Blue Mars Part 38

In the days that followed the crowd dispersed, and Maya wandered Odessa nosing through used-furniture shops and sitting on benches on the corniche, watching the sun bounce over the water. It was lovely to be in Odessa again, but she felt the funereal chill of Spencer's death much more than she would have expected. It cast a pall over even the beauty of this most beautiful town; it reminded her that in coming back here and moving into the old building, they were attempting the impossible- trying to go back, trying to deny time's pa.s.sing. Hopeless- everything was pa.s.sing- everything they did was the last time they would ever do it. Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted. This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came down to the corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the last time, and there would again be nothing lasting about it. Last time after last time, so it would go, on and on, always one final moment after the next, finality following finality in seamless endless succession. She could not grasp it, really. Words couldn't say it, ideas couldn't articulate it. But she could feel it, like the edge of a wave front pushing ever outward, or a constant wind in her mind, rushing things along so fast it was hard to think, hard to really feel them. At night in bed she would think, this is the last time for this night, and she would hug Michel hard, hard, as if she could stop it happening if she squeezed hard enough. Even Michel, even the little dual world they had built-"Oh Michel," she said, frightened. "It goes so fast."

He nodded, mouth pursed. He no longer tried to give her therapy, he no longer tried always and ever to put the brightest face on things; he treated her as an equal now, and her moods as some kind of truth, which was only her due. But sometimes she missed being comforted.

Michel offered no reb.u.t.tal, however, no hopeful comment. Spencer had been his friend. Before, in the Odessa years, when he and Maya had fought, he had sometimes gone to Spencer's to sleep, and no doubt to talk late into the night over gla.s.ses of whiskey. If anyone could draw out Spencer it would have been Michel. Now he sat on the bed looking out the window, a tired old man. They never fought anymore. Maya felt it would probably do her some good if they did; clear out the cobwebs, get charged again. But Michel would not respond to any provocation. He himself didn't care to fight, and as he was no longer giving her therapy, he wouldn't do it for her sake either. No. They sat side by side on the bed. If someone walked in, Maya thought, they would observe a couple so old and worn that they did not even bother to speak anymore. Just sat together, alone in their own thoughts.

"Well," Michel said after the longest time, "but here we are."

Maya smiled. The hopeful remark, made at last, at great effort. He was a brave man. And quoting the first words spoken on Mars. John had had a knack, in a funny way, for saying things. "Here we are." It was stupid, really. And yet might he have meant something more than the John-obvious a.s.sertion, had it been more than the thoughtless exclamation that anyone might make? "Here we are," she repeated, testing the phrase on her tongue. On Mars. First an idea, then a place. And now they were in a nearly empty apartment bedroom, not the one they had lived in before but a corner apartment, with views out big windows to south and west. The great curve of sea and mountains said Odessa, nowhere else. The old plaster walls were stained, the wood floors dark and gleaming; it had taken many years of life to achieve that patination. Living room through one door, hall to the kitchen through the other. They had a mattress on a frame, a couch, some chairs, some unopened boxes- their things from before, pulled out of storage. Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank G.o.d for that.

Soon after that the global elections were held, and Free Mars and its cl.u.s.ter of small allies were returned as a super-majority in the global legislature. Its victory was not as large as had been expected, however, and some of its allies were grumbling and looking around for better deals. Mangala was a hotbed of rumors, one could have spent days at the screen reading columnists and a.n.a.lysts and provocateurs hashing over the possibilities; with the immigration issue on the table the stakes were higher than they had been in years, and the kicked-anthill behavior of Mangala proved it. The outcome of the election for the next executive council remained very much in doubt, and there were rumors that Jackie was fending off challenges from within the party.

Maya shut off her screen, thinking hard. She gave a call to Athos, who looked surprised to see her, then quickly polite. He had been elected representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and was in Mangala working hard for the Greens, who had made a fairly strong showing and had a solid group of representatives, and many interesting new alliances. "You should run for the executive council," Maya told him.

