Blue Mars (82 page)

On the great rim of Olympus Mons, all was as before. A giant cored
circle of flat land; the violet sky in a band around the horizon so far below,
a black zenith above; little hermitages scattered in boulder ejecta that had
been hollowed out. A separate world. Part of blue Mars, but not.

The hut they stopped at first was inhabited by very old red
mendicants of some sort, apparently living there while waiting for the quick
decline to strike them, after which their bodies would be cremated, and the
ashes cast into the thin jet stream.

This struck Sax as overfatalistic. Ann apparently was likewise
unimpressed: “All right,” she said, watching them eat their meager meal. “Let’s
go try this memory treatment then.”

Many of the First Hundred
argued for sites other than Underhill, arguing in a way that they
didn’t even recognize as part of their group nature; but Sax was adamant,
shrugging off requests for Olympus Mons, low orbit, Pseudophobos, Sheffield,
Odessa, Hell’s Gate, Sabishii, Senzeni Na, Acheron, the south polar cap,
Mangala, and on the high seas. He insisted that the setting for such a
procedure was a critical factor, as experiments on context had proved. Coyote
brayed most inappropriately at his description of the experiment with students
in scuba gear learning word lists on the floor of the North Sea, but data were
data, and given the data, why not do their experiment in the place where they
would get the best results? The stakes were high enough to justify doing
everything they could to get it right. After all, Sax pointed out, if their
memories were returned to them intact, anything might be possible—anything—breakthroughs
on other fronts, a defeat of the quick decline, health that lasted centuries
more, an ever-expanding community of garden worlds, from thence perhaps up
again in some emergent phase change to a higher level of progress, into some
realm of wisdom that could not even be imagined at this point— they teetered on
the edge of some such golden age, Sax told them. But it all depended on
wholeness of mind. Nothing could continue without wholeness of mind. And so he
insisted on Underhill.

“You’re too sure,” Marina complained; she had been arguing for
Acheron. “You have to keep more of an open mind about things.”

“Yes yes.” Keep an open mind. This was easy for Sax, his mind was
a lab that had burned down. Now he stood in the open air. And no one could refute
the logic of Underhill, not Marina nor any of the rest of them. Those who
objected were afraid, he thought—afraid of the power of the past. They did not
want to acknowledge that power over them, they did not want to give themselves
fully over to it. But that was what they needed to do. Certainly Michel would
have supported the choice of Underhill, had he been still among them. Place was
crucial, all their lives had served to show that. And even the people dubious,
or skeptical, or afraid—i.e. all of them—had to admit that Underhill was the
appropriate place, given what they were trying to do.

So in the end they agreed to meet there.

At this point Underhill was a kind of museum, kept in the state it
had been in in 2138, the last year it had been a functioning piste stop. This
meant that it did not look exactly as it had in the years of their occupancy,
but the older parts were all still there, so the changes since wouldn’t affect
their project much, Sax judged. After his arrival with several others he took a
walk around to see, and there the old buildings all were: the original four
habitats, dropped whole from space; their junk heaps; Nadia’s square of barrel
vault chambers, with their domed center; Hiroko’s greenhouse framework, its
enclosing bubble gone; Nadia’s trench arcade off to the northwest; Chernobyl;
the salt pyramids; and finally the Alchemist’s Quarter, where Sax ended his
walk, wandering around in the warren of buildings and pipes, trying to ready
himself for the next day’s experience. Trying for an open mind.

Already his memory was seething, as if trying to prove that it
needed no help to do its work. Here among these buildings he had first
witnessed the transformative power of technology over the blank materiality of
nature; they had started with just rocks and gases, really, and from that they
had extracted and purified and transformed and recombined and shaped, in so
many different ways that no one person could keep good track of them all, nor
even imagine their effect. So he had seen but he had not understood: and they
had acted perpetually in ignorance of their true powers, and with (perhaps as a
result) very little sense of what they were trying for. But there in the
Alchemist’s Quarter, he hadn’t been able to see that. He had been so sure that
the world made green would be a fine place.

Now here he stood in the open, head free under a blue sky, in the
heat of second August, looking around and trying to think, to remember. It was
hard to direct the memory; things simply occurred to him. The objects in the
old part of town felt distinctly familiar, as in the word’s root meaning “of
the family.” Even the individual red stones and boulders around the settlement,
and all the bumps and hollows in view, were perfectly familiar, all still in their
proper places on the compass flower. Prospects for the experiment seemed very
good to Sax; they were in their place, in their context, situated, oriented. At
home.

He returned to the square of barrel vaults, where they were going
to stay. Some cars had driven in during his walk, and some little excursion
trains were parked on the sidings next to the piste. People were arriving.
There were Maya and Nadia, hugging Tasha and Andrea, who had arrived together;
their voices rang in the air like a Russian opera, like recitative on the edge
of bursting into song. Of the hundred and one they had begun with, there were
only fourteen of them going to show up: Sax, Ann, Maya, Nadia, Desmond, Ursula,
Marina, Vasili, George, Edvard, Roger, Mary, Dmitri, Andrea. Not so many, but
it was every one of them still alive and in contact with the world; all the
rest were dead, or missing. If Hiroko and the other seven of the First Hundred
who had disappeared with her were still alive, they had sent no word. Perhaps
they would show up unannounced, as they had at John’s first festival on
Olympus. Perhaps not.

