“Moira. My father approved of her, nice Jewish girl. I think he’s a little scared of Elza.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“I’ll give you something to be scared of,” she said from the bedroom, bantering, the hurt gone from her voice.
“Best offer I’ve had today,” he said.
I didn’t hear her walking up behind me, barefoot. She put both hands lightly on my head and tangled my hair with her fingers. “I’ll sleep with Namir tonight.”
“Okay by me,” I said.
“We have to talk.” She rubbed my temples. “You can love her. You will love her, always. But you have to leave her here. Here on Earth.”
“I think that’s already done.” Literally, anyhow.
“We’ll talk about it.” She went back to the large bedroom.
I joined her there an hour later and we did talk. Moira was my generation, a year older than me, but forever young to Elza, and not much I could do about that.
She wanted to know what Moira and I had done that I didn’t do with her, and I tried not to think of it as an invasion of privacy. Of course the big thing she couldn’t do was have me as a twenty-five-year-old lad, and there was another thing I didn’t mention, to preserve the woman’s dead dignity. But I did describe a trick Moira would do with her breasts, and we were both happy and relieved when she made it work. Elza’s a little self-conscious about her small breasts, as Moira was about her large ones. I decided not to bring that up.
While we lay there entwined, the diplomat in me affirmed that I could leave Moira here on Earth. I didn’t say that part of me would stay with her, too; neither of us buried, neither dead.
I pretended to be asleep, as always, when she slipped away to join Dustin. Thinking furiously about the lies that grace our lives.
12
GROWING THINGS
The Martians came up a week after we did. We helped them unload their few packages. Earth-normal weight was oppressive to them, and they clumped around with exaggerated care. Well, it wasn’t exaggeration. Like having to carry around a weight one and a half times as heavy as you are. Carry it for thirteen years with no relief.
Snowbird didn’t complain, but her voice was unnaturally high and reedy. I doubt that they spoke much English on the way up.
I put my arm gently around her shoulders. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?”
“Hard for you, too, Carmen. You haven’t been to Earth in a long time.”
“I exercise in Earth gravity every day.”
“I should do that,” she said. “Become Earth-strong. By the time we return, the quarantine may be lifted.”
Fly-in-Amber, behind us, made a dismal noise. “I have a better idea. Let’s just go home. We can’t live this way.”
She gave him a long blast and high-pitched growl in consensus Martian, and he squawked and clattered back.
She turned back to me. “Perhaps we should rest in Mars territory for a while.” They plodded off, muttering.
“Before long, they’ll be in zero gravity,” Paul said. “He’ll complain about that, too.”
The last thing we would have to do before Paul cut us loose was to tape things down, mostly chairs. When we were flung away from the Space Elevator, we’d be in free fall, like someone jumping out of an airplane. But we would plummet for eleven days. Jostled every now and then by steering jets. That would be tomorrow.
The habitat didn’t have any independent propulsion, of course, but it was firmly attached to the ship that would eventually be our landing vessel, much smaller. It would fly away like an eagle clutching an elephant.
Before that, we had to water the plants. We’d spent six days following the directions the hydroponic engineers had left behind, making sure all the root structures could be kept moist without water surrounding them. There was a water-absorbent granular medium held inside a fine-mesh net for each plant or group of plants. There was no automation in this temporary arrangement, of course. Every morning we’d spend an hour giving each plant a measured shot of water from a portable hydrator, a water pump with a hose and syringe.
The first morning, still in gravity, I split the chore with Dustin. It was interesting to get him alone; he usually deferred to Namir or Elza.
I had to ask him about his weird family, growing up. “I never gave it much thought,” I said, “but isn’t it strange that a person who winds up in espionage should have grown up in a commune, with anarchist parents?”
He laughed. “Not so odd. Like a kid whose parents are lawyers or cops might want to escape and become a bohemian artist.
“I didn’t want to be a spy, anyhow. A philosophy degree doesn’t open many doors, though. The Space Force paid through my doctorate in exchange for four years’ service, which I thought was going to be in communications. You go where they send you, though. They needed engineers for communication.”
“And philosophers for spookery?”
“It’s a grab bag, intelligence. Not that they’d ever admit it, but it’s where you go if you have education but no useful skills. The personnel database says there are three other philosophy Ph.D.s in intelligence. We ought to get together. Form a cabal.”
“Namir says there are more officers in intelligence than any other part of the military.”
He nodded amiably. “As if that were a good thing? It’s been that way for a long time.”
“I’ve never known a philosopher before. If it wasn’t for the Space Force, what would you be doing?”
“Staying out of harm’s way! You know, sit around, think deep thoughts. Beg for scraps.”
“And teach, I suppose.”
“And write papers that two or three people will read.” The bush he was watering had tiny white flowers with a penetrating sweet smell. He bent down and breathed deeply, and read the label. “Martian?”
“Martian miniature limes. They tweaked the genes so it wouldn’t be all branch, growing tall in Martian gravity. We’ll see what it does in one gee.”
“The past year and a half, I’ve been assigned to a think tank in Washington. All the services, multidisciplinary. The Ethics of Military Intervention.”
“Any conclusions?”
He made a sound I’d come to recognize, a puff of air through his nose: amusement, contempt, maybe patience. “Under the present conditions… it’s hard to justify most wars, anyhow, that aren’t a purely defensive reaction to invasion. But now, with the Others threatening the whole human race with casual destruction? How does anyone justify a war against any human enemy?”
“Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”
“No.” He growled a string of foreign syllables. “That’s Farsi: ‘There is some shit a man does not have to eat.’ Adapted from American English, I think, though the principle is widely spread.”
“But it implies there’s another kind of shit that a man does have to eat. Glad I’m a woman.”
He smiled at me. “See? You’re a philosopher already.” He sniffed the lime flowers again. “Though living on recycled shit is something I tried to become philosophical about, before we came up.”
“Hunger helps.” It dominated the menu in Little Mars. The pantry machine broke up all organic waste, and some inorganic, and put it back together to make amino acids, then protein. Mixed in with measured amounts of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, some trace elements, it could produce blocks of edible stuff in programmed colors, textures, and flavors. “Elza said that Namir is a good cook. I wonder what he can do with pseudobeef and pseudochicken.”
“Make pseudo-Beef Stroganoff and pseudo-Chicken Florentine, I guess.” He sighed and leaned back against the lattice that would be supporting bean vines. “Carmen, what do you think our chances really are? Are we just wasting our time? Intuition, I mean, not science.”