Blue Mars (63 page)

PART
TWELVE

              
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---It
Goes So Fast

              
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They walked down to the the low bluffs overlooking the Florentine.
It was night, the air still and cool, the stars bunched overhead in their
thousands. They strode side by side on the bluff trail, looking down at the
beaches below. The black water was smooth, pricked everywhere by reflected
starlight, and the long smeared line reflecting Pseudophobos setting in the
east, leading the eye to the dim black mass of land across the bay.

I’m worried, yes, very worried. In fact I’m scared.

Why?

It’s Maya. Her mind. Her mental problems. Her emotional problems.
They’re getting worse.

What are the symptoms?

The same, only worse. She can’t sleep at night. She hates the way
she looks, sometimes. She’s still in her manic-depressive cycle, but it’s
changing somehow, I don’t know how to characterize it. As if she can’t always
remember where in the cycle she is. Bouncing around in it. She forgets things,
a lot of things.

We all do.

I know. But Maya is forgetting things that I would have said were
essentially May an. She doesn’t seem to care. That’s the worst part; she
doesn’t seem to care.

I find that hard to imagine.

Me too. Maybe it’s just the depressive part of her mood cycle, now
predominating. But there are days when she loses all affect.

What you call jamais vu?

No, not exactly. She has those incidents too, mind you. Like a
certain kind ofprestroke symptom. I know, I know—I told you, I’m scared. But I
don’t know what this is, not really. She has jamais vus that are like a
prestroke symptom. She has presque vus, where she feels almost on the edge of a
revelation that never comes. That often happens to people in pre-epileptic
auras.

I have feelings like that myself.

Yes, I suppose we all do. Sometimes it seems like things will come
clear, and then the feeling goes away. Yes. But for Maya these are very intense,
as in everything.

Better than the loss of affect.

Oh yes. I agree. Presque vu is not so bad. It’s deja vu that is
the worst, and she has periods of continuous deja vu that can last up to a
week. Those are devastating to her. They rob the world of something she can’t
live without.

Contingency. Free will.

Perhaps. But the net effect of all these symptoms is to drive her
into a state of apathy. Almost catatonia. Tried to avoid any of the abnormal
states by not feeling too much. Not feeling at all.

They say one of the common issei ailments is falling into a funk.

Yes, I’ve been reading about that. Loss ofaffectual function,
anomie, apathy. They’ve been treating it as they would catatonia, or
schizophrenia—giving them a serotonin dopamine complex, limbic stimulants . . .
a big cocktail, as you can imagine. Brain chemistry . . . I’ve been dosing her
with everything I can think of, I must admit, keeping journals, running tests,
sometimes with her cooperation, sometimes without her knowing much about it.
I’ve been doing what I can, I swear I have.

I’m sure you have.

But it isn’t working. She’s losing it. Oh Sax—

He stopped, held on to his friend’s shoulder.

I can’t bear it if she goes. She was always such an airy spirit.
We are earth and water, fire and air. And Maya was always in flight. Such an
airy spirit, flying on her own gales up above us. I can’t stand to see her
falling like this!

Ah well.

They walked on.

It’s nice to have Phobos back again.

Yes. That was a good idea of yours.

It was your idea, actually. You suggested it to me.

Did I? I don’t remember that.

You did.

Below them the sea crunched faintly on rocks.

These four elements. Earth, water, fire, and air. One of your
semantic rectangles?

It’s from the Greeks.

Like the four temperaments?

Yes. Thales made the hypothesis. The first scientist.

But there were always scientists, you told me. All the way back to
the savanna.

Yes, that’s true.

And the Greeks—all honor to them, they were obviously great
minds—but they were only part of a continuum of scientists, you know. There has
been some work done since.

Yes I know.

Yes. And some of that subsequent work might be of use to you, in
these conceptual schemata of yours. In mapping the world for us. So that you
might be given new ways of seeing things that might help you, even with
problems like Maya’s. Because there are more than four elements. A hundred and
twenty, more or less. Maybe there are more than four temperaments as well.
Maybe a hundred and twenty of them, eh? And the nature of these
elements—well—things have gotten strange since the Greeks. You know subatomic
particles have an attribute called spin, that comes only in multiples of one
half? And you know how an object in our visible world, it spins three hundred
and sixty degrees, and is back to its original position? Well, a particle with
a spin designated one half, like a proton or a neutron—it has to rotate through
seven hundred and twenty degrees to get back to its original configuration.

What’s that?

It has to go through a double rotation relative to ordinary
objects, to come back to its starting state.

You’re kidding.

No no. This has been known for centuries. The geometry of space is
simply different for spin one half particles. They live in a different world.

And so. ...

