Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [346]
So he and Desmond walked around Chernobyl, throwing rocks at it, laughing, talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a simultaneous transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts. Thus very dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and reassuring to hear someone else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel so close to this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now babbling together with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar region, the parks in the Ares; and they were so similar anyway.
“We all go through the same things.”
“It’s true! It’s true!”
Curious that this fact didn’t affect people’s behavior more.
Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as they passed through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past association. It was near sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on dinner. Most had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug appeared to be a mild appetite suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya had been cooking a big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing them in. Borscht? Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a breadmaker in the morning, and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the barrel vaults.
They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to say Here we are— the others are away tonight— otherwise everything is the same. An ordinary night in Underhill. Talk about work, the various sites— food— the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the others— just as always.
But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a ProvenÃsect;al stew that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a problem.
Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at once— and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, even while speaking— under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said:
“Where are you going after this?”
“Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues invited me to, to, to— to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me, for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse— on Chryse Gulf.”
“Ah.”
Terrible silence, despite all the noise.
“Can I come with you?”
Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”
• • •
And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya’s tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.
Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down