‘You must eat,’ she said. ‘You’re weak.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He took a sandwich, opened it, looked at it, and began to nibble at it.
‘And take the rest of the day off,’ she said. ‘It’s hot. The children want to swim in the canals and hike. Please come along.’
‘I can’t waste time. This is a crisis!’
‘Just for an hour,’ she urged. ‘A swim’ll do you good.’
He rose, sweating. ‘All right, all right. Leave me alone. I’ll come.’
‘Good for you, Harry.’
The sun was hot, the day quiet. There was only an immense staring burn upon the land. They moved along the canal, the father, the mother, the racing children in their swimsuits. They stopped and ate meat sandwiches. He saw their skin baking brown. And he saw the yellow eyes of his wife and his children, their yes that were never yellow before. A few tremblings shook him, but were carried off in waves of pleasant heat as he lay in the sun. He was too tired to be afraid.
‘Cora, how long have your eyes been yellow?’
She was bewildered. ‘Always, I guess.’
‘They didn’t change from brown in the last three months?’
She bit her lips. ‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘Never mind.’
They sat there.
‘The children’s eyes,’ he said. ‘They’re yellow, too.’
‘Sometimes growing children’s eyes change colour.’
‘Maybe we’re children, too. At least to Mars. That’s a thought.’ He laughed. ‘Think I’ll swim.’
They leaped into the canal water, and he let himself sink down and down to the bottom like a golden statue and lie there in green silence. All was water, quiet and deep, all was peace. He felt the steady, slow current drift him easily.
If I lie here long enough, he thought, the water will work and eat away my flesh until the bones show like coral. Just my skeleton left. And then the water can build on that skeleton – green things, deep-water things, red things, yellow things. Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change. And isn’t that what it is up there?
He saw the sky submerged above him, the sun made Martian by atmosphere and time and space.
Up there, a big river, he thought, a Martian river, all of us lying deeep in it, in our pebble houses, in our sunken boulder houses, like crayfish hidden, and the water washing away our old bodies and lengthening the bones and –
He let himself drift up through the soft light.
Tim sat on the edge of the canal, regarding his father seriously.
‘Utha,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked his father.
The boy smiled. ‘You know. Utha’s the Martian word for “father”.’
‘Where did you learn it?’
‘I don’t know. Around. Utha!’
‘What do you want?’