Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  She shut down the screen. Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if only she exerted herself hard enough, the whole world would change. Now she knew better.

  Although it was a hard thing to admit. “It’s enough to turn you red,” she said to Michel as she left for work. “It’s enough to get us up to Mangala,” she warned him.

  But in a week the crisis passed. An accommodation was reached; the settlement was allowed to remain, and the Chinese promised to send up a correspondingly smaller number of legal immigrants the following year. Very unsatisfactory, but there it was. Life went on under this new shadow.

  Except she was walking home, one late-spring afternoon after work, and a line of rosebushes at the back of the corniche caught her attention, and she walked over to have a closer look. Behind the bushes people were walking on Har-makhis Avenue by the cafes, most of them in a hurry. The bushes had a lot of new leaves, their brown a mixture of green and red. The new roses were a pure dark red, their lustrous velvet petals glowing in the afternoon light. Lincoln, the tag on the trunk said. A kind of rose. Also the greatest American, a man who had been a kind of combination of John and Frank, as Maya understood him. One of the Group had written a great play about him, dark and troubling, the hero murdered senselessly, a real heart-breaker. They needed a Lincoln these days. The red of the roses was glowing brightly. Suddenly she couldn’t see; for a moment everything dazzled, as if she had glanced into the sun.

  Then she was looking at an array of things.

  Shapes, colors — she was aware of that much, but what they were — who she was — wordlessly she struggled to recognize…

  Then it all crashed back at once. Rose, Odessa, all of it just as if it had never been gone. But she staggered, she had to catch her balance. “Ah no,” she said. “My God.” She swallowed; throat dry, very dry. A physiological event. It had lasted quite some time. She hissed, choked back a cry. Stood rigid on the gravel path, the hedge brown green before her, spotted by livid red. She would have to remember that color effect for the next Jacobean play they did.

  She had always known it was going to happen. She had always known. Habit, such a liar; she knew that. Inside her ticked a bomb. In the old days it had had three billion ticks, more or less. Now they had rigged it to have ten billion — or more — or less. The ticks kept ticking nevertheless. She had heard of a clock one could buy, which ran downward through a certain finite number of hours, presumably those you had left if you were to live to five hundred years, or whatever length of life you chose. Choose a million and relax. Choose one, and pay a little bit closer attention to the moment. Or dive into your habits and never think about it, like everyone else she knew.

  She would have been perfectly happy to do that. She had done it before and would do it again. But now in this moment something had happened, and she was back in the interregnum, the stripped time between sets of habits, waiting for the next exfoliation. No, no! Why? She didn’t want such a time, they were too hard — she could scarcely stand the raw sense of time passing that came to her during these periods. The sense that everything was for the last time. She hated that feeling, hated it. And this time she hadn’t changed her habits at all! Nothing was different; it had struck out of the blue. Maybe it had been too long since the last time, habits nonwithstanding. Maybe it would start happening now whenever it chose to, randomly, perhaps frequently.

  She went home (thinking, I know where my home is) and tried to tell Michel what had happened, describing and sobbing and describing and then giving up. “We only do things once! Do you understand?”

  He was very concerned, though he tried not to show it. Blank-outs or not, she had no trouble recognizing the moods of Monsieur Duval. He said that her little jamais vu was perhaps a small epileptic fit or a tiny stroke, but he could not be sure, and even tests might not tell them. Jamais vu was poorly understood; a variation on deja vu, essentially its reverse: “It seems to be a kind of temporary interference in the brain’s wave patterns. They go from alpha waves to delta waves, in a little dip. If you’ll wear a monitor we could find out next time it happens, if it does. It’s somewhat like a waking sleep, in which a lot of cognition shuts down.”

  “Do people ever get stuck there?”

  “No. I don’t know of any cases like that. It’s rare, and always temporary.”

  “So far.”

  He tried to act as if that were a baseless fear.

  Maya knew better, and went into the kitchen to start a meal. Bang the pots, open the refrigerator, pull out vegetables, chop them and throw them in the pan. Chop chop chop chop. Stop to cry, stop to stop crying; even this had happened ten thousand times before. The disasters one couldn’t avoid, the habit of hunger. In the kitchen, trying to ignore everything and make a meal; how many times. Well, here we are.

