For a while they sat together in her café— quite a little reunion of the First Thirty-nine, as it turned out: she and Michel and Spencer, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and Yeli Zudov and Mary Dunkel, who had slipped out of Sabishii a month after the shutdown, and Mikhail Yangel, up from Dorsa Brevia, and Nadia, down from South Fossa. Ten of them. “A decimation,” Mikhail noted. They ordered bottle after bottle of vodka, as if they could drown the memory of the other ninety, including their poor farm crew, who at best had just disappeared on them again, and at worst had been murdered. The Russians among them, strangely in the majority that night, began to offer up all the old toasts from home. Let’s pig up! Let’s get healthier! Let’s pour behind the cellar! Let’s get glassed! Let’s get fucked! Let’s fill the eyes with it! Let’s lick it out! Let’s wet the back of the throat! Let’s buy for three! Let’s suck it, pour it, knock it, grab it, beat it, flog it, swing it— and so on and so on, until Michel and Mary and Spencer were looking amazed and appalled. It’s like Eskimos and snow, Mikhail told them.

And then they went back out to dance, the ten of them forming a line of their own, weaving dangerously through the crowds of youngsters. Fifty long Martian years, and still they survived, still they danced! It was a miracle!

But as always in the all-too-predictable fluctuation of Maya’s moods, there came that stall at the top, that sudden downturn— tonight, begun as she noticed the drugged eyes behind the other masks, saw how everyone was on their way out, doing their best to escape into their own private world, where they didn’t have to connect with anyone except that night’s lover. And they were no different. “Let’s go home,” she said to Michel, who was still bouncing along before her in time to the bands, enjoying the sight of all the lean Martian youngsters. “I can’t stand this.”

But he wanted to stay, and so did the others, and in the end she went home by herself, through the gate and the garden and up the stairs to their apartment. The noise of the celebration was loud behind her.

And there on the cabinet over the sink the young Frank smiled at her distress. Of course it goes this way, the youth’s intent look said. I know this story too— I learned it the hard way. Anniversaries, marriages, happy moments— they blow away. They’re gone. They never meant a thing. The smile tight, fierce, determined; and the eyes . . . it was like looking in the windows of an empty house. She knocked a coffee cup off the counter and it broke on the floor; the handle spun there and she cried out loud, sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.

• • •