Blue Mars Part 28

Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was a deep violet blue- clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high alt.i.tudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-alt.i.tude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao's loops of times.p.a.ce, like the successive positions of a finch's head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.

To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses. Out here in the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge of a cliff, and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered by myriad chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were banded by stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining the basalt. Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the gulfs of air below him.

As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites. The Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a walk along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick gra.s.s grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax's image of the Irish coast. The land's edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in the cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one walked over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare rocks.

Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell, steady deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air steamed, the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy squish. Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick brown fox, seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra juniper. Away from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its own. Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.

Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in the upper atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by the sun long after everything else was in twilight's great shadow. So Sax would sit on the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay through the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun's shadow rose up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would appear noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks gleaming like abalone sh.e.l.ls.

The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow. The warmth of the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The patterns of waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.

But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat blurry stars, he grew uneasy. "The snowy poles of moonless Mars," Tennyson had written just a few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this hour that Phobos had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A moment of the areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had completed the desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military base built on Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn't remember. Some kind of desire for symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality prized more by mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still orbiting the sun. "Hmm." He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies were starting out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning them to create a gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.

A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read; informal name for an asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and shape. "Hmmm." Sax tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was superficial: a triaxial ellipsoid, but weren't they all. Potatoshaped, right size, banged hard on one end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been a nice little settlement tucked into it. What's in a name? Say they dropped the pseudo pseudo. A couple of ma.s.s drivers and Als, some side jets... that peculiar moment, when Phobos had shot up over the western horizon. "Hmmmmm," Sax said.

The days pa.s.sed and the seasons. He did field studies and meteorology. Effects of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives out around the peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites. Weather balloons these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than ten grams, lofted by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the exosphere.

Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or gra.s.s, the top downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little payload in his fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen into the balloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to the line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would cut his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the sand, watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a pinp.r.i.c.k and then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand meters, depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479 meters, once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he would read some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like a little piece of him was sailing up into s.p.a.ce. Strange what made one happy.

The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the balloons, but a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew strong and steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a short run into the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite, bobbing this way and that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it stabilized, and he reeled it out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle quiverings in his arms. Or else he wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the resistance, and watched the kite soar up and away. The line was nearly invisible. When the spool ran out the line hummed, and if he held it between his fingers, the wind's fluctuations were communicated to him as a kind of music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a time, out of sight or, if he kept it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw in the sky. Transmitting data all the while. A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area. The mind was a funny animal.

Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the hardest kind of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look down and to the right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was elsewhere, that he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.

"Come visit and go for a walk with me," Sax said again. "I really think you should." How could one emphasize that? "I really really think you should." Throw things together. "Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water." think you should." Throw things together. "Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water."

Michel nodded uncertainly.

Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in Da Vinci. "I wouldn't mind seeing the end of Europe."

"Good man."

So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the Shalbatana cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point. Such a pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing any of the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that he treasured. The weeks would pa.s.s in their comfortable round, and then suddenly one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming without the home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sabishii or Odessa someday, so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more often.

And no one's company pleased him more than Michel's. Although on this day Michel wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed this, and wondered what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help in the long months of his return to speech- had taught him to think again, had taught him to see everything differently. It would be nice if he could do something to repay such a gift, even partially.

Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they stopped, and Sax got out the kite and a.s.sembled it, he handed the spool to Michel.

"Here," he said. "I'll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That way, into the wind." And he held the kite as Michel walked across the gra.s.sy mounds, until the line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started running, and off it went, up up up.

Michel came back grinning. "Here, touch the line- you can feel the wind."

"Ah," Sax said. "So you can." And the nearly invisible line thrummed against his fingers.

They sat down and opened Sax's wicker basket, and took out the picnic lunch he had packed. Michel became quiet once again.

"Something is troubling you?" Sax ventured as they ate. Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. "I think I want to go back to Provence."

"For good?" Sax said, shocked.

Michel frowned. "Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just beginning to enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave."

