difference between love and sex.”
“Okay. So what’s the difference?”
“Sex is like a fresh steak. It smells great, you salivate, you consume it in a couple of minutes, you’re satisfied, you feel great, and you fall asleep.”
“And love?”
“Love is completely different. Love is like flash-frozen food-it lasts forever. Cold as liquid hydrogen. You take it out when you need it, warm it up. You persuade yourself it’s just as good as sex. People who promote love say it’s even better, but that’s a lie constructed out of necessity. The only thing it’s better than is starving to death.”
“Needs a little work,” Erno said. After a moment he added. “There’s a story in Stories for Men about love.”
“I’d think the stories for men would be about sex.”
“No. There’s no sex in any of them. There’s hardly any women at all. Most of them are about men competing with other men. But there’s one about a rich man who bets a poor young man that hunger is stronger than love. He locks the poor man and his lover in separate rooms with a window between them, for seven days without food. At the end of the seven days they’re starving. Then he puts them together in a room with a single piece of bread.”
“Who eats it?”
“The man grabs it, and is at the point of eating it when he looks over at the woman, almost unconscious from hunger. He gives it to her. She refuses it, says he should have it because he’s more hungry than she is. So they win the bet.”
Tyler laughed. “If it had been a steak, they would have lost.” They continued hiking for a while. “That story isn’t about love. It’s about the poor man beating the rich man.”
Erno considered it. “Maybe.”
“So what have you learned from that book? Anything?”
“Well, there’s a lot of killing-it’s like the writers are obsessed with killing. The characters kill for fun, or sport, or money, or freedom, or to get respect. Or women.”
“That’s the way it was back then, Erno. Men-”
Tyler’s voice was blotted out by a tone blaring over their earphones. After fifteen seconds an AI voice came on:
“SATELLITES REPORT A MAJOR SOLAR CORONAL MASS EJECTION. PARTICLE FLUX WILL BEGIN TO RISE IN TWENTY MINUTES, REACHING LETHAL LEVELS WITHIN THIRTY. ALL PERSONS ON THE SURFACE SHOULD IMMEDIATELY SEEK SHELTER. REFRAIN FROM EXPOSURE UNTIL THE ALL CLEAR SOUNDS.
“REPEAT: A MAJOR SOLAR RADIATION EVENT HAS OCCURRED. ALL PERSONS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY TAKE SHELTER.”
Both of them stopped. Erno scanned the sky, frantic. Of course there was no difference. The sun threw the same harsh glare it always threw. His heart thudded in his ears. He heard Tyler’s deep breaths in his earphones.
“How insulated is this shack?” he asked Tyler. “Can it stand a solar storm?”
Tyler didn’t answer for a moment. “I doubt it.”
“How about the mine? Is there a radiation shelter? Or a tunnel?”
“It was a strip mine. Besides,” Tyler said calmly, “we couldn’t get there in twenty minutes.”
They were more than an hour south of the colony.
Erno scanned the horizon, looking for some sign of shelter. A crevasse, a lava tube-maybe they’d run out of air, but at least they would not fry. He saw, again, the threads of the cable towers to the east.
“The cable line!” Erno said. “It has radiation shelters for the cable cars all along it.”
“If we can reach one in time.”
Erno checked his clock readout. 0237. Figure they had until 0300. He leapt off due east, toward the cable towers. Tyler followed.
The next fifteen minutes passed in a trance, a surreal slow motion broken field race through the dust and boulders toward the pylons to the east. Erno pushed himself to the edge of his strength, until a haze of spots rose before his eyes. They seemed to move with agonizing slowness.
They were 500 meters from the cable pylon. 300 meters. 100 meters. They were beneath it.
When they reached the pylon, Erno scanned in both directions for a shelter. The cable line was designed to dip underground for radiation protection periodically all along the length of its route. The distance between the tunnels was determined by the top speed of the cable car and the amount of advance warning the passengers were likely to get of a solar event. There was no way of telling how far they were from a shelter, or in which direction the closest lay.
“South,” Tyler said. “The colony is the next shelter north, and it’s too far for us to run, so our only shot should be south.”
It was 0251. They ran south, their leaps no longer strong and low, but with a weary desperation to them now. Erno kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. The twin cables stretched above them like strands of spider’s web, silver in the sunlight, disappearing far ahead where the next T pylon stood like the finish line in a race.
The T grew, and suddenly they were on it. Beyond, in its next arc, the cable swooped down to the horizon. They kept running, and as they drew closer, Erno saw that a tunnel opened in the distance, and the cable ran into it. He gasped out a moan that was all the shout he could make.
They were almost there when Erno realized that Tyler had slowed, and was no longer keeping up. He willed himself to stop, awkwardly, almost pitching face first into the regolith. He looked back. Tyler had slowed to a stroll.
“What’s wrong?” Erno gasped.
“Nothing,” Tyler said. Though Erno could hear Tyler’s ragged breath, there was no hurry in his voice.
“Come on!” Erno shouted.
Tyler stopped completely. “Women and children first.”
Erno tried to catch his breath. His clock read 0304. “What?”
“You go ahead. Save your pathetic life.”
“Are you crazy? Do you want to die?”
“Of course not. I want you to go in first.”
“Why?”
“If you can’t figure it out by now, I can’t explain it, Erno. It’s a story for a man.”
Erno stood dumbstruck.
“Come out here into the sunshine with me,” Tyler said. “It’s nice out here.”
Erno laughed. He took a step back toward Tyler. He took another. They stood side by side.
“That’s my man Erno. Now, how long can you stay out here?”
The sun beat brightly down. The tunnel mouth gaped five meters in front of them. 0307. 0309. Each watched the other, neither budged.
“My life isn’t pathetic,” Erno said.
“Depends on how you look at it,” Tyler replied.
“Don’t you think yours is worth saving?”
“What makes you think this is a real radiation alert, Erno? The broadcast could be a trick to make us come back.”
“There have been warnings posted for weeks.”
“That only makes it a more plausible trick.”
“That’s no reason for us to risk our lives-on the chance it is.”
“I don’t think it’s a trick, Erno. I’ll go into that tunnel. After you.”
Erno stared at the dark tunnel ahead. 0311. A single leap from safety. Even now lethal levels of radiation might be sluicing through their bodies. A bead of sweat stung his eye.
“So this is what it means to be a man?” Erno said softly, as much to himself as to Tyler.
“This is it,” Tyler said. “And I’m a better man than you are.”
Erno felt an adrenaline surge. “You’re not better than me.”
“We’ll find out.”
“You haven’t accomplished anything.”
