It was time to seek alliances elsewhere.
My vegetable love grew and blossomed in the Martian spring.
The best fossil finds on Mars had been discovered while I traveled to and from Earth. In the Lycus and Cyane Sulci, spread across a broad band north of the old shield volcano Olympus Mons, canyons twist and shove across a thousand kilometers like the imprint of a nest of huge and restless worms. The Mother Ecos once flourished here, surviving for tens of millions of years while the rest of Mars died.
One of the chief diggers was Kiqui Jordan-Erzul. He had an assistant named Ilya Rabinovitch.
I met Ilya at a BM Grange in Rubicon City , below Alba Patera. He had just finished excavating his twelfth mother cyst. I had heard of his work.
The Grange was uniquely Martian. Held at a different station in each district every quarter, Granges combined courting, dancing, lectures and presentations, and BM business in a holiday atmosphere. BMs could swap informal clues about Triple business, negotiate and strike deals without pressure, and prospect for new family members.
Ilya delivered a vivid report on his fossil finds at Cyane Sulci. Memories of my visit with Charles to the sites near Trés Haut Médoc drew me into conversation with Ilya after his talk.
He was small — a centimeter shorter than me — beautifully made, with dark and lively eyes and a quick refreshing smile. Physically, he reminded me of Sean Dickinson, but his personality could not have been more opposite. He loved dancing, and he loved talking publicly and privately about ancient Mars. During a lull between an exhausting series of Patera reels, he sat with me in a tea lounge under a projected night sky and described the Mother Ecos in loving detail, pouring intimate descriptions of the ancient landscape into my sympathetic ear, as if he had lived in those times.
“To dig is to marry Mars,” he said, expecting either a blank stare or a move to another part of the lounge. Instead, I asked him to tell me more.
After the dances, we spent a few hours walking alone around a well-head reservoir. With little warning other than a slow approach and a warning smile, he kissed me and told me he had an irrational attraction. I had heard similar lines before, but coming from Ilya, the technique seemed fresh.
“Oh,” I said, noncommittal, but smiling encouragement.
“I’ve known you for a long time,” he said. Then he winced and glanced at me with his head turned half aside. “Does that sound stupid?”
“Maybe we were Martians once,” I suggested lightly. I’ve always been intrigued by the beginning of a courtship, curiously detached and relaxed, wondering how far the mating dance could possibly go. I had given my signals; I was receptive, and the work was now up to him. “Maybe we knew each other a billion years ago.”
He laughed, drew back, and stretched, and we listened to the liquid tones of falling and circulating waters. Arbeiters ignored us, rolling along their ramps checking flow and purity. Ilya seemed as relaxed as I was, immensely self-assured without appearing arrogant.
“You went to Earth a couple of years ago, didn’t you?”
“Just over a year ago,” I said.
“Earth years, I meant.”
He was involved with fossils; he used Earth years instead of Martian. I wryly considered that history might be repeating itself. “Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“Intense,” I said.
“I’d love to be involved in an Earth dig. They’re still finding major fossils in China and Australia .”
“I don’t think I’ll go back for a while,” I said.
“You didn’t enjoy yourself, did you?”
“Parts of it were lovely,” I said.
“Disappointed in love?” he asked. I laughed. His smile thinned; like most men, he didn’t enjoy being laughed at.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Disappointed by politics.”
His smile returned. “Babe in the woods?”
“Embryo in the savage jungle,” I said ruefully.
The next day, the third day of the Grange, we met again, gravitating with delicious half-conscious intent. He bought me lunch and we walked through glass tubes on the Up, looking across Rubicon Valley . He prodded gently, asking more questions.
For the first time, with a persistent ache that had me close to tears — tears of old pain and relief at finally speaking — I told someone in detail how I personally felt about Earth and what had happened there. I told about feeling betrayed and ignorant and powerless, about Earth’s overwhelming culture.
We finished our lunch and checked into a private space, nothing said, nothing suggested; Ilya led me. I talked some more, and then I leaned on him and he put an arm around my shoulders.
“They treated you pretty shabbily,” he said. “You deserve better.”
Of course, that was what I wanted to hear; but he meant it with utmost sincerity. And gauging what I was prepared for, and not prepared for, he did not press his suit too strongly.
I had rented guest lodgings at Rubicon City for the duration of the Grange. He suggested I stay afterward with his family, Erzul BM, at Olympus Station. I didn’t have time — I had planned to leave early and get back to Jiddah to work on a Majumdar project report. But I promised we’d get together soon.
I wasn’t about to let this relationship lapse. My feelings toward Ilya began simply and directly. He was the sweetest, most intuitive, and most straightforward man I had ever met. I wanted to continue talking with him for hours, days, months, and much longer. Making love seemed a natural extension of talking things through; lying naked together, warmed by our exertion, limbs casually locked, giggling at jokes, aghast at the state of the BMs and the Council that bowed low before Earth…
When I was with him, I felt an extraordinary peace and wholeness. Here was someone who could help me sort things out. Here was a partner.
Erzul’s Olympus Station felt very different from Ylla, or any other station I had visited on Mars. Erzul BM had begun in 2130 as a joint venture between poor American Hispanic, Hispaniolan, and Asian families on Earth. Trying to finance passage to Mars, they had eventually drawn in Polynesians and Filipinos. When they arrived on Mars, they occupied a ready-built trench dome in the western shadow of the Olympus Rupes. Within five Martian years, they had established liaisons with seven other BMs, including the ethnic-Russian Rabinovitch. Erzul had quickly prospered.
A small, prosperous mining and soil engineering BM, respected and unaligned, Erzul had kept all of its contracts on Mars. Now, with ninety mining claims in four districts, they were still small, but efficient and well-regarded, known for their trustworthiness and friendly dealings.
When I arrived at Olympus Station, I checked in to a guest room — Ilya gave me this much freedom, a way out if I didn’t get along with his family — and toured the BM museum, a boring collection of old drilling and digging equipment enlivened by large murals of Polynesian and Hispaniolan myth. He left me before a portrait of Pele, Little Mother of Volcanoes, a passionate and bitchy-looking female of considerable beauty, and returned a few minutes later. A formidable woman accompanied him, taller than Ilya and twice as broad.
“Casseia, I’d like you to meet our syndic, Ti Sandra.”
Ti Sandra looked me over with a little frown, lower lip poked out. An impressively large woman, two meters high and big-boned, with an enormous smile, deep-set warm eyes and a soft-spoken alto voice, Ti Sandra Erzul carried herself with stately bearing. Very dark, thick black hair in a halo around her head, a firmly friendly face with prominent and assertive features, she might have been a warrior queen in a fantasy sim… But her easy manner, her girlish pride in bright clothes, dissipated whatever threat her physical presence might have implied. “Are you a banker?” she asked.
I laughed. “No,” I said.
“Good. I don’t think Ilya would get along with a banker. He’d always be asking for research money.” She smiled sunnily, her deep warm eyes crinkling almost shut, and pulled a loop of flowers from a bag Ilya carried. She spread her large, strong arms wide and said, “You are always welcome. You have such a lovely name, and Ilya is a good judge. He is like my son, except that we are not too far apart in age — five years, you know!”