Now he was really surprised. "Me?"

"You." Maya wanted to tell him to go look in a mirror and think it over, but bit her tongue. "You made the best impression in the campaign, and a lot of people want to support a pro-Earth policy, and don't know who to back. You're their best bet. You might even go talk to MarsFirst and see if you can pull them out of the Free Mars alliance. Promise them a moderate stance and a voice with a councillor, and long-range Reddish sympathies."

Now he was looking worried. If he was still involved with Jackie and he ran for the council, then he would be in big trouble on that front. Especially if he went after MarsFirst as well. But after Peter's visit he might not be as concerned about that as he would have been during the bright nights on the ca.n.a.l. Maya let him go stew about it. There was only so much you could do with these people.

Although she did not want to reconstruct her previous life in Odessa, she did want to work, and at this point hydrology had overtaken ergonomics (and politics, obviously) as her primary area of expertise. And she was interested in the water cycle in the h.e.l.las Basin, curious to see how the work was changing now that the basin was full. Michel had his practice, and was going to get involved with the first settlers' project that had been mentioned to him in Rhodos; she would have to do something; and so after they had unpacked and furnished the new apartment, she went looking for Deep Waters.

The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the name was no longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big group houses in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door, happy to go out to lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation in the local water world, which was still her work.

"Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the h.e.l.las Sea Inst.i.tute." This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives from all the agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well as fisheries, the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all the settlements higher in the the basin's extensive rimland watersheds. The seaside towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea's level at just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score meters higher than the North Sea's current level. "They don't want sea level to change by even a meter," Diana said, "if it can be helped. And the Grand Ca.n.a.l is useless as a runoff ca.n.a.l to the North Sea, because the locks need water flowing in both directions. So it's a matter of balancing the inflow from aquifers and rainfall, with evaporation loss. That's been fine so far. Evaporation loss is slightly higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every year they draw down the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that'll be a problem, but not for a long time, because there's a good aquifer reserve left, and they're refilling a bit now, and may more in the future. We're hoping precipitation levels will also rise over time, and they have been so far, so they probably will continue to, for a while longer anyway. I don't know. That's the main worry, anyway; that the atmosphere will suck off more than the aquifers can resupply."

"Won't the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?"

"Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can."

"They don't forbid anything?"

"Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don't mess with. Or at least they didn't used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and tackling smaller projects."

"It's exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should think."

"Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of Red projects, you know, to protect the higher alt.i.tudes, and any place they can in the south. They've got that const.i.tutional height limit to back them, and so they're always taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win there, and do their thing, and then all the little development projects are somewhat counterbalanced. It's a nightmare legally."

"But they're managing to hold things steady."

"Well, I think the high alt.i.tudes are getting a bit more air and water than they're supposed to. You have to go really high to get away from it."

"I thought you said they were winning in court?"

"In the courts, yes. In the atmosphere, no. There's too much going on."

"You'd think they'd sue the greenhouse-gas factories."

"They have. But they've lost. Those gases have everyone else's support. Without them we'd have gone into an ice age and stayed there."

"But a reduction in emission levels...."

"Yeah, I know. It's still being fought over. It'll go on forever."

"True."

Meanwhile the h.e.l.las Sea's sea level had been agreed on; it was a legislative fact, and efforts all around the basin were coordinated to make sure the sea obeyed the law. The whole matter was fantastically complicated, although simple in principle: they measured the hydrological cycle, with all its storms and variations in rain and snow, melting and seeping into the ground, running over the surface in creeks and rivers, down into lakes and then into the h.e.l.las Sea, there to freeze in the winter, then evaporate in the summer and begin the whole round again... and to this immense cycle they did what was necessary to stabilize the level of the sea, which was about the size of the Caribbean. If there was too much water and they wanted to draw down the sea level, there was the possibility of piping some of it back up into the emptied aquifers in the Amphitrites Mountains to the south. They were fairly limited in this, however, because the aquifers were composed of porous rock which tended to crush down when the water was first removed, making them difficult or impossible to refill. In fact spill-off possibilities were one of the main problems still facing the project. Keeping the balance....

