Blue Mars (90 page)

Francesca returned, dropped the shovel on Nanao’s head. Boone and
Maya, already reabsorbed in their digging, paid no attention.

“Ann, could you go get some ice creams from the kiosk?”

“Sure.”

“Take Tati with you, will you?”

“No!” Tati said.

“Ice cream,” Maya said.

Tati thought it over, worked laboriously to her feet.

She and Ann walked back to the tram-stop kiosk, hand in hand. They
bought six ice creams, and Ann carried five of them in a bag; Tati insisted on
eating hers while they walked. She was not yet good at performing two such
operations at once, and they made slow progress. Melted ice cream ran down the
stick, and Tati sucked ice cream and fist indiscriminately. “Pretty,” she said.
“Taste pretty.”

A tram came into the station and stopped, then moved on. A few
minutes later, three people biked down the path: Sax, leading Nirgal and a
native woman. Nirgal braked his bike next to Ann, gave her a hug. She hadn’t
seen him in many years. He was old. She hugged him hard. She smiled at Sax; she
wanted to hug him too.

They went down and joined Maya and the kids. Maya stood to hug
Nirgal, then shake hands with Bao. Sax biked back and forth on the lawn behind
the sand, at one point riding with no hands and waving at the group; Boone, who
was still using training wheels on his bike, saw him and shouted,
flabbergasted: “How do you do that!”

Sax grabbed the handlebars. He stopped the bike and stared
frowning at Boone. Boone walked awkwardly over to him, arms extended, and
staggered right into his bike. “Something wrong?” Sax inquired.

“I’m trying to walk without using my cerebellum!”

“Good idea,” Sax said.

“I’ll go get more ice cream,” Ann offered, and left Tati this
time, and trundled back up the sand to the grass path. It felt good to walk
into the wind.

As she was returning with a second bag of ice-cream bars, the air
suddenly turned cold. Then she felt a kind of lurch inside her, and a
faintness. The sea surface had a glittery hard purple sheen, well above the
actual surface of the water. And she was very cold. Oh shit, she thought. Here
it comes. Quick decline: she had read about the various symptoms, reported by
people who had been somehow resuscitated. Her heart pounded madly in her chest,
like a child trying to get out of a black closet. Body insubstantial, as if
something had leached her of substance and left her porous; she would collapse
into dust at the tap of a finger. Tap! She grunted with surprise and pain, held
on to herself. Pain in her chest. She took a step toward a bench beside the
path, then stopped and hunched over at a new pain. Tap tap tap! “No!” she exclaimed,
and clutched the bag of ice creams. Heart arrhythmic, yes it was bounding
about, bang bang, bang bang bang bang, bang, No, she said without speaking. Not
yet. The new Ann no doubt, but there was no time for that, Ann herself squeaked
“No,” and then she was thoroughly absorbed in the effort to hold herself
together. Heart you must beat! She held it so tightly she staggered. No. Not
yet. The wind was a subzero frigidity, blowing right through her, her body
ghostly; she held it together by will alone. Sun so bright, the harsh rays
slanting right through her rib cage—the transparency of the world. Then
everything was beating like a heart, the wind breathing right through her. She
held herself together with every cramping muscle. Time stopped, everything
stopped.

She took a short breath. The fit passed. The wind slowly warmed
back up. The sea’s aura went away, leaving plain blue water. Her heart thumped
with its old bump bump bump. Substance returned, pain subsided. The air was
salty and damp, not cold at all. One could sweat in it.

She walked on. How forcibly the body reminded one of things.
Still, she had held. She was going to live. For a while longer, at least. If it
be not now ... but not now. So here she was. Tentatively she walked on, one
step after another. Everything seemed to work. She had gotten away. Brushed
only.

From the sand castle Tati saw Ann and came trundling toward her,
intent on the bag of ice creams. But she went too fast and fell right on her
face. When she pulled herself up her face was coated with sand, and Ann
expected her to howl. But she licked her upper lip like a connoisseur.

Ann walked over to help her. Lifted her to her feet, tried to wipe
the sand off her upper lip; but she whipped her head back and forth to avoid
the help. Ah well. Let her eat some sand, what harm could it do. “There. Not
too much. No, those are for Sax and Nirgal and Bao. No! Hey, look—look at the
gulls! Look at the gulls!”

Tati looked up, saw seagulls overhead, tried to track them, fell
on her butt. “Ooh!” she said. “Pretty! Pretty! Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

Ann hauled her back to her feet. They walked hand in hand toward
the group by its widening hole, its mound of sand topped with drip castles.
Nirgal and Bao were down by the waterline, talking. Gulls planed overhead. Down
the beach an old Asian woman was surf-fishing. The sea was dark blue, the sky
clearing, pale mauve, the remaining clouds scrolling off to the east. The air
all rushing by. Some pelicans glided in a line over the rising face of a wave,
and Tati dragged Ann to a halt, pointing at them. “Innit pretty?”

Ann tried to walk on, but Tati refused to budge, tugged
insistently at her hand: “Innit pretty? Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

“Yes.”

Tati let go of her and trundled over the sand, just managing to
stay on her feet, her diaper waddling like a duck’s behind, the backs of her
fat knees dimpling.

But still it moves, Ann thought. She followed the child, smiling
at her little joke. Galileo could have refused to recant, gone to the stake for
the sake of the truth, but that would have been silly. Better to say what one
had to, and go on from there. A brush reminded one what was important. Oh yes,
very pretty! She admitted it and was allowed to live. Beat on, heart. And why
not admit it. Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere
were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their
kids. There was that to be said. The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it.
She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell
fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brec-ciated
fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of
the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves
broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her
friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.

Acknowledgments

Thanks this time to Lou Aronica, Stuart Atkinson, Terry Baier,
Kenneth Bailey, Paul Birch, Michael Carr, Bob Eckert, Peter Fitting, Karen
Fowler, Patrick Michel Franfois, Jennifer Hershey, Patsy Inouye, Calvin
Johnson, Jane Johnson, Gwyneth Jones, David Kane and Ridge, Christopher McKay,
Beth Meacham, Pamela Mellon, Lisa Nowell, Lowry Pel, Bill Purdy, Joel Russell,
Paul Sattelmeier, Marc Tatar, Ralph Vi-cinanza, Bronwen Wang, and Vie Webb.

A special thanks to Martyn Fogg, and, again, to Charles Sheffield.

About the author

KIM STANLEY
ROBINSON is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy—Red
Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars—as well as Antarctica; The Wild Shore; The Gold
Coast; Pacific Edge; A Short, Sharp Shock; and other novels. He lives in Davis,
California.