The Martians

Chapter 9 Michel in Provence

Many years later Michel made it to Mars anyway.

There was a European Union base on the Argyre Planitia, at the foot of the Charitum Montes, and Michel flew up in one of the fast Lorenz rockets, so it only took six weeks to get there. Once there he settled in for a year and a half residency, the time it took for the planets to realign properly for an inexpensive return. And though the Charitum Range was striking, like the baked ridges of the Atlas Mountains or the ranges in the Mojave, and the light very good (compared with night in Antarctica), he was never once outside, not really. Always indoors, even when out in a rover, or in the modified space suits, which were almost like divers’ wetsuits, with helmets and backpacks, altogether very light in the magical gravity. Nevertheless, shut in. Contained; a sealed vessel. And Michel, like most of the others there, felt it more and more acutely as time passed. All the people at the eight scientific stations exhibited symptoms of claustrophobia, except a small minority who developed agoraphobia. Michel collected data on all of them, and recorded in particular some spectacular breakdowns and a few emergency medevacs. No—there was no doubt—he had been right. Mars was not habitable over the long haul. Terra-forming, while theoretically possible, was thousands of years off. In the meantime it was a rock in space, in effect a giant asteroid. Like all the rest of his team, Michel was overjoyed when it was time to return to the warm blue world and the open air.

But had he really been right? Was Mars really any different than McMurdo, or even Las Vegas, a city located in an unlivable desert? Might not a permanent Mars colony have given humanity a kind of purpose, a symbolic existence to guide it through the splendors and miseries of this dark century, this dangerous millennium? Here back on Earth miracles were being performed, the sciences changing everything on a daily basis, and particularly the medical sciences, where the antivirals and the anticancer treatments and the cell-rejuvenation treatments were all together adding up to some larger balking of death, mind-boggling in its implications. Decades were being tacked on to people’s lives, to Michel’s own life, which went far past the normal span, which went on and on, like many others. If they were lucky enough to have access to the care—if they could afford it, in other words—they would live for many extra decades. Decades! And given the vertiginous logarithmic expansions of scientific knowledge, perhaps that meant they would have the time to make decades into centuries. No one could say.

And yet at the same time no one knew what to do with the added years. An incomprehensible gift. It baffled one’s sense of meaning, for the rest of the world’s troubles did not go away. On the contrary, the immediate practical problems of the increased longevity were vicious—more people, more hunger, more jealousy, more war, more unnecessary premature death. The ingenuity of death seemed to be matching the life sciences stroke for stroke, as in some titanic hand-to-hand combat, so that it sometimes seemed to Michel, as he averted his eyes from the headlines, that they added years to their lives only to have more people to kill or render miserable. Famines were killing off millions in the “underdeveloped” world, while at the same time, on the same planet, near-immortals were sporting in their Xanadus.

Perhaps an international village on Mars could have made it clearer to all that they were a single culture on a single world. The sufferings of any individual Martian settler would have been inconsequential in comparison to the benefits of this great lesson. The project would have justified it. They would have been like cathedral builders, doing hard, life-eating, useless work, in order to make something beautiful that said, We are all one. And some of them certainly would have loved that work, and the life it brought, because of that very statement. That goal—the sheer act of sacrifice for others, of work for the good of later generations. So that people on Earth could look up at night and say, That too is what we are—not just the horrific headlines, but a living world in the sky. A project in history.

So Michel was uneasy when the red star shone in the sky, and his life in the decades after his return from Mars was troubled at best. He moved around Provence restlessly, and even around the rest of France and the Francophone world. Trying to catch hold somewhere, but always slipping off, and returning to Provence. That was home. But still he was not comfortable, there or anywhere.

He worked as a therapist, and felt like a fraud; the doctor was sick. But he knew no other trade. And so he talked to unhappy people, and kept them company, and that was how he made his living. And tried to avoid the headlines. And never looked up at night.

Then one year in the fall a big transnational meeting on space habitation took place in Nice, sponsored in part by the French space program, and as someone who had been there and studied the issues, Michel was invited to speak. As it was only a few kilometers from his apartment, and as something kept drawing him back to the idea, no matter how he resisted it—out of guilt, pride, compulsion, responsibility—who knew; who could know?—he agreed to attend. It was the centennial of their winter in Antarctica.

