She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. “I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the— the beauty until it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined— and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.

But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry— his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so— just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal— which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together— I mean one after the next— but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean— you know how it was then— that Russian couple had fought and been sent home— we all hid everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not ever. And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the . . .” He waved at the blue sky.

“I remember,” she said.