Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  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 Cocktail 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 spacesuit, 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 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 certairj 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 — 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.

  Back into the Alchemist’s Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank God for Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit bulldozer to run.

  But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, slowly, gasping.

  “Ann? Ann?”

  She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. “I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the — the beauty until it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined — and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.

  But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry — his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so — just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal — which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

  “Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together — I mean one after the next — but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean — you know how it was then — that Russian couple had fought and been sent home — we all hid everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not ever.

  And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the …” He waved at the blue sky.

  “I remember,” she said.

  She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn’t get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

  “Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said, frowning. “It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might become… but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still” — sharp laugh — “no. It was you. You didn’t — it wasn’t your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn’t mine either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn’t. And then I forgot about it.”

  “No,” Sax said.

  He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought, to re-remember. He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant at Lookout Point, the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move, it’s a net gain in order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of science; and she had said, for that you would destroy the entire face of a planet. He remembered it.

 
But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the upwelling — clearly she remembered it too — and yet remembered something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

  “Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out — intending to — to reveal ourselves — ”

  Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She laughed again. “Why sure.”

  He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.

  But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had happened — well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.

  Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these upwelling memories to be true — if one so crucial as this one was now cast in doubt — what then of the others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading him to his car, hand on his wrist — could that too be… No. That hand on his wrist. But Ann’s hand had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true.

  And so?

  So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future — his life — what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there nothing they could hold to?

  He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.

  “Well,” Ann said, apparently understanding him. “At least we remember that much. I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they didn’t work out. Something happened that we probably neither understood at the time, so it’s no surprise we can’t remember it properly now, or that we recall it differently. We have to understand something to remember it.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I think so. It’s why two-year-olds can’t remember. They feel things like crazy, but they don’t remember them because they don’t really understand them.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He wasn’t sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood memories Were eidetic images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was true, then he was perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko’s appearance in the storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in the violence of the storm… .

  Ann stepped forward and gave him a hug. He turned his face to the side, his ear pressed against her collarbone. She was tall. He felt her body against his, and he hugged her back, hard. You will remember this forever, he thought. She held him away from her, held him by the arms. “That’s the past,” she said. “It doesn’t explain what happened between us on Mars, I don’t think. It’s a different matter.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We haven’t agreed, but we had the same — the same terms. The same things were important to us. I remember when you tried to make me feel better, in that boulder car in Marineris, during the outbreak flood.”

  “And you me. When Maya was yelling at me, after Frank died.”

  “Yes,” she said, thinking back. Such power of recall they had in these amazing hours! That car had been a crucible, they had all metamorphosed in it, in their own ways. “I suppose I did. It wasn’t fair, you were just trying to help her. And that look on your face…”

  They stood there, looking back at the scattering of low structures that was Underbill.

  “And here we are,” Sax said finally.

  “Yes. Here we are.”

  Awkward instant. Another awkward instant. This was life with the other: one awkward instant after the next. He would have to get used to it, somehow. He stepped back. He reached out and held her hand, squeezed it hard. Then let go. She wanted to walk out past Nadia’s arcade, she said, into the untouched wilderness west of Underbill. She was experiencing a rush of memory too strong to concentrate on the present. She needed to walk.

  He understood. Off she went, with a wave. With a wave! And there was Coyote, over there near the salt pyramids so brilliant in the afternoon light. Feeling Mars’s gravity for the first time in decades, Sax hopped over to the little man. The only one of the First Hundred’s men who had been shorter than Sax. His brother in arms.

  Stumbling here and there through his life, step-by-step shocked elsewhere, it was actually quite difficult to focus on Coyote’s asymmetrical face, faceted like Deimos — but there it was, most vibrantly there, pulsing it seemed with all its past shapes as well. At least Desmond had more or less resembled himself throughout. God knew what Sax looked like to the others, or what he would see if he looked in a mirror — the idea was dizzying, it might even be interesting to test it, look in a mirror while remembering something from his youth, the view might distort. Desmond, a Toba-gonian of Indian descent, now saying something difficult to comprehend, something about rapture of the deeps, unclear if he was referring to the memory drug or to some nautical incident from his youth. Sax wanted so much to tell him that Hiroko was alive, but just as the words were on the tip of his tongue, he stopped himself. Desmond looked so happy at this moment; and he would not believe Sax. So it would only upset him. Knowledge by experience is not always translatable into discursive knowledge, which was a shame, but there it was. Desmond would not believe him because he had not felt that hand on his wrist. And why should he, after all?

  They walked out toward Chernobyl, talking about Arkady and Spencer. “We’re getting old,” Sax said.

  Desmond hooted. He still had a most alarming laugh — infectious, however, and Sax laughed too. “Getting old? Getting old?”

  The sight of their little Rickover put them into paroxysms. Though it was pathetic as well, and brave, and stupid, and clever. Their limbic systems were overloaded still, Sax noted, jangling with all the emotions at once. All his past was coming clearer and clearer, in a kind of simultaneous overlay of sequences, each event with its unique emotional charge, now firing all at once: so full, so full. Perhaps fuller than the, the what — the mind? the soul? — fuller than it was capable of being. Overflowing, yes, that was the way it felt. “Desmond, I’m overflowing.”

  Desmond only laughed harder.

  His life had exceeded his capacity to feel it all at once. Except what was this, then, this feeling? A limbic hum, the roaring hum of the wind in conifers high in the mountains, lying in a sleeping bag at night in the Rockies, with the wind thrumming through the pine needles… Very interesting. Possibly an effect of the drug, which would pass, although he was hoping that there were effects of the drug that would last, and who could say if this aspect might not as well, as an integral part of the whole? Thus: if you can remember your past, and it is very long, then you will necessarily feel very full, full of experiences and emotions, perhaps to the point where it might not be easy to feel much more. Wasn’t that possible? Or perhaps everything would feel more intensely than was appropriate; perhaps he had inadvertently turned them all into horribly sentimental people, stricken with grief if they stepped on an ant, weeping with joy at the sight of sunrise, etc. That would be unfortunate. Enough was enough, or more than enough. In fact Sax had always believed that the amplitude of emotional response exhibited in the people around him could be turned down a fair bit with no very .great loss to humanity. Of course it wouldn’t work to try consciously to damp one’s emotions, that was repression, sublimation, with a resulting overpressure elsewhere. Curious how useful Freud’s steam-engine model of the mind remained, compression, venting, the entire apparatus, as if the brain had been designed by James Watt. But reductiv
e models were useful, they were at the heart of science. And he had needed to blow off steam for a long time.

  So he and Desmond walked around Chernobyl, throwing rocks at it, laughing, talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a simultaneous transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts. Thus very dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and reassuring to hear someone else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel so close to this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now babbling together with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar region, the parks in the Ares; and they were so similar anyway.

  “We all go through the same things.”

  “It’s true! It’s true!”

  Curious that this fact didn’t affect people’s behavior more.

  Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as they passed through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past association. It was near sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on dinner. Most had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug appeared to be a mild appetite suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya had been cooking a big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing them in. Borscht? Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a breadmaker in the morning, and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the barrel vaults.

  They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to say Here we are — the others are away tonight — otherwise everything is the same. An ordinary night in Underbill. Talk about work, the various sites — food — the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the others — just as always.