Blue Mars (51 page)

“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured
tentatively, to see what Michel would say.

“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking—it’s a very persistent
form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of
our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns,
as in Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I
suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly
insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream
of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’—and within a week
everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus
with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”

But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.

And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good
sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko
greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her
disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events
might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he
had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just
as it had happened, every detail vivid!

But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment
of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost
tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember,
for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the
details.

He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of
madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of
them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one
life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come
to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their
time, did not know how to construct a life.

Well—still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs.
There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As
Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were
full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in
the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was
lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old
friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they
were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of
struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite
and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been
trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.

“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to
speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss
him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if
it were something—good. See how beautiful it is—in its own way. In itself, the
way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too
complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try
to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere.... It’s self-organizing.
There’s nothing unnatural about it.”

“Well. ...” Michel demurred.

“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the
sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”

“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann
treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”

“Life?”

“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An
areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own
kind of slow consciousness?”

“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.

“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define
it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”

“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a
baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as
dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello,
rock. What are you thinking? “I mean—here it all is. Still here.”

“But not the same.”

“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything
changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m
automatically opposed to mysticism, but still. . ..”

Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still
Sax.”

“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic
either.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a ... such a pure scientist
that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to
put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of
what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it
up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”

“You always want to know.”

“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than
anything else I can think of! Truly.”

“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re
both crazy!”

They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right
through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.

PART
TEN

              
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---Werteswandel

              
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It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser
went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his
colleagues stood around a table covered with hand-screens.

From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium
and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode
and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million
kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very
short-lived.”

“A matter of nanoseconds.”

“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is
released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by
your electromagnetic fields—there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your
passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the
collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged
particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled minor
apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the
fusion products.”

“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.

“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”

“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s
three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a
thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and
six-fifty for the device and fuel—then you have to burn three hundred and
seventy-three grams a second.”

“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”

“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too.
The trips are short.”

“And these spheres are how big?”

The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine
grams. So we bum twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to
give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”

“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”

The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting
it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that
surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well.
But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”

“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”

“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be
adjusted, of course.”

“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and
decelerate for the second half of the trip.”

The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no.
You only need to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips
you should coast through the middle, to save fuel.”

The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.

The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically.
Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to
Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It
will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century.
Train trips. Ocean liners.”

The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with
people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”

The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Cen-tauri.
Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet
says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.”He raised his cup.
“Cheers.”

Nirgal got in a rhythm
and kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of running,
running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as
Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two
fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a
pilgrim, half worshiper half god.

A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out
running around. Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the
Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmari-neris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in
between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake.
For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or
focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was
running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian
neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords
shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact
but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even
though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear it. He only ran.

It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every
other perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or
west around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of
everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and
drink and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty
degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they
left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges
Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive,
and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the
race in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding
ability rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell
runners to be in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive
extravagance, and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him
with the plan of passing him at the end. But each year he took a different
route, and often he made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers
gave up and took off in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the
pace over the two hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000
kilometers—it required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to
sustain it as a way of life. Running every day.

Nirgal liked it. He wanted to win the next Round-the-Worlder, to
have won a majority of the first ten. He was out researching the route,
checking new trails. Many new paths were being built every year, there had been
a craze recently to inlay staircase trails in the sides of the canyon cliffs
and dorsa and escarpments that everywhere seamed the outback. The trail he was
on now had been constructed since he had last been in this area; it dropped
down the steep cliff wall of a sink in the Aromatum Chaos, and there was a
matching trail on the opposite wall of the sink. Going straight through
Aromatum would add a fair bit of verti-cality to a run, but all flatter routes
had to swing far to north or south, and Nirgal thought that if all the trails
were as good as this one, the cost in elevation might turn out to be worth it.

