Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [259]
“I’m surprised how well you remember,” she said. “My own memory, even of nights like that . . .”
“I remember everything,” Zeyk said gloomily.
“He has the opposite problem to everyone else,” Nazik said, watching her husband. “He remembers too much. He does not sleep well.”
“Hmph.” Maya considered it. “What about the other two?”
Zeyk’s mouth pursed. “I can’t say for sure. Nazik and I spent the rest of that night dealing with Selim. There was an argument about what to do with his body. Whether to take it out to the caravan and then hide what had happened, or to get the authorities in immediately.”
Or to go to the authorities with a lone dead assassin, Maya thought, watching Zeyk’s guarded expression. Perhaps that had been argued as well. He was not telling the story in the same way. “I don’t know what really happened to them. I never found out. There were a lot of Ahad and Fetah in town that night, and Yussuf heard what Selim had said. So it could have been their enemies, their friends, themselves. They died later that night, in a room in the medina. Coagulants.”
Zeyk shrugged.
Another silence. Zeyk sighed, refilled his cup. Nazik and Maya refused.
“But you see,” Zeyk said, “that is just the start. That’s what we saw, what we could tell you for sure. After that, whew!” He made a face. “Arguments, speculation— conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory— not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”
“You don’t believe in any of them?” Maya asked, feeling suddenly hopeless.
“No. I have no reason to. The Ahad and Fetah were in conflict, I know that. Frank and Selim were connected somehow. How that affected Nicosia— whether it did—” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t see how one could know. The past . . . Allah forgive me, the past seems a sort of demon, here to torture my nights.”
“I’m sorry.” Maya stood. The brilliant little chamber suddenly seemed cramped and florid. Catching a glimpse of the evening stars in a window, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk.”
Zeyk and Nazik nodded, and Nazik helped her get her helmet on. “Don’t be long,” she said.
The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.
Maya walked slowly toward an outcropping perhaps a kilometer away. There was something growing in the cracks underfoot, lichen or piggyback moss, its greens all black. She stepped on rocks where she could. Plants had it hard enough on Mars without being stepped on as well. All living things. The chill of the twilight seeped into her, until she could feel the X of the heating filaments in her pants against her knees as she walked. She stumbled and blinked to clear her vision. The sky was full of blurry stars. Somewhere north, in the Aureum Chaos, the body of Frank Chalmers lay in a wash of ice and sediments, his walker for a coffin. Killed while saving the rest of them from being swept away. Though he would have scorned such a description with all his heart. An accident of timing, he would insist, nothing more. The result of having more energy than anyone else, energy fueled by his anger— at her, at John, at UNOMA and all the powers of Earth. At his wife. At his father. At his mother, and himself. At everything. The angry man; the angriest man who had ever lived. And her lover. And the murderer of her other lover, the great love of her life, John Boone, who might have saved them all. Who would have been her partner forever.
And she had set them on each other.
Now the sky was starry black, with no more than a dark purple band left on the western skyline. Her tears were gone, along with