Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “This isn’t climbing at all.”

  “Ah.”

  So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly speaking, unjustifiable.

  And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by horizontal fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and gritting his teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his boot tips and gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down Wang’s Gully, which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it had in any given section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of fatigued excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk his position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer just as he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly pitted, its dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on one crack over a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that crack; was it deep enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to try to find out. So he took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it turned out it was not really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull, groaning involuntarily at the effort, he was up and past it, using holds he never even consciously saw; and then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann, breathing very heavily. She sat serenely on a narrow ledge.

  “Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.

  “Ah.”

  “Got your attention, did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “No memory problems, I trust?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I like about climbing.”

  Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up, Sax said, “So have you been having memory problems?”

  “Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this crack here.”

  “Indeed.”

  That night they lay in sleeping bags, in a clear mushroom tent big enough to hold ten. At this altitude, with its su-perthin atmosphere, it was impressive to consider the strength of the tent fabric, holding in 450 millibars of air with no sign of untoward bulging at any point; the clear material was nice and taut, but not rock hard; no doubt it was holding many bars of air less than would test its holding capacity. When Sax recalled the meters of rock and sandbags they had had to pile on their earliest habitats to keep them from exploding, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the subsequent advancements in materials science.

  Ann nodded when he spoke of this. “We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.”

  “Well. It’s understandable, I think. Just hard to believe.”

  “I suppose I see the distinction,” she said easily.

  Feeling more comfortable, he brought up memory again. “I’ve been having what I call blank-outs, where I can’t remember my thoughts of the previous several minutes, or up to say an hour. Short-term-memory failures, having to do with brain-wave fluctuations, apparently. And the long-term past is getting very uncertain as well, I’m afraid.”

  For a long time she didn’t reply, except to grunt that she’d heard him. Then:

  “I’ve forgotten my whole self. I think there’s someone else in me now. In partway. A kind of opposite. My shadow, or the shadow of my shadow. Seeded, and growing inside me.”

  “How do you mean?” Sax said apprehensively.

  “An opposite. She thinks just what I wouldn’t have thought.” She turned her head away, as if shy. “I call her Counter-Ann.”

  “And how would you — characterize her?”

  “She is … I don’t know. Emotional. Sentimental. Stupid. Cries at the sight of a flower. Feels that everyone is doing their best. Crap like that.”

  “You weren’t like that before, at all?”

  “No no no. It’s all crap. But I feel it as though it’s real. So… now there’s Ann and Counter-Ann. And… maybe a third.”

  “A third?”

  “I think so. Something that isn’t either of the other two.”

  “And what do you — I mean, do you call that one anything?”

  “No. She doesn’t have a name. She’s elusive. Younger. Fewer ideas about things, and those ideas are — strange. Not Ann or Counter-Ann. Somewhat like that Zo, did you know her?”

  “Yes,” Sax said, surprised. “I liked her.”

  “Did you? I thought she was awful. And yet… there’s something like that in me as well. Three people.”

  “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 anticipate 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-cuts, the gaps in memory, thepresque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical 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 Underbill, 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 though
t saying 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 crevasses made their walk into a wandering ramble — in a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls, yet just as difficult of passage 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 circumference. 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 Hundredargued 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, Hell’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 space; 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; Chernobyl; 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 d
o 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 bumps and hollows in view, were perfectly familiar, all still in their proper places on the compass 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.