Well, I don’t know. But it seems suggestive to me. I mean, if you
are going to use physical models as analogues for our mental states, and throw
them together in the patterns that you do, then perhaps you ought to be
considering these somewhat newer physical models. To think of Maya as a proton,
perhaps, a spin one half pariicle, living in a world twice as big as ours.

Ah.

And it gets stranger than that. There are ten dimensions to this
world, Michel. Ten. The three of macrospace that we can perceive, the one of
time, and then six more microdimensions, com-pactifted around the fundamental
particles in ways we can describe mathematically but cannot visualize.
Convolutions and topologies. Differential geometries, invisible but real, down
at the ultimate level ofspacetime. Think about it. It could lead to whole new
systems of thought for you. A vast new enlargement of your mind.

I don’t care about my mind. I only care about Maya.

Yes. I know.

They stood looking over the starry water. Over them arched the
dome of stars, and in the silence the air breathed over them, the sea mumbled
below. The world seemed a big place, wild and free, dark and mysterious.

After a time they turned, and began walking back along the trail.

One time I was taking the train from Da Vinci to Sheffield, and
there was some problem with the piste, and we stopped for a while in Underbill.
I got off and took a walk through the old trailer park. And I started
remembering things, fust looking around. I wasn’t really trying. But things
came to me.

A common phenomenon.

Yes, so I understand. But I wonder if it might not help Maya to do
something like that. Not Underhill in particular, but all the places where she
was happy. Where the two of you were happy. You’re living in Sabishii now, but
why not move back to some place like Odessa?

She didn’t want to.

She might have been wrong. Why don’t you try living in Odessa, and
visiting Underhill from time to time, or Sheffield. Cairo. Maybe even Nicosia.
The south-pole cities, Dorsa Brevia. A dive into Burroughs. A train tour of the
Hellas Basin. All that kind of return might help her to stitch her selves
together, to see again where our story began. Where we were formed for good or
ill, in the morning of the world. She might need that whether she knows it or
not.

Hmm.

Arm in arm they walked back to the crater, following a dim track
through dark bracken.

Bless you, Sax. Bless you.

The water of Isidis Bay
was the color of a bruise or a clematis petal, sparkling with
sunlight that glanced off waves just on the verge of whitecapping. The swell
was from the north, and the cabin cruiser pitched and yawed as they motored
northwest from DuMartheray Harbor. A bright day in spring, Ls 51, m-year 79,
A.D. 2181.

Maya sat on the upper deck of the boat, drinking in the sea air
and the flood of blue sunlight. It was a joy to be out on the water like this,
away from all the haze and junk on shore. Wonderful the way the sea could not
be tamed or changed in any way, wonderful how when one got out of the sight of
land one rocked on blue wilderness again, always the same no matter what
happened back there. She could have sailed on, all day every day, and each
slide down the waves a little roller-coaster ride of the soul.

But that wasn’t what they were about. There ahead white-caps broke
over a broad patch, and beside her the boat’s pilot brought the wheel over a
spoke or two, and knocked the throttle down a few rpm. That white water was the
top of Double Decker Butte, now a reef marked by a black buoy, clanging a deep
bongBong, bongBong, bongBong.

Mooring buoys were scattered around this big nautical church bell.
Their pilot steered to the nearest one. There were no other boats anchored
here, or visible anywhere; it was as if they were alone in the world. Michel
came up from below and stood by her, hand on her shoulder as the pilot cut the
throttle, and a sailor in the bow below them reached out with a boat hook and
snagged the buoy, clipped their mooring rope onto it. The pilot killed the
engine and they drifted back on the swells till the mooring line tugged them
short into one swell, with a loud slap and a fan of white spray. They were at
anchor over Burroughs.

Down in the cabin Maya got out of her clothes and pulled on a
flexible orange dry suit: suit and hood, booties, tank and helmet, lastly
gloves. She had only learned to dive for this descent, and every part of it was
still new, except for the sensation of being underwater, which was like the
weightlessness of space. So once she got over the side of the boat and into the
water, it was a familiar feeling: sinking down, pulled by the weight belt,
aware that the water around her was cold, but not feeling it in any real way.
Breathing underwater; that was odd, but it worked. Down into the dark. She let
go and swam down, away from the little pin of sunlight.