  After that she avoided the row of rosebushes, fearful of another incident. But of course they were visible from anywhere on that stretch of the corniche, right out to the seawall. And they were in bloom almost all the time, roses were amazing that way. And once, in that same afternoon light, pouring over the Hellespontus and making everything to the west somewhat washed out, darkened to pastel opacities, her eye caught the pinprick reds of the roses in the hedge, even though she was walking the seawall — and seeing the tapestry of foam on the black water to one side of her, and the roses and Odessa rising up to the other side, she stopped, stilled by something in the double vision, by a realization — or almost — the edge of an epiphany — she felt some vast truth pushing at her, just outside her — or inside her body, even, inside her skull but outside her thoughts, pushing at the dura that encased the brain — everything explained, everything come clear at last, for once…

  But the epiphany never made it through the barrier. A feeling only, cloudy and huge — then the pressure on her mind passed, and the afternoon took on its ordinary pewter luminance. She walked home feeling full, oceans of clouds in her chest, full to bursting with something like frustration, or a kind of anguished joy. Again she told Michel what had happened, and he nodded; he had a name for this too:

  “Presque vu.” Almost seen. “I get that one a lot,” he said. With a characteristic look of secret sorrow.

  But all of his symptomatic categories suddenly seemed to Maya only to mask what was really happening to her.

  Sometimes she got very confused; sometimes she thought she understood things that did not exist; sometimes she forgot things, forever; and sometimes she got very, very scared. And these were the things Michel was trying to contain with his names and his combinatoires.

  Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of light and time. And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went. Enough days passed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how frightened she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing that it was easy to forget. Just live in la vie quotidienne, pay attention to daily life with its work, friends, visitors.

  Among other visitors were Charlotte and Ariadne, who came down from Mangala to consult with Maya about the worsening situation with Earth. They went out to breakfast on the corniche, and talked about Dorsa Brevia’s concerns. Essentially, despite the fact that the Minoans had left the Free Mars coalition because they disliked its attempt to dominate the outer satellite settlements, among other things, the Dorsa Brevians had come to think Jackie had been right about immigration, at least to an extent.

  “It’s not that Mars is approaching its human carrying capacity,” Charlotte said, “they’re wrong about that. We could tighten our belts, density the towns. And these new floating towns on the North Sea could accommodate a lot of people, they’re a sign of how many more could live here. They have practically no impact, except on harbor towns, in some senses. But there’s room for more harbor towns, on the North Sea anyway.”

  “Many more,” Maya said. Despite the Terran incursions, she did not like to hear anti-immigrant talk in any form. But Charlotte was back on the e
xecutive council, and for years she had supported a close relation to Earth, so this was hard for her to say:

  “It isn’t the numbers. It’s who they are, what they believe. The assimilation troubles are getting really severe.”

  Maya nodded. “I’ve read about them on the screen.”

  “Yes. We’ve tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but they clump, naturally, and you can’t just break them up.”

  “No.”

  “But so many problems are rising — cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives — usually men attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, harassing the new settlements and so on. It’s big trouble. And this with immigration already much reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us about that, they want to send up even more. And if they do we’ll become a kind of human disposal site, and all our work will have gone to waste.”

  “Hmm.” Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But it was depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the other side, just because the problem was getting hard. “Still, whatever you do has to take the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate anyway, and back it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That’s what’s been happening with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to keep it at the lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with the immigrants as they come.”

  The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out at the fresh blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, “The exmetas are a problem as well. They want to come here even more than the UN.”

  “Of course.” It was no surprise to Maya that the old meta-nationals were still such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the Praxis model to survive, and so with that fundamental change in their nature, they were no longer like totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but they were still big and strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of capital accumulated; and they still wanted to do business, to make their members’ livings. Strategies for doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes not: one could make things that people really needed, in a new and better way; or one could play the angles, try to press advantages, try to inflate false needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of strategies, of course, trying to stabilize by diversification as in their old investment days. But that made fighting the bad strategies even harder in a way, because everyone was pursuing them to some extent. And now a lot of exmetas were pursuing very active Martian programs, working for the Terran governments and shipping people up from Earth, building cities and starting farms, mining, production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that emigration from Earth to Mars would not cease until there was an exact balance in their fullnesses; which given the hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would be a disaster for Mars.

  “Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently. “Nevertheless, we have to try to help, and we have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis a vis Earth. Or else it will be war.”

  So Charlotte and Ariadne went away, both looking as worried as Maya felt. And it suddenly occurred to Maya, very grimly, that if they were coming to her for help, then they were in deep trouble indeed.

