“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.
“We interpret what we see to suit our own mindset,” I said pompously.
For a moment, his expression — downturned corners of his mouth, narrowed eyes, a little shake of his head — made me regret those words. If I was playing him like a fish on a line, I might have just snapped the line, and I suddenly felt terribly insecure. The touch of my glove on his thick sleeve did not seem adequate. “I still want to go and see,” I said.
Charles let go of the guide stick. The tractor smoothed to a stop and jerked. He half-turned in his seat. “Do I irritate you?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“I feel like you’re testing me. Asking me key questions to see if I’m suitable.”
I bit my lip and looked into my lap, trying for some contrition. “I’m nervous,” I said.
“Well, so am I. Maybe we should just let up a bit and relax.”
“I was just expressing an opinion,” I said, my own temper flaring. “I apologize for being clumsy. I haven’t been here before, I don’t know you very well, I don’t know what — ”
Charles held up his hands. “Let’s forget all of it. I mean, let’s forget everything that stands between us, and just try to be two friends out on a trip. I’ll relax if you will. Okay?”
I came dangerously close to tears at the anger in his tone. I looked out the window but did not see the ancient carved grotesques outside.
“Okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to be different,” I said. “I’m not good at masks.”
“I’m not either, and I don’t like trying. If I’m not the right person for you, let’s put it all aside and just enjoy the trip.”
“I don’t know what’s making you so angry.”
“I don’t know, either. I’m sorry.”
He pulled the stick forward and we drove in silence for several minutes. “Sometimes I dream about this,” he said. “I dream I’m some sort of native Martian, able to stand naked in the Up and feel everything. Able to travel back in time to when Mars was alive.”
“Coin-eyed, slender, nut-brown or bronze. ‘Dark they were, and golden-eyed.’ ”
“Exactly,” Charles said. “We live on three Marses, don’t we? The Mars they made up back on Earth centuries ago. LitVid Mars. And this.”
The tension seemed to have cleared. My mood shifted wildly. I felt like crying again, but this time with relief. “You’re very tolerant,” I said.
“We’re both difficult,” Charles said. He leaned to one side and bumped helmets with me. Our lips could get no closer, so we settled for that.
“Show me your Mars,” I told him.
The melt river canyon stretched for thirty kilometers, carving a wavering line across the flats. A service path had been carved into the cliffs on both sides, cheaper than a bridge, marring the natural beauty but making the canyon bottom accessible to tractors.
“The areology here is really obvious,” Charles said. “First comes the Glass Sea , then Tharsis One with deep ocean deposits, building up over a billion years, limestone… Then ice sheets and eskers… Then the really big winds at the end of the last glaciation.”
We rolled down the gentle packed tumble slope into the canyon. The walls on each side were layered with iron-rich hematite sands and darker strata of clumped till. “Wind and ice,” I said.
“You got it. Flopsand and jetsand, smear, cling and grind… There’s a pretty thick layer of northern chrome clay.” Charles pointed to a gray-green band on our right, at least a meter deep. He swerved the tractor around a recent boulder fall, squeezed through a space barely large enough to admit us, and we came out twenty meters below the flats. Our treads pushed aside flopsand to reveal paler grades of grind and heavy till.