“Why did he want it closed?”
“He wanted to bring Klein kids here for a history lesson. Exclusively. Give them a sense of deep time.”
Charles walked to the spot of sun and stood there, arms folded, his suit and helmet dazzling white and gold against the dull blue-green shadows beyond. He looked wonderfully arrogant, at home with eternity.
That sense of deep time Charles’s father had coveted for his BM’s children stole over me and brought on a bright, sparkling shock unlike anything I had ever experienced. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. Delicate traceries lined the glassy walls of the buried bubble. I remembered the paleoscape mural in Sean’s hospital room. The natural cathedrals of Mars. All broken and flat now… except here.
I tried to imagine the godly calm of a planet where an immense, soap-bubble structure like this could remain undisturbed over hundreds of millions of years.
“Have you shown anybody else?” I asked.
“No,” Charles said.
“I’m the first?”
“You’re the first.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d love it,” he said.
“Charles, I don’t have half the experience or the… awareness necessary to appreciate this.”
“I think you do.”
“There must be hundreds of others — ”
“You asked to see my Mars,” Charles said. “No one’s ever asked before.”
I could only shake my head. I was unprepared to understand such a gift, much less appreciate it, but Charles had given it with the sweetest of intentions, and there was no sense resisting. “Thank you,” I said. “You overwhelm me.”
“I love you,” he said, turning his helmet. His face lay in shadow. All I could see were his eyes glittering.
“You can’t,” I answered, shaking my head.
“Look at this,” Charles said, lifting his arms like a priest beneath a cathedral dome. His voice quavered. “I work on my instincts. We don’t have much time to make important decisions. We’re fireflies, a brief glow then gone. I say I love you and I mean it.”
“You don’t give me time to make up my own mind!” I cried.
We fell silent for a moment. “You’re right,” Charles said.
I took a deep breath, sucking back my wash of emotions, clutching my hands to keep them from trembling. “Charles, I never expected any of this. You have to give me room to breathe.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, almost below pickup range for his helmet. “We should go back now.”
I didn’t want to go back. All of my life I would remember this, the sort of romantic moment and scene I had secretly dreamed of, though stretched beyond what I could have possibly imagined; the kind of setting and sweeping, impassioned declarations I had hoped for since such ideas had even glimmered hi me. That it aroused so much conflict baffled me.
Charles was giving me everything he had.
On the way back to the tractor, with ten minutes before we started using reserves, Charles knelt and chipped a square from the Glass Sea bed. He handed it to me. “I know you probably already have some,” he said. “But this is from me.”
Leave it to Charles, I thought, to give me flowers made of stone. I slipped the small slab of rock into my pouch. We climbed into the tractor, pressurized, and helped each other suck dust from our suits with a hose.
Charles seemed almost grim as he took the stick and propelled the tractor forward. We circled and climbed out of the canyon in painful silence.
I made my decision. Charles was passionate and dedicated. He cared about things. We had been through a lot together, and he had proven himself courageous and reliable and sensible. He felt strongly about me.
I would be a fool not to return his feelings. I had already convinced myself that my qualms before had come from cowardice and inexperience. As I looked at him then — he refused to look at me, and his face was flushed — I said, “Thank you, Charles. I’ll treasure this.”
He nodded, intent on dodging a field of boulders.
“In a special place in my heart, I love you, too,” I said. “I really do.”
The stiffness in his face melted then, and I saw how terrified he had been. I laughed and reached out to hug him. “We are so — weird” I said.
He laughed as well and there were tears in his eyes. I was impressed by my power to please.
That evening, as the temperature outside the station dipped to minus eighty, the walls and tunnel linings of the warrens creaked and groaned, and we dragged our beds together in the boss’s sleeping quarters. Charles and I kissed, undressed, and we made love.
I don’t know to this day whether I was his first woman. It didn’t matter then, and it certainly doesn’t matter now. He did not seem inexperienced, but Charles showed an aptitude for catching on quickly, and he excited and pleased me, and I was sure that what I felt was love. It had to be; it was right, it was mutual… and it gave me a great deal of pleasure.
I delighted in his excitement, and after, we talked with an ease and directness impossible before.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him, nested in the crook of his arm. I felt secure.
“When I grow up, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head and his brows came together. He had thick, expressive eyebrows and long lashes. “I want to understand,” he said.
“Understand what?” I asked, smoothing the silky black hair on his forearm.
“Everything,” he said.
“You think that’s possible?”
“Yeah.”
“What would it be like? Understanding everything — how everything works, physics, I guess you mean.”
“I’d like to know that, too,” he said. I thought he might be joking with me, but lifting my eyes, I saw he was dead serious. “How about you?” he asked, blinking and shivering slightly.
I scowled. “God, I’ve been trying to figure that out for years now. I’m really interested in management — politics, I guess would be the Earth word. Mars is really weak that way.”
“President of Mars,” Charles said solemnly. “I’ll vote for you.”
I cuffed his arm. “Statist,” I said.
Waiting for sleep, I thought this part of my life had a clear direction. For the first time as an adult, I slept with someone and did not feel the inner bite of adolescent loneliness, but instead, a familial sense of belonging, the ease of desire satisfied by a dear friend.
I had a lover. I couldn’t understand why I had felt so much confusion and hesitation.
The next day, we made love again — of course — and after, strolling through the tunnels with mugs of breakfast soup, I helped Charles inspect the station. Every few years, an active station — whether deserted or not — had to be surveyed by humans and the findings submitted to the Binding Multiples Habitat Board. All habitable stations were listed on charts, and had to be ready for emergency use by anybody. Trés Haut Médoc needed new arbeiters and fresh emergency supplies. Emergency medical nano had gone stale. The pumps probably needed an engineering refit to fix deep structural wear that could not be self-repaired.
After finishing diagnostics on the main pumps, still caught up in yesterday’s trip and my deep-time shock, I asked Charles what puzzled him most about the universe.
“It’s a problem of management,” he said, smiling.
“That’s it,” I said huffily. ‘Talk down to my level.”
“Not at all. How does everything know where and what it is? How does everything talk to every other thing, and what or who listens?”
“Sounds spooky,” I said.
“Very spooky,” he agreed.
“You think the universe is a giant brain.”
“Not at all, madam,” he said, letting a diagnostic lead curl itself into his slate. He tucked the slate into his belt. “But it’s stranger than anyone ever imagined. It’s a kind of computational system… nothing but information talking to itself. That much seems clear. I want to know how it talks to itself, and how we can listen in… and maybe add to the conversation. Tell it what to do.”