LITMIR.BIZ

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minutes (sometimes it was hours, or days), began to worry. He could not be sure what she meant. She could be a woman willing to risk all on a single throw of the dice. Try sidling up to a man to get on his good side. It often worked like a charm.

      He realized that to have power over another’s destiny was intolerable. It corrupted everything. He wanted to slip away to the nearest bed with Mary, hers or his, to fall onto it and make love. But making love could by definition only occur between two free human beings. And as he was warden, judge and jury to this group …

      He moaned at the thought, a little ‘uhnn’ in his throat as the problem struck him in the solar plexus and forced air upward through his vocal cords. Mary gave him a glance, smiled. Across the table Maya picked this up and looked at them. Maya had perhaps heard him groan. Maya saw everything; and if she saw him wanting silly reckless Mary, when really he wanted Maya with all his heart, then it would be a double disaster. Michel loved Maya for her hawklike vision, her fierce sharp intelligence, now watching him casually but completely.

      He got up and went to the counter for a piece of cheesecake, feeling his knees weakly buckling. He dared not look back at either of them.

      Though it was possible the leg contact and all their looks had been in his mind only.

      It was getting strange.

      Two Russians, Sergei and Natasha, had started a relationship soon after their arrival at Lake Vanda. They did not try to hide it, like some other couples Michel knew about or suspected. If anything they were a bit too demonstrative, given the situation; it made some people uncomfortable how affectionate they were with each other. Ordinarily one could ignore strangers kissing in public, watch them or not as one chose. Here there were decisions to be made. Was it worse to be a voyeur or a prude? Did one apply to the programme as an individual or as a part of a couple? Which gave one a better chance? What did Michel think?

      Then during the winter solstice party, June 21st, after everyone had drunk a glass of champagne and was feeling good about getting past that ebb tide in the psychological year, Arkady called them out to see the aurora australis, a filmy electric dance of coloured veils and draperies, soft greens and blues and a pale pink flowing across the grain of their reality, shimmering through the black plenum in quick sine waves. And suddenly, in the midst of this magic, shouting erupted from inside the compound – muffled shrieks, bellows. Michel looked around and all the hooded ski-masked figures were looking at him, as if he should have known this was coming and forestalled it somehow, as if it were his fault – and he ran inside and there were Sergei and Natasha, literally at each other’s throats.

      He tried to detach them and got hit in the side of the face for his trouble.

      After that operatic debacle Sergei and Natasha were expelled to McMurdo – which itself took some doing, both getting the helicopter over during a week of stormy weather, and getting Sergei and Natasha to agree to leave. And after that people’s trust in Michel was heavily damaged, if not shattered completely. Even the administrators of the programme, back in the north, were faintly over-inquisitive when they asked him about it; they noted that records showed he had had an interview with Natasha the day before the fight, and asked what they had talked about, and if he could please share his notes on the meeting, which he declined to do for reasons of professional confidentiality.

      Natasha Romanova: very beautiful. Magnificent posture. The calmest Russian woman I have ever met. Biologist, working in hydroponic farming. Met Sergei Davydov and fell in love with him here in the camp. Very happy now.

      But everyone knew he had been involved with the investigation of the incident, and naturally they must have discussed the fact that he was testing and judging them. And keeping records of course. Mary no longer pressed his leg with hers, if she ever had, nor even sat next to him. Maya watched him more closely than ever, without appearing to. Tatiana continued to seek her peers, speaking always to the person inside one, or behind one. Or inside her. And Michel wondered more and more, as the arbitrary divisions of time they called days passed in their cycles – sleep, hunger, work, Bright Room, tests, relaxation, sleep – whether they could hold it together, mentally or socially, when they got to Mars.

      This of course had been his worry from the start, expressed to the others on the planning committee only partially, as a nervous joke: Since they’re all going to go crazy anyway, why not send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?

      Now, trying to shake the feeling of anxiety growing in him, in the bright rooms and out in the dark world, the joke got less and less funny. People were furtive. Relationships were forming, and Michel saw these relationships now by the absences created by their concealment. Like tracing footprints in air. People no longer caressed who had before; glances were exchanged, then avoided; some people never looked at each other any more, and yet drew toward each other as they passed in the halls out of an internal magnetism too strong to tell the others about, but also too strong to conceal. There were trips out into the frigid starry night, often timed so that both parties were out there together, although they did not leave or return together, but with other parties. Lookout Point, a knob low on the Dais, could be observed through night IR goggles, and sometimes one saw two flowing green bodies delineated out there against the black phosphor background, the two figures overlapping in a slow dance, a beautiful mime. Michel hummed an old song in English as he watched, absorbed beyond shame: ‘I’m a spy, in the house of love – I know the things, that you’re thinking of …’

      Some of these relationships might knit the community together, others might tear it apart. Maya was playing a very dangerous game with Frank Chalmers now, for instance; she went out on walks with him, they talked late into the evenings; unselfconsciously she would put a hand to his arm and laugh, head thrown back, in a way that she never had with Michel. A prelude to a later intensification, Michel judged, as the two were beginning to look like the natural leaders of the expedition. But at the same time she was always playing him off against the Russian men, with whom she would joke in Russian about the non-Russians, unaware perhaps that Frank spoke some Russian, as he did French (atrociously) and several other languages. Frank just watched her, a small inner smile playing over his lips, even when she joked about him and he could understand it. He would even glance at Michel, to see if he too caught what she was doing. As if they were complicit in their interest in Maya!

      And of course she played Michel as well. He could see that. Perhaps just instinctively, as a matter of habit. Perhaps something more personal. He couldn’t tell. He wanted her to care about him …

      Meanwhile, other small groups were withdrawing from the main one. Arkady had his admirers, Vlad his close group of intimates; they were harem keepers, perhaps. On the other hand, Hiroko Ai had her group, and Phyllis hers, each distinct; polyandry as well as polygamy, then, or at least it seemed possible to Michel. They all existed already – in potentiality or in his imagination, it was hard to tell. But it was impossible not to perceive at least part of what was going on among them as the group dynamics of a troop of primates, thrown together all unknown to each other, and therefore sorting things out, establishing consorts, dominance hierarchies, and so on. For they were primates; apes shut in cages; and even though they had chosen the cages themselves, still – there they were. In a situation. Like Sartre’s Huis Clos. No exit. Social life. Lost in a prison of their own devise.

      Even the stablest people were affected. Michel watched fascinated as the two most introverted personalities among them, Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, became interested in each other. It was pure science for both of them, at first; they were very much alike in that, and also in that both were so straightforward and guileless that Michel was able to overhear many of their first conversations. They were all shop talk; Martian geology, with Sax grilling her for the most part, learning from her as from a professor, but always able to contribute from the standpoint of a theoretical physicist, one of the leading lights a decade or two before, in his postgraduate years. Not that Ann seemed to care about that. She was a geologist, a planetologist who had studied Mars ever since grad school, until now in her forties she was one of the acknowledged authorities. A Martian ahead of the fact. So if Sax was interested, she could talk Mars for hours; and Sax was interested. So they talked on and on.

      ‘It’s a pure situation, you have to remember that.

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