Blue Mars (84 page)

“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new
train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together—I mean one after the
next—but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean—you know
how it was then—that Russian couple had fought and been sent home—we all hid
everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat,
at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything
since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars
and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was
nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought
we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like
it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like
that, in that way, not ever.

And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it
was because of the, the ...” He waved at the blue sky.

“I remember,” she said.

She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one
didn’t get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I
remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

“Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said,
frowning. “It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it
seemed like we might become . . . but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had
shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but
still”—sharp laugh—”no. It was you. You didn’t—it wasn’t your kind of thing, I
figured. And it wasn’t mine either! In a way it should have worked, just
because of that. But it didn’t. And then I forgot about it.”

“No,” Sax said.

He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought,
to re-remember. He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant
at Lookout Point, the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move,
it’s a net gain in order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of
science; and she had said, for that you would destroy the entire face of a
planet. He remembered it.

But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the
incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past,
alive with the upwelling—clearly she remembered it too—and yet remembered
something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they?
Didn’t they?

“Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could
we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out—intending to—to
reveal ourselves—”

Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She
laughed again. “Why sure.”

He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and
laughed.

But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony.
Whatever had happened—well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory
upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak
floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.

Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these
upwelling memories to be true—if one so crucial as this one was now cast in
doubt—what then of the others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading
him to his car, hand on his wrist—could that too be. . . . No. That hand on his
wrist. But Ann’s hand had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly
real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern
of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had
to be true.

And so?

So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If
nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an
unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future—his life—what
then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color.
A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely
there; was there nothing they could hold to?

He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.

“Well,” Ann said, apparently understanding him. “At least we
remember that much. I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they
didn’t work out. Something happened that we probably neither understood at the
time, so it’s no surprise we can’t remember it properly now, or that we recall
it differently. We have to understand something to remember it.”

“Is that true?”

“I think so. It’s why two-year-olds can’t remember. They feel
things like crazy, but they don’t remember them because they don’t really
understand them.”

“Perhaps.”

He wasn’t sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood
memories Were eidetic images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was
true, then he was perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko’s
appearance in the storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in
the violence of the storm... .

Ann stepped forward and gave him a hug. He turned his face to the
side, his ear pressed against her collarbone. She was tall. He felt her body
against his, and he hugged her back, hard. You will remember this forever, he
thought. She held him away from her, held him by the arms. “That’s the past,”
she said. “It doesn’t explain what happened between us on Mars, I don’t think.
It’s a different matter.”

“Perhaps.”

“We haven’t agreed, but we had the same—the same terms. The same
things were important to us. I remember when you tried to make me feel better,
in that boulder car in Marineris, during the outbreak flood.”

“And you me. When Maya was yelling at me, after Frank died.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking back. Such power of recall they had in
these amazing hours! That car had been a crucible, they had all metamorphosed
in it, in their own ways. “I suppose I did. It wasn’t fair, you were just
trying to help her. And that look on your face....”

They stood there, looking back at the scattering of low structures
that was Underbill.

“And here we are,” Sax said finally.

“Yes. Here we are.”

Awkward instant. Another awkward instant. This was life with the
other: one awkward instant after the next. He would have to get used to it,
somehow. He stepped back. He reached out and held her hand, squeezed it hard.
Then let go. She wanted to walk out past Nadia’s arcade, she said, into the
untouched wilderness west of Underbill. She was experiencing a rush of memory
too strong to concentrate on the present. She needed to walk.

He understood. Off she went, with a wave. With a wave! And there
was Coyote, over there near the salt pyramids so brilliant in the afternoon
light. Feeling Mars’s gravity for the first time in decades, Sax hopped over to
the little man. The only one of the First Hundred’s men who had been shorter
than Sax. His brother in arms.