So they were fourteen. Thus reduced, Underbill seemed
underoccupied; though all of it was theirs to spread out in, they yet crowded
together into the south wing of the barrel vaults. Nevertheless the emptiness
of the rest of it was palpable. It was as if the place itself was an image of
their failing memories, with their lost labs and lost lands and lost
companions. Every single one of them was suffering from memory losses and disorders
of one sort or another—between them they had experienced almost all the
problems in mentation mentioned in the literature, as far as Sax could tell,
and a good bit of their conversation was taken up in comparative
symptomatology, in the recounting of various terrifying and/or sublime
experiences that had afflicted them in the last decade. It made them jocular
and somber by turns, as they milled around that evening in the little
barrel-vault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window looking out
onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick glass dome, in
its muted light. They ate a picnic dinner brought in coolers, talking, catching
up, then spreading along the south wing, preparing the upstairs bedrooms for an
uneasy night. They stayed up as late as they could, talking and talking; but
eventually they gave up, in ones and twos, and tried to sleep. Several times
that night Sax woke from dreams, and heard people stumbling down to the
bathrooms, or whispering conversations in the kitchen, or muttering to
themselves in the troubled sleep of the aged. Each time he managed to slip back
under again, into a light dream-filled sleep of his own.

Finally morning came. They were up at dawn; in the horizontal
light they ate a quick breakfast, fruit and croissants and bread and coffee.
Long shadows cast west from every rock and hillock. So familiar.

Then they were ready. There was nothing else to do. There was a
kind of collective deep breath—uneasy laughter—an inability to meet the others’
eyes.

Maya, however, was still refusing to take the treatment. She was
unswayed by every argument they tried. “I won’t,” she had said over and over
the night before. “You’ll need a keeper in any case, in case you go crazy. I’ll
do that.”

Sax had thought she would change her mind, that she was just being
Maya. Now he stood before her, baffled. “I thought you were haying the worst
memory troubles of all.”

“Perhaps.”

“So it would make sense to try this treatment. Michel gave you
lots of different drugs for mental trouble.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, looking him in the eye.

He sighed. “I don’t understand you, Maya.”

“I know.”

And she went into the old med clinic in the corner, and took on
her role as their keeper for the day. Everything in there was ready, and she
called them in one by one, and took up little ultrasound injectors and put them
to their necks, and with a little click-hiss administered one part of the drug
package, and gave them the pills that contained the rest of it, and then helped
them insert the earplugs that were custom-designed for each of them, to
broadcast the silent electromagnetic waves. In the kitchen they waited for
everyone to finish their preparations, in a nervous silence. When they were all
done Maya ushered them to the door and guided them outside. And they were off.

Sax saw and felt an image: bright lights, a feeling of his skull
being crushed, choking, gasping, spitting. Chill air and his mother’s voice,
like an animal’s yelp, “Oh? Oh? Oh! Oh!” Then lying wet on her chest, cold.

“Oh my.”

The hippocampus was one of several specific brain regions that had
been very strongly stimulated by the treatment. This meant that his limbic
system, spread under the hippocampus like a net under a walnut, was likewise
stimulated, as if the nut were bouncing up and down on a trampoline of nerves,
causing the trampoline to resonate or even to jangle. Thus Sax felt the start
of what would no doubt be a flood of emotions—registering not any single
emotion, he noted, but many at once and at nearly the same intensity, and free
of any cause—joy, grief, love, hate, exhilaration, melancholy, hope, fear,
generosity, jealousy—many of which of course did not match with their opposite
or with most of the others present in him. The result of this overcrowded mix,
for Sax at any rate, sitting on a bench outside the barrel vault, breathing
hard, was a kind of adrenalized breath-stopping growth in his sensation of
significance. A suffusion of meaning through everything—it was heartbreaking,
or heart filling—as if oceans of clouds were stuffed in his chest, so that he
could scarcely breathe—a kind of nostalgia to the nth power, a fullness, even
bliss—pure sublimity—just sitting there, just the fact that they were alive!
But all of it with a sharp edge of loss, with regret for lost time, with fear
of death, fear of everything, grief for Michel, for John, for all of them
really. This was so unlike Sax’s usual calm, steady, one might even say
phlegmatic state, that he was almost incapacitated; he could not move well, and
for several minutes he bitterly regretted ever initiating any such experiment
as this. It was very foolish—idiotically foolhardy—no doubt everyone would hate
him forever.

Stunned, nearly overwhelmed, he decided to try to walk, to see if
that would clear his head. He found he could walk; push off the bench, stand,
balance, walk, avoiding others who were wandering by in their own worlds, as
oblivious to him as he was to them, everyone getting past each other like
objects to be avoided. And then he was out in the open space of the Underbill
environs, out in the chilly morning breeze, walking toward the salt pyramids,
under a strangely blue sky.

He stopped and looked around—considered—grunted in surprise, came
to a halt—could not walk. For all of a sudden he could remember everything.

