1

She woke in a silence so still she could hear her heart. She couldn’t remember where she was. Then it came back. They were at Nadia and Art’s house, on the coast of the Hellas Sea, just west of Odessa. Tap tap tap. Dawn; the first nail of the day. Nadia was building outside. She and Art lived at the edge of their beach village, in their co-op’s complex of intertwined houses, pavilions, gardens, paths. A community of about a hundred people, linked to a hundred more like it. Apparently Nadia was always working on the infrastructure. Tap tap tap tap tap! Currently building a deck to surround a Zygote bamboo tower.

In the next room someone was breathing. There was an open door between the rooms. She sat up. Drapes on the wall, she pulled them open a crack. Predawn. Grey on gray. A spare room. Sax was on a big bed in the next room, through the door. Under thick coverlets.

She was cold. She got up and padded through the door into his room. His face slack on a broad pillow. An old man. She crawled under the coverlets into bed with him. He was warm. He was shorter than she was, short and round. She knew that, she knew him: from the sauna and pool in Underhill, the baths in Zygote. Another part of their communal body. Tap tap tap tap tap. He stirred and she wrapped herself around him. He snuggled back into her, still deeply asleep.

• • •

During the memory experiment she had focused on Mars. Michel had once said it: Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. And seeing the same hillocks and hollows around Underhill had reminded her intensely of the early years, when over each horizon had been a new thing. The land. In her mind it endured. On Earth they would never know what it was like, never. The lightness, the tight intimacy of the horizon, everything almost within touch; then the sudden immense vistas, when one of Big Man’s neighborhoods hove into view: the vast cliffs, the canyons so deep, the continent volcanoes, the wild chaos. The giant calligraphy of areological time. The world-wrapping dunes. They would never know; it could not be imagined.

But she had known. And during the memory experiment she had kept her mind focused on it, throughout the entirety of a day that had seemed to last ten years. Never once thought of Earth. It was a trick, a tremendous effort; don’t think of the word elephant! But she hadn’t. It was a trick she had gotten good at, the single-mindedness of the great refuser, a kind of strength. Perhaps. And then Sax had come flying over the horizon, crying Remember Earth? Remember Earth? It was almost funny.

But that had been Antarctica. Immediately her mind, so tricky, so focused, had said That’s just Antarctica, a bit of Mars on Earth, a continent transposed. The year they had lived there, a snatched glimpse of their future. In the Dry Valleys they had been on Mars without knowing it. So that she could remember it and it did not lead back to Earth, it was only an ur-Underhill, an Underhill with ice, and a different camp, but the same people, the same situation. And thinking about it, all of it had indeed come back to her, in the magic of the anamnestic enchantment: those talks with Sax; how she had liked someone as solitary in science as she was, how she had been attracted to him. No one else had understood how far you could walk out into it. And out there in that pure distance they had argued. Night after night. About Mars. Aspects technical, aspects philosophical. They had not agreed. But they were out there together.

But not quite. He had been shocked by her touch. Poor flesh. So she had thought. Apparently she had been wrong. Which was too bad, because if she had understood; if he had understood; if they had understood; perhaps all history would have changed. Perhaps not. But they had not understood. And here they were.

And in all the rush into that past, she had never once thought of the Earth farther north, the Earth before. She had stayed inside the Antarctic convergence. Indeed for the most part she had stayed on Mars, the Mars in her mind, red Mars. Now the theory was that the anamnestic treatment stimulated the memory and caused the consciousness to rehearse the associational complexes of node and network, bounding through the years. This rehearsal reinforced the memories in their physical tracery, such as it was, an evanescent field of patterns formed by quantum oscillation. Everything recalled was reinforced; and what was not recalled was perhaps not reinforced; and what was not reinforced would continue to fall prey to breakage, error, quantum collapse, decay. And be forgotten.

So she was a new Ann now. Not the Counter-Ann, nor even that shadowy third person who had haunted her for so long. A new Ann. A fully Martian Ann at last. On a brown Mars of some new kind, red, green, blue, all swirled together. And if there was a Terran Ann still in there, cowering in a lost quantum closet of her own, that was life. No scar was ever fully lost until death and the final dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should be; one wouldn’t want to lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different kind. A balance had to be kept. Here, now, she was the Martian Ann, not issei any longer, but an elderly new native, a Terran-born yonsei. Martian Ann Clayborne, in the moment and the only moment. It felt good to lie there.

• • •

Sax stirred in her arms. She looked at his face. A different face, but still Sax. She had an arm draped over him, and she ran a cold hand down his chest. He woke up, saw who it was, smiled a sleepy little smile. He stretched, turned, pressed his face into her shoulder. Kissed her neck with a little bite. They held on to each other, as they had in the flying boat during the storm. A wild ride. It would be fun to make love in the sky. Not practical in a wind like that. Some other time. She wondered if mattresses were made the same way they used to be. This one was hard. Sax was not as soft as he looked. They hugged and hugged. Sexual congress. He was inside her, moving. She seized him and hugged him, hard, hard.

