Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So they were fourteen. Thus reduced, Underbill 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 barrel-vault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window looking out onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick glass 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 haying 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. 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 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 space of the Underbill 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.

  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 class… 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 timespace, 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. Chernobyl 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 would prove so competent and energetic? He hadn’t remembered that 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. T
wo 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 God 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 lab-rat 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 puberty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann — Ann — he saw her face as he argued with her on the Ares, in Underbill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the warehouse on Pavonis. Why always this assault 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 Underbill 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. As if accomplishment were nothing but a certain number of the body’s three billion heartbeats passed. 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 cluster 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 class 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 canal, 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 quantities 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.

  “Wh
y 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 Underbill 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 damned. 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 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, awefullness, 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.