And no one’s company pleased him more than Michel’s. Although on this day Michel wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed this, and wondered what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help in the long months of his return to speech — had taught him to think again, had taught him to see everything differently. It would be nice if he could do something to repay such a gift, even partially.
Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they stopped, and Sax got out the kite and assembled it, he handed the spool to Michel.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That way, into the wind.” And he held the kite as Michel walked across the grassy mounds, until the line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started running, and off it went, up up up.
Michel came back grinning. “Here, touch the line — you can feel the wind.”
“Ah,” Sax said. “So you can.” And the nearly invisible line thrummed against his fingers.
They sat down and opened Sax’s wicker basket, and took out the picnic lunch he had packed. Michel became quiet once again.
“Something is troubling you?” Sax ventured as they ate.
Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. “I think I want to go back to Provence.”
“For good?” Sax said, shocked.
Michel frowned. “Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just beginning to enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave.”
“It’s heavy on Earth.”
“True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy.”
“Hmm.” Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly evolution had adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g caused an array of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g now, to the point he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.
“Without Maya?” he said.
“I suppose it would have to be. She doesn’t want to go. She says she will someday, but it’s always later, later. She’s working for the credit co-op bank in Sabishii, and thinks she’s indispensable. Well, that’s not fair. She just doesn’t want to miss any of it.”
“Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an olive grove?”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, but…”
Sax didn’t know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As for living with Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine living in a damaged erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus perhaps Michel’s desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.
“You should go,” Sax said. “But wait just a little longer. If they get these pulsed fusion engines on spaceships, then you could be there fairly soon.”
“But that might cause real problems with Earth’s gravity. I think you need the months of the trip to get prepared for it.”
Sax nodded. “What you would need is a kind of exoskeleton. Inside it you’d feel somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps. Those new birdsuits I’ve heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to something like an exoskeleton, or you’d never be able to hold the wings in position.”
“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile. “A flowing shell.”
“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It wouldn’t be so bad.”
“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear walkers for a hundred years — then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”
“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”
Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that.” He shook his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”
The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the grass. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions himself.
After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?”
Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”
“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”
“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m afraid…”
Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”
“I know.”
On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled.
“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.
“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking — it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’ — and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”
But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.
And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!
But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.
He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.
Well — still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.