Blue Mars (73 page)

Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years
between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of
them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those
funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on
the corniche when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus—Terran
nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still
threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs
blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people.
And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”

“What? No—oh no.”

“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”

“Oh my God.”

Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the
remaining First Hundred—lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy
smile ... no. She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from
grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.

“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said
at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.

He sighed. “Maybe.”

Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to
Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about
Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to
Lasswitz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an
expert in aquifer hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to
repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen
him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape
down Marineris. At the time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but
in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the
revolt he had moved down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up
with the underground and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the
demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed
down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the
m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the
Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary
broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders
there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield
and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield
situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first
independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the
community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere.
He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow
twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he
had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big
aquifers under the Charitum Monies without disturbing the surface. A
great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during
a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn’t been
able to revive him.

So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all
people, made a provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that
Hiroko’s band was still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy,
obvious wishful thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not prone to wishful
thinking, so maybe there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain,
however, and the youngest of them, Mary (unless Hiroko were alive) was now 212
years old. The oldest, Ann, was 226. Maya herself was 221, an obvious
absurdity, but there it was, year 2206 in the Terran news reports. . . .

“But there are people in their two-fifties,” Michel noted, “and
the treatments may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may
just be a bad coincidence.”

“Maybe.”

Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker
and darker, which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have
stayed in Provence—that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home
that persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had
been from the moment they had landed—or from the moment he had joined Hiroko—or
perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could
say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone
but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and
his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her breasts his hills,
her belly his valley, her sex his beach and ocean. Of course it was an
impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner; but as it was
all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good
things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relationship. Though
sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of
the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.

Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly
he felt that death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the
great unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it
was a scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the
various manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except
for the speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave
collapse like her jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre—theories were endless, it
was a vital concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected
to become old—for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely
studied. But so far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if
it was any one thing; and the deaths kept happening.

For Yeli’s service they cast some portion of his ashes off in
another swiftly rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the
breakwater they had launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back
and see all Odessa. Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel’s apartment.
Praxis indeed, the way they held each other then. They went through Michel’s
scrapbooks, talking about Olympus Mons, ‘61, Underbill. The past. Maya ignored
all that and served them tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia
remained in the apartment. The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at
the kitchen table, put her hand on Michel’s shoulder, and looked over it at a
grainy black-and-white photo, stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti
sauce and coffee. A faded picture of a young man grinning right at the camera,
grinning with a confident knowing smile.

“What an interesting face,” she said.

Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya
knew she had said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost
distraught. Maya stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared.
Nothing came to her.

She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa,
past all the whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the
terra-cotta flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out
over the indigo plate of the Hellas Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she
cried, but without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had
happened before.

Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the upper
town. There was the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot, or
had it been The Winter’s Tale. Yes, The Winter’s Tale. But there would be no
coming back to life for them.

Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long
staircase alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays,
her spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at
the apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her,
she veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.

She walked up and down the corniche, until she was too tired to
walk. Then she sat on a bench. Across from her in a sidewalk cafe a man was
playing a wheezy bandoneon, a bald man with a white mustache, bags under his
eyes, round cheeks, red nose. His sad music was right there in his face. The
sun was setting and the sea was nearly still, each broad facet glistening with
the viscous glassy luster that liquid surfaces sometimes display, all of it as
orange as the sun winking out over the mountains to the west. She sat back,
relaxing, and felt the sea breeze on her skin. Gulls planed overhead. Suddenly
the sea’s color looked familiar to her, and she remembered looking down from
the Ares at the mottled orange ball that Mars had been, the untouched planet
rolling below them after their arrival in orbit, symbol of every potential
happiness. She had never been happier than that, in all the time since.

And then the feeling came on her again, the pre-epileptic aura of
the presque vu, the sea glittering, a vast significance suffusing everything,
immanent everywhere but just beyond reach, pressing in on things—and with a
little pop she got it—that that very aspect of the phenomenon was itself the
meaning—that the significance of everything always lay just out of reach, in
the future, tugging them forward—that in special moments one felt this tidal
tug of becoming as a sensation of sharp happy anticipation, as she had when
looking down on Mars from the Ares, the unconscious mind filled not with the
detritus of a dead past but with the unforeseeable possibilities of the live
future, ah, yes—anything could happen, anything, anything. And so as the
presque vu washed slowly away from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time
comprehended, she sat back on the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after
all, and the potential for happiness would always be in her.

