The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson Part 24

"Sloppy," she said. "Double jeopardy."

A new schedule evolved. He worked, swam, took the tram home. Usually Selena wasn't there. Often their answering machine held messages for her from Mark, talking about their work. Or messages from her to Smith, telling him that she would be home late. As it was happening so often, he sometimes went out for dinner with Frank and other lane-mates, after the evening workouts. Once at a beach restaurant they ordered several pitchers of beer, and then went out for a walk on the beach, and ended up running out into the shallows of the bay and swimming around in the warm dark water, so different from their pool, splashing each other and laughing hard. It was a good time.

But when he got home that night, there was another message on the answering machine from Selena, saying that she and Mark were working on their paper after getting a bite to eat, and that she would be home extra late.

She wasn't kidding; at two o'clock in the morning she was still out. In the long minutes following the timeslip Smith realized that no one stayed out this late working on a paper without calling home. This was therefore a message of a different kind.

Pain and anger swept through him, first one then the other. The indirectness of it struck him as cowardly. He deserved at least a revelation-a confession-a scene. As the long minutes pa.s.sed he got angrier and angrier; then frightened for a moment, that she might have been hurt or something. But she hadn't. She was out there somewhere fooling around. Suddenly he was furious.

He pulled cardboard boxes out of their closet and yanked open her drawers, and threw all her clothes in heaps in the boxes, crushing them in so they would fit. But they gave off their characteristic scent of laundry soap and her, and smelling it he cried out and sat down on the bed, knees weak. If he carried through with this he would never again see her putting on and taking off these clothes, and just as an animal he groaned at the thought.

But men are not animals. He finished throwing her things into boxes, took them outside the front door and dropped them there.

She came back at three. He heard her kick into the boxes and make some m.u.f.fled exclamation.

He hurled open the door and stepped out.

"What's this?" She had been startled out of whatever scenario she had planned, and now was getting angry. Her, angry! It made him furious all over again.

"You know what it is."

"What!"

"You and Mark."

She eyed him.

"Now you notice," she said at last. "A year after it started. And this is your first response." Gesturing down at the boxes.

He hit her in the face.

Immediately he crouched at her side and helped her sit up, saying, "Oh G.o.d Selena I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to," he had only thought to slap her for her contempt, contempt that he had not noticed her betrayal earlier, "I can't believe I-"

"Get away!"-striking him off with wild blows, crying and shouting-"get away, get away!"-frightened-"you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d, what do you, don't you dare dare hit me!" in a near-shriek, though she kept her voice down too, aware still of the apartment complex around them. Hands held to her face. hit me!" in a near-shriek, though she kept her voice down too, aware still of the apartment complex around them. Hands held to her face.

"I'm sorry Selena. I'm very very sorry, I was angry at what you said but I know that isn't, that doesn't... I'm sorry." Now he was as angry at himself as he had been at her-what could he have been thinking, why had he given her the moral high ground like this, it was she who had broken their bond, it was she who should be in the wrong! She who was now sobbing-turning away-suddenly walking off into the night. Lights went on in a couple of windows nearby. Smith stood staring down at the boxes of her lovely clothes, his right knuckles throbbing.

That life was over. He lived on alone in the apartment by the beach, and kept going into work, but he was shunned there by the others, who all knew what had happened. Selena did not come in to work again until the bruises were gone, and after that she did not press charges, or speak to him about that night, but she did move in with Mark, and avoided him at work when she could. As who wouldn't? Occasionally she dropped by his nook to ask in a neutral voice about some logistical aspect of their breakup. He could not meet her eye. Nor could he meet the eye of anyone else at work, not properly. It was strange how one could have a conversation with people and appear to be meeting their gaze during it, when all the time they were not really quite looking at you and you were not really quite looking at them. Primate subtleties, honed over millions of years on the savannah.

He lost appet.i.te, lost energy. In the morning he would wake up and wonder why he should get out of bed. Then looking at the blank walls of the bedroom, where Selena's prints had hung, he would sometimes get so angry at her that his pulse hammered uncomfortably in his neck and forehead. This got him out of bed, but then there was nowhere to go, except work. And there everyone knew he was a wife-beater, a domestic abuser, an a.s.shole. Martian society did not tolerate such people.

