He worked as a therapist, and felt like a fraud; the doctor was sick. But he knew no other trade. And so he talked to unhappy people, and kept them company, and that was how he made his living. And tried to avoid the headlines. And never looked up at night.
Then one year in the fall a big transnational meeting on space habitation took place in Nice, sponsored in part by the French space program, and as someone who had been there and studied the issues, Michel was invited to speak. As it was only a few kilometers from his apartment, and as something kept drawing him back to the idea, no matter how he resisted it—out of guilt, pride, compulsion, responsibility—who knew; who could know?—he agreed to attend. It was the centennial of their winter in Antarctica.
Then he ignored the thing, displeased with himself for agreeing to go, perhaps even somewhat afraid. And so ignored all the information that came in the mail about it. So that he drove down to the conference one morning, aware only that he would be speaking on a panel that afternoon—and there was Maya Toitovna, standing in the hall, talking to a circle of admirers.
She saw him and frowned slightly; then her eyebrows shot up, and with fingers splayed like wingtip feathers she touched the upper arm of the man next to her, excusing herself from the circle. And then she was standing before him, shaking his hand. “I am Toitovna, do you remember me?”
“Please, Maya,” he said painfully.
She smiled briefly and gave him a hug. Held him at arm’s distance. “You’ve aged well,” she decided. “You look good.”
“You too.”
She waved him off, but it was true. She was silver-haired, her face harshly lined, big gray eyes as clear and intent as ever. A beauty, as always. Even with Tatiana around to obscure the matter, she had always been the most beautiful woman in his life, the most magnificent.
They talked standing there, looking at each other. They were old now, well into their second centuries. Michel had to work to remember his English, and to a lesser extent so did she; and he had to work to remember the tricks of her harsh accent. It turned out she too had been to Mars; she had spent six years there, during the worst of the troubles in the 2060s. She shrugged as she remembered: “It was hard to enjoy it with so much bad happening down here.”
Heart beating hard, Michel suggested meeting for dinner. “Yes, good,” she said.
The conference was transformed. Michel watched the people there freshly; most much younger than he and Maya, eager to get out into space, to live on the moon, on Mars, the Jovian moons—everywhere. Anywhere but Earth. The escapism inherent in their desire was obvious to Michel, but he ignored it, tried to see it their way, tried to temper his statements and responses to match their desire. Without desire who could live? Mars for these people was not a place, not even a destination, but a lens through which to focus their lives. That being the case he did not care to take his usual disparaging position on the issue, now in any case a century old, and perhaps inadequate to the new moment. The world was falling apart; Mars helped people see that. An escape, yes, perhaps; but also a lens. He could help, if he worked at it, to sharpen the focus that the lens gave, perhaps. Or point it at certain things.
So he paid attention, and tried to think about what he was saying. Maya, it turned out, was on the same afternoon panel as he. A bunch of Mars veterans on stage, speaking about their experiences, and what they thought ought to be done. Maya spoke of living on the edge, looking back; the perspective it gave one. How things appeared in their proper proportions, so that it was obvious that a stable permaculture was the most important thing society could work for now.
Someone from the audience asked if they thought the original Russian/American plan to send one hundred permanent colonists might have been, in retrospect, the best way to go.
From down the line of speakers Maya leaned forward to look at him. Apparently he was the obvious one to answer.
He leaned toward his mike.
“Anything can happen in any situation,” he said, thinking hard. “A Mars colony in the 2020s might have become . . . all that we hoped for it. But . . .”
He shook his head, not knowing how to continue. But I lost my nerve. I lost in love. I lost all hope.
“But the odds were against it. Conditions would have been too hard to endure over the long haul. The hundred would have been condemned to . . .”
“Condemned to freedom,” Maya said into her mike.
Michel looked down the line at her, shocked, feeling the desperation grow in him. “Freedom, yes, but in a box. Freedom in a jail. On a rock world, without an atmosphere. Physically it would have been too hard. Life in a box is life in a prison, even if it is a prison of one’s own devise. No, we would have gone mad. Many who go there come back damaged for life. They exhibit symptoms of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder.”
“But you said anything could happen,” said the person in the audience.
“Yes, it’s true. It could have developed. But who can say. What if is never a question with an answer. Looking at the evidence, I said then that it was a project in big trouble. Now we should look at the current situation. We have moved incrementally on Mars, taken things in their proper sequence. The infrastructure is now there in place to start making it an easier place to live. Perhaps now is the time for permanent settlers.”
And thankfully others took up this thread, and he was off the hook, released from their interrogation.
Except that night, over dinner, Maya watched him closely. And at one point the panel of the afternoon came up.
“I didn’t know what to say,” Michel confessed.
“The past,” Maya said dismissively. She waved the whole idea of the past away with a single flick of the hand. A weight came off Michel’s stomach. She did not appear to hold it against him.
They had a wonderful evening.
And the next day they walked the beaches near Nice, the little ones Michel knew from his youth, and on one Maya stripped to her underwear and ran out into the Mediterranean, an old woman with magnificent carriage, rangy shoulders, long legs—this was what science had done for them, giving them these extra years of health when by all rights they should be long dead. They should be dead and gone for decades and yet here they were, out in the sun, catching waves, vigorous and strong, not even bent by the years. In their bodies in any case. And as she staggered out of the surf, dripping, wet and sleek as a dolphin, Maya tilted back her head and laughed out loud. She made the brown young women sunning on the sand look like five-year-olds.
And that evening they ditched the conference, and Michel drove them to a restaurant he knew in Marseilles, overlooking the industrial harbor. They had a wonderful time. And arriving back at the conference hotel, late, Maya took him by the hand and pulled him along with her to her room, and they kissed like twenty-year-olds, blood turned to fire, and fell on her bed.
Michel woke just before dawn and looked at his lover’s face. Sleep made even the old hawk girlish. A beauty. It was character that created beauty—intelligence, and nerve, and the power to feel deeply, to love. Courage was beauty, that was all there was to it. And so age only added to beauty in the end.
This made him happy—to see into the heart of things, to be so there, in reality, in such a gray dawn. But happier still was some feeling of relief he couldn’t quite define. He considered it, watching her breathe. If she was in bed with him—had made love with him, passionately and with great good humor—then she must not bear him any grudge for advising against the Mars project, so many years before. Wasn’t that right? At the time she had wanted to go, he knew that. So . . . So she must have forgiven him. The past, she had said, dismissing it all. The present was what counted to her, the moment we call now, in which anything could happen.