Now he was kissing her all over, nibbling at her, completely under the covers. Submarining around down there. She could feel it all over her. His teeth, occasionally, but mostly it was the licking of a tonguetip over her skin, like a cat. Lick lick lick. It felt good. He was humming, or mumbling. His chest vibrated with it, it was like purring. “Rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrr.” A peaceful luxurious sound. It too felt good on her skin. Vibration, cat tongue, little licks all over her. She tented the coverlet so she could look down at him.

“Now which feels better?” he murmured. “A?” Kissing her. “Or B.” Kissing a different place.

She had to laugh. “Sax, just shut up and do it.”

“Ah. Okay.”

• • •

They had breakfast with Nadia and Art, and the members of their family that were around. Their daughter Nikki was off on a feral trip into the Hellespontus Mountains, with her husband and three other couples from their co-op. They had left the previous evening in a clatter of excited anticipation, like kids themselves, leaving behind their daughter Francesca, and the friends’ kids as well: Nanao, Boone, and Tati. Francesca and Boone were both five, Nanao three, Tati two; all of them thrilled to be together, and with Francesca’s grandparents. Today they were going to go to the beach. A big adventure. Over breakfast they worked on logistics. Sax was going to stay home with Art, and help him plant some new trees in an olive grove that Art was establishing on the hill behind the house. Sax would also be waiting to meet two visitors he had invited: Nirgal, and a mathematician from Da Vinci, a woman named Bao. Sax was excited to be introducing them, Ann saw. “It’s an experiment,” he confided to her. He was as flushed as the kids.

Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would perhaps get down to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning the kids were to be in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this prospect they couldn’t sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table like young dogs.

So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the kids. Maya could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it, Aunt Ann? She nodded. They would take the tram.

• • •

So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and Francesca and Nanao and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver, with Tati on Ann’s lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat behind. Maya came in this way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and Art’s village, in a detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She went in most days to work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work with her theater group. She was also a habitué of the café scene, and, apparently, these kids’ most regular baby-sitter.

Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two of them groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add to the day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous encounter between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman, the play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the body. Ann and the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such a scene.

“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break, “cat got your tongue?”

Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”

“No,” Ann said.

Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked up at them, some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious flecked eyes, Ann saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more like Art, but not much like either. A beauty.

• • •

They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter and kiosk, a restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading inland, and a broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They got off the tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.

It was a cloudy windy day. The beach proved to be nearly deserted. Swift low waves came in at an angle to the strand, breaking in the shallows just offshore, in abrupt white lines. The sea was dark, the clouds pearl gray, in a herringbone pattern under a dull lavender sky. Maya dropped her bags. She and Boone ran to the water’s edge. Down the beach to the east Odessa rose on its hillside, under a hole in the clouds so that all the tiny white walls glowed yellow in the sun. Gulls wheeled by looking for things to eat, feathering in the onshore wind. A pelican air-surfed over the waves, and above the pelican flew a man in a big birdsuit. The sight reminded Ann of Zo. People had died so young: in their forties, thirties, twenties; some in their teens, when they could just guess what they were going to miss; some at the age of these kids. Cut short like frogs in a frost. And it could still happen. At any moment the air itself could pick you up and kill you. Although that would be an accident. Things were different now, it had to be admitted; for barring accident, these kids would probably live a full span. A very full span. There was that to be said for the way things were now.

Nikki’s friends had said it would be best to keep their daughter Tati out of the sand, as she was prone to eating it. So Ann tried to keep her back on the narrow lawn between dunes and beach, but she broke away, howling, and trundled over and plopped back on her diaper on the sand, near the others, looking satisfied. “Okay,” Ann said, giving up and joining her, “but don’t eat any of it.”

Maya was helping Nanao and Boone and Francesca dig a hole. “When we reach water sand we’ll start the drip castle,” Boone declared. Maya nodded, absorbed in the digging.

“Look,” Francesca shrieked at them, “I’m running circles around you.”

Boone glanced up. “No,” he said, “you’re running ovals around us.”

He returned to discoursing with Maya about the life cycle of sand crabs. Ann had met him before; a year ago he had scarcely been talking, just simple phrases like Tati and Nanao’s, Fishie! Mine! and now he was a pedant. The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they eventually became. Who would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it. Although Nikki and her friends, packing happily for their mountain trip, had still seemed a lot like kids to Ann. And they were nearly eighty years old. So perhaps it didn’t happen as much anymore. There was that too to be said for things as they were.

Francesca stopped her circling or ovaling, and plucked a plastic shovel out of Nanao’s hands. Nanao wailed in protest. Francesca turned away and stood on her tiptoes, as if to demonstrate how light her conscience was.

“It’s my shovel,” she said over her shoulder.

“Is not!”

Maya barely glanced up. “Give it back.”

Francesca danced off with it.

“Ignore her,” Maya instructed Nanao. Nanao wailed more furiously, his face magenta. Maya gave Francesca the eye. “Do you want an ice cream or not.”

Francesca returned, dropped the shovel on Nanao’s head. Boone and Maya, already reabsorbed in their digging, paid no attention.

“Ann, could you go get some ice creams from the kiosk?”

“Sure.”

“Take Tati with you, will you?”

“No!” Tati said.

