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.“
“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.