“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile. “A flowing shell.”
“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It wouldn’t be so bad.”
“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear walkers for a hundred years — then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”
“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”
Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that.” He shook his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”
The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the grass. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions himself.
After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?”
Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”
“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”
“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m afraid…”
Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”
“I know.”
On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled.
“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.
“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking — it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’ — and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”
But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.
And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!
But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.
He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.
Well — still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.
“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something — good. See how beautiful it is — in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere… It’s self-organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”
“Well…” Michel demurred.
“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”
“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”
“Life?”
“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow consciousness?”
“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.
“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”
“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What are you thinking? “I mean — here it all is. Still here.”
“But not the same.”
“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically opposed to mysticism, but still…”
Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”
“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a … such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”
“You always want to know.”
“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”
“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”
They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.
PART TEN
Werteswandel
It was past midnight, the offices were quie
t. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with hand-screens.
From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”
“A matter of nanoseconds.”
“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields — there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled minor apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”
“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.
“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”
“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel — then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”
“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”
“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”
“And these spheres are how big?”
The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we bum twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”
“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”
The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”
“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”
“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”
“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the second half of the trip.”
The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no. You only need to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips you should coast through the middle, to save fuel.”
The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.
The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean liners.”
The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”
The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Centauri. Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.” He raised his cup. “Cheers.”
Nirgal got in a rhythmand kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a pilgrim, half worshiper half god.
A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out running around. Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmari-neris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake. For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear it. He only ran.
It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every other perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or west around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and drink and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive, and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the race in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding ability rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell runners to be in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive extravagance, and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him with the plan of passing him at the end. But each year he took a different route, and often he made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers gave up and took off in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the pace over the two hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000 kilometers — it required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to sustain it as a way of life. Running every day.
Nirgal liked it. He wanted to win the next Round-the-Worlder, to have won a majority of the first ten. He was out researching the route, checking new trails. Many new paths were being built every year, there had been a craze recently to inlay staircase trails in the sides of the canyon cliffs and dorsa and escarpments that everywhere seamed the outback. The trail he was on now had been constructed since he had last been in this area; it dropped down the steep cliff wall of a sink in the Aromatum Chaos, and there was a matching trail on the opposite wall of the sink. Going straight through Aromatum would add a fair bit of verti-cality to a run, but all flatter routes had to swing far to north or south, and Nirgal thought that if all the trails were as good as this one, the cost in elevation might turn out to be worth it.
The new trail occupied angled cracks in the blocky cliff wall, the steps fitted like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and very regular, so that it was like running down a staircase in the ruined wall of some giant’s castle. Cliffside trailmaking was an art, a lovely form of work that Nirgal had joined from time to time, helping to move cut rocks with a crane, to wedge them into position on top of the step below — hours in a belay harness, pulling on the thin green lines with gloved hands, guiding big polygons of basalt into place. The first trail builder Nirgal had met had been a woman constructing a trail along the finback of the Geryon Montes, the long ridge on the floor of lus Chasma. He had helped her all of one summer, down most of the ridge. She was still in Marineris somewhere, constructing trails with her hand tools and high-powered rock saws, and pulley systems with superstrong line, and glue bolts stronger than the rock itself — painstakingly assembling a sidewalk or staircase from the surrounding rock, some trails like miraculously helpful natural features, others like Roman roads, others still with a pharaonic or Incan massiveness, huge blocks fitted with hairline precision across boulder slopes or large-grained chaos.
Down three hundred steps, counting, then across the sink floor in the hour before sunset, the strip of sky a velvet violet glowing over dark cliff walls. No trail here on the shadowed sand of the sink floor, and he focused on the rocks and plants scattered over it, running between things, his glance caught by light-colored flowers on top of round-barreled cacti, glowing like the sky. His body was also glowing, with the end of the day’s run, and the
prospect of dinner, his hunger a gnawing from within, a faintness, getting more unpleasant by the minute.
He found the staircase trail on the western cliff wall, up and up, changing gears into the uphill push stride, smooth and regular, turning left and right with the switchbacks, admiring the elegant placement of the trail in the crack system of the cliff, a placement that usually had him running with a waist-high wall of rock on the air side, except during the ascent of one bare sheer patch of rock, where the builders had been forced to the extremity of bolting in a solid magnesium ladder. He hurried up it, feeling his quadriceps like giant rubber bands; he was tired.
On a plinth to the left of the staircase there was a flat patch with a great view of the long narrow canyon below. He turned off the trail and stopped running. He sat down on a rock like a chair. It was windy; he popped his little mushroom tent, and it stood before him transparent in the dusk. Bedding, lamp, lectern, all pulled hastily from his fanny pack in the search for food, all burnished by years of use, and as light as feathers — his gear kit altogether weighed less than three kilos. And there they were in their place at the back, battery-powered stove and food bag and water bottle.
The twilight passed in Himalayan majesty as he cooked a pot of powdered soup, sitting cross-legged on his sleeping pad, leaning back against the tent’s clear wall. Tired muscles feeling the luxury of sitting down. Another beautiful day.
He slept poorly that night, and got up in the predawn cold wind, and packed up quickly, shivering, and ran west again. Out of the last Aromatum jumbles he came to the northern shore of Ganges Bay. The dark blue plate of the bay lay to his left as he ran. Here the long beaches were backed by wide sand dunes, covered by short grass that made for easy running. Nirgal flowed on, in his rhythm, glancing at the sea or into the taiga forest off to the right. Millions of trees had been planted along this coastline in order to stabilize the ground and cut down on dust storms. The great forest of Ophir was one of the least populated regions on Mars; it had been rarely visited in the earlier years of its existence, and had never been host to a tent town; deep deposits of dust and fines had discouraged travel. Now these deposits were somewhat fixed by the forest, but bordering the streams were swamps and quicksand lakes, and unstable loess bluffs that caused breaks in the lattice roof of branches and leaves. Nirgal kept to the border of forest and sea, on the dunes or among stands of smaller trees. He crossed several small bridges spanning river mouths. He spent a night on the beach, lulled to sleep by the sound of breaking waves.
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