Blue Mars (59 page)

“I don’t. . . . Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say.
Hmm.... I thought she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is
crucial.”

“Come on.”

“You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were
sociobiologists.”

“What’s that?”

“Urn—someone who believes that most cultural traits have a
biological explanation.”

“Oh no. Of course not. We’re much freer than that. Mothering can
be any kind of thing. Sometimes mothers are nothing but incubators.”

“I suppose so—”

“Take my word for it.”

“... But Jackie cried.”

On they hiked, in silence. Like a lot of the big craters, Moreux
turned out to have several pie-wedge watersheds, converging on a central marsh
and lake. In this case the lake was small and kidney-shaped, curving around the
rough low knobs of a central peak complex. Zo and Russell came out from under
the forest canopy on an indistinct trail that faded into elephant grass, and
they would have gotten quickly lost except for the stream, which was oxbowing
through the grass toward a meadow and then the marshy lake. Even the meadow was
dominated by elephant grass, great circular clumps of it that stood well
overhead, so that they often had a view of nothing but giant grasses and sky.

The long blades of grass gleamed under the lilac midday zenith.
Russell stumbled along well behind Zo, his round sunglasses like mirrors in his
face, reflecting the grass bundles as he looked this way and that. He appeared
utterly foxed, amazed at the surroundings, and he muttered into an old wristpad
that hung on his wrist like a manacle.

A final oxbow into the lake had created a fine sand-and-pebble
beach, and after testing with a stick for quicksand at the waterline, and
finding the sand firm, Zo stripped off her sweaty singlet and walked out into
the water, which got nice and cold a few meters offshore. She dove under, swam
around, hit her head on the bottom. There was a beached boulder standing over
some deep water, and she climbed it and dove in three or four times, doing a
forward flip in the water right after entry; this forward somersault, difficult
and graceless in the air, caused a quick little tug of weightless pleasure in
the pit of her stomach, a feeling as close to orgasm as any nonorgasm she had
ever felt. So she dove several times, until the sensation wore off and she was
cooled. Then she walked out of the lake and lay on the sand, feeling its heat
and the solar radiation cook both sides of her. A real orgasm would have been
perfect, but despite the fact that she was laid out before him like a map of
sex, Russell sat cross-legged in the shallows, absorbed apparently by the mud,
naked himself except for sunglasses and wristpad. A farmer-tanned little bald
wizened primate, like her image of Gandhi or Homo habilis. It was even a bit sexy
how different he was, so ancient and small, like the male of some
turtle-without-a-shell species. She pulled her knee to the side and shifted up
her bottom in an unmistakable present posture, the sunlight hot on her exposed
vulva.

“What amazing mud,” he said, staring at the glop in his hand.
“I’ve never seen anything like this biome.”

“No.”

“Do you like it?”

“This biome? I suppose so. It’s a bit hot and overgrown, but
interesting. It makes a change.”

“So you don’t object. You’re not a Red.”

“A Red?” She laughed. “No, I’m a whig.”

He thought that one over. “Do you mean to say that greens and Reds
are no longer a contemporary political division?”

She gestured at the elephant grass and saal trees backing the
meadow. “How could they be?”

“Very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “When you go to Uranus,
will you invite a friend of mine?”

“Maybe,” Zo said, and shifted her hips back a bit.

He took the hint, and after a moment leaned forward and began to
massage the thigh nearest him. It felt like a monkey’s little hands on her
skin, clever and knowing. He could lose his whole hand in her pubic hair, a
phenomenon he appeared to like, as he repeated it several times and got an
erection, which she held hard as she came. It was not like being tabled, of
course, but any orgasm was a good thing, especially out in the sun’s hot rain.
And although his handling of her was basic, he did not exhibit any of that
hankering for simultaneous affection which so many of the old ones had, a
sentimentality which interfered with the much more acute pleasures that could
be achieved one person at a time. So when her shuddering had stilled she rolled
on her side, and took his erection in her mouth—like a little finger she could
wrap her tongue entirely around—while giving him a good view of her body. She
stopped once to look herself, big rich taut curves, and saw that the span of
her hips stood nearly as high as his shoulders. Then back to it, vagina
dentata, so absurd those frightened patriarchal myths, teeth were entirely
superfluous, did a python need teeth, did a rock stamp need teeth? Just grab
the poor creatures by the cock and squeeze till they whimpered, and what were
they going to do? They could try to stay out of the grip, but at the same time
it was the place they most wanted to be, so that they wandered in the pathetic
confusion and denial of that double bind—and put themselves at the risk of
teeth anyway, any chance they got; she nipped at him, to remind him of his
situation; then let him come. Men were so lucky they weren’t telepathic.

