Blue Mars Part 39

"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 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 pa.s.s. Still, someday... if only it would come clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was 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 pa.s.s. Still, someday... if only it would come clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was so 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.... 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 crescent-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 pa.s.sing faces luminous before her, each one like a pulsar of consciousness crying I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive.

Great dancing, all night long; a sign that a.s.similation might be happening, the areophany working its invisible spell on everyone who came to the planet, so that their toxic Terran pasts would be diluted and forgotten, and the true Martian culture achieved at last in a collective creation. Yes, and fine. But no peak experience. This was not the place for it, not for her. It was too much the dead hand of the past, perhaps; things were much the same on the peak of Olympus Mons, the sky still black and starry with a purple band around the horizon.... There were hostels built around the immense rim, Marina said, for pilgrims to stay in as they made circ.u.mnavigations of the summit; and other shelters down in the caldera, for the red climbers who spent their existence down in that world of overlapping convex cliffs. Strange what people would do, Maya thought, strange what destinies were being enacted on Mars nowadays.

But not by her. Olympus Mons was too high, therefore too stuck in the past. It was not where she was going to have the kind of experience she was seeking.

She did, however, get a chance to have a long talk with Nirgal, on the train ride back to Odessa. She told him about Charlotte and Ariadne and their concerns, and he nodded and told her about some of his adventures in the outback, many ill.u.s.trating progress in a.s.similation. "We'll win in the end," he predicted. "Mars right now is the battleground of past and future, and the past has its power, but the future is where we're all going. There's a kind of inexorable power in it, like a vacuum pull forward. These days I can almost feel it." And he looked happy.

Then he pulled their bags off the overhead racks, he kissed her cheek. He was thin and hard, slipping away from her. "We'll keep working on it, yes? I'll come visit you and Michel in Odessa. I love you."

Which made her feel better, of course. No peak experience; but a train trip with Nirgal, a chance to talk with that most elusive native, that most beloved son.

After her return from the mountain, however, she continued to be subject to her array of "mental events," as Michel called them. He got more worried every time one of them happened. They were beginning to scare him, Maya saw, even though he tried to hide it. And no wonder. These "events," and others like them, were happening to a lot of his aged clients. The gerontological treatments could not seem to help people's memories hold on to their ever-lengthening pasts. And as their pasts slipped away, year by year, and their memories weakened, the incidence of "events" grew ever higher, until some people even had to be inst.i.tutionalized.

Or, alternatively, they died. The First Settlers' Inst.i.tute that Michel continued to work with had a smaller group of subjects every year. Even Vlad died, one year. After that Marina and Ursula moved from Acheron to Odessa. Nadia and Art had already moved to west Odessa, after their daughter Nikki had grown up and moved there. Even Sax Russell took an apartment in town, though he spent most of the year in Da Vinci still.

For Maya these moves were both good and bad. Good because she loved all these people, and it felt like they were cl.u.s.tering around her, which pleased her vanity. And it was a great pleasure to see their faces. So she helped Marina, for instance, to help Ursula to deal with Vlad's loss. It seemed that Ursula and Vlad had been the true couple, in some sense- though Marina and Ursula... well, there were no terms for the three points of a menage a trois, no matter how it was const.i.tuted. Anyway Marina and Ursula were now the remainder, a couple very close in their grieving, otherwise much like the young native same-s.e.x couples one saw in Odessa, men arm in arm on the street (a comforting sight), women hand in hand.

So she was happy to see the two of them, or Nadia, or any of the rest of the old gang. But she couldn't always remember the incidents they discussed as if unforgettable, and this was irritating. Another kind of jamais vu jamais vu; her own life. No, it was better to focus on the moment, to go down and work on water, or the lighting for the current play, or sit chatting in the bars with new friends from work, or with complete strangers. Waiting for that enlightenment to someday come....

Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche when a black squall approached from over the h.e.l.lespontus- Terran nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other's throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; "Yeli died."

"What? No- oh no."

"Some kind of heart arrhythmia."

"Oh my G.o.d."

Maya hadn't seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining First Hundred- lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli's shy smile... no. She didn't hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.

"This is going to happen more and more often, isn't it?" she said at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.

He sighed. "Maybe."

Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to La.s.switz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer hydrology. In '61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the time they had a.s.sumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved down to Sabis.h.i.+ and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground and helping to make Sabis.h.i.+ into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabis.h.i.+ was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Montes without disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn't been able to revive him.