The new trail occupied angled cracks in the blocky cliff wall, the
steps fitted like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and very regular, so that it
was like running down a staircase in the ruined wall of some giant’s castle.
Cliffside trailmaking was an art, a lovely form of work that Nirgal had joined
from time to time, helping to move cut rocks with a crane, to wedge them into
position on top of the step below—hours in a belay harness, pulling on the thin
green lines with gloved hands, guiding big polygons of basalt into place. The
first trail builder Nirgal had met had been a woman constructing a trail along
the finback of the Geryon Montes, the long ridge on the floor of lus Chasma. He
had helped her all of one summer, down most of the ridge. She was still in
Marineris somewhere, constructing trails with her hand tools and high-powered
rock saws, and pulley systems with superstrong line, and glue bolts stronger
than the rock itself—painstakingly assembling a sidewalk or staircase from the
surrounding rock, some trails like miraculously helpful natural features,
others like Roman roads, others still with a pharaonic or Incan massiveness,
huge blocks fitted with hairline precision across boulder slopes or
large-grained chaos.

Down three hundred steps, counting, then across the sink floor in
the hour before sunset, the strip of sky a velvet violet glowing over dark
cliff walls. No trail here on the shadowed sand of the sink floor, and he
focused on the rocks and plants scattered over it, running between things, his
glance caught by light-colored flowers on top of round-barreled cacti, glowing
like the sky. His body was also glowing, with the end of the day’s run, and the
prospect of dinner, his hunger a gnawing from within, a faintness, getting more
unpleasant by the minute.

He found the staircase trail on the western cliff wall, up and up,
changing gears into the uphill push stride, smooth and regular, turning left
and right with the switchbacks, admiring the elegant placement of the trail in
the crack system of the cliff, a placement that usually had him running with a
waist-high wall of rock on the air side, except during the ascent of one bare
sheer patch of rock, where the builders had been forced to the extremity of
bolting in a solid magnesium ladder. He hurried up it, feeling his quadriceps
like giant rubber bands; he was tired.

On a plinth to the left of the staircase there was a flat patch
with a great view of the long narrow canyon below. He turned off the trail and
stopped running. He sat down on a rock like a chair. It was windy; he popped
his little mushroom tent, and it stood before him transparent in the dusk.
Bedding, lamp, lectern, all pulled hastily from his fanny pack in the search
for food, all burnished by years of use, and as light as feathers—his gear kit
altogether weighed less than three kilos. And there they were in their place at
the back, battery-powered stove and food bag and water bottle.

The twilight passed in Himalayan majesty as he cooked a pot of
powdered soup, sitting cross-legged on his sleeping pad, leaning back against
the tent’s clear wall. Tired muscles feeling the luxury of sitting down.
Another beautiful day.

He slept poorly that night, and got up in the predawn cold wind,
and packed up quickly, shivering, and ran west again. Out of the last Aromatum
jumbles he came to the northern shore of Ganges Bay. The dark blue plate of the
bay lay to his left as he ran. Here the long beaches were backed by wide sand
dunes, covered by short grass that made for easy running. Nirgal flowed on, in
his rhythm, glancing at the sea or into the taiga forest off to the right.
Millions of trees had been planted along this coastline in order to stabilize
the ground and cut down on dust storms. The great forest of Ophir was one of the
least populated regions on Mars; it had been rarely visited in the earlier
years of its existence, and had never been host to a tent town; deep deposits
of dust and fines had discouraged travel. Now these deposits were somewhat
fixed by the forest, but bordering the streams were swamps and quicksand lakes,
and unstable loess bluffs that caused breaks in the lattice roof of branches
and leaves. Nirgal kept to the border of forest and sea, on the dunes or among
stands of smaller trees. He crossed several small bridges spanning river
mouths. He spent a night on the beach, lulled to sleep by the sound of breaking
waves.

The next day at dawn he followed the trail under the canopy of
green leaves, the coast having stopped at the Ganges Chasma dam. The light was
dim and cool. Everything at this hour looked like a shadow of itself. Faint
trails branched off uphill to the left. The forest here was conifer for the
most part: redwoods in tall groves, surrounded by smaller pines and junipers.
The forest floor was covered by dry needles. In wet places ferns broke through
this brown mat, adding their archaic fractals to the sun-dappled floor. A
stream braided among narrow grassy islands. He could rarely see more than a
hundred meters ahead. Green and brown were the dominant colors; the only red
visible was the tint of the redwoods’ hairy bark. Shafts of sunlight like
slender living beings danced over the forest floor. Nirgal ran outside himself,
mesmerized as he passed among these pencils of light. He skipped on rocks across
a shallow creek, in a fern-floored glade. It was like crossing a room, with
hallways extending to similar rooms upstream and down. A short waterfall
gurgled to his left.

