Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness— at least that particular happiness— for her. His “optimism by policy” was going to become more of an effort, and he would now have another antinomy to reconcile in his life, as centrifugal as Provence and Mars— which was simply Maya and Maya.

They lay side by side, each in his or her own thoughts, looking outside and feeling the rover bounce on its shock absorbers. The wind was still rising, the dust now pouring down Echus Chasma and then Kasei Vallis, in a ghostly mimicry of the great outflow that had first carved the channel. Michel pushed up to check the screens. “Up to two hundred kilometers per hour.” Maya grunted. Winds had been far faster in the old days, but with the atmosphere so much thicker, these slower speeds were deceptive; present-day gales were much more forceful than the old insubstantial screamers.

Clearly they would go in tonight, it was only a matter of getting Coyote’s bursted signal. So they lay back down together and waited, tense and relaxed at the same time, giving each other thorough massages to pass the time and relieve the tension, Michel marveling throughout at the catlike grace of Maya’s long muscular body, ancient by the dates, but in most respects the same as ever. As beautiful as ever.

Then finally sunset stained the hazy air, and the monumental clouds to the east, clouds which now covered the cliff face. They got up and sponged down, and ate a meal, and dressed and sat in the drivers’ seats, getting nervous again as the quartz sun disappeared and the stormy twilight fell away.

2

In the dark the wind was sheer noise, and an irregular trembling of the rover on its stiff shock absorbers. Gusts buffeted the car so hard that it was sometimes held down against the full crush of the shocks for seconds at a time, the car struggling to rise on the springs and failing, like an animal fighting to free itself from the bottom of a stream. Then the gust would let off and the car would jerk up wildly. “Are we going to be able to walk in this?” Maya asked.

“Hmm.” Michel had been out in some hard blows before, but in the dark one couldn’t be sure if this was worse than those or not. It certainly seemed like it, and the rover anemometer was now registering gusts of 230 kilometers per hour, but in the lee of their little mesa it was unclear whether these represented true maximums or not.