“You know why this step-up in security has happened,” she said, glaring at Sax. “Those big sabotages were what did it.”
Sax showed no sign of hearing her.
Vlad said, “It’s too bad we couldn’t have fixed on some sort of plan of action at Dorsa Brevia.”
“Dorsa Brevia,” Maya said scornfully.
“It was a good idea,” Marina said.
“Maybe it was. But without a plan of action, agreed on by all, the constitutional stuff was just—” Maya waved a hand. “Building sandcastles. A game.”
“The notion was that each group would do what it thought best,” Vlad said.
“That was the notion in sixty-one,” Maya pointed out. “And now, if Coyote and the radicals start a guerrilla war and it touches things off, then we’re right back in sixty-one all over again.”
“What do you think we should do?” Ursula asked her curiously.
“We should take over ourselves! We make the plan, we decide what to do. We disseminate it through the underground. If we don’t take responsibility for this, then whatever happens will be our fault.”
“That’s what Arkady tried to do,” Vlad pointed out.
“At least Arkady tried! We should build on what was good in his work!” She laughed shortly. “I never thought I would hear myself say that. But we should work with the Bogdanovists, and then everyone else who will join. We have to take charge! We are the First Hundred, we are the only ones with the authority to pull it off. The Sabishiians will help us, and the Bogdanovists will come along.”
“We need Praxis too,” Vlad said. “Praxis, and the Swiss. It has to be a coup rather than a general war.”
“Praxis wants to help,” Marina said. “But what about the radicals?”
“We have to coerce them,” Maya said. “Cut off their supplies, take away their members—”
“That way leads to civil war,” Ursula objected.
“Well, they must be stopped! If they start a revolt too soon and the metanationals come down on us before we’re ready, then we’re doomed. All these uncoordinated strikes at them ought to stop. They accomplish nothing, they only increase the levels of security and make things more difficult for us. Things like knocking Deimos out of its orbit only make them more aware of our presence, without doing anything else.”
Sax, still observing the ducks, spoke in his odd lilting way: “There are a hundred and fourteen Earth-to-Mars transit ships. Forty-seven objects in Mars obit—Mars orbit. The new Clarke is a fully defended space station. Deimos was available to become the same. A military base. A weapons platform.”
“It was an empty moon,” Maya said. “As for the vehicles in orbit, we will have to deal with those at the appropriate time.”
Again Sax did not appear to notice she had spoken. He stared at the damned ducks, blinking mildly, glancing from time to time at Marina.
Marina said, “It has to be a matter of decapitation, like Nadia and Nirgal and Art said in Dorsa Brevia.”
“We’ll see if we can find the neck,” Vlad said drily.
Maya, getting angrier and angrier at Sax, said, “We should each take one of the major cities, and organize people there into a unified resistance. I want to return to Hellas.”
“Nadia and Art are in South Fossa,” Marina said. “But we’ll need all the First Hundred to join us, for this to work.”
“The first thirty-nine,” Sax said.
“We need Hiroko,” Vlad said, “and we need Hiroko to talk some sense into Coyote,”
“No one can do that,” Marina said. “But we do need Hiroko. I’ll go to Dorsa Brevia and talk to her, and we’ll try to hold the south in check.”
“ ‘Coyote’s not the problem,’ Maya said.
Sax jerked out of his reverie, blinked at Vlad. Still not a glance for Maya, even though they were discussing her plan. “Integrated pest management,” he said. “You grow tougher plants among the weeds. And then the tougher plants push them out. I’ll take Burroughs.”
Furious at Sax’s snubbing of her, Maya got up and walked around the little pond. She stopped on the opposite bank, gripped the railing by the path in both hands. She glared at the group across the water, sitting on their benches like retired pensioners chatting about food and the weather and ducks and the last chess match. Damn Sax, damn him! Would he hold Phyllis against her forever, that vile woman—
Suddenly she heard their voices, tiny but clear. There was a curving ceramic wall behind the path, running almost all the way around the pond, and she was almost precisely across the pond from them; apparently the wall functioned as a sort of whispering gallery, she could hear them in perfect miniature, the airy voices a fraction of a second behind their mouths’ little movements.
“Too bad Arkady didn’t survive,” Vlad said. “The Bogdanovists would come around a lot easier.”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “Him and John. And Frank.”
“Frank,” Marina said scornfully. “If he hadn’t killed John none of this would have happened.”
Maya blinked. The railing was holding her up.
“What?” she shouted, without thinking. Across the pond the little figures jerked and looked at her. She detached herself from the railing one hand at a time, and half ran around the pond, stumbling twice.
“What do you mean?” she shouted at Marina as she neared them, the words bursting from her without volition.
Vlad and Ursula met her a few steps from the benches. Marina remained seated, looking away sullenly. Vlad had his hands out and Maya tore right through them to get at Marina. “What do you mean saying such foul things?” she shouted, her voice painful in her own throat. “Why? Why? It was Arabs who killed John, everyone knows that!”
Marina grimaced and shook her head, looking down.
“Well?” Maya cried.
