to Earth, issuing pronouncements from the WHTCIPS (Western Hemisphere Transport Coalition Interplanetary Ship) Barrier Reef, returning, she was at pains to make Martians understand, to a kind of hero’s welcome. Dauble was with her but said nothing, since day by day the awful truth of her failed Statist administration was coming out.
It so happened that there was a Majumdar BM advocate on that very ship, and he took it upon himself to represent all the BMs and other interests hoping to settle with Connor and Dauble. He served them papers, day after day after day, throughout the voyage…
By the time both of them got to Earth, ten months later, they would be poor as Jackson ’s Lode, born on Mars, exiled to Earth, doomed to dodging Triple suits for the rest of their days.
What was happening on Mars was an excellent example of politics in action in a “young” culture, my special area of study with respect to Earth history, and I should have been fascinated, but in fact I ignored much of the daily news.
My youthful ideals had been trodden on none too delicately, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Before I could speck out the eventual course of my education and decide how to serve my family, I had to re-establish who I was. My mother supported my youthful indecision; my father gave in to my mother. I had some time away from commitments.
When UM restarted classes, I switched campuses and majors, going to Durrey Station, the third-largest town on Mars and home of UM’s second-largest branch. I studied high humanities — text lit from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, philosophy before quantum mechanics, and the most practical subject in my list, morals and ethics as a business art. Four hapless souls shared my major, studying things most pioneering, practical Martians could not have given a damn about.
I needed a rest. So I decided to have fun.
I hadn’t thought about Charles for months. I did not know he had gone to Durrey Station as well. When classes started, we did not run into each other immediately. I saw him in Shinktown over student break.
Seven hundred and ninety students fled UM Durrey at Solstice and either went to work on their farms, if from the local, more sober and well-established families of Mariner Valley, or took refuge in Shinktown. Some, already married, spread out to their half-built warrens, soon to become new stations, and did what married people do.
My family kept no farms and required little of me in the way of overt filial piety. They loved me but let me choose my own paths.
Shinktown was a not very charming maze of shops, small and discreet hotels, game rooms, and gyms, seventeen kilometers from Durrey Station, where students went to get away from their studies, their obligations to family and town; to blow it all out and kick red.
Mars has never been a planet of prudes. Still, its attitudes toward sex befitted a frontier culture. The goals of sex are procreation and the establishment of strong connections between individuals and families; sex leads to (or should lead to) love and lasting relationships; sex without love may not be sinful, but it is almost certainly wasteful. To the ideal Martian man or woman, as portrayed in popular LitVids, sex was never a matter of just scratching an itch; it was devilishly complicated, fraught with significance and drama for individual and family, a potential liaison (one seldom married within one’s BM) and the beginning of a new entity, the stronger and dedicated dyad of perfectly matched partners.
That was the myth and I admit I found it attractive. I still do. It’s been said that a romantic is someone who never accepts the evidence of her eyes and ears.
In this age, few were physically unattractive. There was no need and little inclination among most Martians to let nature take its uncertain course. That particular question had been hammered into a viable public policy for most citizens of the Triple seventy Martian years and more ago. I was attractive enough, my genetic heritage requiring little adjustment if any — I’d never asked my mother and father, really — and men were not reluctant to talk to me.
But I had never taken a lover, mostly because I found young men either far too earnest or far too frivolous or, most commonly, far too dull. What I wanted for my first (and perhaps only) love was not physical splendor alone, but something deeply significant, something that would make Mars itself — if not the entire Triple — sigh with envy when my imagined lover and I published our memoirs, in ripe old age…
I was no more a prude than any other Martian. I did not enjoy going to bed alone. I often wished I could lower my standards just enough to learn more about men; handsome men, of course, men with a little grit, supremely self-confident. For that sort of experimentation, beauty and physical splendor would be more important than brains, but if one could have both — wit and beauty and prowess -
So fevered my dreams.
Shinktown was a place of temptations for a young Martian, and that was why so many of us went there. I enjoyed myself at the dances, flirted and kissed often enough, but shied from the more intimate meetings I knew I could have. The one continuing truth of male and female relations — that the man attempts and the woman chooses — was in my favor. I could attract, test, play the doubtless cruel and (I thought) entirely fair game of sampling the herd.
In the middle of the break, on an early spring evening, a local university club held a small mixer following a jai alai game in the arena. I’d attended the game and was enjoying a buzz of frustration at lithe male bodies leaping and slamming the heavy little ball, uneasy with a mix of strong Shinktown double-ferment tea and a little wine, and I hoped to dance it off and flirt and then go home and think.
I spotted Charles first, from across the room, while dancing with a Durrey third-form. Charles was talking to (“chatting up” I said to myself) a tall, big-eyed exotique who seemed to me way out of his league. When the dance ended, I edged through the crowd and bumped into him by accident from behind. He turned from the exotique, saw me, and to my dismay, his face lit up like a child’s. He fell all over himself to disentangle from the big-eyed other.
I had thought about the UMS action for months and wanted to talk about it, and Charles seemed perfect to fulfill that function.
“We could get dinner,” Charles suggested as we strolled off the dance floor.
“I’ve already eaten,” I said.
“Then a snack.”
“I wanted to talk about last summer.”
“Perfect opportunity, over a late dessert.”
I frowned as if the suggestion were somehow improper, then gave in. Charles took my arm — that seemed safe enough — and we found a small, quiet autocafe in an outer tunnel arc. The arc branched north of Shinktown quarters for permanent residents and offered little convenience shops, most tended by arbeiters. We passed through the central quadrangle, a hectare of tailored green surrounded by six stories of stacked balconies. The quadrangle architecture tried to imitate the worst of old Earth, retrograde, oppressive. The shop arc, however, was comparatively stylish and benign.