2312

She had seen the traveling isolatoes, solitary old spacers who made their own way in the world, who were not partnered in any fashion with other people. That was her crowd; she had been one of them herself for more than half her life. Had they all been on the hunt? She recalled something she had heard people say: I want to meet somebody. Meet; they meant “mate.” I want to mate somebody. “Meet” was the future subjunctive of “mate,” in the mood of desire. And when you looked around, you saw it: pair-bonding kept coming back. It was a future conditional tense, a subjunctive verb: to mate somebody, and then meet them. It was an atavistic thing, as if they were swans, or some other creature with a genetic urge to pair off. “Swan is not a swan,” she told her baffled coworkers in the park. But how did she know?

“I want to meet somebody,” she said to Mqaret experimentally.

Mqaret laughed at her. “You like this guy! This person Wahram from Saturn. So maybe what you mean is ‘I’ve met somebody.’ ”

Swan stared at Mqaret. It still hadn’t fully sunk in to her that it was possible to be loved. Or even to love. “But I met him a long time ago. I’ve known him for years now!”

“Even better,” Mqaret said. “You know him. In fact you had to spend a lot of time with him. What happened in that utilidor? Didn’t something happen?”

“We whistled, mostly,” she said. “But yes. Something happened.”

“Maybe that’s what a marriage is,” Mqaret said. “Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.”

“Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth-an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.

At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she?

But wasn’t marriage a promise somehow not to change?

She slogged around in the wetlands and kept on thinking about it. One day a frog the same color as the rocks hopped away from her accidental hand, then sat there staring up at her, alert and curious, calm but ready to leap again. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.” And yet now that she had, it sat there glossier than any rock, alive and breathing.

S he went out on a walkabout. Headed to the north of Terminator’s latitude, into the Tricrena Albedo. Out into the garbled chiaroscuro of the terminator, where sidelong rays of sunlight raked suddenly up the tilting land, blazing so violently that the still-shadowed land appeared blacker than matter. Clashing shards of black and white-her eye could scarcely put the landscape back together again. Just the way she liked it, sometimes. Her schizophrenic life space.

She fell into sunwalker mode, oriented herself by the memorized maps inside her. She knew as she trudged blindly westward that she would soon come over the rise north of Mahler, pass some baked ballardian abandoned space plane runways, then find herself at the top of an escarpment, a little bulging crack in the land, very old, the land above overlooking a two-hundred-meter drop to the plains below. Luckily the escarpment sported a system of tilted ledges that served as a neat staircase down. She had been here before. These Ebersbacher Ledges were often trod by sunwalkers using this route, and had been swept clear of dust and rubble many years before. So it was a broken switchbacking path of clean stone tilts that led her down to the plain beyond. On Mercury the horizon was just the right distance away, she felt; not something you could reach out and touch, but something you could walk to and investigate.