So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all people, made a provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that Hiroko's band was still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy, obvious wishful thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not p.r.o.ne to wishful thinking, so maybe there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain, however, and the youngest of them, Mary (unless Hiroko were alive) was now 212 years old. The oldest, Ann, was 226. Maya herself was 221, an obvious absurdity, but there it was, year 2206 in the Terran news reports....

"But there are people in their two-fifties," Michel noted, "and the treatments may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may just be a bad coincidence."

"Maybe."

Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker and darker, which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have stayed in Provence- that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home that persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had been from the moment they had landed- or from the moment he had joined Hiroko- or perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s his hills, her belly his valley, her s.e.x his beach and ocean. Of course it was an impossible project being someone's home as well as their partner; but as it was all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relations.h.i.+p. Though sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.

Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly he felt that death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the great unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it was a scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the various manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except for the speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave collapse like her jamais vu jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre jamais vivre- theories were endless, it was a vital concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected to become old- for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely studied. But so far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if it was any one thing; and the deaths kept happening.

For Yeli's service they cast some portion of his ashes off in another swiftly rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the breakwater they had launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back and see all Odessa. Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel's apartment. Praxis indeed, the way they held each other then. They went through Michel's sc.r.a.pbooks, talking about Olympus Mons, '61, Underhill. The past. Maya ignored all that and served them tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia remained in the apartment. The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at the kitchen table, put her hand on Michel's shoulder, and looked over it at a grainy black-and-white photo, stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti sauce and coffee. A faded picture of a young man grinning right at the camera, grinning with a confident knowing smile.

"What an interesting face," she said.

Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya knew she had said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost distraught. Maya stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared. Nothing came to her.

She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa, past all the whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the terra-cotta flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out over the indigo plate of the h.e.l.las Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she cried, but without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had happened before.

Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the upper town. There was the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot The Blood Knot, or had it been The Winter's Tale The Winter's Tale. Yes, The Winter's Tale The Winter's Tale. But there would be no coming back to life for them.

Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long staircase alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays, her spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at the apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her, she veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.

She walked up and down the corniche, until she was too tired to walk. Then she sat on a bench. Across from her in a sidewalk cafe a man was playing a wheezy bandoneon, a bald man with a white mustache, bags under his eyes, round cheeks, red nose. His sad music was right there in his face. The sun was setting and the sea was nearly still, each broad facet glistening with the viscous gla.s.sy l.u.s.ter that liquid surfaces sometimes display, all of it as orange as the sun winking out over the mountains to the west. She sat back, relaxing, and felt the sea breeze on her skin. Gulls planed overhead. Suddenly the sea's color looked familiar to her, and she remembered looking down from the Ares Ares at the mottled orange ball that Mars had been, the untouched planet rolling below them after their arrival in orbit, symbol of every potential happiness. She had never been happier than that, in all the time since. at the mottled orange ball that Mars had been, the untouched planet rolling below them after their arrival in orbit, symbol of every potential happiness. She had never been happier than that, in all the time since.

And then the feeling came on her again, the pre-epileptic aura of the presque vu presque vu, the sea glittering, a vast significance suffusing everything, immanent everywhere but just beyond reach, pressing in on things- and with a little pop she got it- that that very aspect of the phenomenon was itself the meaning- that the significance of everything always lay just out of reach, in the future, tugging them forward- that in special moments one felt this tidal tug of becoming as a sensation of sharp happy antic.i.p.ation, as she had when looking down on Mars from the Ares Ares, the unconscious mind filled not with the detritus of a dead past but with the unforeseeable possibilities of the live future, ah, yes- anything could happen, anything, anything. And so as the presque vu presque vu washed slowly away from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time comprehended, she sat back on the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after all, and the potential for happiness would always be in her. washed slowly away from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time comprehended, she sat back on the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after all, and the potential for happiness would always be in her.

Part Thirteen

Experimental Procedures

At the last minute Nirgal went up to Sheffield. From the train station he took the subway out to the Socket, not seeing a thing. Inside the vast halls of the Socket he walked to the departure lounge. And there she was.

When she saw him she was pleased that he had come, but irritated that he had come so late. It was almost time for her to go. Up the cable, onto a shuttle, out to one of the new hollowed-out asteroids, this one particularly large and luxuriant; and then off, accelerating for a matter of months, until it could coast at several percent of the speed of light. For this asteroid was a stars.h.i.+p; and they were off to a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like planet rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun. A new world, a new life. And Jackie was going.

