got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”
“What?”
“She’s pretty mad at you.”
“Mad at me?”
“Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”
While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said, “No! Why should she be?”
“Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”
“Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”
“Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”
“But why is she angry?”
“Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”
“This …” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”
Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.
For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examining the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.
He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at Martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!
No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.
Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.
A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.
Everything looks so fine from up here.
Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.
Or not enough.
It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.
What do you mean?
Games don’t mean anything.
Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.
John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.
Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.
A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.
I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?
No.
Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur … talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white-blond hair, her fashion-magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resumé, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.
That