Shame or anger; anger or shame. Grief or humiliation. Resentment or regret. Lost love. Omnidirectional rage.

Mostly he didn't swim anymore. The sight of the women swimmers was too painful now, though they were as friendly as always; they knew nothing of the lab except him and Frank, and Frank had not said anything to them about what had happened. It made no difference. He was cut off from them. He knew he ought to swim more, and he swam less. Whenever he resolved to turn things around he would swim two or three days in a row, then let it fall away again.

Once at the end of an early evening workout he had forced himself to attend-and now he felt better, as usual-while they were standing in the lane steaming, his three most constant lane-mates made quick plans to go to a nearby trattoria after showering. One looked at him. "Pizza at Rico's?"

He shook his head. "Hamburger at home," he said sadly.

They laughed at this. "Ah come on. It'll keep another night."

"Come on, Andy," Frank said from the next lane. "I'll go too, if that's okay."

"Sure," the women said. Frank often swam in their lane too.

"Well..." Smith roused himself. "Okay."

He sat with them and listened to their chatter around the restaurant table. They still seemed to be slightly steaming, their hair wet and wisping away from their foreheads. The three women were young. It was interesting; away from the pool they looked ordinary and undistinguished: skinny, mousy, plump, maladroit, whatever. With their clothes on you could not guess at their fantastically powerful shoulders and lats, their compact smooth musculatures. Like seals dressed up in clown suits, waddling around a stage.

"Are you okay?" one asked him when he had been silent too long.

"Oh yeah, yeah." He hesitated, glanced at Frank. "Broke up with my girlfriend."

"Ah ha! I knew knew it was something!" Hand to his arm (they all b.u.mped into each other all the time in the pool): "You haven't been your usual self lately." it was something!" Hand to his arm (they all b.u.mped into each other all the time in the pool): "You haven't been your usual self lately."

"No." He smiled ruefully. "It's been hard."

He could never tell them about what had happened. And Frank wouldn't either. But without that none of the rest of his story made any sense. So he couldn't talk about any of it.

They sensed this and shifted in their seats, preparatory to changing the topic. "Oh well," Frank said, helping them. "Lots more fish in the sea."

"In the pool," one of the women joked, elbowing him.

He nodded, tried to smile.

They looked at each other. One asked the waiter for the bill, and another said to Smith and Frank, "Come with us over to my place, we're going to get in the hot tub and soak our aches away."

She rented a room in a little house with an enclosed courtyard, and all the rest of the residents were away. They followed her through the dark house into the courtyard, and took the cover off the hot tub and turned it on, then took their clothes off and got in the steaming water. Smith joined them, feeling shy. People on the beaches of Mars sunbathed without clothes all the time, it was no big deal really. Frank seemed not to notice, he was perfectly relaxed. But they didn't swim at the pool like this.

They all sighed at the water's heat. The woman from the house went inside and brought out some beer and cups. Light from the kitchen fell on her as she put down the carton of beer and pa.s.sed out the cups. Smith already knew her body perfectly well from their many hours together in the pool; nevertheless he was shocked seeing the whole of her. Frank ignored the sight, filling the cups from the carton.

They drank beer, made small talk. Two were vets; their lane leader, the one who had been pregnant, was a bit older, a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab near the pool. Her baby was being watched by her co-op that night. They all looked up to her, Smith saw, even here. These days she brought the baby to the pool and swam just as powerfully as ever, parking the babycarrier just beyond the splash line. Smith's muscles melted in the hot water, he sipped his beer, listening to them.

One of the women looked down at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the water and laughed. "They float like pool buoys."

Smith had already noticed this.

"No wonder women swim better than men."

"As long as they aren't so big they interfere with the hydrodynamics."

Their leader looked down through her fogged gla.s.ses, pink-faced, hair tied up, misted, demure. "I wonder if mine float less because I'm nursing."

"But all that milk."

"Yes but the water in the milk is neutral density, it's the fat that floats. It could be that empty b.r.e.a.s.t.s float even more than full ones."

"Whichever has more fat, yuck."

