“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old stories—” Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s— it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”

Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”

“True.”

And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.

• • •

They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit, and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder about the possibility of some kind of browns.”

Ann glanced at him. “And where’s the red in it?”

“Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land untouched. The areophany.”

“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis.”

“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds.”

“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.

Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.

• • •

“Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?” Ann asked one night as they were retiring to their hulls.

“It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening gesture only, because if it’s serious it would be so— unintelligent. They must know that Clarke is very vulnerable to— removal from the scene.”