After the guards closed the door behind her, I got up, pacing the room with my hands clasped behind my back. At the Leonardo screen, I stopped and stared. Not at the sketch, but at the reflection of the man looking at it. It had been three days since I’d left the room, and I still struggled to recognize my reflection as my own. I wondered how many people, roughly, went through years without a mirror. Very few, I thought, though I personally knew almost three dozen.
Even with my hair barbered, my scrub-brush beard shaved away, I looked feral. Somewhere during my years in the room, I’d developed jowls. Little sacks of skin puffed under my eyes, a shade darker and bluer than the brown of my cheeks. I had gray hair now, which I’d known intellectually, but seeing it now felt shocking. Quintana’s attacks on me had left no marks. Even the knife wound, cared for by the station’s medical expert system, would leave no scar. Time had done me immeasurably more damage, as it did with everyone. If I squinted, I could still make out traces of the man I thought of when I pictured myself. But only traces. I wondered how Alberto had been able to bring himself to fuck the tired old man in my reflection. But, I supposed, beggars and choosers.
That I would not return to the room seemed a given now. They had not sent me back there, had given me new clothes, new quarters. Even Brown, during his long interrogations, hadn’t been allowed to shave. My naked, white-stubbled chin bore witness to the fact that I’d surpassed him. For the first day, I’d proudly marched out my egg hypothesis for one person, then another, then another, then the first again. Then they gave me a read-only access file that covered the years I had been gone. Two thousand pages, and I read it with the kind of longing and jealousy I imagined of someone following the career of an estranged child. From the uncanny transit of Eros to the surface of Venus to the creation of the ring gate to the discovery and activation of more than a thousand other gates that opened to a thousand empty solar systems, it filled me with wonder and joy and the bone-deep regret that I hadn’t been there to see it happen.
I dropped the egg theory and took up my more natural hypothesis of the gate. They thought they’d given me a cheat sheet, a way to pass myself off as better than I was for the Martian. I wasn’t concerned with what they thought. If they considered me a fool, it still wouldn’t be less than I thought of them. I could only hope that the negotiation between the Belters and Mars went well. My fate was in their hands, as it had been for years now.
The door opened and Michio Pa returned. The Martian was at her side. The same unfortunate skin, the same nut-brown hair. My heart beat with a violence that left me short of breath, and for a long moment I feared that something dire and medical was happening.
“Dr. Cortázar?” the Martian said.
“Yes,” I said, rushing toward him too quickly, pushing my hand out before me like the unfounded presumption of intimacy. “Yes, I am. That’s me.”
The Martian smiled coolly, but he shook my hand. No physical contact had ever been more electric.
“I understand you’ve made some sense of our ring gates?”
Michio Pa, at his side, nodded as if unconsciously prompting me.
“Not in exhaustive depth,” I said. “But I have the broad strokes.”
When he replied, it was like a punch in the gut. “Why did you lie to us at first?”
“About?” I asked, trying to buy time.
He smiled, though the expression had no humor. “You had to know that every sound in that holding cell is monitored and recorded.”
No. I hadn’t known that. Though in hindsight it seemed obvious.
He continued. “You deliberately fed Dr. Brown a false story about your analysis, then at the last minute gave him the correct version. I’d like to understand why.”
“I rethought my…” I began, then trailed off when I saw the knowing look in his eye.
“You were gaming him,” the Martian said. “Manipulating him to try to secure your position. Incorrectly believing that we would be traded the least valuable prisoner.”
The way he said it was not a question, but I found myself nodding anyway.
“The fact that he didn’t spot your falsified conclusions in the data,” the Martian continued, “is the reason you’re here. So, I suppose, your plan failed its way to success.”
“Thank you,” I replied inanely.
“Be aware that we know exactly what you are, what tactics you favor, and will not tolerate this behavior in the future. The consequences of failing to understand this fact of your future existence would be extreme.”
“I understand,” I said, and it was the truth. Something in my expression seemed to please him, and he relaxed a little.
“I am developing something of a private task force to examine the data that’s coming in from the initial probes that have gone through to the other side of the ring gate. Your experience with the initial discovery puts you in a rare position. I’d like you to join us. It won’t be freedom. That was never in cards. But it won’t be here, and it will be work.”
“I don’t need freedom,” I said.
His smile held an echo of sorrow I couldn’t parse. I wondered if Alberto would have known what it meant. The Martian clapped my shoulder and a wave of relief lifted me up.
“Come with me, Doctor,” he said. “I have some things to show you.”
I offered silent thanks to whatever imaginary God was listening and let the Martian lead me to this wide new universe, opening before me.
I did let myself wonder how the room would be without me. Whether Brown would ever understand how I’d outplayed him. Whether Alberto would take another lover. How many years would stretch out before Fong and Navarro gave up hope that I would somehow come back for them all. Questions I did not expect ever to answer, because in the end I didn’t actually care.
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