“But Selim and he…”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “No one knows what went on between those two, Maya. That’s all just talk. No one can ever know what other people really said to each other. They make that stuff up. And it doesn’t matter what people say to each other either. Not compared to what they do. Even if Frank took this Arab and said, ‘Kill John, I want you to do it, kill him kill him’—even if he said that, which I doubt very much, because Frank was never that straightforward, you have to admit”—he waited for her to nod and force a smile—“even so, if this Selim then went off and killed John, got his friends to help him, then it was still their doing, you know? The people who do the deed are the ones responsible, if you ask me. All this stuff about following orders, or he made me do it or whatnot, all that is so much bullshit, it’s just excuses.”
“So if Hitler never killed anyone himself…”
“Then he’s not as guilty as the guys in the camps, pulling the triggers and turning on the gas! That’s right! He was just a crazy old fuck. But they were murderers. And there were a lot more of them than there were of him. Sad when you think of it that way.”
“Yes.” So sad it could hardly bear thinking about.
“But look, Nicosia was complicated. A lot of people were fighting that night. Arab factions were fighting each other, Arabs were fighting Swiss, construction crews were fighting other crews. People say, ‘Oh that Frank Chalmers started it all, started the riots as a cover for his arranging the murder of John Boone’—give me a break! They just want to make it simple, they want a simple story, do you understand? They pin blame on a single person because then it makes a simple story. And they can only handle simple stories. Because then only one person has to be responsible, rather than all the people who were fighting that night.”
She nodded, feeling heartened all of a sudden. “It’s true. So—I mean—we were there too. So we were part of it too.”
He nodded, grimacing again. He came over and sat on the couch beside her, put his head in his hands. “I think about that,” he said, muffled at the floor, “sometimes. I was sneaking around town in my usual way, having a high old time. It was like carnival back home in Trinidad, I thought. Everyone dancing to the music and wearing masks. I had a red mask, a monster face, and I could go anywhere I wanted. I saw John, I saw Frank. I saw you talking to Frank, in that park—you were wearing a white mask, you looked beautiful. I saw Sax down in the medina. And John was partying as usual. I—if only I had known he was in trouble, ahhh. . . . I mean, I had no idea that anyone was out for him. If I had only guessed, I might have been able to pull him aside and tell him to get out of the way of it. I had introduced myself to him at that party up on Olympus, just a little before that. He was happy to see me. He had found out about Hiroko and Kasei, you know. He would have listened to me, I think. But I didn’t know.”
Maya laid her hand on his thigh. “None of us knew.”
“No.”
“Except,” she said, “maybe Frank.”
Desmond sighed. “Maybe. But maybe not. And if he did know, then that would be bad, sure. But if I know him, he would have paid for it later, in his mind. Because those two were close. It would be like killing your brother. People pay in their mind, I believe that. So . . .” He shook his head to get out of that train of thought, glanced at her. “No need to worry about it now, Maya. They’re both gone now.”
“Yes.”
“They’re gone and we’re here.” Gesturing around to include Michel, or all of them in Odessa. “It’s the living who matter. It’s life that matters.”
“Yes. It’s life that matters.”
He staggered up, went back into the study. “G’night.”
“Good night.” And she put the book down on the floor and slept.
4. The Years
In the years that followed she seldom thought of Frank again. He had been laid to rest, or else lost in the tumult of those times. The years flowed by like water downriver. Maya imagined Terran lives were like Terran rivers, fast and wild at their starts in the mountains, strong and full across the prairies, slow and meandering near the sea; while on Mars their lives resembled the abrupt jumbled paths of the streams they were only now creating—falling off scarps, disappearing in potholes, getting pumped up to unexpected new elevations great distances away.
Thus she rode out the tense approach to the second revolution, and took that drop with everyone else, then made the trip back to Earth. Thinking of her youth there was like trying to remember an earlier incarnation. She worked with Nirgal and the Terrans, visited Michel in Provence, and returned to Mars seeing both men better than she ever had before. She settled with Michel in Sabishii, and helped Nadia get the government going, when she could do it without Nadia seeing what she was doing. She knew the look she would get if she tried to intervene directly. So she stayed in Sabishii, and life quieted down a bit, or at least fell into a more predictable pattern: Michel had his practice and some work at the university, while Maya worked for the Tyrrhena Massif Water Project, and occasionally taught in the town’s schools. She very seldom saw Desmond or thought of him much, and indeed she and Michel ran into the other old ones far less often than they ever had before. Their circle of acquaintances was largely that of their work places, and the neighborhood they lived in—new, like everything else in the second Sabishii. They lived in a third-floor apartment in a big hollow apartment block with a very nice park courtyard, and on evenings warm enough they often ate down at tables in the courtyard and talked with their neighbors, played games, read, did handwork. It was a real community, and sometimes Maya would look around her at the people in it and think that here was a historical reality that would not ever be recorded in any way: a good solid neighborhood, with everyone doing their work and having their families together as some kind of shared collective project, in which an individual family made sense as part of a larger whole that was not easy to characterize. Whole decades slipped by in this anonymous goodness, and very rarely did the ghosts of her previous incarnations come back to haunt her. Nor her old friends either.
5. Helping Him
Then many years after that, when Maya was beginning to have trouble with her extended déjà vus and other “mental events,” as Michel called them, Desmond dropped by late at night, after the timeslip when no one else would have thought to visit.
Michel was already asleep, and Maya up reading. She gave Desmond a hug and brought him into the kitchen and sat him down while she got water on the stove for tea. He had been trembling when she hugged him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
He flinched. “Oh, Maya.”
“What is it!”
He shrugged. “I visited Sax in Da Vinci, and Nirgal was there staying with him. His place up in the hills was covered by dust, did you hear?”
“Yes. Too bad.”
“Yeah. But anyway they started talking about Hiroko. As if she was still alive. Sax even claimed to have seen her once, out in a storm. And I—I got so angry, Maya! I could have killed them!”
“Why?” she said.
“Because she’s dead. Because she’s dead and they refuse to face it. Just because they never saw the bodies, they make up all these stories.”
“They’re not the only ones.”
“No. But they believe the stories, just because they want to. As if believing makes it true.”
“And doesn’t it?” she said, pouring out the water into cups.