Blue Mars (69 page)

Off to the west, the rugged peaks of the Hellespontus Montes began
to poke over the waves, distant and small, very different in character from the
smooth northern rise. So they had to be close. Maya climbed up farther in the
shrouds. And there it was, on the rise of the northern slope—the topmost rows
of parks and buildings, all green and white, turquoise and terra-cotta. And
then the big bowed middle of town, like an enormous amphitheater looking down
on the stage of the harbor, which came over the horizon white lighthouse first,
then the statue of Arkady, then the breakwater, then the thousand masts of the
marina, and the jumble of roofs and trees behind the stained concrete of the
corniche seawall. Odessa.

She scampered down the shroud like a crew member, almost, and
hugged a few of them and Michel, feeling herself grin, feeling the wind pour
over them. They came into the harbor and the sails furled into their masts like
touched snails. They puttered into a slip, and walked down a gangplank, and
along the dock, up through the marina and into the corniche park. And there
they were. The blue trolley still clang-clanged on the street behind the park.

Maya and Michel walked down the corniche hand in hand, looking at
all the food vendors and the small outdoor cafes across the street. All the
names seemed new, not a single one the same, but that was restauranteering for
you; they all looked much as they had before, and the city rising up terrace by
terrace behind the seafront was just as they remembered it: “There’s the Odeon,
there’s the Sinter—”

“That’s where I worked for Deep Waters, I wonder what they all do
now?”

“I think maintaining sea level keeps a good number of them busy.
There’s always some kind of water work.”

“True.”

And then they came to the old Praxis apartment building, its walls
now mostly ivy-covered, the white stucco discolored, the blue shutters faded.
In need of a bit of work, as Michel said, but Maya loved it that way: old.
There on the third floor she spotted their old kitchen window and balcony, and
Spencer’s there beside it. Spencer himself was supposed to be inside.

And they went in the gate, and said hello to the new concierge,
and indeed Spencer was inside, sort of: he had died that afternoon.

It shouldn’t have mattered so much
. Maya hadn’t seen Spencer Jackson in
years, she had never seen that much of him, even when he lived next door; never
known him at all well. No one had. Spencer was one of the least comprehensible
of the First Hundred, which was saying a lot. His own man, his own life. And he
had lived as part of the surface world under an assumed identity, a spy,
working for the security gestapo in Kasei Vallis for almost twenty years, until
the night they had blown the town away and rescued Sax, and Spencer as well.
Twenty years as someone else, with a false past, and no one to talk to; what
would that do to one? But then Spencer had always been withdrawn, private,
self-contained. So maybe it hadn’t mattered as much to him. He had seemed all
right in their years in Odessa, always in therapy with Michel of course, and a
very heavy drinker at times; but easy to have as a neighbor, a good friend,
quiet, solid, reliable in his ways. And he certainly had continued to work, his
production with the Bogdanovist designers had never flagged, neither during his
double life or after. A great designer. And his pen sketches were beautiful.
But what would twenty years of duplicity do to you? Maybe all his identities
had become assumed. Maya had never thought about it; she couldn’t imagine it;
and now, packing Spencer’s things in his empty apartment, she wondered that she
had never even tried before—that somehow Spencer had managed to live in such a
way that one did not even wonder about him. It was a very strange
accomplishment. Crying, she said to Michel, “You have to wonder about
everybody!”

He only nodded. Spencer had been one of his best friends.

And then in the next few days an amazing number of people came to
Odessa for the funeral. Sax, Nadia, Mikhail, Zeyk and Nazik, Roald, Coyote,
Mary, Ursula, Marina and Vlad, Jurgen and Sibilla, Steve and Marion, George and
Ed-vard, Samantha, really it was like a convocation of the remaining Hundred
and associated issei. And Maya stared around at all their old familiar faces,
and realized with a sinking heart that they would be meeting like this for a
long time to come. Gathering from around the world each time one fewer, in a
final game of musical chairs, until one day one of them would get a call and
realize they were the last one left. A horrible fate. But not one that Maya
expected to have to endure; she would die before that, surely. The quick
decline would get her, or something else; she would step in front of a trolley
if she had to. Anything to avoid such a fate. Well—not anything. To step in
front of a trolley would be both too cowardly and too brave, at one and the
same time. She trusted she would die before it came to that. Ah, never fear;
death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it. Maybe
the final survivor of the First Hundred wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.
New friends, a new life—wasn’t that what she was searching for now? So that
these sad old faces were just a hindrance to her?