And this kind of effort was going on all over Mars. It was crazy. But they wanted to do it, and that was that. Diana was talking now about the efforts to keep the Argyre Basin dry, an effort in its way as large as the one to fill h.e.l.las: they had built giant pipelines to evacuate water from Argyre to h.e.l.las if h.e.l.las needed water, or to river systems that led to the North Sea if it didn't.

"What about the North Sea itself?" Maya asked.

Diana shook her head, mouth full. Apparently the consensus was that the North Sea was beyond regulation, but basically stable. They would just have to watch and see what happened, and the seaside towns up there take their chances. Many believed that the North Sea's level would eventually fall a bit, as water returned to the permafrost or was trapped in one of the thousands of crater lakes in the southern highlands. Then again precipitation and runoff into the North Sea was substantial. The southern highlands were where the issue would be decided, Diana said; she called up a map onto her wristpad screen to show Maya. Watershed construction co-ops were still wandering around installing drainage, running water into highland creeks, reinforcing riverbeds, excavating quicksand, which in some cases revealed the ghost creekbeds of ancient watersheds below the fines; but mostly their new streams had to be based on lava features or fracture canyons, or the occasional short ca.n.a.l. The result was very unlike the venous clarity of Terran watersheds: a confusion of little round lakes, frozen swamps, canyon arroyos, and long straight rivers with abrupt right-angle turns, or sudden disappearances into sinkholes or pipelines. Only the refilled ancient riverbeds looked "right"; everywhere else the terrain looked like a bomb range after a rainstorm.

Many of the Deep Waters veterans who had not directly joined the h.e.l.las Sea Inst.i.tute had started an a.s.sociated co-op of their own, which was mapping the groundwater basins around h.e.l.las, measuring the return of water to the aquifers and the underground rivers, figuring out what water could be stored and recovered, and so on. Diana was a member of this co-op, as were many of the people in Maya's old office. After their lunch Diana went to the rest of the group, and told them about Maya's return to town; when they heard that Maya was interested in joining them, they offered her a position in the co-op with a reduced joining fee. Pleased at the compliment, she decided to take them up on it.

So she worked for Aegean Water Table, as the co-op was called. She got up in the mornings and made coffee and ate some toast or a biscuit, or croissant, or m.u.f.fin, or crumpet. In fine weather she ate out on their balcony; more often she ate in the bay window at the round dining table, reading the Odessa Messenger Odessa Messenger on the screen, noting every little incident that combined to reveal to her the darkening situation vis a vis Earth. The legislature in Mangala elected the new executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven; she had been replaced by Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts she could find, and watched the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to run, she said she was tired after so many m-years, and would take a break like she had several times before, and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that last remark). Nanedi kept a discreet silence on that topic, but he had the pleased, slightly amazed look of the man who had killed the dragon; and though Jackie declared that she would continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus, clearly her influence there had waned, or else she would still be on the council. on the screen, noting every little incident that combined to reveal to her the darkening situation vis a vis Earth. The legislature in Mangala elected the new executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven; she had been replaced by Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts she could find, and watched the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to run, she said she was tired after so many m-years, and would take a break like she had several times before, and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that last remark). Nanedi kept a discreet silence on that topic, but he had the pleased, slightly amazed look of the man who had killed the dragon; and though Jackie declared that she would continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus, clearly her influence there had waned, or else she would still be on the council.

So; she had bowled Jackie off the global playing field; but the anti-immigrant forces were still in power. Free Mars still held its supermajority alliance in uneasy check. Nothing important had changed; life went on; the reports from pullulating Earth were still ominous. Those people were going to come up after them someday, Maya was sure of it. They were getting along among themselves, they could rest, take a look around, make some plans, coordinate their efforts. Better really to eat breakfast without turning the screen on, if she wanted to keep her appet.i.te.

