Blue Mars

"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 antic.i.p.ate 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-outs, the gaps in memory, the presque vus presque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just a.n.a.lytical 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." as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just a.n.a.lytical 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 Underhill, 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 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 creva.s.ses made their walk into a wandering ramble- in a real maze now, a maze with creva.s.ses rather than walls, yet just as difficult of pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mference. 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.

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, h.e.l.l"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 s.p.a.ce; 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; Chern.o.byl; 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 b.u.mps and hollows in view, were perfectly familiar, all still in their proper places on the compa.s.s 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, Underhill 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 barrelvault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window looking out onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick gla.s.s 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 having 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 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 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. 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 s.p.a.ce of the Underhill 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 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 cla.s.s...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 times.p.a.ce, 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: areological time, as slow and long as the great systolis itself. In the walkers one had felt hollow. Chern.o.byl 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 Ares would prove so competent and energetic? He hadn"t remembered that would prove so competent and energetic? He hadn"t remembered that Ares 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 G.o.d 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 labrat 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 p.u.b.erty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann- Ann- he saw her face as he argued with her on the 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 G.o.d 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 labrat 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 p.u.b.erty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann- Ann- he saw her face as he argued with her on the Ares Ares, in Underhill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the warehouse on Pavonis. Why always this a.s.sault 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.

Wandering in the Alchemist"s Quarter. He came on Vasili again, sitting in the dust with the tears running down his face. The two of them had botched the Underhill algae experiment together, right there inside this very building, but Sax doubted very much that this was what Vasili was crying about. Something from the many years he had worked for UNOMA, perhaps, or something else- no way to know- well, he could ask- but wandering around Underhill seeing faces, and then remembering in a rush everything about them that one knew, was not a situation conducive to follow-up inquiries. No- walk on, leave Vasili to his own past. Sax did not want to know what Vasili regretted. Besides, halfway to the horizon to the north a figure was striding away alone- Ann. Odd to see her head free of a helmet, white hair coursing back in the wind. It was enough to stop the flow of memories- but then he had seen her that way before, in Wright Valley, yes, her hair light then too, dishwater blond they called that color, not very generously. So dangerous to develop any bond under the watchful eyes of the psychologists. They were there on business, under pressure, there was no room for personal relations which were dangerous indeed, as Natasha and Sergei had proved. But still it happened. Vlad and Ursula became a couple, solid, stable; and same with Hiroko and Iwao, Nadia and Arkady. But the danger, the risk. Ann had looked at him across the lab table, eating lunch, and there was something in her eye, some regard- he didn"t know, he couldn"t read people. They were all such mysteries. The day he got his letter of acceptance, selection to the First Hundred, he had felt so sad; why was that? No way of knowing. But now he saw that letter in the fax box, the maple tree outside the window; he had called Ann to see if she had been included- she had, a bit of a surprise, her such a loner, but he had been a bit happier, but still- sad. The maple had been red-leafed; autumn in Princeton, traditionally a melancholy time, but that hadn"t been it, not at all. Just sad sad. As if accomplishment were nothing but a certain number of the body"s three billion heartbeats pa.s.sed. And now it was ten billion, and counting. No, there was no explanation. People were mysteries. So when Ann had said, "Do you want to hike out to Lookout Point?" in that dry valley lab, he had agreed instantly, without a stammer. And without really arranging to, they had walked out separately; she had left the camp and hiked out to Lookout Point, and he had followed, and out there- oh yes- looking down at the cl.u.s.ter of huts and the greenhouse dome, a kind of proto-Underhill, he had taken her gloved hand in his, as they sat side by side arguing over terraforming in a perfectly friendly way, no stakes involved. And she had pulled her hand away as if shocked, and shuddered (it was very cold, for Terra anyway) and he had stammered just as badly as he had after his stroke. A limbic hemorrhage, killing on the spot certain elements, certain hopes, yearnings. Love dead. And he had harried her ever since. Not that these events functioned as proper causal explanations, no matter what Michel would have said! But the Antarctic cold of that walk back to the base. Even in the eidetic clarity of his current power of recollection he could not see much of that walk. Distracted. Why, why had he repelled her so? Little man. White lab coat. There was no reason. But it had happened. And left its mark forever. And even Michel had never known.