“It was a manner of speaking,” Vlad said from behind. “Frank did a lot to undermine John in those years, you know that’s true. Some say he inflamed the Moslem Brotherhood against John, that’s all.”
“Pah!” Maya said. “We have all argued with each other, it means nothing!”
Then she noticed that Sax was looking right at her—finally, now that she was furious—staring at her with a peculiar expression, cold and impossible to read—a glare of accusation, of revenge, of what? She had shouted in Russian and the others had replied in kind, and she didn’t think Sax spoke it. Perhaps he was just curious about what had upset them so. But the antipathy in that steady stare—as if he were confirming what Marina had said—hammering it into her like a nail!
Maya turned and fled.
She found herself in front of the door to her room with no memory of crossing Sabishii, and threw herself inside as if into her mother’s arms; but in the beautiful spare wooden chamber she drew up short of the bed, shocked by the memory of some other room that had turned from womb to trap on her, in some other moment of shock and fear . . . no answers, no distraction, no escape. . . . Over the little sink she caught sight of her face as if in a framed portrait—haggard, ancient, eyes bright red around the rims, like the eyes of a lizard. A nauseating image. That was it—the time she had caught sight of her stowaway on the Ares, the face seen through an algae jar. Coyote: a shock which had proved not hallucination, but reality.
And so it might be with this news of Frank and John.
She tried to remember. She tried with all her might to remember Frank Chalmers, to really remember him. She had spoken with him that night in Nicosia, in an encounter unremarkable for its awkwardness and tension, Frank as always acting aggrieved and rejected. . . . They had been together at the very moment John was being knocked unconscious, and dragged into the farm and left to die. Frank couldn’t have . . .
But of course there were surrogates. You could always pay people to act for you. Not that the Arabs would have been interested in money per se. But pride, honor—paid in honor, or in some political quid pro quo, the kind of currency Frank had been so expert at printing. . . .
&
nbsp; But she could remember so little of those years, so little of the specifics. When she put her mind to it, and forced herself to remember, to recollect, it was frightening how little came up. Fragments; moments, potsherds of an entire civilization. Once she had been so angry she had knocked a coffee cup off a table, the broken handle bare like a half-eaten bagel on a table. But where had that been, and when, and with whom? She couldn’t be sure! “Aahh,” she cried involuntarily, and the haggard antediluvian face in the mirror suddenly disgusted her with its pathetic reptile pain. So ugly. And once upon a time she had been a beauty, she had been proud of that, she had used it like a scalpel. Now . . . her hair had gone from pure white to a dull gray in recent years, changed somehow in the last treatment. And now it was thinning, for God’s sake, and only in some places while not in others. Disgusting. And once a beauty, once upon a time. That hawkish regal face—and now—As if the Baroness Blixen, also a rare beauty in her youth, had crumbled into the syphilitic witch Isak Dinesen and then lived on for centuries after that, like a vampire or a zombie—a ravaged living lizard of a corpse, 130 years old, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. . . .
She strode to the sink and yanked on the side of the mirror, revealing a crowded medicine cabinet. Nail scissors on the top shelf. Somewhere on Mars they made nail scissors, of magnesium no doubt. She took them down and pulled a hank of hair out from her head till it hurt, and cut it off right against her scalp. The blades were dull, but if she pulled hard enough they worked. She had to be careful not to cut her scalp, some tiny remnant of her vanity would not allow that. So it was a long, tedious, painstaking and pain-giving job. But a comfort, somehow, to be so distracted, so methodical, so destructive.
The initial cut was ragged enough to require a great deal of trimming, which took a long time. An hour. But she could not make the hairs come to the same length, and finally she got out the razor from the shower, and finished by shaving, patting with toilet paper the cuts that bled copiously, ignoring the old scars revealed, the awful bumps and hollows of the bare skull, so close under the skin, it was hard to do it all without ever looking at the monstrous face hanging from the front of the skull.
When she was done she stared ruthlessly at the freak in the mirror—androgynous, withered, insane. The eagle become vulture: skin head, wattled neck, beady eyes, hook nose, and the lipless downturned little mouth. Staring at this hideous face, there were long, long moments when she could not remember a single thing about Maya Toitovna. She stood frozen in the present, a stranger to everything.
A knock at the door made her jump, and released her. She hesitated, suddenly ashamed, even frightened. Another part of her croaked, “Come in.”
The door opened. It was Michel. He saw her and stopped in the doorway. “Well?” she said, staring at him and feeling naked.
He swallowed, cocked his head. “Beautiful as ever.” With a crooked grin.
She had to laugh. She sat on her bed and began to weep. She sniffed and sniffed. “Sometimes” she said, wiping her eyes, “sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get-so tired of it, of everything that I’ve done.”
Michel sat beside her. “We’re locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?”
Maya shook her head. “I was down in the park with Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax who hates me, and looking at them all, and we have to do something, we really do, but looking at them and remembering everything—trying to remember—we suddenly all seemed such damaged people.”
“A lot has happened,” Michel said, and put his hand on hers.