Not everything everything. He could not recall what he had had for
breakfast on 2 August 13 in 2029, for instance; that was in accord with
experiments which suggested that daily habitual activities were not
differentiated enough on entrainment to allow for individual recall. But as a
class . . . in the late 2020s he had started his days back in the barrel vault,
at the southeast corner, where he had shared an upstairs bedroom with Hiroko,
Evgenia, Rya, and Iwao. Experiments, incidents, conversations flickered in his
mind as he saw that bedroom in his mind’s eye. A node in timespace, vibrating a
whole network of days. Rya’s pretty back across the room as she washed under
her arms. Things people said that hurt in their carelessness. Vlad talking
about clipping genes. He and Vlad had stood out here together on this very
spot, in their very first minute on Mars, looking around at everything without
a word for each other, just absorbing the gravity and the pink of the sky and
the close horizons, looking just as they looked now, so many years later:
areo-logical time, as slow and long as the great systolis itself. In the
walkers one had felt hollow. Chernobyl had required more concrete than could be
cured in the thin dry cold air. Nadia had fixed it somehow, how? Heating it,
that’s right. Nadia had fixed a lot of things in those years—the barrel vaults,
the manufactories, the arcade—who would have suspected a person so quiet on the
Ares would prove so competent and energetic? He hadn’t remembered that Ares
impression of her for ages. She had been so pained when Tatiana Durova was
killed by a falling crane, it was a shock to them all, all except Michel, who
had been revealed as amazingly dissociated by the disaster, their first death. Would
Nadia remember that now? Yes, she would if she thought about it. Nothing unique
about Sax, or to be more accurate, if the treatment was working on him, it
would work on all of them. There was Vasili, who had fought for UNOMA in both
revolutions; what was he remembering? He looked stricken, but it could have
been rapture—anything or everything—very likely it was the everything emotion,
the fullness, apparently one of the first effects of the treatment. Perhaps he
was remembering Tatiana’s death as well. Once Sax and Tatiana had gone out on a
hike in Antarctica during their year there, and Tatiana had slipped on a loose
boulder and sprained an ankle, and they had had to wait on Nussbaum Riegel for
a helicopter from McMurdo to lift them back to camp. He had forgotten that for
years, and then Phyllis had reminded him of it the night she had had him
arrested, and he had promptly forgotten it again until this very moment. Two
rehearsals in two hundred years; but now it was back, the low sun, the cold,
the beauty of the Dry Valleys, Phyllis’s jealousy of Tatiana’s great dark
beauty. That their beauty should die first—it was like a sign, a primal curse,
Mars as Pluto, planet of fear and dread. And now that day in Antarctica, the
two women long dead—he was the only carrier of that day so precious, without
him it would be gone. Ah yes—what one could remember was precisely the part of
the past that one had felt the most, the events spiked by emotion above a
certain threshold—the great joys, the great crises, the great disasters. And
the small ones as well. He had been cut from the seventh-grade basketball team,
had cried alone after reading the list, at a drinking fountain at the far edge
of the school, thinking You will remember this forever. And by God he had. Great
beauty. The first times one did things had that special charge, first love—who
had that been, though? A blank, back there in Boulder, a face—some friend of a
friend—but that wasn’t love; and he couldn’t recall her name. No—now he was
thinking of Ann Clayborne, standing before him, looking at him closely,
sometime long ago. What had he been trying to recall? The rush of thought was
so dense and rapid he would not be able to remember some of this remembering,
he was pretty sure. A paradox, but only one of many caused by the single thread
of consciousness in the huge field of the mind. Ten to the forty-third power,
the matrix in which all big bangs flowered. Inside the skull was a universe as
vast as the one outside. Ann—he had taken a walk with her in Antarctica as
well. She was strong. Curious, during the walk across Olympus Mons caldera he
had never once remembered this walk across Wright Valley in Antarctica, despite
the similarities, a walk during which they had argued so earnestly over the
fate of Mars, and he had wanted so much to take her hand, or for her to take
his, why he had had a kind of crush on her! And him in his lab-rat mode, having
never before risen to such feelings, now stifled for no better reason than
shyness. She had looked at him curiously but had not understood his import,
only wondered that he should stammer so. He had stammered a fair bit when a
boy, it was a biochemical problem apparently solved by puberty, but it
occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann—Ann—he saw her face as he
argued with her on the Ares, in Underbill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the warehouse on
Pavonis. Why always this assault on a woman he had been attracted to, why? She
was so strong. And yet he had seen her so depressed that she lay helplessly on
the floor, in that boulder car, for many days as her red Mars died. Just lay
there. But then she had pried herself off the floor and gone on. She had
stopped Maya from yelling at him. She had helped bury her partner Simon. She
had done all these things, and never, never, never had Sax been anything but a
burden to her. Part of her pain. That was what he was for her. Angry with her
in Zygote or Gamete—Gamete—both, really—her face so drawn—and then he hadn’t
seen her for twenty years. And then later, after he had forced the longevity
treatment on her, he hadn’t seen her for thirty years. All that time, wasted.
If they lived for a thousand years it wouldn’t be long enough to justify such
waste.