"I could run an experiment, nurse him from just one side and then get in and see-" But they were laughing too hard for her to complete this scenario. "It would work! Why are you laughing!"

They only laughed more. Frank was cracking up, looking blissed, blessed. These women friends trusted them. But Smith still felt set apart. He looked at their lane leader: a pink bespectacled G.o.ddess, serenely vague and unaware; the scientist as heroine; the first full human being.

But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. "It's a bad mistake to worship women," he warned. "A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn't worth discussing the difference. The genes are almost entirely identical, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that's it. So they're just like you and me."

"More than a couple."

"Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you're better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. p.e.n.i.s just an oversized c.l.i.toris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent."

Smith stared at him. "You're kidding."

"What do you mean?"

"Well-I've never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way."

"So what? It happens, it's a specialized function. You never see women e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we're all the same. We're all in it together. There are no differences."

Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artefact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bon.o.bos and muriquis were gentle co-operators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.

Patterns in the fossil DNA data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic-resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

"Look here," Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. "Here's a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three-oh-four, near the juncture, see?"

"You've got a female then?"

"I don't know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It's in Hillis 8050..."

Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. "Comparing junk to junk... I don't know..."

"But it's a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation."

Frank squinted at the screen. "Um, well." He glanced quickly at Smith.

Smith said, "I'm wondering if there's some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammal precursors to both these."

"But dolphins are not our ancestors," Frank said.

"There's a common ancestor back there somewhere."

"Is there?" Frank straightened up. "Well, whatever. I'm not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It's sort of similar, but, you know."

"What do you mean, don't you see that? Look right there!"

Frank glanced down at him, startled, then noncommittal. Seeing this Smith became inexplicably frightened.

"Sort of," Frank said. "Sort of. You should run hybridization tests, maybe, see how good the fit really is. Or check with Acheron about repeats in non-gene DNA."

"But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?"

Frank looked even more noncommittal than before. He glanced out of the door of the nook. Finally he said, "I don't see it that congruent. Sorry, I just don't see it. Look, Andy. You've been working awfully hard for a long time. And you've been depressed too, right? Since Selena left?"

Smith nodded, feeling his stomach tighten. He had admitted as much a few months before. Frank was one of the very few people these days who would look him in the eye.

"Well, you know. Depression has chemical impacts in the brain, you know that. Sometimes it means you begin seeing patterns that others can't see as well. It doesn't mean they aren't there, no doubt they are there. But whether they mean anything significant, whether they're more than just a kind of a.n.a.logy, or similarity-" He looked down at Smith and stopped. "Look, it's not my field. You should show this to Amos, or go up to Acheron and talk to the old man."

"Uh huh. Thanks, Frank."

"Oh no, no, no need. Sorry, Andy. I probably shouldn't have said anything. It's just, you know. You've been spending a h.e.l.l of a lot of time here."

"Yeah."

Frank left.

Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. He got some of his work done in dreams. Sometimes he found he could sleep down on the beach, wrapped in a greatcoat on the fine sand, lulled by the sound of the waves rolling in. At work he stared at the lined dots and letters on the screens, constructing the schematics of the sequences, nucleotide by nucleotide. Most were completely unambiguous. The correlation between the two main schematics was excellent, far beyond the possibility of chance. X chromosomes in humans clearly exhibited non-gene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these pa.s.sages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. Y chromosomes were quite stable. Frank had appeared not to believe it, but there it was, right on the screen. But how could it be? What did it mean? Where did any of them get what they were? They had natures from birth. Just under five million years ago, chimps and humans separated out as two different species from a common ancestor, a woodland ape. The Inis geoffrensis Inis geoffrensis fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan s.e.xual encounters are rape. fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan s.e.xual encounters are rape.

One night after finishing work alone in the lab, he took a tram in the wrong direction, downtown, without ever admitting to himself what he was doing, until he was standing outside Mark's apartment complex, under the steep rise of the dorsum ridge. Walking up a staircased alleyway ascending the ridge gave him a view right into Mark's windows. And there was Selena, washing dishes at the kitchen window and looking back over her shoulder to talk with someone. The tendon in her neck stood out in the light. She laughed.

Smith walked home. It took an hour. Many trams pa.s.sed him.