“Do you have trouble remembering?” Maya shivered, and clasped his hand like a life raft. “Sometimes I get so scared that I’ll forget everything.” She sniffed a laugh. “I guess that means I’d rather be a convict than an idiot, to answer your question. If you forget, you’re free of the past, but nothing means anything. So there’s no escape”—she started to cry again—“remember or forget, it hurts just as bad.”
“Memory problems are pretty common at our age,” Michel said gently. “Especially events in the middle distance, so to speak. There are exercises that help.”
“It’s not a muscle.”
“I know. But the power of recollection seems to strengthen with use. And the act of remembering apparently strengthens the memories themselves. It makes sense when you think about it. Synapses physically reinforced or replaced, that sort of thing.”
“But then, if you can’t face what you remember—oh Michel—” She took in a big unsteady breath. “They said—Marina said that Frank had murdered John. She said it to the others when she thought I couldn’t hear, said it as if it was something they all knew!” She clutched him by the shoulder, squeezed as if she could rip the truth out of him with her claws. “Tell me the truth, Michel! Is it true? Is that what you all think happened?”
Michel shook his head. “No one knows what happened.”
“I was there! I was in Nicosia that night and they weren’t! I was with Frank when it happened! He had no idea, I swear!”
Michel squinted, uncertain, and she said, “Don’t look like that!”
“I’m not, Maya, I’m not. I don’t mean anything by it. I have to tell you everything I’ve heard, and I’m trying to remember myself. There have been rumors—all kinds of rumors!—about what happened that night. It’s true, some say Frank was—involved. Or connected to the Saudis who killed John. That he met with the one who died later the next day, and so on.”
Maya began to weep harder. She bent over her clenched stomach and put her face on Michel’s shoulder, her ribs heaving. “I can’t stand it. If I don’t know what happened . . . how can I remember? How can I even think of them?”
Michel held her, soothed her with his embrace. He squeezed the muscles of her back, over and over. “Ah, Maya.”
After a long time she sat up, went to the sink and washed her face in cold water, avoiding the mirror’s gaze. She returned to the bed and sat, utterly despondent, a seeping blackness in every muscle.
Michel took her hand again. “I wonder if it might not help to know. Or at least, to know as much as you can. To investigate, you know. To read about John and Frank. There are books now, of course. And to ask the other people who were in Nicosia, particularly the Arabs who saw Selim el-Hayil before he died. That kind of thing. It would give you a kind of control, you see. It wouldn’t be remembering exactly, but it wouldn’t be forgetting either. Those aren’t the only two alternatives, strange as it may seem. We have to assume our past, you see? We have to make it a part of what we are now, by an act of the imagination. It’s a creative thing, an active thing. It’s not a simple process. But I know you, and you are always better when you are active, when you have a little control.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she said. “I can’t stand not to know, but I’m afraid to know. I don’t want to know. Especially if it’s true.”
“See how you feel about it,” Michel suggested. “Try it and see. Given that both alternatives are painful, it might be you prefer action to the alternative.”
“Well.” She sniffed, took a single glance across the room. From the room on the other side of the mirror, an ax murderer stared out at her. “My God I am so ugly,” she said, revulsion making her nauseated to the verge of vomiting.
Michel stood, went to the mirror. “There is a thing called body dysmorphic disorder,” he said. “It’s related to obsessive-compulsive disorders, and to depression. I’ve noticed signs of it in you for a long time now.”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Ah. Well, it’s a treatable problem.”
“Birthdays?”
“Body dysmorphic disorder.”
“I won’t take drugs.”
He put a towel over the mirror, turned to look at her. “What do you mean? It may be a simple lack of serotonin. A biochemical insufficiency. A disease. Nothing to be ashamed of in that. We all take drugs. Clomipramine is
very helpful for this problem.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“And no mirrors.”
“I’m not a child!” she snarled. “I know what I look like!” She leaped up and tore the towel off the mirror. Insane reptile vulture, pterodactylic, ferocious—it was impressive, in a way.
Michel shrugged. He had a little smile on his face, which she wanted to punch, or kiss. He liked lizards.
She shook her head to clear it. “Well. Take action, you say.” She thought about it. “I certainly prefer action to the alternative, in the current situation we’re in.” She told him about the news from the south, and her proposal to the others. “They make me so angry. They’re just waiting for disaster to strike again. All but Sax, and he is a loose cannon with all his sabotages, consulting with no one but these fools he has—we have to do something coordinated!”
“Good,” he said emphatically. “I agree. We need this.”
She regarded him. “Will you come to Hellas Basin with me?”
And he smiled, a spontaneous grin of pure pleasure. Of delight that she had asked! It pierced her heart to see it.
“Yes,” he said. “I have some business to finish here, but I can do that quickly. Just a few weeks.” And he smiled again. He loved her, she saw; not just as a friend or therapist, but as a lover too. And yet with a certain kind of distance, a Michel distance, some kind of therapist thing. So that she could still breathe. Be loved and still breathe. Still have a friend.
“So you can still stand to be with me, even though I look like this.”
“Oh Maya.” He laughed. “Yes, you are still beautiful, if you want to know. Which you still do, thank God.” He gave her a hug, pulled back and inspected her. “It is a trifle austere. But it will do.”
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