Down and down. Past the upper edge of Double Decker Butte, past
its silvered or coppery windows, standing in rows like mineral extrusions or
the one-way mirrors of observers from another dimension. Quickly gone in the
murk, however, and she dream-parachuted down again, down and down. Michel and a
couple others were following her, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see
them. Then a robot trawl shaped like a thick bed frame sank past them all, its
powerful headlights shooting forward long cones of crystalline fluidity, cones
so long that they became one blurry diffuse cylinder, flowing this way and that
as the trawl dipped and bobbed, striking now a distant mesa’s metallic windows,
now the black muck down on the rooftops of the old Nied-erdorf. Somewhere down
there, the Niederdorf Canal had run—there, a gleam of white teeth—the Bareiss
columns, impervious white under their diamond coating, about half-buried in
black sand and muck. She pulled up and kicked her fins back and forth a few
times to stop descending, then pushed a button that shot some compressed air
into one part of her weight belt, to stabilize herself. She floated then over
the canal like a ghost. Yes; it was like Scrooge’s dream, the trawl a kind of
robot Christmas Past, illuminating the drowned world of lost time, the city she
had loved so much. Sudden darts of pain lanced through her ribs; mostly she was
numb to any” feeling. It was too strange, too hard to understand or believe
that this was Burroughs, her Burroughs, now Atlantis at the bottom of a Martian
sea.

Bothered by her lack of feeling, she kicked hard and swam down the
canal park, over the salt columns and farther west.

There on the left loomed Hunt Mesa, where she and Michel had lived
in hiding over a dance studio; then the broad black upslope of Great Escarpment
Boulevard. Ahead lay Princess Park, where in the second revolution she had
stood on a stage and given a speech to a huge throng; the crowd had stood just
below where she was floating now. Over there—that was where she and Nirgal had
spoken. Now the black bottom of a bay. All of that, so long ago—her life— They
had cut open the tent and walked away from the city, they had flooded it and
never looked back. Yes, no doubt Michel was right, this dive was a perfect
image of the murky processes of memory; and maybe it would help to see it; and
yet... Maya felt her numbness, and doubted it. The city was drowned, sure. But
it was still here. Anytime they wanted to someone could rebuild the dike and
pump out this arm of the bay, and there the city would be again, drenched and
steaming in the sunlight, safely enclosed in a polder as if it were some town
in the Netherlands; wash down the muddy streets, plant streetgrass and trees,
clean out the mesa interiors, and the houses and the shops down in the
Niederdorf, and up the broad boulevards—polish the windows—and there you would
have it all again—Burroughs, Mars, on the surface and gleaming. It could be
done; it even made sense, almost, given how much excavation there had been in
the nine mesas, given that Isidis Bay had no other good harbor. Well, no one
would ever do it. But it could be done. And so it was not really like the past
at all.

Numb, and feeling more and more chill, Maya shot more air into the
weight belt, turned and swam back up the length of Canal Park, back toward the
light trawl. Again she spotted the row of salt columns, and something about
them drew her. She kicked down to them, then swam just over the black sand,
disturbing the rippled surface with the downdraft from her fins. The rows of
Bareiss columns had bracketed the old canal. They looked more tumbledown than
ever now that their symmetricality was ruined by half burial. She remembered
taking afternoon walks in the park, west into the sun, then back, with the
light pouring past them. It had been a beautiful place. Down among the great
mesas it had been like being in a giant city of many cathedrals.

There beyond the columns was a row of buildings. The buildings
were the anchoring point for a line of kelp; long trunks rose from their roofs
into the murk, their broad leaves undulating gently in a slow current. There
had been a cafe in the front of that end building, a sidewalk cafe, partly
shaded by a trellis covered with wisteria. The last salt column served as a
marker, and Maya was sure of her identification.

She swam laboriously into a standing position, and a time came
back to her. Frank had shouted at her and run off, no rhyme or reason as usual
with him. She had dressed and followed him, and found him here hunched over a
coffee. Yes. She had confronted him and they had argued right there, she had
berated him for not hurrying up to Sheffield ... she had knocked a coffee cup
off the table, and the handle had broken off and spun on the ground. Frank got
up and they walked away arguing, and went back to Sheffield. But no, no. That
wasn’t how it had been. They had quarreled, yes, but then made up. Frank had
reached across the table and held her hand, and a great black weight had lifted
off her heart, giving her a brief moment of grace, of being in love and being
loved.

One or the other. But which had it been?

She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t be sure. So many fights with
Frank, so many reconciliations; both could have happened. It was impossible to
keep track, to remember what had happened when. It was all blurring together in
her mind, into vague impressions, disconnected moments. The past, disappearing
entirely. Small noises, like an animal in pain—ah—that was her throat. Mewling,
sobbing. Numb and yet sobbing, it was absurd. Whatever had happened then, she
just wanted it back. “Fuh.” She couldn’t say his name. It hurt, as if someone
had stuck a pin in her heart. Ah—that was feeling, it was! It couldn’t be
denied; she was gasping with it, it hurt so. One couldn’t deny it.

She pumped the fins slowly, floated off the sand, up away from the
rooftops anchoring their kelp. Sitting miserably at that cafe table, what would
they have thought if they had known that a hundred and twenty years later she
would be swimming overhead, and Frank dead all that time?