Then he ignored the thing, displeased with himself for agreeing to go, perhaps even somewhat afraid. And so ignored all the information that came in the mail about it. So that he drove down to the conference one morning, aware only that he would be speaking on a panel that afternoon—and there was Maya Toitovna, standing in the hall, talking to a circle of admirers.

She saw him and frowned slightly; then her eyebrows shot up, and with fingers splayed like wingtip feathers she touched the upper arm of the man next to her, excusing herself from the circle. And then she was standing before him, shaking his hand. “I am Toitovna, do you remember me?”

“Please, Maya,” he said painfully.

She smiled briefly and gave him a hug. Held him at arm’s distance. “You’ve aged well,” she decided. “You look good.”

“You too.”

She waved him off, but it was true. She was silver-haired, her face harshly lined, big gray eyes as clear and intent as ever. A beauty, as always. Even with Tatiana around to obscure the matter, she had always been the most beautiful woman in his life, the most magnificent.

They talked standing there, looking at each other. They were old now, well into their second centuries. Michel had to work to remember his English, and to a lesser extent so did she; and he had to work to remember the tricks of her harsh accent. It turned out she too had been to Mars; she had spent six years there, during the worst of the troubles in the 2060s. She shrugged as she remembered: “It was hard to enjoy it with so much bad happening down here.”

Heart beating hard, Michel suggested meeting for dinner. “Yes, good,” she said.

The conference was transformed. Michel watched the people there freshly; most much younger than he and Maya, eager to get out into space, to live on the moon, on Mars, the Jovian moons—everywhere. Anywhere but Earth. The escapism inherent in their desire was obvious to Michel, but he ignored it, tried to see it their way, tried to temper his statements and responses to match their desire. Without desire who could live? Mars for these people was not a place, not even a destination, but a lens through which to focus their lives. That being the case he did not care to take his usual disparaging position on the issue, now in any case a century old, and perhaps inadequate to the new moment. The world was falling apart; Mars helped people see that. An escape, yes, perhaps; but also a lens. He could help, if he worked at it, to sharpen the focus that the lens gave, perhaps. Or point it at certain things.

So he paid attention, and tried to think about what he was saying. Maya, it turned out, was on the same afternoon panel as he. A bunch of Mars veterans on stage, speaking about their experiences, and what they thought ought to be done. Maya spoke of living on the edge, looking back; the perspective it gave one. How things appeared in their proper proportions, so that it was obvious that a stable permaculture was the most important thing society could work for now.

Someone from the audience asked if they thought the original Russian/American plan to send one hundred permanent colonists might have been, in retrospect, the best way to go.

From down the line of speakers Maya leaned forward to look at him. Apparently he was the obvious one to answer.

He leaned toward his mike.

“Anything can happen in any situation,” he said, thinking hard. “A Mars colony in the 2020s might have become . . . all that we hoped for it. But . . .”

He shook his head, not knowing how to continue. But I lost my nerve. I lost in love. I lost all hope.

“But the odds were against it. Conditions would have been too hard to endure over the long haul. The hundred would have been condemned to . . .”

“Condemned to freedom,” Maya said into her mike.

Michel looked down the line at her, shocked, feeling the desperation grow in him. “Freedom, yes, but in a box. Freedom in a jail. On a rock world, without an atmosphere. Physically it would have been too hard. Life in a box is life in a prison, even if it is a prison of one’s own devise. No, we would have gone mad. Many who go there come back damaged for life. They exhibit symptoms of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder.”

“But you said anything could happen,” said the person in the audience.

“Yes, it’s true. It could have developed. But who can say. What if is never a question with an answer. Looking at the evidence, I said then that it was a project in big trouble. Now we should look at the current situation. We have moved incrementally on Mars, taken things in their proper sequence. The infrastructure is now there in place to start making it an easier place to live. Perhaps now is the time for permanent settlers.”

And thankfully others took up this thread, and he was off the hook, released from their interrogation.

Except that night, over dinner, Maya watched him closely. And at one point the panel of the afternoon came up.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Michel confessed.

“The past,” Maya said dismissively. She waved the whole idea of the past away with a single flick of the hand. A weight came off Michel’s stomach. She did not appear to hold it against him.

