LITMIR.BIZ

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a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.

      And so they made love. For a time passion took her away. Afterwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.

      And yet they were co-mayors, so to speak. So if it was put on a zero sum basis …

      Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again before they left. But it wasn’t quite the same as the first time, she found herself distracted. So much in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn’t, there was no doubt about that. And looking at Frank Chalmers’s face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasn’t right. It made her uneasy.

      But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more distant. But then in the days after their encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with him. It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.

      And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself.

      To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situation. And once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their encounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with others as well. All this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzzled. Once, when she left a group just before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance and reserve. But he had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talk about it. But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.

      Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himself. But it was … awkward.

      Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she got from it. Hiroko was right; everything was different in a closed system. It was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had served as her education in this regard. In the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing him again. They had been part of a group, up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of things. Maya was vexed with herself; she didn’t want to seem completely fickle, although at this point either way she went it would probably look that way. So she went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to make love. And so she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the whole incident a good memory for him. She found herself becoming more passionate than ever before, she really wanted to please him. And then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.

      That was the last time.

      Δ V. V for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.

      Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Δ v of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth’s orbit and fly to Mars requires a minimum Δ v of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Δ v of about one kilometer per second. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involved. Climbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the direction of an enormous inertia.

       History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?

      The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

      The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at 45° angles. There was a runner’s course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the increased pressure of the two 22.5° bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinder. It was beginning to seem a rather narrow world.

      Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow larger. The process of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed. One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in the bubble dome. It was April back home, though the Ares’ season was midsummer. After their service they came down to the D dining hall for brunch. Maya, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and tea. The conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.

      “I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being. It’s a nice concept. But the Christ story …” John shook his head.

      “Do you really know the story?” Phyllis asked.

      “I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota,” John replied shortly. “I went to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me.”

      Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions like this. He had a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.

      John said,

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