“The old vats,” Charles said. “Cuve, they were called. Juice from the grapes — ”
“I can guess,” I interrupted. “I’m something of a wine connoisseur, actually.” That was stretching the truth considerably.
“Oh, really?” Charles asked, genuinely pleased. “Then maybe you can explain more to me. I’ve always wondered why the winery didn’t work out.”
“Where’d they get their grapes?” I asked, adopting an expert air.
“Cuvée in situ. Grew them in the vats, grape cell suspension… Inoculated it, fermented it right where it grew.”
“That’s why it failed,” I said with a sniff. “Worst wine imaginable.” So I had heard, at any rate; I had never tried it myself.
“My folks tell me it was pretty bad. Some of it’s stored around here, I think… Just abandoned.”
“For how long?”
“Twenty years at least.”
“Terrestrial years,” I said.
“Right.”
“I prefer Martian years, myself.”
Charles took my little feints and jabs pretty well, I thought, not getting irritated, yet not backtracking to flatter me, either.
“Shall we look for them?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember seeing them when I was a child… somewhere down here.” He led the way. I lagged a few steps and peered into a glass window in the side of one cuve. Empty blackness. The whole place saddened me. How often had Martians attempted to do something the way it had been done on Earth, half inventing something, half following ancient tradition, and failing miserably?
“You know how we make wine now, don’t you?” I asked, catching up with him.
“Pure nano, all artificial, right?”
“Some of it’s not bad, either.”
“Have you ever tasted Earth wine?” Charles asked.
“Good heavens, no,” I said. “My family’s not rich.”
“I tasted some a few years ago. Madeira . Cost a friend four hundred Triple dollars.”
“Lucky man,” I said. “ Madeira used to be aged in the holds of ships, sent around the Horn.” That just about plumbed my knowledge of wine.
“It was pretty good. A little sweet, though.”
We pushed aside a thin fiberglass door and entered a storage area behind the vat room. Hidden behind neatly folded piles of filter cloth, a single lonely drum sat in one corner. Charles stooped beside the drum and peered at its label. “Vintage 2152,” he said. “M.Y. 43. Never bottled, never released.” He glanced up at me with a comic look of fearful anxiety. “Might kill us both.”
“Let’s try it,” I said.
The spigot plug had been turned to the wall. Charles called one of the maintenance arbeiters to bring in a forklift and move the drum. The arbeiter did its work, and we were able to tap the barrel. Charles went off to find glasses, leaving me with my thoughts in the cold, empty room.
I stared at the foamed rock walls, then said, out loud, “What in hell am I doing?” I was far from any station or town, with a young man I knew little about, putting myself into what could be a very compromising situation, going against my better judgment, much less my previous plans for just such an occasion… when I would have tested and picked out a very suitable candidate for a serious relationship, a significant love-matching.
Clearly, I didn’t know my own mind. I liked Charles, he was certainly pleasant, but he was no…
Sean Dickinson.
I frowned and pinched my upper arm as a kind of punishment. If Sean Dickinson were here, I thought, we might already be in bed together… But I could see Sean waking in the morning, glancing at me with disapproval, taciturn after a night of passion. Was that what I wanted? Experience of sex with the added spice of an illusion of romance, with someone I could never have a future with, and therefore no strings attached?
My face heated.
Charles returned with two thick glasses and I pretended to examine the arbeiter for a moment, blinking myself back into control. “Anything wrong?” Charles asked.
I shook my head, smiling falsely. “It just looks so pitiful.” I took one of the glasses.
Charles stretched his neck between nervous shoulders, clearly more unsure about me than I was about him. But he made a brave show, and with a magician’s hocus-pocus gesture, turned the stopcock and poured a thin stream of deep red liquid into his glass.
“It wouldn’t be polite to offer you some first,” he said, and lifted the glass. “It’s my family’s mistake, after all.”
He sniffed the glass, swirled it, smiled at the pretension, and took a sip. I watched his face curiously, wondering how bad it could be.
He showed genuine surprise.
“Well?” I asked.
“Not fatal,” he said. “Not fatal at all. It’s drinkable.”
He poured a glass for me. The wine was rough, demanding a little more throat control to get it down than I really preferred, but it was not nearly as bad as it could have been.
“We’re young,” Charles decided. “We’ll survive. Should we decant a liter or two, have it with dinner?”
“Depends on what dinner is,” I said.
“What we brought with us, and whatever I can scrounge from the emergency reserves.”
“Maybe I can cook,” I said.
“That would be great.”
We ate in the station boss’s dining room on an old metal table and chairs that nobody had seen fit to remove. Ten-year-old music played softly over the louder system, rapid hammer-beat kinjee tunes that might have put my parents in a romantic mood, but did nothing for me. I preferred development, not drugdrum.
I will not say the wine liberated me from my cares, but it did induce calm, and for that I was grateful. The food was tractable — gray paste at least five years old — Martian years — that fortunately shaped itself into something palatable, if not gourmet. Charles was embarrassingly appreciative. I had to bite my tongue not to point out that the paste did most of the work. He was trying to be nice, to make me feel good. My ambivalence was a puzzle to both of us.
The air system in the old warren creaked and groaned as we finished our dinner. Outside, the boss’s station display told us, the surface temp had dropped to minus eighty Celsius and the wind was whining at a steady one hundred kiphs. I wasn’t worried for our safety — we had enough supplies to keep us for a couple of weeks. If we wished to leave, the tractor could get us through anything but a major storm, which wasn’t in the offing, according to satcom weather reports.
We weren’t in any danger, nobody knew where we were, the wine illumined a Charles more and more handsome with every sip, and still my neck ached with tension.
“Tomorrow we’ll go out to the shaved flats in an old melt river canyon,” Charles said, lifting his glass and staring at the wine within as if it were rare vintage. He closed one eye to squint at the color, caught my dubious expression, and laughed. His laugh might have been the first thing I fell in love with — easy and gentle, self-deprecating but not humble, accompanied by a roll of his eyes and a lift of his chin.
“What are shaved flats?” I asked.
“Natural fractures in the limestone. Upper layers separate from lower, maybe because of vibration from the wind, and the upper layer begins to fragment. Soon — well, in a hundred million years — frost forms in the cracks, and the upper layer erodes into sand and dust, which blow away, leaving the next layer down… Shaved, so to speak.“