So she took to going downtown and having a larger breakfast on the corniche, with Diana, or later Nadia and Art, or with visitors to town. After breakfast she would walk down to the AWT offices, near the eastern end of the seafront- a good walk, in air that each year was just the slightest bit saltier. At AWT she had an office with a window, and did what she had done for Deep Waters, serving as liaison with the h.e.l.las Sea Inst.i.tute, and coordinating a fluctuating team of areologists and hydrologists and engineers, directing their research efforts mostly in the h.e.l.lespontus and Amphitrites mountains, where most of the aquifers were. She took trips around the curve of the coast to inspect some of their sites and facilities, going up into the hills, staying often in the little harbor town of Montepulciano, on the southwest sh.o.r.e of the sea. Back in Odessa she worked through the days, and quit early, and wandered around the town, shopping in used-furniture stores, or for clothes; she was getting interested in the new styles and their changes through the seasons; it was a stylish town, people dressed well, and the latest styles suited her, she looked rather like a smallish elderly native, with erect regal carriage.... Often she arranged to be out on the corniche in the late afternoon, walking home to their apartment, or else sitting below it in the park, or having an early meal in the summers in some seaside restaurant. In the fall a flotilla of ships docked at the wharf and threw out gangplanks between the ships and charged entry for a wine festival, with fireworks over the lake after dark. In the winter the dusk fell on the sea early, and the insh.o.r.e water was sometimes sheeted with ice, and glowing with a pastel of whatever clear color might be filling the sky that evening, dotted by ice-skaters and swift low iceboats.

One twilight hour as she was eating by herself, a theater company put on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle The Caucasian Chalk Circle in an adjoining alley, and between the dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the quality of light was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely followed the play, but some moments struck her with great force, especially the blackouts when the action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage in the late light. That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be perfect. in an adjoining alley, and between the dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the quality of light was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely followed the play, but some moments struck her with great force, especially the blackouts when the action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage in the late light. That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be perfect.

Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht's theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for a.s.similating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few plays of the cla.s.sical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana's political evenings in the UNTA years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in the lighting of that night's production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very same parks Diana's group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.

And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. "No," she said. "I don't want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in that play about John."

"That's an opera," Michel said. "You'd have to be a soprano."

"Nevertheless."

She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well. So as the m-years pa.s.sed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political plays, including a complete run through of the work of the South African Athol Fugard, searing pa.s.sionate plays anatomizing inst.i.tutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English language plays since Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful a.s.similation into the areophany- a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya's best window into the contemporary world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it- very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.

In those same years, as the months pa.s.sed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a few productions of old cla.s.sics, and as Maya watched them, she got more and more snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate utopianism, a drive for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old Terran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed- somehow happier. They were the replacement for her fights with Michel, she realized one night- a sublimation, he would have said, and a good one at that- easier on him, of course, and more dignified all around, n.o.bler. And there was that connection to the ancient Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number of ways all around h.e.l.las Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a neocla.s.sicism that Maya felt was good for them all, as they confronted and tried to measure up to the Greeks' great honesty, their unflinching look at reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called which should have been called Clytemnestra Clytemnestra- those amazing women, reacting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Ca.s.sandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya: "Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red.

Go home and yield to fate in time, In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act."