She stood grimly through the short memorial service and the quick
eulogies. Those who spoke looked somewhat perplexed as to what they could say.
A big crowd of engineers had come from Da Vinci, Spencer’s colleagues from his
design years. Clearly a lot of people had been fond of him, it was surprising,
even though Maya had been fond of him herself. Curious that such a hidden man
could evoke such a response. Perhaps they had all projected onto his blank-ness,
made their own Spencer and loved him as part of themselves. They all did that
anyway; that was life.

But now he was gone. They went down to the harbor and the
engineers let loose a helium balloon, and when it reached a hundred meters
Spencer’s ashes began to spill out, in a slow trickle. Part of the haze, the
blue of the sky, the brass of sunset.

In the days that followed the crowd dispersed, and Maya wandered
Odessa nosing through used-furniture shops and sitting on benches on the
corniche, watching the sun bounce over the water. It was lovely to be in Odessa
again, but she felt the funereal chill of Spencer’s death much more than she
would have expected. It cast a pall over even the beauty of this most beautiful
town; it reminded her that in coming back here and moving into the old
building, they were attempting the impossible—trying to go back, trying to deny
time’s passing. Hopeless—everything was passing— everything they did was the
last time they would ever do it. Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them
into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing
lasted. This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came
down to the corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the
last time, and there would again be nothing lasting about it. Last time after
last time, so it would go, on and on, always one final moment after the next,
finality following finality in seamless endless succession. She could not grasp
it, really. Words couldn’t say it, ideas couldn’t articulate it. But she could
feel it, like the edge of a wave front pushing ever outward, or a constant wind
in her mind, rushing things along so fast it was hard to think, hard to really
feel them. At night in bed she would think, this is the last time for this
night, and she would hug Michel hard, hard, as if she could stop it happening
if she squeezed hard enough. Even Michel, even the little dual world they had
built—”Oh Michel,” she said, frightened. “It goes so fast.”

He nodded, mouth pursed. He no longer tried to give her therapy,
he no longer tried always and ever to put the brightest face on things; he
treated her as an equal now, and her moods as some kind of truth, which was
only her due. But sometimes she missed being comforted.

Michel offered no rebuttal, however, no hopeful comment. Spencer
had been his friend. Before, in the Odessa years, when he and Maya had fought,
he had sometimes gone to Spencer’s to sleep, and no doubt to talk late into the
night over glasses of whiskey. If anyone could draw out Spencer it would have
been Michel. Now he sat on the bed looking out the window, a tired old man.
They never fought anymore. Maya felt it would probably do her some good if they
did; clear out the cobwebs, get charged again. But Michel would not respond to
any provocation. He himself didn’t care to fight, and as he was no longer
giving her therapy, he wouldn’t do it for her sake either. No. They sat side by
side on the bed. If someone walked in, Maya thought, they would observe a
couple so old and worn that they did not even bother to speak anymore. Just sat
together, alone in their own thoughts.

“Well,” Michel said after the longest time, “but here we are.”

Maya smiled. The hopeful remark, made at last, at great effort. He
was a brave man. And quoting the first words spoken on Mars. John had had a
knack, in a funny way, for saying things. “Here we are.” It was stupid, really.
And yet might he have meant something more than the John-obvious assertion, had
it been more than the thoughtless exclamation that anyone might make? “Here we
are,” she repeated, testing the phrase on her tongue. On Mars. First an idea,
then a place. And now they were in a nearly empty apartment bedroom, not the
one they had lived in before but a corner apartment, with views out big windows
to south and west. The great curve of sea and mountains said Odessa, nowhere
else. The old plaster walls were stained, the wood floors dark and gleaming; it
had taken many years of life to achieve that patination. Living room through
one door, hall to the kitchen through the other. They had a mattress on a
frame, a couch, some chairs, some unopened boxes—their things from before,
pulled out of storage. Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that.
It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture,
use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked
reality of the world. And thank God for that.

