4

Certainly, Jane felt miserable around the prisoners. They were always working hard, and she barely had anything to do. For someone like her who was already concerned about the small size of her contribution to her community, such a position was untenable. Jane had often feared that she was simply lazy.

She had never before felt so aware of her dominance over her fellow Martians. In general, Martian society was constructed so that those in power were not confronted with its inequality. It seems that they liked to be powerful without feeling like it was unfair. I believe the true reason for this was a desire to escape culpability. Since birth, Jane had been in many positions of dominance, though she would have been shocked to know it. So when she found herself a free person with nothing to do on an island full of prisoners laboring under duress, it was a dreadfully unpleasant feeling—even if it wasn’t actually that different from the life she had been living before. Jane was an overlord with the heart of an underdog.

So she talked Franklin into letting her join them in the fields. She thought it would be more egalitarian, or at least help her not to feel so guilty. This, of course, was a farce. Not that she couldn’t keep up—her first day, she worked almost frantically, at least twice as hard as anyone else—but it was painfully clear that she was trying to prove something. Everyone knew that she was the wife of the warden, and any pretensions she had to fairness were entirely speculative.

While she was working, or in the mess tent eating with the prisoners, she never said who her husband was, and by noon on the second day of her experiment, she was feeling pleased with herself and what she thought was her secret, too. Then, in the afternoon, a tree was felled, and just before the magnificent moment of its final breaking fall, several prisoners approached her and escorted her out of the area.

‘Can’t have the warden’s wife squished beneath a tree, can we?’ One of them said.

Jane kept at the work for a week, because she didn’t want to be seen as a quitter. But it was clear that no one actually expected her to work, and her presence in the fields was mostly just awkward. And so she stopped. Because it was better to quit than to pretend, and because she could—which was the whole difference anyway.

Still unwilling to accept her position of superiority, Jane imagined that she might use her talents to benefit the prisoners—she needed some way to fill her time. She decided to offer a course of education in poetry, so that those who were interested might better themselves. These lectures were actually quite poorly attended. It seems the ignorant prisoners had no sense of the poetic supernova that was building in their midst.

The point is that she had time on her hands, and this is why I think Ross’s nightly speeches were actually coherent. She must have been helping him.