They had a wonderful evening.

And the next day they walked the beaches near Nice, the little ones Michel knew from his youth, and on one Maya stripped to her underwear and ran out into the Mediterranean, an old woman with magnificent carriage, rangy shoulders, long legs—this was what science had done for them, giving them these extra years of health when by all rights they should be long dead. They should be dead and gone for decades and yet here they were, out in the sun, catching waves, vigorous and strong, not even bent by the years. In their bodies in any case. And as she staggered out of the surf, dripping, wet and sleek as a dolphin, Maya tilted back her head and laughed out loud. She made the brown young women sunning on the sand look like five-year-olds.

And that evening they ditched the conference, and Michel drove them to a restaurant he knew in Marseilles, overlooking the industrial harbor. They had a wonderful time. And arriving back at the conference hotel, late, Maya took him by the hand and pulled him along with her to her room, and they kissed like twenty-year-olds, blood turned to fire, and fell on her bed.

Michel woke just before dawn and looked at his lover’s face. Sleep made even the old hawk girlish. A beauty. It was character that created beauty—intelligence, and nerve, and the power to feel deeply, to love. Courage was beauty, that was all there was to it. And so age only added to beauty in the end.

This made him happy—to see into the heart of things, to be so there, in reality, in such a gray dawn. But happier still was some feeling of relief he couldn’t quite define. He considered it, watching her breathe. If she was in bed with him—had made love with him, passionately and with great good humor—then she must not bear him any grudge for advising against the Mars project, so many years before. Wasn’t that right? At the time she had wanted to go, he knew that. So . . . So she must have forgiven him. The past, she had said, dismissing it all. The present was what counted to her, the moment we call now, in which anything could happen.

She woke and they got up, and went down to breakfast, and Michel felt a most curious sensation: It was as if he were walking in Martian g. His body was light, floating ever so slightly, feet just padding the floor. Walking on air! He laughed to feel such a cliché come true, right there in his own body, in this very moment. And he suddenly knew he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, no matter what happened, no matter if he lived a thousand years. Make this your last thought when you die, he told himself, and you’ll be happy even then, to know that you once had such a moment. The balance will be even and more than even.

After breakfast they abandoned the conference entirely. Michel drove her around and showed her his Provence. He showed her Nîmes and Orange and Montpellier and Villefranche-sur-Mer, his old beach, where they swam again. And he showed her the Pont du Gard, where the Romans had made their most beautiful creation. “Nadia would like this.” And he took her up to Les Baux, the hilltop village overlooking the Camargue and the Med, the peaks honeycombed with the ancient chambers of the hermitage, poor monks up there above the world and all its Saracens. And later that afternoon they sat in a sidewalk café in Avignon, down from the Pope’s palace, under plane trees, and Michel sipped cassis and watched her relax into her metal chair like a cat. “This is nice,” she said. “I like this.” And again he felt himself floating in Martian g, and she laughed to see the idiot grin plastered across his face.

But the next day the conference was scheduled to end. And that night, in bed, after they had finished making love and were lying stretched against each other, sweaty and warm, he said impulsively, “Will you stay longer?”

“Ah no,” she said. “No—I have to get back.”

She got up abruptly to go to the bathroom. When she came back she saw the look on his face, and said immediately, “But I’ll come back! I’ll come back and visit.”

“Yes?”

“Of course. What, did you think I wouldn’t? What do you take me for? Did you think I was not here too?”

“No.”

“Did you think I do this all the time?”

“No.”

“I should hope not.”

She returned to bed, pulled back to look at him. “I’m not the kind of person to pull back when the stakes get high.”

“Me neither.”

“Except in Antarctica, right? We could have been up there a century ago, had our own world to live in together.” She jabbed him with a finger. “Right?”

“Ahh—”

“But you said no.” Now the knives were showing. Nothing ever went away, not really. “You could have said yes and we would have been there a century ago, in 2026. We could have been a couple there, maybe. Eventually we might have gotten together. We could have been together for sixty or seventy years, who knows!”

“Oh come on,” he said.

“We could have! I liked you, you liked me. It was a bit like this, even in Antarctica, admit it. But you said no. You lost your nerve.”