Afterward they took another dip in the lake, and back on the sand
he pulled a loaf of bread from his day pack. They broke the loaf in half and
ate.

“Were you purring, then?” he said between swallows.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You had the trait inserted?”

She nodded, swallowed. “Last time I took the treatment.”

“The genes are from cats?”

“From tigers.”

“Ah.”

“It turns out to be a minor change in the larynx and vocal cords.
You should try it, it feels really good.”

He was blinking and did not answer.

“Now who’s this friend you want me to take to Uranus?”

“Ann Clayborne.”

“Ah! Your old nemesis.”

“Something like that.”

“What makes you think she would go?”

“She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new
things. And I think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart
in an impact, and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image
I’d ... like her to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most
famous antagonists in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of
settlement. Those first years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to
think of it. Clearly the experience had brecciated the minds of all those who
had suffered through it. And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage
inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s
stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony,
Maya’s betrayals—all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so
on—such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far
as she could tell. As if the old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in
poison, slowly excreting the necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully
oxygenated life.

Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to
have understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo
liked that attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should,
shouldn’t you? You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the
diplomatic group.”

“It’s a Free Mars group?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she
answered when she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles
smoothed by the fat under the skin—hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry
black pubic hair (she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs.
Women’s bodies were much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo
had been wrong about that, although his David made a best case for his
argument, a flier’s body if ever there was one.

“I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.

“I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”

“I could have carried you on my back.”

“Really?”

She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos. . .
.”Sure. It would depend on the suit.”

“It’s amazing what those suits can do.”

“It’s not just the suits.”

“No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”

“I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”

“Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big
people are getting.”

“Especially genitals.”

“Do you think so?”

She laughed. “Just teasing.”

“Ah.”

“Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased
use, eh?”

“Yes. Depth of chests have grown greater, I read.”

She laughed again. “The thin air, right?”

“Presumably. It’s true in the Andes, anyway. The distances from
spine to sternum in Andean natives are nearly twice as large as they are in
people who live at sea level.”

“Really! Like the chest cavities of birds, eh?”

“I suppose.”

“Then add big pecs, and big breasts....”

He didn’t reply.

“So we’re evolving into something like birds.”

He shook his head. “It’s phenotypic. If you raised your kids on
Earth, their chests would shrink right back down.”

“I doubt I’ll have kids.”

“Ah. Because of the population problem?”

“Yes. We need you issei to start dying. Even all these new little
worlds aren’t helping that much. Earth and Mars are both turning into anthills.
You’ve taken our world from us, really. You’re kleptoparasites.”

“That sounds redundant.”

“No, it’s a real term, for animals that steal food from their
young during exceptionally hard winters.”

“Very apt.”

“We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred.”

“Or as soon as we have children.”

She grinned. He was so imperturbable! “Whichever comes first.”
         
:

He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed,
although it was vexing too: “Of course it will never happen.”

“No. But it won’t be necessary.”

“No? You’re going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?”

“No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are
dying. It’s bound to happen.”

“Is it?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t think they’ll figure out ways to cure these new
diseases, keep stringing things along?”

“In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or
later....” He shrugged.

“That’s a bad thought,” Zo said.

She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He
stood and dressed too.

“Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?” he asked.

“No, who’s she?”

“A mathematician, living in Da Vinci.”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping
to look after the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked
like a lone hyena, standing looking down a wash at them. . . . Zo found she was
enjoying herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were
unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of
the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped
space-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in
inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up
Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no
patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one
didn’t seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.

When they got back to the village she patted him on the head.
“That was fun. I’ll talk to your friend.”

“Thanks.”

A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that
appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.

“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”

“Yes?”

“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to
strangers.”

“Boone?”

“Jackie’s daughter.”

“Ah.”

Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so
wonderful that a lot of people hated her.

“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”

“Ah.”