End of a dream. Disorientation, of a shift from one reality to
another. Floating in the dark water brought back some of the numbness. Ah but
there it was, that pinprick pain, there inside, encysted—insisted—hold on to it
forever, hold on to any feeling you can, any feeling you can dredge up out of
all that muck, anything! Anything but the numbness; sobbing in pain was rapture
compared to that.

And so Michel was proved right again, the old alchemist. She
looked around for him; he had swum off on voyages of his own. Quite some time
had passed, the others were making their rendezvous in the cone of light before
the trawl, like tropical fish in a dark cold tank, drawn to the light in hopes
of warmth. Dreamy slow weightlessness. She thought of John, floating naked
against black space and crystal stars. Ah—too much to feel. One could only
stand a single shard of the past at a time; this drowned city; but she had made
love to John here too, in a dorm somewhere in the first years—to John, to Frank,
to that engineer whose name she could seldom recall, no doubt to others
besides, all forgotten, or almost; she would have to work on that. Encyst them
all, precious stabs of feeling held in her forever, till death did they part.
Up, up, up, among the colorful tropical fish with their arms and their legs,
back into the light of day, blue sunlight, ah God yes, ears popping, a
giddiness perhaps of nitrogen narcosis, rapture of the deep. Or the rapture of
human depth, the way they lived and lived, giants plunged through the years,
yes, and what they held on to. Michel was swimming up from below, following
her; she kicked then waited, waited, clasped him and squeezed hard, ah, how she
loved the other’s solidity in her arms, that proof of reality, she squeezed thinking
thank you Michel you sorcerer of my soul, thank you Mars for what endures in
us, drowned or encysted though it may be. Up into the glorious sun, into the
wind, strip off the suit with cold clumsy fingers, pull it off and step out of
it chrysalislike, careless of the power of the female nude over the male eye,
then suddenly aware of it, give them that startling vision of flesh in the
sunlight, sex in the afternoon, breathe deep in the wind, goose-pimpling all
over with the shock of being alive. “I’m still Maya,” she insisted to Michel,
teeth chattering; she hugged her breasts and toweled off, luxury of terry cloth
on wet skin. She pulled on clothes, whooped at the chill of the wind. Michel’s
face was the image of happiness, the deification, that mask of joy, old
Dionysius, laughing aloud at the success of his plan, at the rapture of his
friend and companion. “What did you see?” “The cafe—the park—the canal—and
you?” “Hunt Mesa—the dance studio—Thoth Boulevard—Table Mountain.” In the cabin
he had a bucket of champagne on ice, and he popped the cork and it shot off
into the wind and landed lightly on the water, then floated off on the blue
waves.

But she refused to say any more about it. She would not tell the
story of her dive. The others did and then it was her turn, somehow, and the
people on the boat were looking at her like vultures, eager to gulp down her
experiences. She drank her champagne and sat silently on the upper deck,
watching the broad-sloped waves. Waves looked odd on Mars, big and sloppy,
impressive. She gave Michel a look to let him know she was all right, that he
had done well to send her under. Beyond that, silence. Let them have their own
experiences to feed on, the vultures.

The boat returned to DuMartheray Harbor, which consisted of a
little crescent of marina-platted water, curving under part of the apron .of
DuMartheray Crater. The slope of the apron was covered with buildings and
greenery, right up to the rim.

They disembarked and walked up through the town, had dinner in a
rim restaurant, watching sunset flare over the water of Isidis Bay. The evening
wind fell down the escarpment and whistled offshore, holding the waves up and
tearing spray off their tops, in white plumes crossed by brief rainbow arcs.
Maya sat next to Michel, and kept a hand on his thigh or shoulder. “Amazing,”
someone said, “to see the row of salt columns still gleaming down there.”

“And the rows of windows in the mesas! Did you see that broken
one? I wanted to go in and look, but I was afraid.”

Maya grimaced, concentrated on the moment. People across the table
were talking to Michel about a new institute concerning the First Hundred and
other early colonists— some kind of museum, a repository of oral histories,
committees to protect the earliest buildings from destruction, etc., also a
program to provide help for superelderly early settlers. Naturally these
earnest young men (and young men could be so earnest) were particularly
interested in Michel’s help, and in finding and somehow enlisting all of the
First Hundred left alive; twenty-three now, they said. Michel was of course
perfectly courteous, and indeed seemed truly interested in the project.

Maya couldn’t have hated the idea more. A dive into the wreckage
of the past, as a kind of smelling salts, repellent but invigorating—fine. That
was acceptable, even healthy. But to fix on the past, to focus on it;
disgusting. She would have happily tossed the earnest young men over the rail.
Meanwhile Michel was agreeing to interview all the remaining First Hundred, to help
the project get started. Maya stood up and went to the rail, leaned against it.
Below on the darkening water luminous plumes of spray were still blowing off
the top of every wave.