“Well, now that’s truth.”
“It’s just that they were his.”
The cart was a common electric, wider and tougher than the ones they used on stations. The tires were clear polymer that wouldn’t streak the floors of the corridors. Alex slid into the passenger’s seat, Min taking the controls. They talked about small, domestic things – who in the family was getting married, who was getting divorced, who was moving and where. A surprising number of Min’s siblings were on ships headed for the Ring, and though she didn’t say it outright, he had the sense that she was more interested in hearing about what he’d seen on the other side of it than in him.
They passed down a long access tunnel and then across one of the linking bridges to Bunker Hill. It was the neighborhood where Alex had grown up. His father’s ashes were in the crypt at the synagogue, his mother’s had been scattered over the Ophir Chasmata. The first girl he’d ever kissed had lived in rooms two corridors down from the place Min’s family was in now. His best friend growing up had been an ethnic Chinese boy named Johnny Zhou who’d lived with an older brother and sister on the other side of the canyon.
Driving along the corridors now, the memories flooded him. The curve of the corridor where the Lone Star Sharabaghar had held weekend dance and drinking contests. The time when he was nine that he’d been caught stealing gum from the bodega at the corner of Dallas corridor and Nu Ren Jie. Getting violently sick in the bathrooms at the Alamo Mall Toll Plaza. A thousand things like them probably happened every day. The only thing that made Alex’s experiences different at all was that they were his.
He didn’t recognize for a while what was making him uncomfortable. Like the difference between thrust and planetary gravity, the emptiness of the corridors was almost too subtle to notice at first. Even as Min drove deeper into the neighborhood, it was the lights he noticed, and then the locks. All along the corridors, scattered like a handful of thrown sand, rooms and businesses were closed, the windows dark. That in itself didn’t mean much, but Alex noticed first one, then a few, then – like flowers in a meadow – a sudden spread of the clunky external locks that landlords and security put on doors when the units weren’t in use. He kept up his end of the banter with his cousin, but he started counting as they drove. In the next hundred doors – homes, businesses, maintenance closets, schools – twenty-one weren’t in use.
As Min pulled the cart to a halt at her own doorway, he mentioned it.
“Yup,” she said with a lightness that seemed forced. “Ghost world.”
Somewhere in the years he’d been gone, Talissa had moved. The old rooms they’d had together were in Ballard, tucked in between the naval station and the old water processing plant. According to the local directories, she was in Galveston Shallow now. It wasn’t the neighborhood he’d imagined for her, but things changed. Maybe she’d come into money. He hoped so. Anything that had made her life better, he was in favor of.
The corridors of Galveston Shallow were wide. Half the light came down shafts from the surface, the actual light of the sun strung through a series of transparent shielding to keep the radiation to a minimum. The wide, sloping ceilings gave the place a sense of being natural, almost organic, and the smell of the mechanical air recyclers was nearly hidden by the rich, loamy scents of growing plants. Wide swaths of greenery filled the common areas with devil’s ivy and snake plant. The sorts of things that cranked out a lot of oxygen. The moisture in the air was strange and soothing. This, Alex realized, was the dream of Mars made real, if small. The terraforming project would make the whole planet like this someday, if it worked. Flora and fauna and air and water. Someday, centuries after he was gone, people might walk on the surface of Mars, surrounded by plants like these. Might feel the real sun against their skins.
He was distracting himself. He checked his position on his hand terminal against Tali’s new address. His heart was going faster than usual and he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. He wondered what she’d say, how she’d look at him. Anger or joy would both be justified. Still, he hoped for joy.
His plan – find the place, gather himself, and ring the bell – failed because as soon as he turned the last curve to her rooms, he saw her. She was kneeling in among the plants in the common space, a trowel in one hand. She wore thick canvas work pants smeared with soil and a pale brown shirt with a wealth of pockets and loops for gardener’s tools, most of them empty. Her hair was a rich brown, so free of gray it had to be dyed. Her face was wider, thicker at the cheeks. Time had been kind to her. She wasn’t beautiful. Maybe she’d never been beautiful, but she was handsome and she was Talissa.