Blue Mars (71 page)

In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act.”

We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true. She loved the
truth of these things. Sad plays, sad music—threnodies, gypsy tangos,
Prometheus Bound, even the Jacobean revenge plays—the darker the better,
really. The truer. She did the lighting for Titus Andronicus and people were
disgusted, appalled, they said it was just a bloodbath, and by God she
certainly used a lot of red spots—but that moment when the handless and
tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done it to her, or knelt to carry
away Titus’s severed hand in her teeth, like a dog—the audience had been as if
frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had not had his sense of stagecraft
right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then with every play he had gotten
more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, even as an old man; she had
come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of King Lear in an elation,
flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the lighting crew by the
shoulder, shaking him, shouting “Was that not wonderful, magnificent?”

“Ka, Maya, I don’t know, I might have preferred the Restoration
version myself, the one where Cordelia is saved and marries Edgar, do you know
that one?”

“Bah! Stupid child! We have told the truth tonight, that is what
is important! You can go back to your lies in the morning!” Laughing harshly at
him and throwing him back to his friends, “Foolish youth!”

He explained to the friends: “It’s Maya.”

“Toitovna? The one in the opera?”

“Yes, but for real.”

“Real,” Maya scoffed, waving them away. “You don’t even know what
real is.” And she felt that she did.

And friends came to town, visiting for a week or two; and then, as
the summers got warmer and warmer, they took to spending one of the Decembers
out in a beach village west of the town, in a shack behind the dunes, swimming
and sailing and windsurfing and lying on the sand under an umbrella, reading and
sleeping through the perihelion. Then back into Odessa, to the familiar
comforts of their apartment and the town, in the burnished light of the
southern autumn which was the longest season of the Martian year, also the
approach to aphelion, day after day dimmer and dimmer, until aphelion came, on
Ls 70, and between then and the winter solstice at Ls 90 was the Ice Festival,
and they ice-skated on the white sea ice right under the corniche, looking up
at the town’s seafront all drifted with snow, white under black clouds; or
iceboating so far out on the ice that the town was just a break in the white
curve of the big rim. Or eating by herself in steamy loud restaurants, waiting
for the music to start, wet snow pelting down on the street outside. Walking into
a musty little theater and its anticipatory laughter. Eating out on the balcony
for the first time in the spring, sweater on against the chill, looking at the
new buds on the tips of the tree twigs, a green unlike any other, like little
viriditas teardrops. And so around, deep in the folds of habit and its rhythms,
happy in the deja vu that one made for oneself.

Then she turned on her screen one morning and checked the news and
found out that a large settlement of Chinese had been discovered already esconced
in Huo Hsing Vallis (as if the name justified the intrusion); a surprised
global police had ordered them to leave, but now they were calmly defying the
order. And the Chinese government was warning Mars that any interference with
the settlement would be regarded as an attack on Chinese citizens, with an
appropriate response. “What!” Maya shouted. “No!”

She called up everyone in Mangala she knew; these days there
weren’t that many of them in positions of any importance. She asked what they
knew, and demanded to be told why the settlers weren’t being escorted back to
the elevator and sent home, and so on; “This is simply not acceptable, you have
to stop it now!”

But incursions only a bit less blatant had been happening for some
time now, as she had seen herself in occasional news reports. Immigrants were
being landed in cheap landing vehicles, bypassing the elevator and the
authorities in Sheffield. Rocket-and-parachute landings, as in the old days;
and there was little that could be done about it, without provoking an
interplanetary incident. People were working hard on the problem behind the
scenes. The UN was backing China, so it was hard. Progress was being made,
slowly but surely. She was not to worry.

She shut down the screen. Once upon a time she had suffered under
the illusion that if only she exerted herself hard enough, the whole world
would change. Now she knew better.

Although it was a hard thing to admit. “It’s enough to turn you
red,” she said to Michel as she left for work. “It’s enough to get us up to
Mangala,” she warned him.

But in a week the crisis passed. An accommodation was reached; the
settlement was allowed to remain, and the Chinese promised to send up a
correspondingly smaller number of legal immigrants the following year. Very
unsatisfactory, but there it was. Life went on under this new shadow.

Except she was walking home, one late-spring afternoon after work,
and a line of rosebushes at the back of the cor-niche caught her attention, and
she walked over to have a closer look. Behind the bushes people were walking on
Har-makhis Avenue by the cafes, most of them in a hurry. The bushes had a lot
of new leaves, their brown a mixture of green and red. The new roses were a
pure dark red, their lustrous velvet petals glowing in the afternoon light.
Lincoln, the tag on the trunk said. A kind of rose. Also the greatest American,
a man who had been a kind of combination of John and Frank, as Maya understood
him. One of the Group had written a great play about him, dark and troubling,
the hero murdered senselessly, a real heart-breaker. They needed a Lincoln
these days. The red of the roses was glowing brightly. Suddenly she couldn’t
see; for a moment everything dazzled, as if she had glanced into the sun.

Then she was looking at an array of things.

Shapes, colors—she was aware of that much, but what they were—who
she was—wordlessly she struggled to recognize…

Then it all crashed back at once. Rose, Odessa, all of it just as
if it had never been gone. But she staggered, she had to catch her balance. “Ah
no,” she said. “My God.” She swallowed; throat dry, very dry. A physiological
event. It had lasted quite some time. She hissed, choked back a cry. Stood
rigid on the gravel path, the hedge brown green before her, spotted by livid
red. She would have to remember that color effect for the next Jacobean play
they did.

