The Mating of the Moons

SHE CAME TO MARS IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING, SHE KNEW NOT WHAT, TO GIVE HER LIFE MEANING. SHE FOUND IT ... IN A WAY....
The sun glared, fiercely detached. The thin air suddenly seemed friendless, empty, a vast lake of poison and glassy water. All at once, the stretching plains of sand began to waver with a terrible insubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes.
Even the Ruins of Taovahr were false. And for Madeleine, even if they were not false, there was no sign of the outer garments of dream with which, on a thousand lonely nights back home on the Earth, she had clothed those dusty scattered skeletons of crumbled stone.
Don, one of the brightest and most handsomely uniformed of all the bright young guide-hosts at Martian Haven, droned on to the finish of his machine-tooled lecture about the Ruins of Taovahr. He, of course, was the biggest chunk of falseness on Mars.
And so folks, this is all that's left of a once great civilization. A few columns and worn pieces of stone. And we can never know now how they lived and loved and died—for no trace whatsoever of an ancient people remain. The dim, dark seas of time have swept their age-old secrets into the backwash of eternity—
Oh God, whispered Madeleine.
Shhhh! said her father. And her mother blinked at her with a resigned tolerance.
But he's a living cliche, she said, trying to control the faintness, the dizziness, the dullness coming back as the last illusion drained away. Even if the ruins were real, he'd make them seem trite.
Madeleine! her mother gasped, but in a subdued way.
But there ought to be something special about a Martian ruin, Mother.
Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, as all good hosts were to rich tourists. You're hard to please, Miss Ericson. Maybe too hard. His lingering glance stopped just short of crudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance all women were assumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, as he did everything else—discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.