He couldn't sleep that night. He went down to the beach and lay rolled in his greatcoat. Finally he fell asleep.

He had a dream. A small hairy bipedal primate, chimp-faced, walked like a hunchback down a beach in east Africa, in the late afternoon sun. The warm water of the shallows lay greenish and translucent. Dolphins rode inside the waves. The ape waded out into the shallows. Long powerful arms, evolved for hitting; a quick grab and he had one by the tail, by the dorsal fin. Surely it could escape, but it didn't try. Female; the ape turned her over, mated with her, released her. He left and came back to find the dolphin in the shallows, giving birth to twins-one male, one female. The ape's troop swarmed into the shallows, killed and ate them both. Farther offsh.o.r.e the dolphin birthed two more.

The dawn woke Smith. He stood and walked out into the shallows. He saw dolphins inside the transparent indigo waves. He waded out into the surf. The water was only a little colder than the workout pool. The dawn sun was low. The dolphins were only a little longer than he was, small and lithe. He bodysurfed with them. They were faster than him in the waves, but flowed around him when they had to. One leapt over him and splashed back into the curl of the wave ahead of him. Then one flashed under him, and on an impulse he grabbed at its dorsal fin and caught it, and was suddenly moving faster in the wave, as it rose with both of them inside it-by far the greatest bodysurfing ride of his life. He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Discovering Life

The final approach to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a narrow road running up the flank of the ugly brown mountains overlooking Los Angeles, is an adequate road in ordinary circ.u.mstances, but when something newsworthy occurs it is inadequate to handle the influx of media visitors. On this morning the line of cars and trailers extended down from the security gate almost to the freeway off-ramp, and Bill Dawkins watched the temperature gauge of his old Ford Escort rise as he inched forward, all the vehicles adding to the smog already making the air a tangible gray mist. Eventually he pa.s.sed the security guards and drove up to the employee parking lot, then walked down past the guest parking lot, overflowing with TV trailers topped by satellite dishes. Surely every language and nation in the world was represented, all bringing their own equipment, of course.

Inside the entry building Bill turned right and looked in the press-conference room, also jammed to overflowing. A row of Bill's colleagues sat up on the stage behind a long table crowded with mikes, facing the cameras and lights and reporters. Bill's friend Mike Collinsworth was answering a question about contamination, trying to look like he was enjoying himself. But very few scientists like other scientists listening in on them when they are explaining things to nonscientists, because then there is someone there to witness just how gross their gross simplifications are; so an affair like this was in its very nature embarra.s.sing. And to complicate the situation this press corps was a very mixed crowd, ranging from experts who in some senses (social context, historical background) knew more than the scientists themselves, all the way to TV faces who could barely read their prompters. That plus the emotional load of the subject matter, amounting almost to hysteria, gave the event an excruciating quality that Bill found perversely fascinating to watch.

A telegenic young woman got the nod from John and took the radio mike being pa.s.sed around. "What does this discovery mean to you?" she said. "What do you think the meaning of this discovery will be?"

The seven men on stage looked at one another, and the crowd laughed. John said, "Mike?" and Mike made a face that got another laugh. But John knew his crew; Mike was a smart a.s.s in real life, indeed Bill could imagine some of his characteristic answers scorching the air: It means I have to answer stupid questions in front of billions of people, it means I can stop working eighty-hour weeks and see what a real life is like again; but Mike was also good at the PR stuff, and with a straight face he answered the second of the questions, which Bill would have thought was the harder of the two.

"Well, the meaning of it depends, to some extent, on what the exobiologists find out when they investigate the organisms more fully. If the organisms follow the same biochemical principles as life on Earth, then it's possible they are a kind of cousin to Terran life, bounced on meteorites from Mars to here, or here to Mars. If that's the case, then it's possible that DNA a.n.a.lysis will even be able to determine about when the two families parted company, and which planet has the older population. We may find out that we're all Martians originally."

He waited for the obligatory laugh. "On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That's a very different scenario." Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his soundbite envelope, also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short: "Either way that turns out, we'll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross s.p.a.ce between planets, or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we'll be safer in a.s.suming that life is fairly widespread in the universe."