“No. It doesn’t. She’s dead. The whole farm crew. All of them were killed.” And he put his head down on the kitchen table and began to weep.
Surprised, Maya moved around to his side of the table, sat beside him. She put a hand on his back. Again he was trembling, but it wasn’t the same. She reached out and pulled her teacup across the table, closer to her. She sipped from it. His spasming ribs calmed down.
“It’s cruel,” she said. “The, the disappearing. When you never see the bodies, you don’t know what to think. You’re stuck in limbo.”
He straightened up, nodded. He sipped his tea.
“You never saw Frank’s body,” he said. “But you don’t go around telling people you think he might still be alive.”
“No,” she said, and waved a hand. “But that flood . . .”
He nodded.
“The farm crew, though. You can see why people indulge themselves. They could have escaped, after all. Theoretically.”
He nodded. “But they were behind me in the maze. I only just got out in time. And then I hung around for days, and they didn’t come out. They didn’t make it.” He shuddered convulsively. A great deal of nervous energy, she thought, in that wiry little body. “No. They were caught and killed. If they had gotten out, I would have seen them. Or she would have contacted me. She was cruel, but not that cruel. She would have let me know by now.” His face was twisted: grief, anger. He was still angry at her, she saw. It reminded her of Frank. She had been angry at him for years after his death. Wondering if he had killed John. Desmond had talked to her about that, many years before. She recalled: Desmond had been trying to figure out how to comfort her, that night. He had been lying, perhaps. If he knew a different truth, if he had seen Frank put a knife in John, would he have told her, that night? No.
Now she tried to figure out what would help him to think about Hiroko. She sipped her tea in the timeslip silence, and he did too.
“She loved you,” she said.
He looked at her, surprised. Finally he nodded.
“She would have let you know if she was still around, like you say.”
“I think so.”
“So probably she is dead. But Nirgal and Sax—Michel too, for that matter—”
“Michel too?”
“Half the time, anyway. Half the time he thinks it is just compensation, a myth that helps them. The other half he’s convinced they’re out there. But if it helps them, you know . . .”
He sighed. “I suppose.”
She thought some more. “You love her still.”
“I do.”
“Well. That’s life too. Of a sort. Movement of, you know—Hiroko structures. In your mind. Quantum jumps, as Michel says. Which is all we ever are anyway. Right?”
Desmond regarded the scarred and wrinkled back of his hand. “I don’t know. I think we are maybe more than that.”
“Well. Whatever. It’s life that matters, isn’t that what you told me one time?”
“Did I?”
“I think so. It seems like you did. A good working principle, anyway, whoever said it.”
He nodded. They sipped tea, their reflections transparent in the black windows. A bird in the sycamore outside broke the night silence.
“I worry that another bad time may be coming,” Maya said, to change the subject. “I don’t think Earth will let us get away with the immigration controls much longer. They’ll break them and Free Mars will protest, and we’ll be at war before you know it.”
He shook his head. “I think we can avoid it.”
“But how? Jackie would start a war just to keep her power.”
“Don’t worry so much about Jackie. She doesn’t matter. The system is so much bigger than her—”
“But what if the systems collide? We’re living on borrowed time. The two worlds have very different interests now, and diverging more all the time. And then the people at the top will matter.”
He waggled a hand. “There are so many of them. We can tip the majority of them toward reasonable behavior.”
“Can we? Tell me how.”
“Well, we can always threaten them with the reds. There are still reds out there, plotting away. Trying to crash the terraforming any way they can. We can use that to our advantage.”
And so they talked politics, until the sky in the windows went gray, and the scattered birdsong became a chirping chorus. Maya kept drawing him out. Desmond knew all the factions on Mars very well, and had some good ideas. She found it extremely interesting. They plotted strategy. By breakfast time they had worked out a kind of plan to try when the time came. Desmond smiled at this. “After all these years, we still think we can save the world.”
“Well we can,” Maya said. “Or we could, if only they would do what we told them to.”
They woke Michel with the smell and crackle of frying bacon, and with Desmond singing some calypso tune into the bedroom. Maya felt warm, sleepy, hungry. Work would be hard that day but she didn’t care.
6. Losing Him
Life went on. She lived with Michel, she worked, she loved, she coped with her health problems. Mostly she was content. But it was possible sometimes to regret that long-lost spark of true passion, unstable and wild though it had always been. Sometimes she knew she might have gotten more pure joy in life if John had lived, or Frank. Or if she had ever connected with Desmond as a partner—if, sometime when they were both free, they had committed to each other in some kind of intermittent monogamy, storklike, meeting after their travels and migrations year after year. A path not taken; and everything therefore different.
What happened instead was that life went on, and slowly, as the years passed, they drifted farther and farther apart; not because of any loss of feeling on either side, she felt, but just because they saw each other so seldom, and other people and other matters took up their thoughts. This was the way it happened; you lived and moved on, and the people closest to you did the same, and life drew you apart, somehow—jobs, partners, whatever—and after a while, when they were not there as part of daily life, as a physical presence, a body in the room, a voice saying new things, then it was possible to love them only as a certain kind of memory. It became the case that you used to love them, and only remembered that love, rather than felt it as you had when they were part of the texture of daily life. Only with your partner could you really keep on loving them, because it was only your partner you stayed with. And even with them it was possible to drift apart, into different sets of habits, different thoughts. If that was so with the person you slept with, how much more so with friends who had moved on too, and now lived on the other side of the world. So eventually you lost them, and there was no help for that. Only if you had been partnered with them. And you could only be partners with one person. If she and Desmond had ever joined each other in that way—who knew what would have happened. The banked coals of an old, distant friendship; when sparks might have flown forever, as from an open forge. She might have been able to make him quiver every time she touched him. She loved the memory of loving him so much that she sometimes thought it could have been that way.
And once in a very long while, she got inklings that Desmond felt somewhat the same; which was nice. One night, for instance, many years later, when Michel was out of town, Desmond came by in the early evening and rang the bell, and they went down together to the corniche and walked the seafront. It was lovely to be together again like that, Maya thought as they walked, alone and arm in arm, on the edge of her Hellas Sea, followed by dinner in a corner of one of the bistros, warming up and talking face-to-face over a table cluttered with glasses and plates. Such men she loved, such friends.