Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glass of water. “I like the way you work those people,” she said, her back to him. She drank from the glass, looked over her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers, a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, but exposed. He pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himself away. Surely she would see, see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smile. He knew it was a wan and crooked smile; but feeling his face like a stiff mask over his real flesh, he took comfort. No one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or astrology. So he was safe.

But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public and private. She joined him at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first hundred. And she went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.

And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them-if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful. That was prestige that Maya did not need, but she knew what she wanted. And wasn’t he doing it, after all? Infuriating a large part of his power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful of locals? Yes, she was getting what she wanted. And all without a word, or without a direct word. Nothing but praise and affection.

So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her pride in him. And then, energized by the day’s work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of consort. Hell, a consort! And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.

Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best… that she should be so stupid… it was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.

Or perhaps it was just him. Because she seemed so real! Her laughter, her white hair, her passion, my God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of orgasm. A true self, didn’t it have to be so? Didn’t it? He could hardly believe otherwise. A true self.

But sadly deceived. One morning he awoke from a dream of John. It was from their time together on the space station, when they had been young. Except in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger or blame. It was just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares. A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each other. Feeling the horror of that Frank had groaned through the dream, and tried to fold in on himself, and awakened. It was hot, his skin was sweaty. Maya was sitting up, her hair wild, her breasts swinging loosely between her arms. “What’s wrong!” she was saying. “What’s wrong!”

“Nothing!” he cried, and got up and padded to the bathroom. But she came after him, put her hands on him. “Frank, what was it?”

“Nothing,” he shouted, involuntarily jerking out of her grip. “Can’t you leave me alone!”

“Of course,” she said, hurt. A flush of anger: “Of course I can.” And she walked out of the bathroom.

“Of course you can!” he shouted after her, suddenly furious at her stupidity, to be so ignorant of him, so vulnerable to him, when it was all an act anyway. “Now that you’ve got what you want from me!”

“What does that mean?” she said, reappearing instantly in the bathroom doorway, a sheet around her.

“You know what I mean,” he said bitterly. “You’ve got what you wanted from the treaty, haven’t you. And you never would have, without me.”

She stood there, hands on her hips, watching him. The sheet was loose around her hips and she looked like the French figure of Liberty, very beautiful and very dangerous, her mouth a tight line. She shook her head in disgust and walked away. “You don’t have the faintest idea, do you,” she said.

He followed her. “What do you mean?”

She threw the sheet away and stepped violently into her underwear, yanked it up over her bottom. As she dressed she hurled short sentences at him. “You don’t know anything about what other people think. You don’t even know what you think. What do you want out of the treaty? You, Frank Chalmers? You don’t know. It’s only what I want, what Sax wants, what Helmut wants. What any of them want. You yourself have no opinion. Whatever is easiest to manage. Whatever leaves you in control at the end.

“And as for feelings!” She was dressed, standing at the door. She stopped to glare at him, a look like a lightning strike: he had been standing there too stunned to move and so now he stood there naked before her, exposed to the full blast of her scorn. “You don’t have any feelings, do you. I’ve tried, believe me, but you just-” She shuddered, apparenly unable to think of words vile enough to describe him. Hollow, he wanted to say. Empty. An act. And yet-

She walked out.

So when they signed the new treaty, Maya was not at his side; not even in Burroughs. Which a relief in many ways, really. And yet he could not help but feel empty, and cold in the chest; and certainly the others of the first hundred (at least) knew something had happened between them (again), which was infuriating, or so he told himself.

They signed the thing in the same conference room they had hammered it out in, with Helmut doing the honors with a big smile, and each delegate coming up in turn, in penguin suit or black evening gown, to say a few words for the cameras and then put their hand to “the document,” a gesture that only Frank seemed to see as bizarrely archaic, like scratching a petroglyph. Ridiculous. When it was his turn he went up and said something about striking a balance, which was exactly it; he had arranged the competing interests to strike together at angles that matched their momentum exactly, arranging a traffic accident so that all the vehicles would collide into a single solidified mass. The result was something not all that dissimilar to the previous version of the treaty, with both emigration and investment, the two main threats to the status quo (if there was such a thing on Mars), mostly blocked, and (this was the clever part) blocked by each other. It was a good piece of work, and he signed with a flourish, “for the United States of America,” he announced emphatically, glaring around the world intently. That would play well on vid.