Maya laughed. She was feeling better. Soon she would be back on level, or at least crossing through that zone on the way to euphoria. Maya was labile. Stability-lability was the most recent characteristic Michel had been studying in the first hundred; Maya represented the labile extreme.
“Let’s drive out and see the arcade,” she said. Michel agreed, wondering what might happen if they ran into John. They went to the parking lot and checked out a roadrunner. Michel drove the little jeep and listened to Maya talk. Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or-was this better or worse?-as if you were engaged in telepathy.
The cement road was smooth, and he drove at the roadrunner’s top speed of sixty kph. He could just feel the rush of thin air against his faceplate. All that CO2 that Sax so wanted to scrub from the atmosphere. Sax would need powerful scrubbers, even more powerful than the lichens; he needed forests, enormous multi-layered halophylic rainforests, trapping enormous loads of carbon in wood, leaves, mulch, peat. He needed peat bogs a hundred meters deep, rain forests a hundred meters tall. He had said as much. It marked Ann’s face just to hear the sound of his voice.
Fifteen minutes’ drive and they came to Nadia’s arcade. The site was still under construction and looked raw and messy, like Underhill in the beginning but on a larger scale. A long mound of burgundy rubble had been excavated from the trench, which ran east and west like Big Man’s grave.
They stood at one end of the great trench. Thirty meters deep, thirty wide, a kilometer long. The south side of the trenchwas now a wall of glass; the north side of the trench was covered with arrays of filtering mirrors, alternating with wall-mesocosms, marsjars or terrariums, all of them together a colorful mix, like a tapestry of past and future. Most of the terrariums were filled with spruce trees and other flora that made it resemble the great world-wrapping terran forest of the sixtieth latitude. Like Nadia Cherneshevsky’s old home in Siberia, in other words. Was this perhaps a sign that she had a touch of his disease? And could he prevail on her to build a Mediterranean?
Nadia was up working on a bulldozer. A woman with her own kind of viriditas. She stopped and came over to talk briefly with them. The project was coming along, she told them calmly. Amazing what one could do with the robot vehicles that were still being sent up from Earth. The concourse was done, and planted with a variety of trees, including a strain of dwarf sequoia already thirty meters tall, nearly as tall as the whole arcade. The three stacked rows of Underhill-style vaulted chambers behind the concourse were installed, their insulation in place. The settlement had just the other day been sealed and heated and pressurized, so that it was possible to work inside it without suits. The three floors were stacked on each other in ever smaller arches, reminding Michel of the Pont du Gard; of course all the architecture here was Roman in origin, so that should not be a surprise. The arches were wider, however, and slighter. Airier in the tolerance of the gee.
Nadia went back to work. Such a calm person. Stabile, the very opposite of labile. Low-keyed, private, inward. Couldn’t be less like her old friend Maya; it was good for Maya to be around her. Opposite end of the scale, keep her from flying away. Set an example for her. As in this encounter, where Maya was matching Nadia’s calm tone. And when Nadia went back to work, Maya retained some of that serenity. “I’ll miss Underhill when we move out here,” she said. “Won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Michel said. “This will be a lot sunnier.” All three floors of the new habitat would open onto the tall concourse, and have terraced broad balconies on the sunny side of the rooms, so that even though the whole structure faced north and was buried deeper than Underhill, the heliotropic filtered mirrors on the other side of the trench would pour light onto them from dawn to dusk. “I’ll be happy to move. We’ve needed the space from the beginning.”
“But we won’t get all this space to ourselves. There’ll be new people here.”
“Yes. But that will give us space of a different kind.”
She looked thoughtful. “Like John and Frank leaving.”
“Yes. But even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” In a larger society, he told her, the claustrophobic village atmosphere of Underhill would begin to dissipate; this would give a better perspective on certain aspects of things. Michel hesitated before continuing, unsure how to say it. Subtlety was dangerous when you were both using a second language, coming at it from different native tongues; possibilities for misunderstanding were all too real. “You must accept the idea that you perhaps do not want to choose between John and Frank. That in fact you want them both. In the context of the first hundred that can only be scandalous. But in a larger world, over time…”
“Hiroko keeps ten men!” she exclaimed angrily.
“Yes, and so do you. So do you. And in a larger world, no one will know or care.”
He went on reassuring her, telling her that she was powerful, that (using Frank’s terms) she was the alpha female of the troop. She disagreed and forced more praise from him until finally she was satiated, and he could suggest they return home.
“Don’t you think it will be a shock to have new people around? Different people?” She was driving, and as she turned to ask him this she almost drove off the road.
“I suppose.” Parties had already landed in Borealis and Acidalia, and the videotapes of them had been a shock, you could see it in people’s faces. As if aliens had arrived from space. But so far only Ann and Simon had met with any of them in person, running into a rover expedition north of Noctis Labyrinthus. “Ann said it felt as if someone had stepped out of the TV.”
“My life feels like that all the time,” Maya said sadly.
Michel lifted his eyebrows. The Maya program would not have said that. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. Half the time it seems like one big simulation, don’t you think?”
“No.” He considered it. “I don’t.” It was all too real, in fact-the cold of it seeping up through the rover seat deep into his flesh-inescapably real, inescapably cold. Perhaps as a Russian she didn’t appreciate that. But it was always, always cold. Even at noon on midsummer’s day, with the sun overhead like an open furnace door blazing in the sand-colored sky, the temperature would be at best 260° K, meaning 20 degrees below zero Centigrade, cold enough to push through the mesh of a walker and make each move a little diamond pattern of hurt. As they approached Underhill Michel felt the cold pushing through the fabric into his skin, and he felt the too-cool oxygenated air expand out of the mouthpiece deep into his lungs, and he glanced up at the sand horizon and the sand sky and said to himself, I am a diamondback snake, slithering through a red desert of cold stone and dry dust. Someday I will shed my skin like a phoenix in a fire, to become some new creature of the sun, to walk the beach naked and splash in warm salt water…
Back at Underhill he turned on the shrink program in his head and asked Maya if she were feeling better, and she touched her faceplate to his, giving him a brief glimpse of a gaze that was a kiss. “You know I do,” her voice said in his ear. He nodded. “ I think I’ll go for another walk, then,” he said, and did not say But what about me? What will make me feel better? He willed the movement of his legs and walked off. The bleak plain surrounding the base was a vision out of some post-holocaust desolation, a nightmare world; nevertheless he didn’t want to go back into their little warren of artificial light and heated air and carefully deployed colors, colors that he himself had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here; the colors were all wrong, or worse, irrelevant. Wallpaper in hell.