“Ice cream,” Maya said.

Tati thought it over, worked laboriously to her feet.

She and Ann walked back to the tram-stop kiosk, hand in hand. They bought six ice creams, and Ann carried five of them in a bag; Tati insisted on eating hers while they walked. She was not yet good at performing two such operations at once, and they made slow progress. Melted ice cream ran down the stick, and Tati sucked ice cream and fist indiscriminately. “Pretty,” she said. “Taste pretty.”

A tram came into the station and stopped, then moved on. A few minutes later, three people biked down the path: Sax, leading Nirgal and a native woman. Nirgal braked his bike next to Ann, gave her a hug. She hadn’t seen him in many years. He was old. She hugged him hard. She smiled at Sax; she wanted to hug him too.

They went down and joined Maya and the kids. Maya stood to hug Nirgal, then shake hands with Bao. Sax biked back and forth on the lawn behind the sand, at one point riding with no hands and waving at the group; Boone, who was still using training wheels on his bike, saw him and shouted, flabbergasted: “How do you do that!”

Sax grabbed the handlebars. He stopped the bike and stared frowning at Boone. Boone walked awkwardly over to him, arms extended, and staggered right into his bike. “Something wrong?” Sax inquired.

“I’m trying to walk without using my cerebellum!”

“Good idea,” Sax said.

“I’ll go get more ice cream,” Ann offered, and left Tati this time, and trundled back up the sand to the grass path. It felt good to walk into the wind.

• • •

As she was returning with a second bag of ice-cream bars, the air suddenly turned cold. Then she felt a kind of lurch inside her, and a faintness. The sea surface had a glittery hard purple sheen, well above the actual surface of the water. And she was very cold. Oh shit, she thought. Here it comes. Quick decline: she had read about the various symptoms, reported by people who had been somehow resuscitated. Her heart pounded madly in her chest, like a child trying to get out of a black closet. Body insubstantial, as if something had leached her of substance and left her porous; she would collapse into dust at the tap of a finger. Tap! She grunted with surprise and pain, held on to herself. Pain in her chest. She took a step toward a bench beside the path, then stopped and hunched over at a new pain. Tap tap tap! “No!” she exclaimed, and clutched the bag of ice creams. Heart arrhythmic, yes it was bounding about, bang bang, bang bang bang bang, bang, bang, No, she said without speaking. Not yet. The new Ann no doubt, but there was no time for that, Ann herself squeaked “No,” and then she was thoroughly absorbed in the effort to hold herself together. Heart you must beat! She held it so tightly she staggered. No. Not yet. The wind was a subzero frigidity, blowing right through her, her body ghostly; she held it together by will alone. Sun so bright, the harsh rays slanting right through her rib cage— the transparency of the world. Then everything was beating like a heart, the wind breathing right through her. She held herself together with every cramping muscle. Time stopped, everything stopped.

She took a short breath. The fit passed. The wind slowly warmed back up. The sea’s aura went away, leaving plain blue water. Her heart thumped with its old bump bump bump. Substance returned, pain subsided. The air was salty and damp, not cold at all. One could sweat in it.

She walked on. How forcibly the body reminded one of things. Still, she had held. She was going to live. For a while longer, at least. If it be not now . . . but not now. So here she was. Tentatively she walked on, one step after another. Everything seemed to work. She had gotten away. Brushed only.

From the sand castle Tati saw Ann and came trundling toward her, intent on the bag of ice creams. But she went too fast and fell right on her face. When she pulled herself up her face was coated with sand, and Ann expected her to howl. But she licked her upper lip like a connoisseur.

Ann walked over to help her. Lifted her to her feet, tried to wipe the sand off her upper lip; but she whipped her head back and forth to avoid the help. Ah well. Let her eat some sand, what harm could it do. “There. Not too much. No, those are for Sax and Nirgal and Bao. No! Hey, look— look at the gulls! Look at the gulls!”

Tati looked up, saw seagulls overhead, tried to track them, fell on her butt. “Ooh!” she said. “Pretty! Pretty! Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

Ann hauled her back to her feet. They walked hand in hand toward the group by its widening hole, its mound of sand topped with drip castles. Nirgal and Bao were down by the waterline, talking. Gulls planed overhead. Down the beach an old Asian woman was surf-fishing. The sea was dark blue, the sky clearing, pale mauve, the remaining clouds scrolling off to the east. The air all rushing by. Some pelicans glided in a line over the rising face of a wave, and Tati dragged Ann to a halt, pointing at them. “Innit pretty?”

Ann tried to walk on, but Tati refused to budge, tugged insistently at her hand: “Innit pretty? Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

“Yes.”

Tati let go of her and trundled over the sand, just managing to stay on her feet, her diaper waddling like a duck’s behind, the backs of her fat knees dimpling.

But still it moves, Ann thought. She followed the child, smiling at her little joke. Galileo could have refused to recant, gone to the stake for the sake of the truth, but that would have been silly. Better to say what one had to, and go on from there. A brush reminded one what was important. Oh yes, very pretty! She admitted it and was allowed to live. Beat on, heart. And why not admit it. Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their kids. There was that to be said. The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.