PART
THIRTEEN

              
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---Experimental

Procedures

              
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At the last minute Nirgal went up to Sheffield. From the train
station he took the subway out to the Socket, not seeing a thing. Inside the
vast halls of the Socket he walked to the departure lounge. And there she was.

When she saw him she was pleased that he had come, but irritated
that he had come so late. It was almost time for her to go. Up the cable, onto
a shuttle, out to one of the new hollowed-out asteroids, this one particularly
large and luxuriant; and then off, accelerating for a matter of months, until
it could coast at several percent of the speed of light. For this asteroid was
a star-ship; and they were off to a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like
planet rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun. A new world, a new
life. And fackie was going.

Nirgal still couldn’t quite believe it. He had gotten the message
only two days before, had not slept as he tried to decide whether this
mattered, whether it was part of his life, whether he ought to see her off,
whether he ought to try to talk her out of it.

Seeing her now, he knew he could not talk her out of it. She was
going. I want to try something new, she had said in her message, a voice record
without a visual image. There coming from his wrist, her voice: There’s nothing
for me here now anymore. I’ve done my part. I want to try something new.

The group in the starship asteroid were mostly from Dorsa Brevia.
Nirgal had called Charlotte to try to find out why. It’s complicated, Charlotte
said. There’s a lot of reasons. This planet they’re going to is relatively
nearby, and it’s perfect for terraform-ing. Humanity going there is a big step.
The first step to the stars.

I know, Nirgal had said. Quite a few starships had already left,
off to other likely planets. The step had been taken.

But this planet is the best one yet. And in Dorsa Brevia, people
are beginning to wonder if we don’t have to get that distance from Earth to get
a fresh start. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind. And now it’s looking
bad again. These unauthorized landings; it could be the start of an invasion.
And if you think of Mars as being the new democratic society, and Earth the old
feudalism, then the influx can look like the old trying to crush the new,
before it gets too big. And they’ve got us outnumbered twenty billion to two.
And part of that old feudalism is patriarchy itself. So the people in Dorsa
Brevia wonder if they can get a little bit more distance. It’s only twenty
years to Aldebaran, and they’re going to live a long time. So a group of them
are doing it. Families, family groups, childless couples, childless single
people. It’s like the First Hundred going to Mars, like the days ofBoone and
Chalmers.

And so fackie sat on the carpeted floor of the departure lounge,
and Nirgal sat next to her. She looked down. She was smoothing the carpet with
the palm of her hand, and then drawing patterns in the nap, letters. Nirgal,
she wrote.

He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but
subdued. People looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going,
some were seeing people off. Through a broad window they looked into the
interior of the socket, where elevator cars levitated in silence against the
walls, and the foot of the 37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten
meters over the concrete floor.

So you’re going, Nirgal said.

Yes, fackie said. I want a new start.

Nirgal said nothing.

It will be an adventure, she said.

True. He didn’t know what else to say.

In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.

It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity,
spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny.
It’s what we ought to be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where
Hiroko is—that she and her people joined one of the first starships, the one to
Barnard’s star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.

It’s as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true;
he could imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora,
of humanity across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from
there. A step out of the cradle. The end of prehistory.

He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This
was the last time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the
other were dying. That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently
together in this room. That people should leave everyone they knew.

And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so
strange—they had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with
ninety-nine strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had
had parents, presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them
had had spouses, except for the six married couples who had been part of the
hundred. Single childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That
was who they were. And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.

Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the
light. Fine-grained gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back
down. Wherever you go, she wrote, there you are.

She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.

I don’t know.

They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable
chamber, an elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved
over a piste to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped
its outer side.

Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave this world
forever. Don’t leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the
time we made love by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?

He said nothing. She remembered.

I don’t know.

He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased
the second you. With his forefinger he wrote we.

She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?

The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for
departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself
standing, facing fackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was
her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed
in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to
the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.

Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever
you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was
what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the
planet. Now I am flying to Al-debaran.