But what had he been like, really? Or rather, why had he been that way? Was there ever any explaining why they were themselves? There was so little she knew about him before they had met: a whole life back there in America, an incarnation that she had not seen. The bulky dark man she had met in Antarctica— even that person was almost lost to her, overlaid by everything that had happened on the Ares, and on Mars. But before that nothing, or next to nothing. He had headed NASA, got the Mars program off the ground, no doubt with the same corrosive style he had exhibited in later years. He had been married briefly, or so she seemed to recall. What had that been like? Poor woman. Maya smiled. But then she heard Marina’s tiny voice again, saying, “If Frank hadn’t killed John,” and she shuddered. She stared at the lectern in her lap. The Japanese passengers at the front of the car were singing a song, a drinking song apparently, as they had a flask out and were passing it around. Jarry-Desloges was behind them now, and they were gliding along the northern rim of the Iapygia Sink, an oval depression that they could see a fair way across before the horizon cut it off. The depression was saturated with craters, and now inside each ring was a slightly separate ecology; it was like looking down into a bombed florist’s shop, the baskets scattered everywhere and mostly broken, but here a basket of yellow tapestry, there of pink palimpsest, of whitish or bluish or green Persian carpets. . . .

She tapped on her lectern, and typed out Chalmers.

It was an immense bibliography: articles, interviews, books, videos, a whole library of his communiqués to Earth, another library of commentaries, diplomatic, historical, biographical, psychological, psychobiographical— histories, comedies, and tragedies, in every medium, including, apparently, an opera. Meaning some villainous coloratura was down there on Earth, singing her thoughts.

She clicked off the lectern, appalled. After a few minutes of deep breathing she clicked it back on, and called up the file. She couldn’t bear to look at any video or still images; she went for the shortest biographical articles in print, from popular magazines, and called one up at random and began to read.

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