“Where does the frost come from, this far south?” I asked.
“The shaving stopped about three hundred million years ago. Not enough water frost to matter any more. Some CO2 in the winter. But that’s where fossils are. This used to be a pretty good area for ancient tests.”
“Tests?”
“Shells. Most no bigger than your finger, but my great uncle found an intact Archimedes snapper about three meters long. Right here, while digging out the tunnels for this station.”
“What’s an Archimedes snapper?” I knew something about old Martian biology, enough to remember the largest creature of the tertiary Tharsis period, but I wanted to listen to Charles some more. His voice was very pretty, actually, and I had come to enjoy hearing him explain things.
“Big screw-shaped jointed worm with razor-sharp spines. Spun through sea-bottom muds chopping up smaller animals, then sent out stomach tendrils to digest the bits and suck them in.”
I grued delicately. Charles appreciated the effect.
“Pretty grim if you were, say, a triple test jelly during mating season,” he added, finishing his glass. He lifted it toward me, inquiring without words if I wanted more.
“But I’m not,” I said. “So why does it sound awful?”
“More wine, awful?” Charles asked.
“I’m not a triple test jelly, so why does an Archimedes snapper sound horrible?”
“Not used to fresh meat,” Charles said.
“I’ve never had meat,” I said. “It’s supposed to… sharpen your drives. Your instincts.”
Charles lifted his glass again toward me. I wondered if he wanted me drunk. That would not be a very sporting desire, a supine woman nearly out of her senses; would that satisfy him, or would he try for all of me, mind as well as body?
“No thank you,” I said. “It looks like blood.”
“Venous blood,” Charles agreed, putting his half-full glass down. “I’ve had enough, too. I’m not used to it.”
“I think it’s time to sleep,” I suggested.
Charles stared at the floor. I focused on his smile and specked an image of Charles and me without blankets, without clothes, in blood-warm rooms, and felt more heat rise that was not due to the wine. I wanted to encourage him, but something still held me back.
If he did not make a move now, he might miss me, and I would not have to decide whether to accept. I wondered how many women had put heavy action on Charles, and how often he had accepted — if ever. It would be awful if we were both inexperienced — wouldn’t it?
“We have a lot to do tomorrow,” Charles said, turning his eyes away. “I’m pleased you decided to come with me. It’s a real boost to my ego.”
“Why?”
“I’d hate to rush anything now,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear.
“Rush what?”
He filled his glass of wine, then frowned and stuck out his tongue. “I don’t know why I did that. I don’t want any more. You’re very tolerant.” His next words came in a rush, accompanied by quick hand gestures as if in a debate. “I’m shy and I’m clumsy and I don’t know what to do, or whether to do anything, and the thing I want most right now is to just talk with you, and find out why I’m so attracted to you. But I think I should be doing something else, too, trying to kiss you or… Of course, I wouldn’t mind that.” He looked squarely at me, distressed. “Would you?”
I had hoped to be guided through this by someone who could educate me.
“Talking is good,” I said.
Charles came forward a little too quickly, and we kissed.
He put his hand on my shoulder, hugged me without squeezing, and then, instinct shoving in, began to get more insistent. I gently pushed him back, then leaned forward and kissed him again to show I wasn’t rejecting him. His face flushed and his eyes unfocused. “Let’s take it easy,” I said.
We slept in separate rooms. Through the wall, I heard Charles pace and mumble. I don’t think he got much sleep that night. Surprisingly, I slept well.
The next morning, I dressed, came into the kitchen and found the main arbeiter frozen in the middle of the floor. I touched it tentatively. A faint recorded voice said, “I am no longer functional. I need to be repaired or replaced.” Then it shut down completely.
I made my own cup of tea and waited for Charles. He came in a few minutes later, trying not to look tired, and I warmed a cup for him.
“Sleep well?” I asked.
He shook his head. “And you?”
“I slept okay. I’m sorry you were upset.”
“You’re not a Shinktown sweet. Not to me.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“But I don’t know what you expect.”
I took his hand and said, “We are going to spend a wonderful day sightseeing and looking for fossils. We’ll talk more and get to know each other. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s a start,” Charles said.
We ate breakfast and suited up.
“None of this was scrubbed by glaciers,” Charles said, pointing to the plain with his gloved hand. We both wore full pressure suits in the tractor cab, but our helmet visors were raised. The tractor motors ramped to a low whine as we climbed a bump in the flat expanse. “They swept by about a hundred kilometers east and fifty west. They left a melt river canyon not far from here, though. It cuts down through a couple of billion years.
“We’ll pass through three layers of life descending into the canyon. The topmost layer is about a half a billion years old. The glaciers came about a hundred million years after they died. The middle layer is two billion years old. That’s the Secondary and Tertiary, Pre-shield and Tharsis One Ecos. At the bottom, in the shaved flats, is the silica deposit.”
“The Glass Sea ,” I said. Every Martian was given a Glass Sea fossil at some point in their childhood.
Charles steered us around a basalt-capped turban of limestone. Basalt fragments from an ancient meteor impact lay scattered over the area. I tried to imagine the meteor striking the middle of the shallow ocean, spraying debris for hundreds of kilometers and throwing up a cloud of muddy rain and steam… Devastation for an already fragile ecology. “Makes me twitchy,” I said.
“What does?”
“Time. Age. Makes our lives look so trivial.”
“We are trivial,” Charles said.
I set my face firmly and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Empty time isn’t very…” I searched for the right word. What came to mind were warm, alive, interesting, but these words all seemed to reveal my feminine perspective, and Charles’s knee-jerk response had been decidedly masculine and above-it-all intellectual. “Active. No observers,” I concluded lamely.
“Given that, we’re still here for just an instant, and the changes we make on the landscape will be wiped out in a few thousand years.”
“I disagree,” I continued. “I think we’re going to make a real mark on things. We observe, we plan ahead, we’re organized — ”
“Some of us are,” Charles said, laughing.
“No, I mean it. We can make a big difference. All the flora and fauna on Mars were wiped out because they…” I still couldn’t clearly express what I wanted to say.
“They weren’t organized,” Charles offered.
“Right”
“Wait until you see,” Charles said.
I shivered. “I don’t want to be convinced of my triviality.”
“Let the land speak,” Charles said.
I had never been very comfortable with large ideas — astrophysics, areology, all seemed cavernous and dismal compared to the bright briefness of human history. In my studies I focused on the intricacies of politics and culture, human interaction; Charles I think preferred the wide-open territories of nature without humanity.