Blue Mars (81 page)

“Oh dear,” Sax said. “I—isn’t it really part of the suit’s
system?”

It was, but she shook her head. “The suit is autonomous.”

“Semiautonomous, I hope.”

She smiled. “Yes. But no wristpad is necessary. Look— that thing
connects you to the whole world. It’s your manacle to spacetime. Today let’s
just be in Wang’s Gully. It will be enough.”

It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting
up through steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day
Sax followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one,
scrambling up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom
with the feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an
ankle. “This isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this
the kind of climbing you always do?”

“This isn’t climbing at all.”

“Ah.”

So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were,
strictly speaking, unjustifiable.

And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by
horizontal fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and
gritting his teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his
boot tips and gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down
Wang’s Gully, which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it
had in any given section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of
fatigued excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk
his position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer
just as he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly
pitted, its dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on
one crack over a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that
crack; was it deep enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to
try to find out. So he took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it
turned out it was not really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull,
groaning involuntarily at the effort, he was up and past it, using holds he
never even consciously saw; and then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann,
breathing very heavily. She sat serenely on a narrow ledge.

“Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.

“Ah.”

“Got your attention, did it?”

“Yes.”

“No memory problems, I trust?”

“No.”

“That’s what I like about climbing.”

Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up,
Sax said, “So have you been having memory problems?”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this
crack here.”

“Indeed.”

That night they lay in sleeping bags, in a clear mushroom tent big
enough to hold ten. At this altitude, with its su-perthin atmosphere, it was
impressive to consider the strength of the tent fabric, holding in 450
millibars of air with no sign of untoward bulging at any point; the clear
material was nice and taut, but not rock hard; no doubt it was holding many
bars of air less than would test its holding capacity. When Sax recalled the
meters of rock and sandbags they had had to pile on their earliest habitats to
keep them from exploding, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the subsequent
advancements in materials science.

Ann nodded when he spoke of this. “We’ve moved beyond our ability
to understand our technology.”

“Well. It’s understandable, I think. Just hard to believe.”

“I suppose I see the distinction,” she said easily.

Feeling more comfortable, he brought up memory again. “I’ve been
having what I call blank-outs, where I can’t remember my thoughts of the
previous several minutes, or up to say an hour. Short-term-memory failures,
having to do with brain-wave fluctuations, apparently. And the long-term past
is getting very uncertain as well, I’m afraid.”

For a long time she didn’t reply, except to grunt that she’d heard
him. Then:

“I’ve forgotten my whole self. I think there’s someone else in me
now. In partway. A kind of opposite. My shadow, or the shadow of my shadow.
Seeded, and growing inside me.”

“How do you mean?” Sax said apprehensively.

“An opposite. She thinks just what I wouldn’t have thought.” She
turned her head away, as if shy. “I call her Counter-Ann.”

“And how would you—characterize her?”

“She is ... I don’t know. Emotional. Sentimental. Stupid. Cries at
the sight of a flower. Feels that everyone is doing their best. Crap like
that.”

“You weren’t like that before, at all?”

“No no no. It’s all crap. But I feel it as though it’s real. So .
. . now there’s Ann and Counter-Ann. And .. . maybe a third.”

“A third?”

“I think so. Something that isn’t either of the other two.”

“And what do you—I mean, do you call that one anything?”

“No. She doesn’t have a name. She’s elusive. Younger. Fewer ideas
about things, and those ideas are—strange. Not Ann or Counter-Ann. Somewhat
like that Zo, did you know her?”

“Yes,” Sax said, surprised. “I liked her.”

“Did you? I thought she was awful. And yet... there’s something
like that in me as well. Three people.”

“It’s an odd way to think of it.”

She laughed. “Aren’t you the one who had a mental lab that
contained all your memories, filed by room and cabinet number or something?”

“That was a very effective system.”

She laughed again, harder. It made him grin to hear it. Though he
was frightened too. Three Anns? Even one had been more than he could
understand.

“But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my
past. Some people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible
the palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved.
But if you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So,
I’ll run across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance,
and try to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever,
and the whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never
happened.”

“A problem with the palace.”

“Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my—my incident— I was
sure nothing would ever happen to my ability to—to think.”

“You still seem to think okay.”

Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-cuts, the gaps in memory,
thepresque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just
analytical or cognitive ability, but something more general.... He tried to
describe what had been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be
listening closely. “So you see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done
on memory. It’s gotten interesting— pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and
the Acheron labs have been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something
that might help us.”

“A memory drug, you mean?”

“Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So.
My notion is to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a
number of the First Hundred gathered at Underbill, and take it together.
Context is very important to recollection, and the sight of each other might
help. Not everyone is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining
First Hundred are, actually.”

“Not so surprising. Who?”

He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of
them left; a dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I
know I would like it more than anything.”

“It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross
this caldera.”

Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of
their world. The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on
this day, and no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The
stretch of ten minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The
feeling in one’s legs.

And there were the rings of the calderas around them, jutting far
into the sky even when the two walkers were out in the center of the central
circle, out where the later, deeper calderas appeared as big embayments in a
single wall’s roundness. Out here the planet’s sharp curvature had no effect on
one’s perspective, the curve was for once invisible, the cliffs free and clear
even thirty kilometers away. The net effect, it seemed to Sax, was of a kind of
enclosure. A park, a stone garden, a maze with only one wall separating it from
the world beyond, the world which, though invisible, conditioned everything
here. The caldera was big but not big enough. You couldn’t hide here. The world
poured in and overflowed the mind, no matter its hundred-trillion-bit capacity.
No matter how big the neural array there was still just a single thread of awed
mentation, consciousness itself, a living wire of thought saying rock, cliff,
sky, star.

The rock became heavily cracked by fissures, each one an arc of a
circle with its center point back in the middle of the central circle: old
cracks relative to the big new holes of the north and south circles, old cracks
filled with rubble and dust. These rock crevasses made their walk into a
wandering ramble—in a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls,
yet just as difficult of passage as a walled one.

But they threaded it, and finally reached the rim of north circle,
number 2 on Sax’s map. Looking down into it gave them a new perspective—a
proper shape to the caldera and its circular embayments, a sudden drop to a
heretofore hidden floor, a thousand meters below.

Apparently there was a climbing route down onto the floor of north
circle; but when Ann saw the look on his face as she pointed it out—achievable
only by rappelling—she laughed. They would only have to climb up out of it
again, she said easily, and the main caldera wall was already tall enough. They
could hike around north circle to another route instead.

Surprised by this flexibility, and thankful for it, Sax followed
her around the north circle on its west circumference. Under the great wall of
the main caldera they stopped for the night, popped the tent, ate in silence.

After sunset Phobos shot up over the western wall of the caldera
like a little gray flare. Fear and dread, what names.

“I heard that putting the moons back in orbit was your idea?” Ann
said from her sleeping bag.

“Yes, it was.”

“Now that’s what I call landscape restoration,” she said, sounding
pleased.

Sax felt a little glow. “I wanted to please you.”

After a silence: “I like seeing them.”

“And how did you like Miranda?”

“Oh, it was very interesting.” She talked about some of the
geological features of the odd moon. Two planetesimals, impacted, joined
together imperfectly. . . .

“There’s a color between red and green,” Sax said when it appeared
she was done talking about Miranda. “A mixture of the two. Madder alizarin, it’s
sometimes called. You see it in plants sometimes.”

“Uh-huhn.”

“It makes me think of the political situation. If there couldn’t
be some kind of red-green synthesis.”

“Browns.”

“Yes. Or alizarins.”

“I thought that’s what this Free Mars-Red coalition was, Irishka
and the people who tossed out Jackie.”

“An anti-immigration coalition,” Sax said. “The wrong kind of
red-green combination. In that they’re embroiling us in a conflict with Earth
that isn’t necessary.”

“No?”

“No. The population problem is soon going to be eased. The
issei—we’re hitting the limit, I think. And the nisei aren’t far behind.”

“Quick decline, you mean.”

“Exactly. When it gets our generation, and the one after, the
human population of the solar system will be less than half what it is now.”

“Then they’ll figure out a different way to screw it up.”

“No doubt. But it won’t be the Hypermalthusian Age anymore. It’ll
be their problem. So, worrying so much about immigration, to the point of
causing conflict, threatening interplanetary war... it just isn’t necessary.
It’s shortsighted. If there was a red movement on Mars pointing that out,
offering to help Earth through the last of the surge years, it might keep
people from killing each other, needlessly. It would be a new way of thinking
about Mars.”

“A new areophany.”

“Yes. That’s what Maya called it.”

She laughed. “But Maya is crazy.”

“Why no,” Sax said sharply. “She certainly is not.”

Ann said no more, and Sax did not press the issue. Phobos moved
visibly across the sky, backward through the zodiac.

They slept well. The next day they made an arduous climb up a
steep gully in the wall, which apparently Ann and the other red climbers
considered the walker’s route out. Sax had never had such a hard day’s work in
his life; and even so they didn’t make it all the way out, but had to pitch the
tent in haste at sunset, on a narrow ledge, and finish their emergence the
following day, around noon.