Nirgal still couldn't quite believe it. He had gotten the message only two days before, had not slept as he tried to decide whether this mattered, whether it was part of his life, whether he ought to see her off, whether he ought to try to talk her out of it.

Seeing her now, he knew he could not talk her out of it. She was going. I want to try something new, she had said in her message, a voice record without a visual image. There coming from his wrist, her voice: There's nothing for me here now anymore. I've done my part. I want to try something new.

The group in the stars.h.i.+p asteroid were mostly from Dorsa Brevia. Nirgal had called Charlotte to try to find out why. It's complicated, Charlotte said. There's a lot of reasons. This planet they're going to is relatively nearby, and it's perfect for terraforming. Humanity going there is a big step. The first step to the stars.

I know, Nirgal had said. Quite a few stars.h.i.+ps had already left, off to other likely planets. The step had been taken.

But this planet is the best one yet. And in Dorsa Brevia, people are beginning to wonder if we don't have to get that distance from Earth to get a fresh start. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind. And now it's looking bad again. These unauthorized landings; it could be the start of an invasion. And if you think of Mars as being the new democratic society, and Earth the old feudalism, then the influx can look like the old trying to crush the new, before it gets too big. And they've got us outnumbered twenty billion to two. And part of that old feudalism is patriarchy itself. So the people in Dorsa Brevia wonder if they can get a little bit more distance. It's only twenty years to Aldebaran, and they're going to live a long time. So a group of them are doing it. Families, family groups, childless couples, childless single people. It's like the First Hundred going to Mars, like the days of Boone and Chalmers.

And so Jackie sat on the carpeted floor of the departure lounge, and Nirgal sat next to her. She looked down. She was smoothing the carpet with the palm of her hand, and then drawing patterns in the nap, letters. Nirgal, she wrote.

He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but subdued. People looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going, some were seeing people off. Through a broad window they looked into the interior of the socket, where elevator cars levitated in silence against the walls, and the foot of the 37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten meters over the concrete floor.

So you're going, Nirgal said.

Yes, Jackie said. I want a new start.

Nirgal said nothing.

It will be an adventure, she said.

True. He didn't know what else to say.

In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.

It's an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It's our destiny. It's what we ought to be doing. In fact I've heard people say that that's where Hiroko is- that she and her people joined one of the first stars.h.i.+ps, the one to Barnard's star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.

It's as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true; he could imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora, of humanity across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from there. A step out of the cradle. The end of prehistory.

He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This was the last time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the other were dying. That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently together in this room. That people should leave everyone they knew.

And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so strange- they had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with ninety-nine strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had had parents, presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them had had spouses, except for the six married couples who had been part of the hundred. Single childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That was who they were. And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.

Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the light. Fine-grained gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back down. Wherever you go, she wrote, there you are.

She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.

I don't know.

They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable chamber, an elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved over a piste to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped its outer side.

Don't go, he wanted to say. Don't go. Don't leave this world forever. Don't leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the time we made love by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?

He said nothing. She remembered.

I don't know.

He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased the second you. With his forefinger he wrote we.

She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?

The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing Jackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.

Later he got a print message by radio from deep s.p.a.ce. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn't true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.

The northern polar island had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the ma.s.sive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and s.h.i.+fting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.

Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have acc.u.mulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn't stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.

Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau was cut with tributary streams like the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the territory to a great depth.

It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast deserts of red s.h.i.+fting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the best.

He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more than ten meters away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.

Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, "behind him." And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.

So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix on his position and his car's. He had a very good map program in his wristpad these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees north lat.i.tude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so apt, this anthropomorphic a.n.a.logizing) was some small purple saxifrage, stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.

Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in the light- the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him- the delicious weariness in his feet- and then something indefinable, he had to admit it- unexplainable- in that the individual elements of the experience were insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this was love. Spirit of place, love of place- the areophany, not only as Hiroko had described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko- could she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, to learn to feel it oneself... love of planet. Love of a planet's life. Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one's regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One's regard focused, in the center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.

Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological scale something rather like Hiroko's viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in "little bangs" at the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread was as far removed from the others as it was possible to be. Thus all the life islands were widely separated in times.p.a.ce, making contact between any two islands very unlikely simply because they were all late phenomena, and at a great distance from the rest; there hadn't been time for contact. This hypothesis, if true, seemed to Sax a more than adequate explanation for the failure of SETI, that silence from the stars that had been ongoing for nearly four centuries now. A blink of the eye compared to the billion light-years that Deleuze estimated separated all life islands each a tertiary emergent phenomenon.