He stopped for a drink from the far side of the creek. Then as he
straightened up he saw a marmot, waddling over moss under the waterfall. He
felt a quick stab to the heart. The marmot drank and then washed its paws and
face. It did not see Nirgal.

Then there was a rustle and the marmot ran, was buried in a flurry
of spotted fur—white teeth—a big lynx, pinning the marmot’s throat in powerful
jaws, shaking the little creature hard, then pressing it still under a big paw.

Nirgal had jumped at the moment of attack, and now as the lynx
stood over its prey it looked in Nirgal’s direction, as if just now registering
the movement. Its eyes glittered in the dim light, its mouth was bloody; Nirgal
shuddered, and when the cat saw him and their gazes locked, he saw it running
at him and jumping on him, its pointed teeth bright even in the dim light—

But no. It disappeared with its prey, leaving only a bobbing fern.

Nirgal ran on. The day was darker than the cloud shadow could
explain, a malign dimness. He had to focus on the trail. Light flickered
through the shadows, white piercing green. Hunter and hunted. Ice-rimmed ponds
in the gloom. Moss on bark, fern patterns in his peripheral vision. Here a
gnarly pile of bristlecone pines, there a pit of quicksand. The day was chill,
the night would be frigid.

He ran all day. His pack bounced against his back, nearly empty of
food. He was glad he was nearing his next cache. Sometimes on runs he took only
a few handfuls of cereal and lived off the land as best he could, gathering
pine nuts and fishing; but on trips of that kind half of every day had to be
spent in the search for food, and there wasn’t much to be found. When the fish
were biting a lake was an incredible cornucopia. Lake people. But on this run
he was going full tilt from cache to cache, eating seven or eight thousand
calories a day, and still ravenous every evening. So when he came to the little
arroyo containing his next cache, and found the arroyo’s side wall collapsed in
a landslide over it, he shouted with dismay and anger. He even dug for a while
at the pile of loose rock; it was a small slide; but a couple of tons would
have to be removed. No chance. He would have to run hard across Ophir to the
next cache, and go hungry. He took off in the very moment of realization,
thinking to save time.

Now he looked for edible things as he ran, pine nuts, meadow
onions, anything. He ate the food left in his pack very slowly, chewing it for
as long as he could, trying to imagine it to some higher level of nutrient
value. Savoring every bite. Hunger kept him awake part of every night, though
he slept heavily through the hours before dawn.

On the third day of this unexpected hunger run he emerged from the
forest just south of Juventa Chasma, in land broken by the ancient Juventa
aquifer outbreak. It was a lot of work to make his way through this land on a
clean line, and he was hungrier than he could ever remember being; and his next
cache still two days away. His body had eaten all its fat reserves, or so it
felt, and was now feeding on the muscles themselves. This autocannibalism gave
every object a sharp edge, tinged with glories—the whiteness shining out of
things, as if reality itself were going translucent. Soon after this stage, as
he knew from similar past experiences, the lung-gom-pa state would give way to
hallucinations. Already there were lots of crawling worms in his eyes, and
black dots, and circles of little blue mushrooms, and then green lizardlike
things scurrying along in the sand, right before the blurs of his feet, for
hours at a time.

It took all the thought he could muster to navigate the broken
land. He watched the rock underfoot and the land ahead equally, head up and
down and up and down, in a bobbing motion that had little to do with his
thinking, which browsed over near and far in an entirely different rhythm. The
Juventa Chaos, downhill to his right, was a shallow jumbled depression, over
which he could see to a distant horizon; it was like looking into a big
shattered bowl. Ahead the land was rumpled and uneven, pits and hillocks
covered with boulders and sand drifts, the shadows too dark, the sunlit
highlights too bright. Dark yet glary; it was near sunset again, and his pupils
were pinched by the light. Up and down, up and down; he came on an ancient dune
side, and glissaded down the sand and scree, a dreamy descent, left, right,
left, each step carrying him down a few meters, feet cushioned by sand and
gravel shoved off the angle of repose. All too easy to get used to that; once
on flat ground again it was hard work to return to honest jogging, and the next
little uphill was devastating. He would have to look for a campsite soon,
perhaps in the next hollow, or on the next sandy flat next to a rock bench. He
was starving, faint with lack of food, and nothing in his pack but some meadow
onions pulled earlier; but it would help to be so tired, he would fall asleep
no matter what. Exhaustion beat hunger every time.