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been like this.”

“You don’t know! Anything could happen, you said so yourself on that panel the other day. You admitted it then, in front of everyone.”

He felt himself getting heavy. Sinking down into the bed.

“Yes,” he said. “Anything could have happened.”

He had to admit it to her, admit it just to her, lying next to her naked in bed.

“It’s true. And I said no. I was afraid. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, severe as any hawk.

He rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling, unable to meet her gaze. A hotel ceiling. He was getting heavier by the moment. He had to exert himself, to swim back to the surface. “But,” he said. He sighed. He looked at her. “Now it’s now. And—here we are, right?”

“Please,” she said. “You sound like John when he first landed there.”

She and John Boone had been a celebrity couple for a few years, several decades ago; she had mentioned him briefly the day before. A shallow man, she had said. All he wants is to have fun.

“But it’s true what he said,” Michel said. “Here we are.”

“Yes yes. And I’ll come back too. I told you that. But I have business to attend to.”

“But you’ll come back?” he asked, clasping her arm. “Even though—even though I . . .”

“Yes yes,” she said. She stopped, and looked like she was thinking something over. Then: “You admitted it. That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s where we are now. So I’ll come back.”

She kissed him; then rolled onto him. “When I can.”

The next morning she left. Michel drove her to the airport, kissed her good-bye. Back at his car, looking at its shabby interior, he groaned; he wasn’t sure she really would return.

But she had said she would. And here they were, on Earth, in the year 2126. What might have been was no more than a dream, forgotten on waking. They could only go on from the here and now. So he had to stop worrying about the past, and think about what he could do now. If Maya was going to return, it would not be to comfort a guilt-stricken unhappy old man, that was certain. Maya looked forward. She was ready to go on making her life, no matter what had happened in the past. That was one of the qualities that made him love her; she was alive to the present, living in it. And she would want a partner to be the same. So he would have to live up to that; he would have to construct a life here, now, in Provence, that was worthy of Maya’s love, that would make her want to come back, again and again, perhaps to stay, at least to visit. Perhaps to invite him back with her to Russia. Perhaps to make a life together.

It was a project.

The question, then, was where to settle, where to make a home? He was a Provençal, therefore he would settle in Provence. But he had moved around so much over the years that no one place represented home above all the others. But now he wanted one. Now when Maya returned (if she did; on the phone it sounded like she had a lot to keep her there in Russia), he wanted to be able to show her a Michel centered in the moment, happy. At home, and by being at home, justifying after the fact his decision to say no to Mars, to opt instead for the Mediterranean, that cradle of civilization still rocking, the coast’s sun-washed rocky headlands still glowing in the light. Seduce the Russian beauty with the warmth of Provence.

A sign appeared, in the form of a family event; Michel’s great-uncle died, and left to Michel and his nephew Francis a house on the coast, east of Marseilles. Michel thought of Maya’s love for the sea and went to see his nephew. Francis was deeply involved in Arlesian affairs, and was agreeable to selling his share of the house to Michel, trusting that he would remain welcome there, which he certainly would be—Michel’s late brother’s son was among the most cherished people in Michel’s life, a rock of good humor and good sense. And now, bless him, perfectly amenable. He seemed to know what Michel intended.

So the place was Michel’s. An unadorned old vacation house on the beach, at the back of a little inlet between Pointe du Déffend and Bandol. A very modest place, in keeping with his great-uncle’s character, and with Michel’s project; it looked very much like a place Maya would like, beautifully located under plane trees, on a low beach no more than three or four meters higher than the sea, behind a little creek-crossed beach wedged between two small rocky headlands. A line of cypress trees ran up the crease in the hills.

One evening after the place was established as his, after a day spent moving things into it, Michel stood on the sand with his feet in the water, looking in the open door of the old place, then out at the wide horizon of the sea. The Martian sense of lightness began to seep back into him. Oh Provence, oh Earth this most beautiful world, each beach a gift of time and space, pendant on the sea and sparkling in the sun. . . . He kicked at the spent wave washing up the strand, and the water jetted out from his foot, glazed bronze by the horizontal sunlight. The sky under the sun was a bright bar of pewter, on a blazing sea. He said to himself, Here is my home, Maya. Come back and live with me.