So viriditas existed in the universe like this saxifrage on the great sand curves of the polar island: small, isolate, magnificent. Sax saw a curving universe before him; but Deleuze maintained that they lived in a flat universe, on the cusp between permanent expansion and the expand-contract model, in a delicate balance. And he also maintained that the turning point, when the universe would either start to shrink or else expand past all possibility of shrinking, appeared to be very close to the present time! This made Sax very suspicious, as did the implication in Deleuze that they could influence the matter one way or the other: stomp on the ground and send the universe flying outward to dissolution and heat death, or catch one's breath, and pull it all inward to the unimaginable omega point of the eschaton: no. The first law of thermodynamics, among many other considerations, made this a kind of cosmological hallucination, a small G.o.d's existentialism. Psychological result of humanity's suddenly vastly increased physical powers, perhaps. Or Deleuze's own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything.

In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth's surface, but they did. Coincidences happened. Most of these anthropocentric features, however, seemed to Sax likely to be the mark of the limits of their understanding; very possibly there were things larger than the universe, and others smaller than strings- some even larger plenum, made of even smaller components- all beyond human perception, even mathematically. If that were true it might explain some of the inconsistencies in Bao's equations- if one allowed that the four macrodimensions of times.p.a.ce were in relation to some larger dimensions, like the six microdimensions were to their ordinary four, then the equations might work quite beautifully- he had a vision of one possible formulation, right there- He stumbled, caught his balance. Another small bench of sand, about three times the size of the normal one. Okay- on and up to the car. Now what had he been thinking about?

He couldn't remember. He had been thinking something interesting, he knew that. Figuring something out, it seemed like. But try as he might, he couldn't recall what it was. It bulked at the back of his mind like a rock in his shoe, a tip-of-the-tongueism that never came through. Most uncomfortable; even maddening. It had happened to him before, he seemed to recall- and more frequently recently, wasn't that true? He wasn't sure, but that felt right. He had been losing his train of thought, and then been unable to retrieve it, no matter how hard he tried.

He reached his car without seeing his walk there. Love of place, yes- but one had to be able to remember things to love them! One had to be able to remember one's thoughts! Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner together, then ate it without noticing.

This memory trouble would not do.

Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wristpad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several different strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the languages of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterize. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow- they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse- fast, coherent, effortless- the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone's thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others- the stream of one's consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.

So, well; these incidents were just one of the many conditions they had to adapt to in their unnaturally prolonged old age. It was very inconvenient, even irritating. No doubt the matter ought to be investigated, although memory was a notorious quagmire for brain science. And it was somewhat like the leaky-roof problem; immediately after such a lost train of thought, with the absent shape of it still in his mind, and the emotional excitation, it almost drove him mad; but as the content of the thought was was forgotten, half an hour later it did not seem much more significant than the slipping away of dreams in the minutes after waking. He had other things to worry about. forgotten, half an hour later it did not seem much more significant than the slipping away of dreams in the minutes after waking. He had other things to worry about.

Such as the death of his friends. Yeli Zudov this time, a member of the First Hundred he had never known well; nevertheless he went down to Odessa, and after a memorial service, a lugubrious affair during which Sax was frequently distracted by thoughts of Vlad, of Spencer, of Phyllis, and then of Ann- they returned to the Praxis building, and sat in Michel and Maya's apartment. It was not the same apartment they had lived in before the second revolution, but Michel had taken pains to make it look much the same, as far as Sax could recall- something about Maya's therapy, as she was having more and more mental trouble- Sax wasn't sure what the latest was. He had never been able to deal with the more melodramatic aspects of Maya, and he hadn't paid overmuch attention to Michel's talk about her when the two of them last got together- it was always different, always the same.

Now, however, he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go back into the kitchen, past the table on which Michel's sc.r.a.pbooks were spread. Face up was a photo of Frank that Maya had treasured long ago; she had had it taped to the kitchen cabinet by the sink, in the apartment down the hall- Sax remembered that most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature of those tense years: all of them struggling while the young Frank laughed at them.

Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely. Remembering their earlier dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very long ago.

But she said, "What an interesting face."

Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the physiological manifestations of distress. To lose the substance of a speculative train of thought, a venture into the metaphysical- that was one thing. But this- her own past, their past- it was insupportable. Not to be abided. He would not abide it.

Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.