“You’re a better judge of human nature than you think,” I said with a sigh. I leaned back on the bed.
He shrugged sadly. “But I’ve fapped up,” he said.
“How?”
“I want to know you better. I feel something really special when I see you.”
Intrigued, I was about to continue with my infernal questioning — How? What do you mean? — when Charles stood up. “But it’s useless. You haven’t liked me from the start.”
I gaped at him.
“You think I’m awkward, I’m not in the least like Sean, and that was who you’d set your sights on… And now I seem to be putting him down.”
“Sean doesn’t appeal to me,” I said, eyes downcast in what I hoped was demure honesty. “Certainly not after what he said.”
“I’m sorry,” Charles said.
“Why are you always apologizing? Sit down, please.”
Neither of us had touched our mineral water.
Charles sat. He lifted his glass. “You know, this water has been sitting for a billion years, locked in limestone… Old life. That’s what I’d really like to be doing. Besides getting the physics grants and starting research, I mean. Going Up and exploring the old sea beds. Not talking politics. I need someone to come with me and keep me company. I thought maybe you’d like to do that.” Charles looked up, then rushed his proposal out breathlessly. “Klein BM has an old vineyard about twenty kilometers from here. I could borrow a tractor, show you the — ”
“A winery?” I asked, startled.
“Failed. Converted to a water station. Not much more than a trench dome, but there are good fossil beds. Maybe the old discarded vintage has mellowed by now and we could try to gag it down.”
“Are you asking?” I felt a sudden warmth so immediate and unexpected that it brought moisture to my eyes. “Charles, you surprise me.” I surprised myself. Then, eyes downcast again, “What are you expecting?”
“You might like me better away from this place. I don’t fit into Shinktown, and I don’t know why I came here. I’m glad I did, of course, because you’re here, but…”
“An old winery. And… going Up again?”
“In proper pressure suits. I’ve done it often enough. I’m pretty safe to be with.“ He pointed his finger Up. ”I’m no LitVid idol, Casseia. I can’t sweep you off your feet.“
I pretended not to hear that. “I’ve never gone fossiling,” I said. “It’s a lovely idea.”
Charles swallowed and quickly decided to press on. “We could leave now. Spend a few days. Wouldn’t cost much — my BM isn’t rich, but we’d borrow equipment nobody’s using now. No problem with the oxygen budget. We can bring hydrogen back for a net gain. I can call and tell the station to warm up for us.”
This was something slightly wicked and hugely unexpected and quite lovely. Charles would never pressure me to go one step farther than I wanted. It was perfect.
“I’ll try not to bore you with physics,” he said.
“I can take it,” I said. “What makes you think I was ever interested in Sean, romantically?” ,
Wisely, he didn’t answer, and immediately set about making late-night preparations.
Martians saw the surface of their world most often through the windows of a train. Perhaps nine or ten times in a life, a Martian would go Up and walk the surface in a pressure suit — usually in crowds and under close supervision, tourists on their own planet.
Call it fear, call it reason, most Martians preferred tunnels, and dubbed themselves rabbits, quite comfortably; red rabbits, to distinguish from the gray rabbits on Earth’s moon.
I think I was more nervous sitting in the tractor beside Charles than I had been in my skinseal months earlier. I trusted Charles not to lose us in the ravines and ancient glacier tongues; he radiated self-confidence. What unnerved me was the proximity to emotions I had safely kept locked away behind philosophy.
I will not explain my turnaround. I was becoming attracted to Charles, but the process was slow. As he drove, I sneaked looks at him and studied his lean features, his long, straight nose, slow-blinking eyes large and brown and observant, upper lip delicately sensuous, lower lip a trifle weak, chin prominent, neck corded and scrawny — a heady mix of features I found attractive and features I wasn’t sure I approved of. Unaesthetic, not perfection. Long fingers with square nails, broad bony shoulders, chest slightly sunken…
I knit my brows and turned my attention to the landscape. I was not inclined to physical science, but no Martian can escape the past; we are told tales in our infant beds.
Mars was dead; once, it had been alive. On the lowland plains, beneath the ubiquitous flopsands and viscous smear lay a thick layer of calcareous rock, limestone, the death litter of unaccounted tiny living things on the floor of an ancient sea that had once covered this entire region and, indeed, sixty percent of northern Mars.
The seas, half a billion Martian years before, had fallen victim to Mars’s aging and cooling. The interior flows of Mars slowed and stabilized just as Mars began to develop — and push aside — its continents, thus cutting short the migration of its four young crustal plates, ending the lives of chains of gas-belching volcanoes. The atmosphere began its long flight into space. Within six hundred million Martian years, life itself retreated, evolving to more hardy forms, leaving behind fossil sea beds and karsts and, last of all, the Mother Ecos and the magnificent aqueduct bridges. (“Ecos” is singular; “ecoi” plural.)
All around us, ridges of yellow-white limestone poked from the red-ochre flopsand. Rusted, broken boulders scattered from impact craters topped this mix like chocolate sprinkles on rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream. Against the pink sky, the effect was severe and heart-achingly beautiful, a chastening reminder that even planets are mortal.
“Like it?” Charles asked. We hadn’t talked much since leaving Durrey in the borrowed Klein tractor.
“It’s magnificent,” I said.
“Wait till we get to the open karsts — like prairie dog holes. Sure signs of aquifers, but it takes an expert to know how deep, and whether they’re whited.” Whited aquifers carried high concentrations of arsenic, which made the water a little more expensive to mine. “Whited seas had entirely different life forms. That’s probably where the mothers came from.”
I knew little about the mother cysts — single-organism repositories of the post-Tharsis Omega Ecos, a world’s life in a patient nutshell, parents of the aqueduct bridges. Their fossils had been discovered only in the past few years, and I hadn’t paid much attention to news about them. “Have you ever seen a mother?” Charles asked.
“Only in pictures.”
“They’re magnificent. Bigger than a tractor, heavy shells a foot thick — buried in the sands, waiting for one of the ancient wet cycles to come around again… The last of their kind.” His eyes shone and his mouth curved up in an awed half-smile. His enthusiasm distanced me for a moment. “Some might have lasted tens of millions of years. But eventually the wets never came.” He shook his head and his lips turned down sadly, as if he were talking about family tragedy. “Some hunters think we’ll find a live one someday. The holy grail of fossil hunters.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are there any fossil mothers where we’re going?”
He shook his head. “They’re very rare. And they’re not found in karsts. Most have been found in the sulci.”
“Oh.”
“But we can look.” He smiled a lovely little boy’s smile, open and trusting.
The Klein BM winery, a noble experiment that hadn’t panned out, lay buried in the lee of a desiccated frost-heave plateau twenty kilometers west of Durrey Station. Now it was maintained by arbeiters, and fitfully at that, judging from the buildup of static flopsands on the exposed entrance. A gate carried a bright green sign, “Trés Haut Médoc.” Charles urged the tractor beneath the sign. The garage opened slowly and balkily, gears jammed with dust, and Charles parked the tractor in its dark enclosure.