The Martians

Another time: ‘Why aren’t you hooked up with a man?’

‘Who?’

‘That’s for you to say.’

‘Indeed.’

He dropped the subject. He never intruded, that was part of the friendship.

Then Sax left for what Desmond called the demimonde, which made Maya restless, and unexpectedly sad. She had thought Sax enjoyed her company as the other main teacher of the kids. Though of course it was hard to tell with him. But to have his face surgically altered, in order to move out of Zygote to the north; it felt like a kind of rebuke. Not only to be such a small factor in his plans, but then to be staying behind herself, in their little refuge, when the world was still out there, changing every day. And then she missed him too, his flat affect and his peculiar thought, like that of a large brilliant toddler, or a member of some other primate species, cousin to theirs: Homo scientificus. She missed him. And it began to feel like it was time for her to thaw, end her hibernation, and start another life.

Desmond helped with that. He came by after an unusually long time away, and asked Maya to go back out with him. ‘There’s a man from Praxis here on planet I want to talk to. Nirgal thinks he’s the something or other, the messenger, but I don’t know.’

‘Sure,’ Maya said, pleased to be asked.

Half an hour’s packing and she was ready to leave forever. She went to Nadia and told her to tell the others she was off, and Nadia nodded and said ‘Good, good, you need to get out,’ always the critical sister.

‘Yes yes,’ Maya said sharply, and she was off to the garage when she saw Michel going out to the dunes, and called to him. He had left Underhill without saying goodbye and it had bothered her ever since, and she wouldn’t do the same to him. She walked out to the first ridge of dune sand.

‘I’m going with Coyote.’

‘Not you too! Will you come back?’

‘We’ll see.’

He regarded her face closely. ‘Well, good.’

‘You should get out too.’

‘Yes … perhaps now I will.’ He was serious, even grave, watching her so closely. Maybe it was Michel Desmond had been referring to, she thought. ‘Do you think it’s time?’ he asked.

‘Time for?’

‘For us? For us to be out there?’

‘Yes,’ she ventured.

Then she was off, skulking north with the Coyote, to the equator west of Tharsis, following canyon walls and threading boulder plains. It was great to see the land again, but she didn’t like the skulking. They ducked under the fallen elevator cable in a glaciated region midway up west Tharsis, and followed the cable downhill west for two days. They came on a giant moving building that was running over the cable, processing it for little cars running back up tracks to Sheffield, and Desmond said, ‘Look, he’s out in a field car, let’s follow.’ Maya watched as Coyote disabled the poor man’s door to the building while he was out on a drive, and then stood by Coyote cautiously, ready for anything, as Coyote approached the man pounding fearfully on the door, and made his farcical greeting:

‘Welcome to Mars!’

Indeed. One look at the man and Maya knew he knew just who they were, and had been sent out to contact them, and learn what he could and report back to his masters on Earth.

‘He’s a spy,’ she said to Desmond when they were alone.

‘He’s a messenger.’

‘You don’t know that!’

‘Okay, okay. But be careful with him. Don’t be rude.’

But then they heard that Sax had been captured. Caution was thrown to the winds – and did not come back, in Maya’s life, for many years.

Desmond turned into a different version of himself, ferociously focused on rescuing Sax; this was the kind of friend he was, and he loved Sax as much as any of them. Maya watched him with something like fear. Then Michel and Nirgal joined them on their way to Kasei, and without a glance at her Desmond assigned her to Michel’s car, in the western arm of their attack on the security compound. And she saw that she had been right; it was Michel whom Desmond had meant for her.