Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,98

careful to hold back no matter what, we agree about almost everything and I’ve been so enthusiastic about that part that I’ve given him the wrong signal again, so he did it again, yesterday in the pool he—he held me, you know, took my arms in his hands—” she crossed her arms and clasped her biceps in her hands—“and asked me to leave John for him, which I would never do, and he was shaking, and I said I couldn’t but I was shaking too.” So later she had been on edge, and had started a fight with John, started it so flagrantly that he had gotten truly angry and had left and taken a rover out to Nadia’s arcade, and spent the night there with the construction team; and Frank had come to talk to her again, and when she had (just barely) put him off, Frank had declared he was going to live with the European settlement on the other side of the planet, he who was the colony’s driving force! “And he’ll really do it, he’s not one to threaten. He’s been learning German the way he does, languages are nothing to Frank.”

Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It was difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recognition. So it was hard to care. What about his troubles? They went much, much deeper; but no one ever listened to him. He walked back and forth in front of the window, reassuring her with the usual questions and comments. The greenery in the atrium was refreshing, it could have been a courtyard in Arles or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon’s narrow plane tree-shaded plaza near the Pope’s palace, the plaza and its café tables which in the summer just after sunset had just the color of Mars. Taste of olive and red wine …

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. Standard part of therapy hour. They crossed the atrium and went to the kitchens, so Michel could eat a breakfast which he forgot even as he swallowed; we should call eating forgetting, he thought as they walked around the hall to the locks. They put on suits—Maya entering a change room to get her unders on—then checked them and went in the lock and depressurized it and then opened the big outer door and stepped outside.

The diamond chill. For a while they stayed on the sidewalks circling Underhill, taking a tour of the dump and its great salt pyramids. “Do you think they’ll ever find a use for all this salt?” he said.

“Sax is still working on it.”

From time to time Maya went on talking about John and Frank. Michel asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in the way a Maya program would have answered. Their voices right in each other’s ears, the intimacy of the intercom.

They came to the lichen farm, and Michel stopped to gaze over the trays, to soak in their intense living color. Black snow algae, and then thick mats of too lichen, in which the algae symbiote was a blue-green strain that Vlad had just gotten to grow alone; red lichen, which seemed not to be doing well. Superfluous in any case. Yellow lichen, olive lichen, a lichen that looked exactly like battleship paint. Flaky white and lime-green lichen—living green! It pulsed in the eye, a rich and improbable desert flower. He had heard Hiroko, looking down at such a growth, say “This is viriditas,” which was Latin for “greening power.” The word had been coined by a Christian mystic of the Middle Ages, a woman named Hildegard. Viriditas, now adapting to conditions here, and spreading slowly over the lowlands of the northern hemisphere. In the southern summers it did even better; one day it had reached 285 degrees Kelvin, a record high by twelve degrees. The world was changing, Maya remarked as they walked by the flats. “Yes,” Michel said, and could not help adding, “Only three hundred years before we reach livable temperatures.”

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