inheritance is tied up in the liaison contract for two more years, until Tadâs eighteen!â
âIt doesnât matter. If weâre living there, you can findsomething youâd like to study, and we can get by on my trust funds.â
âYour mother will say youâre too young.â
âWeâre both young, sure, but a cohabitation liaison is only a five-year contract.â He took my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. âIf you had something you wanted to do, something that didnât include me, I wouldnât have askedâ¦â
âNo,â I said, breathless at the sudden simplicity of it all. Liaising with Witt would get me away from Paul! Perhaps this was simply meant to be. âOf course I donât have other plans!â
It was only at home, later, as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered what heâd said. No concs in university towers. As though his proposal might have been based on that. No. I set the idea aside. Witt was tooâ¦well, too mannerly even to think anything like that. At that moment I also realized that he hadnât said he loved me, but then, I hadnât said I loved him, either.
REMEMBERING MATTY
I donât think about Mars when Iâm awake, but when Iâm half-asleep, I often dream about it: caverns and canyons so huge they could swallow the moon, airlocks everywhere, XT suits for people moving between caverns or outside. XT suits are very expensive. I got Paulâs old suits when he outgrew them, and Taddeus got the ones Iâd outgrown. Sometimes I dream about Tad and Matty and me, but mostly I dream about space. I dream of being alone, with no one else around, just wonderful emptiness going on and on forever.
On Mars, almost everyone lives in caverns cut in the sides of the big canyons, where itâs warmer and wetterâwell, damper, at least. When I was there, Earth embassy was in one of the smaller caverns that housed only a few hundred people. Our home cave was next to the embassy, fairly large, with a room for each of us and a studio for Matty. When I was little, I thought all mothers had studios and made sensories.
Mars food was imported or hydroponic. During a dust storm, dust got through a filter that had been made on Earthmoon by Earth Enterprises, and all the food died. The people got so hungry they rioted against Earth. My father tried to calm them down, which was a mistake. Someone cut his air hose and he died. That was the Great Mars Riot, when I wasnât even a year old, so I donât remember my father, Victor Delis, at all. Matty told me he was a savant, and he spokefifty languages including Zhaar, which was either a fib or an exaggeration because nobody spoke Zhaar except the Zhaar themselves, and none of them were left.
Almost everyone knows the name Joram Bonner. If someone wants to see and hear and smell a windblown willow dropping leaves in rippling water, he buys Joram Bonner the Elderâs âBrook Seriesâ Vista Replication Wall-view, VRW. If someone wants to see the Grand Canyon, hear the shriek of an eagle, see the waterfalls plunging over the rimrock, itâs all there in Joram Bonner IIâs VRW no. 39, Canyon Suites . Vista-reps are partly on-site records and partly reconstructions from other sources including substantive records of similar things on other planets. The VRWs made by our Joram Bonner III, or his father, Joram II, or his grandfather, Joram the Elder, are the only record we have of old forests, lost rivers, vanished prairies; theyâre all we have of old Earth and all most of us will ever see of the far-off worlds. Almost everyone on Earth has at least one vista made by a Bonner, to keep them sane.
Matty had known Joram Bonner since they were children, and theyâd studied art together. Mattyâs work was very different from Joramâs, less realistic, more interpretive and based on her explorations of the Martian gorges. She recorded
âIt doesnât matter. If weâre living there, you can findsomething youâd like to study, and we can get by on my trust funds.â
âYour mother will say youâre too young.â
âWeâre both young, sure, but a cohabitation liaison is only a five-year contract.â He took my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. âIf you had something you wanted to do, something that didnât include me, I wouldnât have askedâ¦â
âNo,â I said, breathless at the sudden simplicity of it all. Liaising with Witt would get me away from Paul! Perhaps this was simply meant to be. âOf course I donât have other plans!â
It was only at home, later, as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered what heâd said. No concs in university towers. As though his proposal might have been based on that. No. I set the idea aside. Witt was tooâ¦well, too mannerly even to think anything like that. At that moment I also realized that he hadnât said he loved me, but then, I hadnât said I loved him, either.
REMEMBERING MATTY
I donât think about Mars when Iâm awake, but when Iâm half-asleep, I often dream about it: caverns and canyons so huge they could swallow the moon, airlocks everywhere, XT suits for people moving between caverns or outside. XT suits are very expensive. I got Paulâs old suits when he outgrew them, and Taddeus got the ones Iâd outgrown. Sometimes I dream about Tad and Matty and me, but mostly I dream about space. I dream of being alone, with no one else around, just wonderful emptiness going on and on forever.
On Mars, almost everyone lives in caverns cut in the sides of the big canyons, where itâs warmer and wetterâwell, damper, at least. When I was there, Earth embassy was in one of the smaller caverns that housed only a few hundred people. Our home cave was next to the embassy, fairly large, with a room for each of us and a studio for Matty. When I was little, I thought all mothers had studios and made sensories.
Mars food was imported or hydroponic. During a dust storm, dust got through a filter that had been made on Earthmoon by Earth Enterprises, and all the food died. The people got so hungry they rioted against Earth. My father tried to calm them down, which was a mistake. Someone cut his air hose and he died. That was the Great Mars Riot, when I wasnât even a year old, so I donât remember my father, Victor Delis, at all. Matty told me he was a savant, and he spokefifty languages including Zhaar, which was either a fib or an exaggeration because nobody spoke Zhaar except the Zhaar themselves, and none of them were left.
Almost everyone knows the name Joram Bonner. If someone wants to see and hear and smell a windblown willow dropping leaves in rippling water, he buys Joram Bonner the Elderâs âBrook Seriesâ Vista Replication Wall-view, VRW. If someone wants to see the Grand Canyon, hear the shriek of an eagle, see the waterfalls plunging over the rimrock, itâs all there in Joram Bonner IIâs VRW no. 39, Canyon Suites . Vista-reps are partly on-site records and partly reconstructions from other sources including substantive records of similar things on other planets. The VRWs made by our Joram Bonner III, or his father, Joram II, or his grandfather, Joram the Elder, are the only record we have of old forests, lost rivers, vanished prairies; theyâre all we have of old Earth and all most of us will ever see of the far-off worlds. Almost everyone on Earth has at least one vista made by a Bonner, to keep them sane.
Matty had known Joram Bonner since they were children, and theyâd studied art together. Mattyâs work was very different from Joramâs, less realistic, more interpretive and based on her explorations of the Martian gorges. She recorded
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