And he dreamed.
He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——
And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented cottage and saying exasperatedly: “Why do you run off by yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——”
And his sisters: “Playing with his wooden swords and his radium pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful books——”
He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of Mars.
And Steinhart: “What is reality, Kimmy?”
The hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.
He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world.
He dreamed of his wife. “You don’t live here, Kim.”