Repression. Thinking of Michel made him think of Maya. Ann was on the horizon now, he would never catch her; he wasn"t sure he wanted to at that moment, still stunned by this so-surprising, so-painful memory. He went looking for Maya. Past where Arkady had laughed at their tawdriness when he came down from Phobos, past Hiroko"s greenhouse where she had seduced him with her impersonal friendliness, like primates on the savanna, the alpha female grabbing one male among the others, an alpha, a beta, or that cla.s.s of could-be-alpha-but-not-interested which struck him as the only decent way to behave; past the trailer park where they had all slept on the floor together, a family. With Desmond in a closet somewhere. Desmond had promised to show them how he had lived then, all his hiding places. Jumble of Desmond images, the flight over the burning ca.n.a.l, then the flight over burning Kasei, the fear in Kasei as the security people strapped him into their insane device; that had been the end of Saxifrage Russell. Now he was something else, and Ann was Counter-Ann, also the third woman that was neither Ann nor Counter-Ann. He could perhaps speak to her on that basis: as two strangers, meeting. Rather than the two who had met in the Antarctic.

Maya was sitting in the barrel-vault kitchen, waiting for a big teapot to boil. She was making tea for them.

"Maya," Sax said, feeling the words like pebbles in his mouth, "You should try it. It"s not so bad."

She shook her head. "I remember everything that I want to. Even now, without your drugs, even now when I hardly remember anything, I still remember more than you ever will. I don"t want any more than that."

It was possible that minute quant.i.ties of the drugs had gotten into the air and thus onto her skin, giving her a small fraction of the hyperemotional experience. Or perhaps this was just her ordinary state.

"Why shouldn"t now be enough?" she was saying. "I don"t want my past back, I don"t want it. I can"t bear it."

"Maybe later," Sax said.

What could one say to her? She had been like this in Underhill as well- unpredictable, moody. It was amazing what eccentrics had been selected to the First Hundred. But what choice had the selection committee had? People were all like that, unless they were stupid. And they hadn"t sent stupid people to Mars, or not at first, or not too many. And even the dull-witted had their complexities.

"Maybe," she said now, and patted his head, and took the teapot off the burner. "Maybe not. I remember too much as it is."

"Frank?" Sax said.

"Of course. Frank, John- they"re all there." She stabbed her chest with a thumb. "It hurts enough. I don"t need more."

"Ah."

