Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [276]
And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging— it had nothing to do with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”
But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko’s disappearance, when she had tried to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.
Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: “Why don’t you escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while.”
Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been instinct only, she was stunned— disbelieving— and the disbelief absorbed all her effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even worse if you hadn’t gotten along with the child— worse than if you loved them, ah, God—”Go,” Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a queen. That would change when the news sank in.
Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights left off and the starry sheen of the canal was banked by black berms of slag. It looked like the scroll of a life, someone’s world line: bright neon squiggles, moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars over-head and underfoot. A black piste over which they glided soundlessly.
She walked back to their boat. Stumped down the gang-plank. It was distressing to feel this way for an enemy, to lose an enemy to this kind of disaster. “Who am I going to hate now?” she cried to Michel.
“Well,” Michel said, shocked. Then, in a comforting tone: “I’m sure you’ll think of someone.”
Maya laughed shortly, and Michel cracked a brief smile. Then he shrugged, looking grave. He less than any of them had been lulled by the treatment. Immortal stories in mortal flesh, he had always insisted. He was downright morbid about it. And here another illustration of his point.
“So the all-too-human got hers at last,” he said.
“She was an idiot with all those risks, she was asking for it.”
“She didn’t believe in it.”
Maya nodded. No doubt true. Few believed in death anymore, especially the young, who never had, even before the days of the treatment. And now less than ever. But believe in it or not, it was touching down more and more, mostly of course among the superelderly. New diseases, or old diseases returned, or else a rapid holistic collapse with no apparent cause— this last had killed Helmut Bronski and Derek Hastings in recent years, people Maya had met, if not known well. Now an accident had struck someone so much younger than they were that it made no sense, fit no pattern but youthful recklessness. An accident. Random chance.
“Do you still want to get Peter to come?” Michel asked, from out of a whole different realm of thought. What was this, realpolitik from Michel? Ah— he was trying to distract her. She almost laughed again.
“Let’s still get in touch with him,” she said. “See if he might come.” But this was only to reassure Michel; her heart was not in it.
That was the beginning of the string of deaths.
3
But she didn’t know that then. Then, it was only the end of their canal journey.
The burn of the aerial lens had stopped just short of the eastern edge of the Hellas Basin watershed, between Dao and Harmakhis valleys. The final segment of the canal had been dug by conventional means,