his gaze, her breasts still magnets to his eye, completely different in appearance if she so much as shifted an elbow, and yet in every position completely familiar to him… his breasts, his arms, ribs, flanks. She was, for better and worse, the person he was closest to, a beautiful pink animal and also an avatar for him, of sex, of life itself on this bare rocky world. If this was what they were at sixty-five, and if the treatment did no more than hold them at this point, for even a few added years, or (the shock of it still) for decades? For decades? Well, it was astonishing. Absolutely too much to grasp, he had to stop trying or he would strip all the gears of his mind. But could it be? Could it really be? The aching desire of all true lovers through all the ages, to have a bit more time together, to be able to stretch out and live the love fully… Similar feelings seemed to be stirring Maya. She was in a great mood, she watched him from hooded eyes, with that come-hither half-smile he knew so well, one knee up and tucked in her armpit, not flaunting her sex at him but just comfortable, relaxing as she would if she were alone… yes, there was nothing like Maya in a good mood, no one could infect other people with it so much and so surely. He felt a rush of affection for that aspect of her character, an IV of sentiment, and he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, eros just a spice in a feast of agape, and suddenly as usual the words just burst out of him, he said things to her that he had never said before, “Let’s get married!” he said and when she laughed he did too, and said, “No no, I mean it, let’s get married.” Get married and grow really, really old together, seize whatever gift years came and make them a shared adventure, have kids, watch the kids have kids, watch the grandkids have kids, watch the great-grandkids have kids, my Lord who knew how long it might last? They might watch a whole nation of descendants flourish, become patriarch and matriarch, a kind of mini Martian Adam and Eve! And Maya laughed at each declaration, her eyes vivacious and sparkling with affection, windows to a soul in a very, very good mood, watching him and soaking him up, he could feel the blotter tug of her gaze watching him and laughing delightedly at each new absurd hilarious phrase that burst out of him, and saying to him “Something like that, yes, something like that,” and then hugging him hard. “Oh John,” she said. “You know how to make me happy. You are the best man I ever had.” She kissed him and he found that despite the sauna’s heat it was going to be easy to shift the emphasis from agape to eros; but now the two were one, indistinguishable, a great mingled flood of love. “So you’ll marry me and all?” he said as he locked the sauna door and they began to fall into it. “Something like that,” she said, eyes flashing, face ablaze with an absolutely ravishing smile.
6
When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently from when you expect to live only twenty.
This they proved almost immediately. John spent the winter there at Acheron, on the edge of the CO2 fog cap that still descended over the North Pole every winter, studying areobotany with Marina Tokareva and her lab group. He did this on Sax’s instruction, and because he felt in no hurry to leave. Sax seemed to have forgotten about the search to find out who the saboteurs were, which made John a little suspicious. In his spare time he still made efforts through Pauline, concentrating on the areas he had been working on before Acheron, travel records mostly, and then employment records of all the people who had traveled to the areas where the sabotages had taken place. Presumably there were a lot of people involved, so individual travel records might not tell him much. But everyone on Mars had been sent there by an organization, and by checking which organizations had sent people to the relevant places, he hoped to get some indications. It was a messy business, and he had to rely on Pauline not only for statistics but advice, which was worrying.