Soon after that the global elections were held, and Free Mars and
its cluster of small allies were returned as a super-majority in the global
legislature. Its victory was not as large as had been expected, however, and
some of its allies were grumbling and looking around for better deals. Mangala
was a hotbed of rumors, one could have spent days at the screen reading
columnists and analysts and provocateurs hashing over the possibilities; with
the immigration issue on the table the stakes were higher than they had been in
years, and the kicked-anthill behavior of Mangala proved it. The outcome of the
election for the next executive council remained very much in doubt, and there
were rumors that Jackie was fending off challenges from within the party.

Maya shut off her screen, thinking hard. She gave a call to Athos,
who looked surprised to see her, then quickly polite. He had been elected
representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and was in Mangala working hard
for the Greens, who had made a fairly strong showing and had a solid group of
representatives, and many interesting new alliances. “You should run for the
executive council,” Maya told him.

Now he was really surprised. “Me?”

“You.” Maya wanted to tell him to go look in a mirror and think it
over, but bit her tongue. “You made the best impression in the campaign, and a
lot of people want to support a pro-Earth policy, and don’t know who to back.
You’re their best bet. You might even go talk to MarsFirst and see if you can
pull them out of the Free Mars alliance. Promise them a moderate stance and a
voice with a councillor, and long-range Reddish sympathies.”

Now he was looking worried. If he was still involved with Jackie
and he ran for the council, then he would be in big trouble on that front.
Especially if he went after MarsFirst as well. But after Peter’s visit he might
not be as concerned about that as he would have been during the bright nights
on the canal. Maya let him go stew about it. There was only so much you could
do with these people.

Although she did not want to reconstruct her previous life in
Odessa, she did want to work, and at this point hydrology had overtaken
ergonomics (and politics, obviously) as her primary area of expertise. And she
was interested in the water cycle in the Hellas Basin, curious to see how the
work was changing now that the basin was full. Michel had his practice, and was
going to get involved with the first settlers’ project that had been mentioned
to him in Rhodes; she would have to do something; and so after they had
unpacked and furnished the new apartment, she went looking for Deep Waters.

The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the
name was no longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big
group houses in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door,
happy to go out to lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation
in the local water world, which was still her work.

“Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the Hellas Sea
Institute.” This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives
from all the agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well
as fisheries, the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all
the settlements higher in the the basin’s extensive rim-land watersheds. The
seaside towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea’s
level at just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score
meters higher than the North Sea’s current level. “They don’t want sea level to
change by even a meter,” Diana said, “if it can be helped. And the Grand Canal
is useless as a runoff canal to the North Sea, because the locks need water
flowing in both directions. So it’s a matter of balancing the inflow from
aquifers and rainfall, with evaporation loss. That’s been fine so far. Evaporation
loss is slightly higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every
year they draw down the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that’ll be a problem,
but not for a long time, because there’s a good aquifer reserve left, and
they’re refilling a bit now, and may more in the future. We’re hoping
precipitation levels will also rise over time, and they have been so far, so
they probably will continue to, for a while longer anyway. I don’t know. That’s
the main worry, anyway; that the atmosphere will suck off more than the
aquifers can resupply.”

“Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”

“Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate
studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex,
there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still
pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes
what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the
environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can.”

“They don’t forbid anything?”

“Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t
mess with. Or at least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting
tougher, and tackling smaller projects.”

“It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable,
I should think.”

“Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of
Red projects, you know, to protect the higher altitudes, and any place they can
in the south. They’ve got that constitutional height limit to back them, and so
they’re always taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win
there, and do their thing, and then all the little development projects are
somewhat counterbalanced. It’s a nightmare legally.”