Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [136]
Then they moved back into the living compartment of the car, and made love. Tight with apprehension as they both were, they fell into it with intensity. No doubt the talk of Underhill had started this; Michel recalled vividly his illicit lusts for Maya in those years, and buried his face in her silvery hair, and tried his best to merge with her, to climb right into her. Such a big feline animal she was, pushing back in an equally wild attempt to take him in, which effort carried him completely away. It was good to be by themselves, to be free to disappear into surprised ravishment, nothing but a series of moans and yelps and electric rushes of sensation.
• • •
Afterward he lay on her, still inside her, and she held his face and stared at him. “In Underhill I loved you,” he said.
“In Underhill,” she said slowly, “I loved you too. Truly. I never did anything about it because I would have felt foolish, what with John and Frank. But I loved you. That was why I was so angry at you when you left. You were my only friend. You were the only one I could talk with honestly. You were the only one who really listened to me.”
Michel shook his head, remembering. “I didn’t do a very good job of that.”
“Maybe not. But you cared about me, didn’t you? It wasn’t just your job?”
“Oh no! I loved you, yes. It is never just a job with you, Maya. Not for anyone or anything.”
“Flatterer,” she said, pushing him. “You always did that. You tried to put the best interpretation on all the horrible things I did.” She laughed shortly.
“Yes. But they weren’t so horrible.”
“They were.” She pursed her mouth. “But then you disappeared!” She slapped his face lightly. “You left me!”
“I left, anyway. I had to.”
Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness— at least that particular happiness— for her. His “optimism by policy” was going to become more of an effort, and he would now have another antinomy to reconcile in his life, as centrifugal as Provence and Mars— which was simply Maya and Maya.
They lay side by side, each in his or her own thoughts, looking outside and feeling the rover bounce on its shock absorbers. The wind was still rising, the dust now pouring down Echus Chasma and then Kasei Vallis, in a ghostly mimicry of the great outflow that had first carved the channel. Michel pushed up to check the screens. “Up to two hundred kilometers per hour.” Maya grunted. Winds had been far faster in the old days, but with the atmosphere so much thicker, these slower speeds were deceptive; present-day gales were much more forceful than the old insubstantial screamers.
Clearly they would go in tonight, it was only a matter of getting Coyote’s bursted signal. So they lay back down together and waited, tense and relaxed at the same time, giving each other thorough massages to pass the time and relieve the tension, Michel marveling throughout at the catlike grace of Maya’s long muscular body, ancient by the dates, but in most respects the same as ever. As beautiful as ever.
Then finally sunset stained the hazy air, and the monumental clouds to the east, clouds which now covered the cliff face. They got up and sponged down, and ate a meal, and dressed and sat in the drivers’ seats, getting nervous again as the quartz sun disappeared and the stormy twilight fell away.
2
In the dark the wind was sheer noise, and an irregular trembling of the rover on its stiff shock absorbers. Gusts buffeted the car so hard that it was sometimes held down against the full crush of the shocks for seconds at a time, the car struggling to rise on the springs and failing, like an animal fighting to free itself from the bottom of a stream. Then the gust would let off and the car would jerk up wildly.