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.
We sat in the cafe and sipped Valley coffee while waiting for our cakes to arrive. Charles said little at first, his nerves evident. He smiled broadly at my own few words, eager to be accommodating.
Tiring rapidly of this verbjam, I leaned forward. “Why did you come to Shinktown?” I asked.
“Bored and lonely. I’ve been up to my neck in Bell Continuum topoi. You… don’t know what this is, I presume.”
“No,” I said.
“Well, it’s fascinating. It could be important someday, but right now it’s on the fringe. Why did you come?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. For company, I suppose.” I realized, with some concern, that this was my way of being coquettish. My mother would have called it bitchy, and she knew me well enough.
“Looking for a good dance partner? I’m probably not your best choice.”
I waved that off. “Do you remember what Sean Dickinson said?”
He grimaced. “I’d like to forget.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“I’m not much of a student of human nature.” Charles examined his tiny cup. The cakes arrived and Charles slapped palm on the arbeiter. “My treat,” he said. “I’m old-fashioned.”
I let that pass as well. “I think he was monstrous,” I said.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
My lips wrapped around the word again, savoring it. “Monstrous. A political monster.”
“He really stung you, didn’t he? Remember, he was hurt.”
“I’ve tried to understand the whole situation, why we didn’t accomplish anything. Why I was willing to follow Sean and Gretyl almost anywhere…”
“Follow them? Or the cause?”
“I believed — believe in the cause, but I was following them” I said. “I’m trying to understand why.”
“They seemed to know what they were doing.”
We talked for an hour, going in circles, getting no closer to understanding what had happened to us. Charles seemed to accept it as a youthful escapade, but I’d never allowed myself the luxury of such japes. Failure gave me a deep sensation of guilt, of time wasted and opportunities missed.
When we finished our cakes, it seemed natural that we should go someplace quiet and continue talking. Charles suggested the quad. I shook my head and explained that I thought it looked like an insula. Charles was not a student of history. I said, “An insula. An apartment building in ancient Rome .”