"It's heavy on Earth."

"True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy."

"Hmm." Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly evolution had adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g caused an array of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g now, to the point he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.

"Without Maya?" he said.

"I suppose it would have to be. She doesn't want to go. She says she will someday, but it's always later, later. She's working for the credit co-op bank in Sabishii, and thinks she's indispensable. Well, that's not fair. She just doesn't want to miss any of it."

"Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an olive grove?"

"It's not the same."

"No, but...."

Sax didn't know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As for living with Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine living in a damaged erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus perhaps Michel's desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.

"You should go," Sax said. "But wait just a little longer. If they get these pulsed fusion engines on s.p.a.ceships, then you could be there fairly soon."

"But that might cause real problems with Earth's gravity. I think you need the months of the trip to get prepared for it."

Sax nodded. "What you would need is a kind of exoskeleton. Inside it you'd feel somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps. Those new birdsuits I've heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to something like an exoskeleton, or you'd never be able to hold the wings in position."

"An ever-shifting carapace of carbon," Michel said with a smile. "A flowing sh.e.l.l."

"Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It wouldn't be so bad."

"So first we move to Mars, you're saying, where we have to wear walkers for a hundred years- then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can sit out here in the sun only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years."

"Or forever after," Sax said. "That's correct."

Michel laughed. "Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that." He shook his head. "Someday we'll be able to do everything we want, eh?"

The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the gra.s.s. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions himself.

After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, "How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?"

Michel shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't seen her for years."

"She didn't take the brain plasticity treatment."

"No. She's stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I'm afraid...."

Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: "I'm afraid she will never be sane, not really."

"I know."

On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn't think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled. "Like those people who think they've seen Hiroko," he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.

"Ah yes," Michel said. "Magical thinking- it's a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hiroko's case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one's presence, and wake up crying 'I saw her'- and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly."

But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.

And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel's explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond's. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn't right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!

But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn't quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko's appearance, or after. Not the details.

He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.

Well- still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the gra.s.s, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.

"How John would have liked this," Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. "I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something- good. See how beautiful it is- in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don't. It's too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere.... It's self-organizing. There's nothing unnatural about it."

"Well...." Michel demurred.

"There isn't! We can fiddle all we want, but we're only like the sorcerer's apprentice. It's all taken on a life of its own."

"But the life it had before," Michel said. "This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice."

"Life?"

"Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don't have their own kind of slow consciousness?"

"I think consciousness has to do with brains," Sax said primly.

"Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists."

"That's a worth it still has." Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shattercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. h.e.l.lo, rock. What are you thinking? "I mean- here it all is. Still here."

"But not the same."

"But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that's too mystical for me. Not that I'm automatically opposed to mysticism, but still...."

Michel laughed. "You've changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax."

"I should hope so. But I don't think Ann is much of a mystic either."

"What, then?"

"I don't know! I don't know. Such a... such a pure scientist that, that she can't stand to have the data contaminated? That's a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don't try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don't know. But I want to know."

"You always want to know."

"True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly."

"Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann." Michel grinned. "We're both crazy!"

They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.

Part Ten

Werteswandel

It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with handscreens.

From the samovar the head adviser said, "So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived."

"A matter of nanoseconds."

"Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields- there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your pa.s.sengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, pa.s.sing through your angled mirror apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the pa.s.sage collimates the fusion products."

"That's right, that's the neat part," said the engineer.

"Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?"

"If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that's three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so a.s.sume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel- then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second."

"Ka, that adds up fairly fast?"

"It's about thirty tons a day, but it's a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short."

"And these spheres are how big?"

The physicist said, "A centimeter radius, ma.s.s point-twenty-nine grams. So we burn twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give pa.s.sengers in the ship a good continuous g feel."

"I should say so. But helium3, isn't it quite rare?"

The engineer said, "A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that's not been going well. But Jupiter has all we'll ever need."

"So the ships will carry five hundred pa.s.sengers."