She had always known it was going to happen. She had always known.
Habit, such a liar; she knew that. Inside her ticked a bomb. In the old days it
had had three billion ticks, more or less. Now they had rigged it to have ten
billion— or more—or less. The ticks kept ticking nevertheless. She had heard of
a clock one could buy, which ran downward through a certain finite number of
hours, presumably those you had left if you were to live to five hundred years,
or whatever length of life you chose. Choose a million and relax. Choose one,
and pay a little bit closer attention to the moment. Or dive into your habits
and never think about it, like everyone else she knew.

She would have been perfectly happy to do that. She had done it
before and would do it again. But now in this moment something had happened,
and she was back in the interregnum, the stripped time between sets of habits,
waiting for the next exfoliation. No, no! Why? She didn’t want such a time,
they were too hard—she could scarcely stand the raw sense of time passing that
came to her during these periods. The sense that everything was for the last
time. She hated that feeling, hated it. And this time she hadn’t changed her
habits at all! Nothing was different; it had struck out of the blue. Maybe it
had been too long since the last time, habits nonwithstanding. Maybe it would
start happening now whenever it chose to, randomly, perhaps frequently.

She went home (thinking, I know where my home is) and tried to
tell Michel what had happened, describing and sobbing and describing and then
giving up. “We only do things once! Do you understand?”

He was very concerned, though he tried not to show it. Blank-outs
or not, she had no trouble recognizing the moods of Monsieur Duval. He said
that her little jamais vu was perhaps a small epileptic fit or a tiny stroke,
but he could not be sure, and even tests might not tell them. Jamais vu was
poorly understood; a variation on deja vu, essentially its reverse: “It seems
to be a kind of temporary interference in the brain’s wave patterns. They go
from alpha waves to delta waves, in a little dip. If you’ll wear a monitor we
could find out next time it happens, if it does. It’s somewhat like a waking sleep,
in which a lot of cognition shuts down.”

“Do people ever get stuck there?”

“No. I don’t know of any cases like that. It’s rare, and always
temporary.”

“So far.”

He tried to act as if that were a baseless fear.

Maya knew better, and went into the kitchen to start a meal. Bang
the pots, open the refrigerator, pull out vegetables, chop them and throw them
in the pan. Chop chop chop chop. Stop to cry, stop to stop crying; even this
had happened ten thousand times before. The disasters one couldn’t avoid, the
habit of hunger. In the kitchen, trying to ignore everything and make a meal;
how many times. Well, here we are.

After that she avoided the row of rosebushes, fearful of another
incident. But of course they were visible from anywhere on that stretch of the
corniche, right out to the seawall. And they were in bloom almost all the time,
roses were amazing that way. And once, in that same afternoon light, pouring
over the Hellespontus and making everything to the west somewhat washed out,
darkened to pastel opacities, her eye caught the pinprick reds of the roses in
the hedge, even though she was walking the seawall—and seeing the tapestry of
foam on the black water to one side of her, and the roses and Odessa rising up
to the other side, she stopped, stilled by something in the double vision, by a
realization—or almost—the edge of an epiphany—she felt some vast truth pushing
at her, just outside her—or inside her body, even, inside her skull but outside
her thoughts, pushing at the dura that encased the brain—everything explained,
everything come clear at last, for once…

But the epiphany never made it through the barrier. A feeling
only, cloudy and huge—then the pressure on her mind passed, and the afternoon
took on its ordinary pewter luminance. She walked home feeling full, oceans of
clouds in her chest, full to bursting with something like frustration, or a
kind of anguished joy. Again she told Michel what had happened, and he nodded;
he had a name for this too:

“Presque vu.” Almost seen. “I get that one a lot,” he said. With a
characteristic look of secret sorrow.

But all of his symptomatic categories suddenly seemed to Maya only
to mask what was really happening to her.

Sometimes she got very confused; sometimes she thought she
understood things that did not exist; sometimes she forgot things, forever; and
sometimes she got very, very scared. And these were the things Michel was
trying to contain with his names and his combinatoires.

Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of
light and time. And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went.
Enough days passed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how
frightened she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing
that it was easy to forget. Just live in la vie quotidienne, pay attention to
daily life with its work, friends, visitors.

Among other visitors were Charlotte and Ariadne, who came down
from Mangala to consult with Maya about the worsening situation with Earth.
They went out to breakfast on the corniche, and talked about Dorsa Brevia’s
concerns. Essentially, despite the fact that the Minoans had left the Free Mars
coalition because they disliked its attempt to dominate the outer satellite
settlements, among other things, the Dorsa Brevians had come to think Jackie
had been right about immigration, at least to an extent.

“It’s not that Mars is approaching its human carrying capacity,”
Charlotte said, “they’re wrong about that. We could tighten our belts, density
the towns. And these new floating towns on the North Sea could accommodate a
lot of people, they’re a sign of how many more could live here. They have
practically no impact, except on harbor towns, in some senses. But there’s room
for more harbor towns, on the North Sea anyway.”

“Many more,” Maya said. Despite the Terran incursions, she did not
like to hear anti-immigrant talk in any form. But Charlotte was back on the
executive council, and for years she had supported a close relation to Earth,
so this was hard for her to say:

“It isn’t the numbers. It’s who they are, what they believe. The
assimilation troubles are getting really severe.”

Maya nodded. “I’ve read about them on the screen.”

“Yes. We’ve tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but
they clump, naturally, and you can’t just break them up.”

“No.”

“But so many problems are rising—cases of sharia, family abuse,
ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives—usually men
attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating,
harassing the new settlements and so on. It’s big trouble. And this with
immigration already much reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us
about that, they want to send up even more. And if they do we’ll become a kind
of human disposal site, and all our work will have gone to waste.”