  So her direct political work picked up again, although she tried to keep a limit on it. She seldom traveled away from Odessa, except for AWT business. She did not stop working with her theater group, which in any case was now the true heart of her political work. But she started going to meetings again, and rallies, and sometimes she took the stage and spoke. Werteswandel took many forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for Odessa’s seat in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of Friends, if they couldn’t find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a chance to think it over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in the end they decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group, who worked in the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped that, and went on doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less actively — feeling more and more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following — that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth century existed to prove. So they had to be careful, and not let too many people up — it was a tightrope act — but coping with a limited period of overpopulation was better than dealing with an outright invasion, and this was a point she made in meeting after meeting.

  And all this time Nirgal was out there in the outback, wandering in his nomadic life and talking to the ferals and the farmers, and, she hoped, having his usual effect on the Martian worldview, on what Michel called its collective unconscious. She pinned a lot of her hopes on Nirgal. And did her best to deal with this other strand in her life, to face up to history, in some ways the darkest strand of all, as it stitched its course through her life and bunched it up, in a big twisting loop, back into the foreboding that had prevailed during her previous life in Odessa.

  So that was already a kind of malign deja vu. And then the real deja vus came back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a day of it was torture; and a week, hell itself. The stereo-temporal state, Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the “always-already sensation.” Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repetition of some earlier identical day — this was how it felt — as if Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, the endless repetition of all possible spa-cetime continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the non-stereotemporal state — like double vision coming back into focus, giving things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.

  “Ah good,” Michel said as she came out of one of these spells, obviously wondering which of the drugs he had been giving her had done the trick.

  “Maybe if I could just get to the other side of a presque vu,” Maya said weakly. “Not deja or presque or jamais, but just the vu.”

  “A kind of enlightenment,” Michel guessed. “Satori. Or epiphany. A mystical oneness with the universe. It’s usually a short-lived phenomenon, I am told. A peak experience.”

  “But with a residue?”

  “Yes. Afterward you feel better about things. But, well, it’s said to usually come only if one achieves a certain…”

  “Serenity?”

  “No, well… yes. Stillness of mind, you might say.”

  “Not my kind of thing, you mean.”

  Which cracked a grin. “But it could be cultivated. Prepared for, I mean. That’s what they do in Zen Buddhism, if I understand it correctly.”

  So she read some Zen texts. But they all made it clear; Zen was not information, but behavior. If your behavior was right, then the mystic clarity might descend; or might not. And even if it did, it was usually a brief thing, a vision.

  She was too stuck in her habits for that kind of change in her mental behavior. She was not in the kind of control of her thoughts that could prepare for a peak experience. She lived her life, and these mental breakdowns intruded on her. Thinking about the past helped to trigger them, it seemed; so she focused on the present as much as she could. That was Zen, after all, and she got fairly good at it; it had been an instinctive survival strategy for years. But a peak experience… sometimes she yearned for it, for the almost seen to be seen at last. A presque vu would
descend on her, the world take on that aura of vague powerful meaning just outside her thoughts, and she would stand and push, or relax, or just try to follow it, to bring it on home; curious, fearful, hoping; and then it would fade, and pass. Still, someday … if only it would come clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was so curious; what would the insight be? What was that understanding which hovered just outside her mind, those times? It felt too real to be just an illusion…

  So, though it didn’t occur to her at first that this was what she was seeking, she accepted an invitation from Nirgal to go with him to the Olympus Mons festival. Michel thought it was a great idea. Once every m-year, in the northern spring, people met on the summit of Olympus Mons near Crater Zp, to hold a festival inside a cascade of cresent-shaped tents, over stone and tile mosaics, as during that first meeting there, the celebration of the end of the Great Storm, when the ice asteroid had blazed across the sky and John had spoken to them of the coming Martian society.

  Which society, Maya thought as they ascended the great volcano in a train car, might be said to have arrived, at least in certain times and places. Now, here: here we are. On Olympus, on Ls 90 every year, to remember John’s promise and celebrate its achievement. By far the greater number of celebrants were young natives, but there were a lot of new immigrants as well, come up to see what the famous festival was like, intent on partying all week long, mostly by continuously playing music or dancing to it, or both. Maya preferred dance, as she still played no other instrument than the tambourine. And she lost Michel and all their other friends there, Nadia and Art and Sax and Marina and Ursula and Mary and Nirgal and Diana and all the rest, so that she could dance with strangers, and forget. Do nothing but focus on the passing faces luminous before her, each one like a pulsar of consciousness crying I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.