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.”
Impossible to read what she meant by that one.
“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me.”
“He did?”
“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on Miranda.”
“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”
“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”
“Miranda, you said?”
“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”
“If you like it?”
“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”
Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”
“Yes yes.”
A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”