He walked back outside, feeling stuffed, uncertain of anything, off balance. Limbic system vibrating madly under the impact of his whole life, under the impact of Maya, so beautiful and d.a.m.ned. How he wished her happy, but what could one do? Maya lived her unhappiness to the full, it made her happy one might say. Or complete. Perhaps she felt this acutely uncomfortable emotional overfullness all the time! Wow. So much easier easier to be phlegmatic. And yet she was so alive. The way she had flailed them onward out of the chaos, south to the refuge in Zygote... such strength. All these strong women. Actually to face up to life"s awfulness, awfulness, to face it and feel it without denial, without defenses, just admit it and carry on. John, Frank, Arkady, even Michel, they had all had their great optimism, pessimism, idealism, their mythologies to mask the pain of existence, all their various sciences, and still they were dead- killed off one way or another- leaving Nadia and Maya and Ann to carry on and carry on. No doubt he was a lucky man to have such tough sisters. Even Phyllis- yes, somehow- with the toughness of the stupid, making her way, pretty well at least, fairly well, well at least making it, for a while. Never giving up. Never admitting anything. She had protested his torture, Spencer had told him so, Spencer and all their hours of aerodynamics together, telling him over too many whiskeys how she had gone to the security chief in Kasei and demanded his release, his decent treatment, even after he had knocked her cold, almost killed her with nitrous oxide, lied to her in her own bed. She had forgiven him apparently, and Spencer had never forgiven Maya for killing her, though he pretended he had; and Sax had forgiven her, even though for years he had acted as if he hadn"t, to get some kind of hold on her. Ah the strange recombinant tangle they had made of their lives, result of the overextension, or perhaps it was that way in every village always. But so much sadness and betrayal! Perhaps memory was triggered by loss, as everything was inevitably lost. But what about joy? He tried to remember: could one cast back by emotional category, interesting idea, was that possible? Walking through the halls of the terraforming conference, for instance, and seeing the poster board that estimated the heat contribution of the Russell c.o.c.ktail at twelve kelvins. Waking up in Echus Overlook and seeing that the Great Storm was gone, the pink sky radiant with sunlight. Seeing the faces on the train as they slid out of Libya Station. Being kissed in the ear by Hiroko, in the baths one winter day in Zygote, when it was evening all afternoon. Hiroko! Ah- ah- He had been huddling in the cold, quite vexed to think he would be killed by a storm just when things were getting interesting, trying to work out how he might call his car to him, as it seemed he would not be able to get to it, and then there she had appeared out of the snow, a short figure in a rust-red s.p.a.cesuit, bright in the white storm of wind and horizontal snow, the wind so loud that even the intercom mike in his helmet was no more than a whisper: "Hiroko?" he cried as he saw her face through the slush-smeared faceplate; and she said "yes." And pulled him up by the wrist- helped him up. That hand on his wrist! He to be phlegmatic. And yet she was so alive. The way she had flailed them onward out of the chaos, south to the refuge in Zygote... such strength. All these strong women. Actually to face up to life"s awfulness, awfulness, to face it and feel it without denial, without defenses, just admit it and carry on. John, Frank, Arkady, even Michel, they had all had their great optimism, pessimism, idealism, their mythologies to mask the pain of existence, all their various sciences, and still they were dead- killed off one way or another- leaving Nadia and Maya and Ann to carry on and carry on. No doubt he was a lucky man to have such tough sisters. Even Phyllis- yes, somehow- with the toughness of the stupid, making her way, pretty well at least, fairly well, well at least making it, for a while. Never giving up. Never admitting anything. She had protested his torture, Spencer had told him so, Spencer and all their hours of aerodynamics together, telling him over too many whiskeys how she had gone to the security chief in Kasei and demanded his release, his decent treatment, even after he had knocked her cold, almost killed her with nitrous oxide, lied to her in her own bed. She had forgiven him apparently, and Spencer had never forgiven Maya for killing her, though he pretended he had; and Sax had forgiven her, even though for years he had acted as if he hadn"t, to get some kind of hold on her. Ah the strange recombinant tangle they had made of their lives, result of the overextension, or perhaps it was that way in every village always. But so much sadness and betrayal! Perhaps memory was triggered by loss, as everything was inevitably lost. But what about joy? He tried to remember: could one cast back by emotional category, interesting idea, was that possible? Walking through the halls of the terraforming conference, for instance, and seeing the poster board that estimated the heat contribution of the Russell c.o.c.ktail at twelve kelvins. Waking up in Echus Overlook and seeing that the Great Storm was gone, the pink sky radiant with sunlight. Seeing the faces on the train as they slid out of Libya Station. Being kissed in the ear by Hiroko, in the baths one winter day in Zygote, when it was evening all afternoon. Hiroko! Ah- ah- He had been huddling in the cold, quite vexed to think he would be killed by a storm just when things were getting interesting, trying to work out how he might call his car to him, as it seemed he would not be able to get to it, and then there she had appeared out of the snow, a short figure in a rust-red s.p.a.cesuit, bright in the white storm of wind and horizontal snow, the wind so loud that even the intercom mike in his helmet was no more than a whisper: "Hiroko?" he cried as he saw her face through the slush-smeared faceplate; and she said "yes." And pulled him up by the wrist- helped him up. That hand on his wrist! He felt felt it. And up he came, like viriditas itself, the green force pouring through him, through the white noise, the white static sleeting by, her grip warm and hard, as full as the plenum itself. Yes. Hiroko had been there. She had led him back to the car, had saved his life, had then disappeared again, and no matter how certain Desmond was of her death in Sabishii, no matter how convincing his arguments were, no matter how often second climbers had been hallucinated by solo climbers in distress, Sax knew better, because of that hand on his wrist, that visitation in the snow- Hiroko herself in the hard compact flesh, as real as rock. Alive! So that he could rest in that knowledge, he could it. And up he came, like viriditas itself, the green force pouring through him, through the white noise, the white static sleeting by, her grip warm and hard, as full as the plenum itself. Yes. Hiroko had been there. She had led him back to the car, had saved his life, had then disappeared again, and no matter how certain Desmond was of her death in Sabishii, no matter how convincing his arguments were, no matter how often second climbers had been hallucinated by solo climbers in distress, Sax knew better, because of that hand on his wrist, that visitation in the snow- Hiroko herself in the hard compact flesh, as real as rock. Alive! So that he could rest in that knowledge, he could know something know something- in the inexplicable seeping of the unexplainable into everything, he could rest in that known fact. Hiroko lived. Start with that and go on, build on it, the axiom of a lifetime of joy. Perhaps even convince Desmond of it, give him that peace.

He was back outside, looking for the Coyote. Not an easy task, ever. What did Desmond recall of Underhill- hiding, whispers, the lost farm crew, then the lost colony, slipping away with them- out there driving around Mars in disguised boulder cars, being loved by Hiroko, flying over the night surface in a stealthed plane, playing the demimonde, knitting the underground together- Sax could almost remember it himself, it was so vivid to him. Telepathic transfer of all their stories to all of them; one hundred squared, in the square of barrel vaults. No. That would be too much. Just the imagination of someone else"s reality was stunning enough, was all the telepathy one required or could handle.

But where had Desmond gone? Hopeless. One could never find Coyote; one only waited for him to find you. He would show up when he chose. For now, out northwest of the pyramids and the Alchemist"s Quarter, there was a very ancient lander skeleton, probably from the original pre-landing-equipment drop, its metal stripped of paint and encrusted with salt. The beginning of their hopes, now a skeleton of old metal, nothing really. Hiroko had helped him unload this one.