and I had Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, ‘It’s like the floor of a room.’” He stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko’s face. Yes … no. Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. “I’ve missed her. I come here, and it’s impossible to believe it’s the same place, and so … it’s hard to believe I ever really knew her.” He paused, tried to focus on their faces. “Do you understand?”
“No!” someone bellowed.
A flicker of his old anger boiled through his confusion. “I’m saying we have to make a new Mars here! I’m saying we’re completely new beings, that nothing is the same here! Nothing is the same!”
He had to give up, go sit down. Other speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the amphitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balconies. A green and white vision.
He couldn’t tell them. No one could tell them. Only time, and Mars itself. And in the meantime they would act in obvious contradiction to their own best interests. It happened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?
He left the amphitheater, stalked through the park and the town. “How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinski over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”
“Ideology, sir.”
“But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”
“Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. They acknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life.”
“But then they weren’t materialists at all!” He swore with disgust. “No wonder Marxism is dead.”
“Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists.”
“Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians.”
“Marxists are Hegelian, sir.”
“Shut up,” Frank snarled, and broke the connection.
Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mouth. Even now, when it was just what they needed, when it was the only thing that would save them.
Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him a hug. He endured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauve sky. He couldn’t meet her eye. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it.”
“For an hour.” After which the emigrants would disappear as before. It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
He hurried off to the mesa offices. Maya came along and chattered at him as he checked into one of the yellow-walled rooms on the fourth floor. Bamboo furniture, flowery sheets and couch cushions. Maya was full of plans, cheery, pleased with him. She was pleased with him! He crushed his teeth together until they hurt. Bruxism was giving him headaches and all kinds of facial pain, wearing through his crowns and the cartilage in his jaw joints.
Finally he stood and walked to the door. “I have to go for a walk,” he said. As he left he saw her face in his peripheral vision: hurt surprise. As usual.
He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flying. On the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk café, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.
Suddenly Maya was standing before him.
“What do you mean by this?” she said. She gestured at the table, at his own annoyed scowl. “What is wrong now?”
He stared at his coffee cup,