Blue Mars (89 page)

She woke in a silence
so still she could hear her heart. She couldn’t remember where
she was. Then it came back. They were at Nadia and Art’s house, on the coast of
the Hellas Sea, just west of Odes’sa. Tap tap tap. Dawn; the first nail of the
day. Nadia was building outside. She and Art lived at the edge of their beach
village, in their co-op’s complex of intertwined houses, pavilions, gardens,
paths. A community of about a hundred people, linked to a hundred more like it.
Apparently Nadia was always working on the infrastructure. Tap tap tap tap tap!
Currently building a deck to surround a Zygote bamboo tower.

In the next room someone was breathing. There was an open door
between the rooms. She sat up. Drapes on the wall; she pulled them open a
crack. Predawn. Grey on gray. A spare room. Sax was on a big bed in the next
room, through the door. Under thick coverlets.

She was cold. She got up and padded through the door into his
room. His face slack on a broad pillow. An old man. She crawled under the
coverlets into bed with him. He was warm. He was shorter than she was, short
and round. She knew that, she knew him: from the sauna and pool in Un-derhill,
the baths in Zygote. Another part of their communal body. Tap tap tap tap tap.
He stirred and she wrapped herself around him. He snuggled back into her, still
deeply asleep.

During the memory experiment she had focused on Mars. Michel had
once said it: Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. And
seeing the same hillocks and hollows around Underbill had reminded her
intensely of the early years, when over each horizon had been a new thing. The
land. In her mind it endured. On Earth they would never know what it was like,
never. The lightness, the tight intimacy of the horizon, everything almost
within touch; then the sudden immense vistas, when one of Big Man’s
neighborhoods hove into view: the vast cliffs, the canyons so deep, the
continent volcanoes, the wild chaos. The giant calligraphy of areological time.
The world-wrapping dunes. They would never know; it could not be imagined.

But she had known. And during the memory experiment she had kept
her mind focused on it, throughout the entirety of a day that had seemed to
last ten years. Never once thought of Earth. It was a trick, a tremendous
effort; don’t think of the word elephant] But she hadn’t. It was a trick she
had gotten good at, the single-mindedness of the great refuser, a kind of
strength. Perhaps. And then Sax had come flying over the horizon, crying
Remember Earth? Remember Earth? It was almost funny.

But that had been Antarctica. Immediately her mind, so tricky, so
focused, had said That’s just Antarctica, a bit of Mars on Earth, a continent
transposed. The year they had lived there, a snatched glimpse of their future.
In the Dry Valleys they had been on Mars without knowing it. So that she could
remember it and it did not lead back to Earth, it was only an ur-Underhill, an
Underbill with ice, and a different camp, but the same people, the same
situation. And thinking about it, all of it had indeed come back to her, in the
magic of the anamnestic enchantment: those talks with Sax; how she had liked
someone as solitary in science as she was, how she had been attracted to him.
No one else had understood how far you could walk out into it. And out there in
that pure distance they had argued. Night after night. About Mars. Aspects
technical, aspects philosophical. They had not agreed. But they were out there
together.

But not quite. He had been shocked by her touch. Poor flesh. So
she had thought. Apparently she had been wrong. Which was too bad, because if
she had understood; if he had understood; if they had understood; perhaps all
history would have changed. Perhaps not. But they had not understood. And here
they were.

And in all the rush into that past, she had never once thought of
the Earth farther north, the Earth before. She had stayed inside the Antarctic
convergence. Indeed for the most part she had stayed on Mars, the Mars in her
mind, red Mars. Now the theory was that the anamnestic treatment stimulated the
memory and caused the consciousness to rehearse the associational complexes of
node and network, bounding through the years. This rehearsal reinforced the
memories in their physical tracery, such as it was, an evanescent field of
patterns formed by quantum oscillation. Everything recalled was reinforced; and
what was not recalled was perhaps not reinforced; and what was not reinforced
would continue to fall prey to breakage, error, quantum collapse, decay. And be
forgotten.

So she was a new Ann now. Not the Counter-Ann, nor even that
shadowy third person who had haunted her for so long. A new Ann. A fully
Martian Ann at last. On a brown Mars of some new kind, red, green, blue, all
swirled together. And if there was a Terran Ann still in there, cowering in a
lost quantum closet of her own, that was life. No scar was ever fully lost
until death and the final dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should
be; one wouldn’t want to lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different
kind. A balance had to be kept. Here, now, she was the Martian Ann, not issei
any longer, but an elderly new native, a Ter-ran-born yonsei. Martian Ann
Clayborne, in the moment and the only moment. It felt good to lie there.

Sax stirred in her arms. She looked at his face. A different face,
but still Sax. She had an arm draped over him, and she ran a cold hand down his
chest. He woke up, saw who it was, smiled a sleepy little smile. He stretched,
turned, pressed his face into her shoulder. Kissed her neck with a little bite.
They held on to each other, as they had in the flying boat during the storm. A
wild ride. It would be fun to make love in the sky. Not practical in a wind
like that. Some other time. She wondered if mattresses were made the same way
they used to be. This one was hard. Sax was not as soft as he looked. They
hugged and hugged. Sexual congress. He was inside her, moving. She seized him
and hugged him, hard, hard.

