Another moment of uneasy silence. Clearly, Charles did not know how to begin, nor what was expected; neither did I, but as the female in this pairing, it was not my responsibility to initiate, and I did not want to try.
“Shall we see the winery?” he inquired suddenly, holding out his hand.
I took the hand and we began our formal tour of Trés Haut Médoc.
Charles was disarmingly nervous. Disarming, because I had to say little and do nothing but follow him; he gave a gentle, constant commentary on things Martian, most of which I knew. His voice was soothing even as he ran through technical details. In time, I listened more to the tone than the content, enjoying the masculine music of fact laid upon fact, an architecture to shield us for the moment against being alone together.
Ninety percent or more of any Martian station lay underground. Pressurization requirements and protection against radiation flux through the thin atmosphere made this the most economical method of construction. Some attempts had been made in the first ten years to push high-rises and multi-story uplooks through the dirt, but Mars had been settled on a shoestring. Buried or bermed construction was much cheaper. Heat exchangers, sensors, pokeups, entrances and exits, a few low buildings, broke the surface, but even now we remained, by and large, troglodytes.
Half of the aquifers on Mars were solid — mineral aquifers — and half liquid. Solid aquifers came in many varieties. Some were permafrosts and heaves, which produced hummocky terrain. Some ice domes on Mars were ten kilometers across, but nearly all heaves had long since lost the water that produced them. The evaporated water either re-condensed at the poles, or was lost across the ages to space. The thin atmosphere was nearly moisture-free.
Trés Haut Médoc sat half a kilometer above a liquid flow, probably the same flow that supplied Durrey. Water seeped through the limestone and pooled in deeper fissures and caves extending as much as ten kilometers below the karst.
Our first stop was the pumping station. The pump, a massive cluster of steel-blue cylinders and spheres melded together like an abstract sculpture, had been working steadily for fifteen Martian years. It extracted its own fuel, deuterium, from the water it pulled out of the ground.
“We hooked this up to the Durrey pipes about nineteen years ago, Earth years,” Charles explained, walking around the pump. “Just after the winery shut down and the station was automated and evacuated. A source of revenue to offset our failure.” Our footsteps echoed hollow on the frosted stone floor. Air whispered through wall-mounted vents, cool and tangy-musty. “It’s the station’s only reason to exist now. Durrey wants it, pays for it, so we keep the pump going. While I’m here, I’ll justify our visit by filing a report…”
“And get some replacement arbeiters,” I suggested.
“Maybe. The folks who set up the winery were a California family… Or were they Australian? I forget now.”
“Big difference,” I suggested.
“Not really. I know a lot of Australians and Californians now. Except for accent, they’re pretty alike. My own family is from New Zealand , actually. How about yours?”
“I’m not sure. German/Indian, I think.”
“That explains your lovely skin,” Charles said.
“I don’t pay much attention to heritage.”
Charles led me into the water-settling chambers. The dark pools sat still as glass in their quarried limestone basins, filling two chambers each a hectare in extent and ten meters deep. Somewhere beneath our feet, transfer pumps thumped faintly, sending the water to Durrey’s buried pipelines. I breathed in the cold moist air, touched the damp limestone walls.
“Like old bones, that rock,” Charles said.
“Right. Sea bottoms.”
“Half our towns and stations couldn’t exist without limestone flats.”
“Why didn’t it get turned into marble or something?” I asked, partly to demonstrate I was not totally ignorant of areology.
Charles shook his head. “No major areological activity for the past billion years. Marble takes heat and pressure to form. Mars is asleep. It can’t do the job any more.”
“Oh.” I had not demonstrated anything except my ignorance. Still, that didn’t bother me; I was giving Charles every chance to show off, just to see who he really was, what kind of man I had chosen to spend a few days with, alone.
We took a bridge over the farthest pool and down a sloping tunnel. The next chamber held row upon row of corrugated mirror-bright stainless-steel tanks wrapped in coils of orange ceramic pipes. Here the musty-tangy smell was almost overpowering. It stimulated something like racial memory, and I thought of cool dank root cellars on warm summer days, filled with sweet-smelling wooden crates of apples and potatoes, hard-packed dirt floors…
“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.