“What, me? I have no idea. It’s not for me to say, anyway. You know me. I don’t like telling people what to do.”
They wait in silence, sipping their hot chocolate.
“But you know, if you did just direct a couple of little comets right into the ocean...”
Old friends, laughing at old friends just for being themselves. Eileen leans in against Roger, feeling better.
Next morning with a whoosh they are off east again, and in a few hours’ sailing are out on the ice with no land visible, skating on the gusty wind with runners clattering or schussing or whining or blasting, depending on wind and ice consistencies. The day passes, and it begins to seem like they are on an all-ice world, like Callisto or Europa. As the day ends they slide around into the wind and come to a halt, then get out and drive in some ice screws around the boat and tie it into the center of a web of lines. By sunset they are belayed, and Roger and Eileen go for a walk over the ice.
“A beautiful day’s sail, wasn’t it?” Roger asks.
“Yes, it was,” Eileen says. But she cannot help thinking that they are out walking on the surface of their ocean. “What did you think about what Hans was saying last night, about taking another bash at it?”
“You hear a lot of people talking that way.”
“But you?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t like a lot of the methods they talk about. But—” He shrugs. “What I like or don’t like doesn’t matter.”
“Hmm.” Underfoot the ice is white, with tiny broken air bubbles marring the surface, like minuscule crater rings. “And you say the youngsters aren’t much interested either. But I can’t see why not. You’d think they’d want terraforming to be working more than anyone.”
“They think they have lots of time.”
Eileen smiles at this. “They may be right.”
“That’s true, they may. But not us. I sometimes think we’re sad not so much because of the crash as the quick decline.” He looks at her, then down at the ice again. “We’re two hundred and fifty years old, Eileen.”
“Two hundred forty.”
“Yeah yeah. But there’s no one alive older than two-sixty.”
“I know.” Eileen remembers a time when a group of old ones were sitting around a big hotel restaurant table, building card houses, as there was no other card game all of them knew; they collaborated on one card house four storeys high, and the structure was getting shaky indeed when someone said, “It’s like my longevity treatments.” And though they had laughed, no one had the steadiness of hand to set the next card.
“Well. There you have it. If I were twenty I wouldn’t worry about the crash either. Whereas for us it’s very likely the last Mars we’ll know. But, you know. In the end it doesn’t matter what kind of Mars you like best. They’re all better than nothing.” He smiles crookedly at her, puts an arm around her shoulders, and squeezes.
The next morning they wake in a fog, but there is a steady breeze as well, so after breakfast they unmoor and slide east with a light slick sliding sound. Ice dust, pulverized snow, frozen mist—all flash east past them.
Almost immediately after taking off, however, a call comes in on the radiophone. Roger picks up the handset, and Freya’s voice comes in. “You left us behind.”
“What? Shit! What the hell were you doing out of the boat?”
“We were down on the ice, fooling around.”
“For Christ’s sake, you two.” Roger grins despite himself as he shakes his head. “And what, you’re done now?”
“None of your business,” Jean-Claude calls happily in the background.
“But you’re ready to be picked up,” Roger says.
“Yes, we are ready.”
“Okay, well, shit. Just hold put there. It’ll take a while to beat back up to you in this wind.”
“That’s all right. We have our warm clothes on, and a ground pad. We will wait for you.”
“As if you have any choice!” Roger says, and puts the handset down.
He starts sailing in earnest. First he turns across the wind, then tacks up into it, and the boat suddenly shrieks like a banshee. The sail-mast is cupped tight. Roger shakes his head, impressed. You would have to shout to be heard over the wind now, but no one is saying anything; they’re letting Roger concentrate on the sailing. The whiteness they are flying through is lit the same everywhere, they see nothing but the ice right under the cockpit, flying by. It is not the purest whiteout Eileen has ever been in, because of the wind and the ice under the lee rail, but it is pretty close; and after a while even the ends of the iceboat, even the ice under the lee rail, disappear into the cloud. They fly, vibrating with their flight, through a roaring white void; a strange kinetic experience, and Eileen finds herself trying to open her eyes farther, as if there might be another kind of sight inside her, waiting for moments like this to come into play.
Nothing doing. They are in a moving whiteout, that’s all there is to it. Roger doesn’t look pleased. He’s staring down at their radar, and the rest of the instrumentation. In the old days pressure ridges would have made this kind of blind sailing very dangerous. Now there is nothing out there to run into.
Suddenly they are shoved forward, the roar gets louder, there is darkness below them. They are skating over a sandy patch. Then out of it and off again, shooting through bright whiteness. “Coming about,” Roger says.
Eileen braces herself for the impact of their first tack, but then Roger says, “I’m going to wear about, folks.” He brings the tiller in toward his knees and they career off downwind, turn, turn, then catch the wind on their opposite beam, the boat’s hull tipping alarmingly to the other side. Booms below as the ballast weight shifts up to the windward rail, and then they are howling as before, but on the opposite tack. The whole operation has been felt and heard rather than seen; Roger even has his eyes closed for a while. Then a moment of relative calm, until the next wearing about. A backward loop at the end of each tack.
Roger points at the radar screen. “There they are, see?”
Arthur peers at the screen. “Sitting down I take it.”
Roger shakes his head. “They’re still mostly over the horizon. That’s their heads.”
“You hope.”
Roger is looking at the APS screen and frowning. He wears away again. “We’ll have to come up on them slow. The radar only sees to the horizon, and even standing up it won’t catch them farther than six k away, and we’re going about a hundred fifty k an hour. So we’ll have to do it by our APS positions.”
Arthur whistles. Satellite navigation, to make a rendezvous in a whiteout. . . . “You could always,” Arthur begins, then claps his hand over his mouth.
Roger grins at him. “It should be doable.”
For a nonsailor like Eileen, it is a bit hard to believe. In fact all the blind vibration and rocking side to side have her feeling a bit dizzy, and Hans and Stephan and Frances look positively queasy. All five of them regard Roger, who looks at the APS screen and shifts the tiller minutely, then all of a sudden draws it in to his knees again. On the radar screen Freya and Jean-Claude appear as two glowing green columns. “Hey you guys,” Roger says into the radio handset, “I’m closing on you, I’ll come up from downwind, wave your arms and keep an eye out, I’ll try to come up on your left side as slow as I can.”
He pulls the tiller gently back and forth, watching the screens intently. They come so far up into the wind that the sail-mast spreads into a very taut French curve, and they lose way. Roger glances ahead of the boat, but still nothing there, just the pure white void, and he squints unhappily and tugs the tiller another centimeter closer to him. The sail is feathering now and has lost almost all its curve; it feels to Eileen as if they are barely making headway, and will soon stall and be thrown backward; and still no sign of them.