Now he was kissing her all over, nibbling at her, completely under
the covers. Submarining around down there. She could feel it all over her. His
teeth, occasionally, but mostly it was the licking of a tonguetip over her
skin, like a cat. Lick lick lick. It felt good. He was humming, or mumbling.
His chest vibrated with it, it was like purring. “Rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrr.” A
peaceful luxurious sound. It too felt good on her skin. Vibration, cat tongue,
little licks all over her. She tented the coverlet so she could look down at
him.

“Now which feels better?” he murmured. “A?” Kissing her. “Or B.”
Kissing a different place.

She had to laugh. “Sax, just shut up and do it.”

“Ah. Okay.”

They had breakfast with Nadia and Art, and the members of their
family that were around. Their daughter Nikki was off on a feral trip into the
Hellespontus Mountains, with her husband and three other couples from their
co-op. They had left the previous evening in a clatter of excited anticipation,
like kids themselves, leaving behind their daughter Francesca, and the friends’
kids as well: Nanao, Boone, and Tati. Francesca and Boone were both five, Nanao
three, Tati two; all of them thrilled to be together, and with Francesca’s
grandparents. Today they were going to go to the beach. A big adventure. Over
breakfast they worked on logistics. Sax was going to stay home with Art, and
help him plant some new trees in an olive grove that Art was establishing on
the hill behind the house. Sax would also be waiting to meet two visitors he
had invited: Nirgal, and a mathematician from Da Vinci, a woman named Bab. Sax
was excited to be introducing them, Ann saw. “It’s an experiment,” he confided
to her. He was as flushed as the kids.

Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would
perhaps get down to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning
the kids were to be in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this
prospect they couldn’t sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table
like young dogs.

So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the
kids. Maya could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it,
Aunt Ann? She nodded. They would take the tram.

So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and
Francesca and Nanao and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver,
with Tati on Ann’s lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat
behind. Maya came in this way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and
Art’s village, in a detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She
went in most days to work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work
with her theater group. She was also a habitue of the cafe scene, and,
apparently, these kids’ most regular baby-sitter.

Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two
of them groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add
to the day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous
encounter between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old
woman, the play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the
body. Ann and the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such
a scene.

“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break,
“cat got your tongue?”

Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”

“No,” Ann said.

Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked
up at them, some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious
flecked eyes, Ann saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more
like Art, but not much like either. A beauty.

They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter
and kiosk, a restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading
inland, and a broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They
got off the tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.

It was a cloudy windy day. The beach proved to be nearly deserted.
Swift low waves came in at an angle to the strand, breaking in the shallows
just offshore, in abrupt white lines. The sea was dark, the clouds pearl gray,
in a herringbone pattern under a dull lavender sky. Maya dropped her bags. She
and Boone ran to the water’s edge. Down the beach to the east Odessa rose on
its hillside, under a hole in the clouds so that all the tiny white walls
glowed yellow in the sun. Gulls wheeled by looking for things to eat,
feathering in the onshore wind. A pelican air-surfed over the waves, and above
the pelican flew a man in a big birdsuit. The sight reminded Ann of Zo. People
had died so young: in their forties, thirties, twenties; some in their teens,
when they could just guess what they were going to miss; some at the age of
these kids. Cut short like frogs in a frost. And it could still happen. At any
moment the air itself could pick you up and kill you. Although that would be an
accident. Things were different now, it had to be admitted; for barring
accident, these kids would probably live a full span. A very full span. There
was that to be said for the way things were now.

Nikki’s friends had said it would be best to keep their daughter
Tati out of the sand, as she was prone to eating it. So Ann tried to keep her
back on the narrow lawn between dunes and beach, but she broke away, howling,
and trundled over and plopped back on her diaper on the sand, near the others,
looking satisfied. “Okay,” Ann said, giving up and joining her, “but don’t eat
any of it.”

Maya was helping Nanao and Boone and Francesca dig a hole. “When
we reach water sand we’ll start the drip castle,” Boone declared. Maya nodded,
absorbed in the digging.

“Look,” Francesca shrieked at them, “I’m running circles around
you.”

Boone glanced up. “No,” he said, “you’re running ovals around us.”

He returned to discoursing with Maya about the life cycle of sand
crabs. Ann had met him before; a year ago he had scarcely been talking, just
simple phrases like Tati and Na-nao’s, Fishie! Mine! and now he was a pedant.
The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at
that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai
creatures they eventually became. Who would dare to do that, who would dare
deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and
everyone did it. Although Nikki and her friends, packing happily for their
mountain trip, had still seemed a lot like kids to Ann. And they were nearly
eighty years old. So perhaps it didn’t happen as much anymore. There was that
too to be said for things as they were.

Francesca stopped her circling or ovaling, and plucked a plastic
shovel out of Nanao’s hands. Nanao wailed in protest. Francesca turned away and
stood on her tiptoes, as if to demonstrate how light her conscience was.

“It’s my shovel,” she said over her shoulder.

“Is not!”

Maya barely glanced up. “Give it back.”

Francesca danced off with it.

“Ignore her,” Maya instructed Nanao. Nanao wailed more furiously,
his face magenta. Maya gave Francesca the eye. “Do you want an ice cream or
not.”