So he went back to the conference table and carried on as before. The walk on the bridge, as it was now being called (others called it the Chalmers Shift), had broken the impasse. February 6th, 2057; Ls=144, M-15; a red-letter date in the history of diplomacy. Now it was a matter of giving everyone else a piece, and fixing the actual numbers. As this process ground along Chalmers talked with all the first hundred observers there, reassuring them and checking their opinions. Sax, it turned out; was upset with him, because he thought that if the transnats ceased investment his terraforming would have to slow considerably. He saw all the arriving business as heat. And yet Ann too was upset with him, because a new treaty based on the shift would allow both emigration and investment, and she and the Reds had been hoping for a treaty that would give Mars a kind of world park status. That kind of disconnection from reality made him crazy. “I’ve just saved you fifty million Chinese immigrants,” he yelled at her, “and you bitch at me because I haven’t managed to send everyone back home. You bitch because I didn’t work a miracle and turn this rock into a holy shrine, right next door to a world that’s beginning to look like Calcutta on a bad day. Ann, Ann, Ann. What would you have done? What would you have done except stalk around glaring at every single fucking thing people said, and convincing everyone that you’re from Mars? Jesus Christ. Go out and play with your rocks and leave the politics to people who can think.”
“Remember what thinking is, Frank,” she said. Somehow he had made her smile for a second there, in the middle of his tirade. But she laid the same old wild glare on him before she left.
But Maya, now; Maya was pleased with him. He could feel her gaze on him when he talked in the public meetings. Millions of people watching, and he felt only that gaze. It made him angry. She was full of admiration for the bridge walk, and he told her only what she would be pleased to hear about the backstage compromises he was making in order to get it accepted. She began joining him every evening during the cocktail hour, approaching him when the first press of critics and supplicants had ebbed, standing by his side through the second and third waves, watching and easing things along with her laugh, and extricating him from time to time with reminders that they had to go out and eat. Then they would go out onto restaurant terraces under the stars, and eat and then sip coffee, looking over the orange tiles and roof gardens under one of the big mesa-topping tents, feeling the evening breeze just as if they were out in the open. The MarsFirst crowd had committed themselves to his plan; so he had most of the locals, and he had the home office, and those were the two most important single parties in the whole process, he judged, aside from the transnational leadership, which he could do little about. So it was only a matter of time before he would work the deal. As he would tell her, sometimes, late in the evenings when he had fallen a bit under her spell. Been calmed by her. “Between us we’ll get it done,” he would say as he looked up at the vivid stars in the sky, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.
And one night she kept returning to his side during the cocktail gathering. With all the others they watched the Terran news reports of the day’s progress, and saw again how oddly distorted and flattened they appeared, like tiny players in an incomprehensible soap opera. And then they left together, and ate, and then went walking down the wide grassy boulevards, eventually coming to his room in the lower town. And she accompanied him inside. Without explanation or comment, in Maya’s usual way. As if she always did this. It just happened, was happening. She was in his room, and then in his arms, hugging him. They lay on his bed and she kissed him. The shock of it was such that Frank felt completely removed from his body, his flesh like rubber. This was beginning to worry him when the sheer animal presence of her broke through the shock, body spoke to body and suddenly he could feel her again; sensation flooded back into him, and he responded to it with animal intensity. It had been a long time.
Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glass of water. “I like the way you work those people,” she said, her back to him. She drank from the glass, looked over her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers, a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, but exposed. He pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himself away. Surely she would see, see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smile. He knew it was a wan and crooked smile; but feeling his face like a stiff mask over his real flesh, he took comfort. No one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or astrology. So he was safe.
But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public and private. She joined him at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first hundred. And she went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.
And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them – if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful. That was prestige that Maya did not need, but she knew what she wanted. And wasn’t he doing it, after all? Infuriating a large part of his power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful of locals? Yes, she was getting what she wanted. And all without a word, or without a direct word. Nothing but praise and affection.
So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her pride in him. And then, energized by the day’s work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of consort. Hell, a consort! And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.
Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best… that she should be so stupid… it was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore: over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.
Or perhaps it was just him. Because she seemed so real! Her laughter, her white hair, her passion, my God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of orgasm. A true self, didn’t it have to be so? Didn’t it? He could hardly believe otherwise. A true self.
But sadly deceived. One morning he awoke from a dream of John. It was from their time together on the space station, when they had been young. Except in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger or blame. It was just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares. A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each other. Feeling the horror of that Frank had