Stumbling here and there through his life, step-by-step shocked
elsewhere, it was actually quite difficult to focus on Coyote’s asymmetrical
face, faceted like Deimos—but there it was, most vibrantly there, pulsing it
seemed with all its past shapes as well. At least Desmond had more or less
resembled himself throughout. God knew what Sax looked like to the others, or
what he would see if he looked in a mirror—the idea was dizzying, it might even
be interesting to test it, look in a mirror while remembering something from
his youth, the view might distort. Desmond, a Toba-gonian of Indian descent,
now saying something difficult to comprehend, something about rapture of the
deeps, unclear if he was referring to the memory drug or to some nautical
incident from his youth. Sax wanted so much to tell him that Hiroko was alive,
but just as the words were on the tip of his tongue, he stopped himself.
Desmond looked so happy at this moment; and he would not believe Sax. So it
would only upset him. Knowledge by experience is not always translatable into
discursive knowledge, which was a shame, but there it was. Desmond would not
believe him because he had not felt that hand on his wrist. And why should he, after
all?

They walked out toward Chernobyl, talking about Arkady and
Spencer. “We’re getting old,” Sax said.

Desmond hooted. He still had a most alarming laugh— infectious,
however, and Sax laughed too. “Getting old? Getting old?”

The sight of their little Rickover put them into paroxysms. Though
it was pathetic as well, and brave, and stupid, and clever. Their limbic
systems were overloaded still, Sax noted, jangling with all the emotions at
once. All his past was coming clearer and clearer, in a kind of simultaneous
overlay of sequences, each event with its unique emotional charge, now firing
all at once: so full, so full. Perhaps fuller than the, the what—the mind? the
soul?—fuller than it was capable of being. Overflowing, yes, that was the way
it felt. “Desmond, I’m overflowing.”

Desmond only laughed harder.

His life had exceeded his capacity to feel it all at once. Except
what was this, then, this feeling? A limbic hum, the roaring hum of the wind in
conifers high in the mountains, lying in a sleeping bag at night in the
Rockies, with the wind thrumming through the pine needles. . . . Very
interesting. Possibly an effect of the drug, which would pass, although he was
hoping that there were effects of the drug that would last, and who could say
if this aspect might not as well, as an integral part of the whole? Thus: if
you can remember your past, and it is very long, then you will necessarily feel
very full, full of experiences and emotions, perhaps to the point where it
might not be easy to feel much more. Wasn’t that possible? Or perhaps
everything would feel more intensely than was appropriate; perhaps he had
inadvertently turned them all into horribly sentimental people, stricken with
grief if they stepped on an ant, weeping with joy at the sight of sunrise, etc.
That would be unfortunate. Enough was enough, or more than enough. In fact Sax
had always believed that the amplitude of emotional response exhibited in the
people around him could be turned down a fair bit with no very .great loss to
humanity. Of course it wouldn’t work to try consciously to damp one’s emotions,
that was repression, sublimation, with a resulting overpressure elsewhere.
Curious how useful Freud’s steam-engine model of the mind remained,
compression, venting, the entire apparatus, as if the brain had been designed
by James Watt. But reductive models were useful, they were at the heart of
science. And he had needed to blow off steam for a long time.

So he and Desmond walked around Chernobyl, throwing rocks at it,
laughing, talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a
simultaneous transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts.
Thus very dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and reassuring to
hear someone else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel
so close to this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now
babbling together with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar
region, the parks in the Ares; and they were so similar anyway.

“We all go through the same things.”

“It’s true! It’s true!”

Curious that this fact didn’t affect people’s behavior more.

Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as
they passed through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past association. It
was near sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on
dinner. Most had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug
appeared to be a mild appetite suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya
had been cooking a big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing
them in. Borscht? Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a
breadmaker in the morning, and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the
barrel vaults.

They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest
corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning
of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when
she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small
screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old
way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some
sense to say Here we are—the others are away tonight—otherwise everything is
the same. An ordinary night in Underbill. Talk about work, the various
sites—food—the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk
in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm
them, ignoring the others—just as always.

But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a Provencal stew
that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people
stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it
could be a problem.

Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly
talking at once—and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone
all at once, even while speaking—under that noise, Ann leaned into him and
said:

“Where are you going after this?”

“Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues
invited me to, to, to—to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me,
for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse—on Chryse Gulf.”