We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true. She loved the truth of these things. Sad plays, sad music- threnodies, gypsy tangos, So true, so true. She loved the truth of these things. Sad plays, sad music- threnodies, gypsy tangos, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Bound, even the Jacobean revenge plays- the darker the better, really. The truer. She did the lighting for even the Jacobean revenge plays- the darker the better, really. The truer. She did the lighting for t.i.tus Andronicus t.i.tus Andronicus and people were disgusted, appalled, they said it was just a bloodbath, and by G.o.d she certainly used a lot of red spots- but that moment when the handless and tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done it to her, or knelt to carry away t.i.tus's severed hand in her teeth, like a dog- the audience had been as if frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had not had his sense of stagecraft right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then with every play he had gotten more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, even as an old man; she had come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of and people were disgusted, appalled, they said it was just a bloodbath, and by G.o.d she certainly used a lot of red spots- but that moment when the handless and tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done it to her, or knelt to carry away t.i.tus's severed hand in her teeth, like a dog- the audience had been as if frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had not had his sense of stagecraft right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then with every play he had gotten more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, even as an old man; she had come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of King Lear King Lear in an elation, flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the lighting crew by the shoulder, shaking him, shouting "Was that not wonderful, magnificent?" in an elation, flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the lighting crew by the shoulder, shaking him, shouting "Was that not wonderful, magnificent?"

"Ka, Maya, I don't know, I might have preferred the Restoration version myself, the one where Cordelia is saved and marries Edgar, do you know that one?"

"Bah! Stupid child! We have told the truth tonight, that is what is important! You can go back to your lies in the morning!" Laughing harshly at him and throwing him back to his friends, "Foolish youth!"

He explained to the friends: "It's Maya."

"Toitovna? The one in the opera?"

"Yes, but for real."

"Real," Maya scoffed, waving them away. "You don't even know what real is." And she felt that she did.

And friends came to town, visiting for a week or two; and then, as the summers got warmer and warmer, they took to spending one of the Decembers out in a beach village west of the town, in a shack behind the dunes, swimming and sailing and windsurfing and lying on the sand under an umbrella, reading and sleeping through the perihelion. Then back into Odessa, to the familiar comforts of their apartment and the town, in the burnished light of the southern autumn which was the longest season of the Martian year, also the approach to aphelion, day after day dimmer and dimmer, until aphelion came, on Ls 70, and between then and the winter solstice at Ls 90 was the Ice Festival, and they ice-skated on the white sea ice right under the corniche, looking up at the town's seafront all drifted with snow, white under black clouds; or iceboating so far out on the ice that the town was just a break in the white curve of the big rim. Or eating by herself in steamy loud restaurants, waiting for the music to start, wet snow pelting down on the street outside. Walking into a musty little theater and its antic.i.p.atory laughter. Eating out on the balcony for the first time in the spring, sweater on against the chill, looking at the new buds on the tips of the tree twigs, a green unlike any other, like little viriditas teardrops. And so around, deep in the folds of habit and its rhythms, happy in the deja vu that one made for oneself.

Then she turned on her screen one morning and checked the news and found out that a large settlement of Chinese had been discovered already esconced in Huo Hsing Vallis (as if the name justified the intrusion); a surprised global police had ordered them to leave, but now they were calmly defying the order. And the Chinese government was warning Mars that any interference with the settlement would be regarded as an attack on Chinese citizens, with an appropriate response. "What!" Maya shouted. "No!"

She called up everyone in Mangala she knew; these days there weren't that many of them in positions of any importance. She asked what they knew, and demanded to be told why the settlers weren't being escorted back to the elevator and sent home, and so on; "This is simply not acceptable, you have to stop it now!"

But incursions only a bit less blatant had been happening for some time now, as she had seen herself in occasional news reports. Immigrants were being landed in cheap landing vehicles, bypa.s.sing the elevator and the authorities in Sheffield. Rocket-and-parachute landings, as in the old days; and there was little that could be done about it, without provoking an interplanetary incident. People were working hard on the problem behind the scenes. The UN was backing China, so it was hard. Progress was being made, slowly but surely. She was not to worry.

She shut down the screen. Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if only she exerted herself hard enough, the whole world would change. Now she knew better.

Although it was a hard thing to admit. "It's enough to turn you red," she said to Michel as she left for work. "It's enough to get us up to Mangala," she warned him.

But in a week the crisis pa.s.sed. An accommodation was reached; the settlement was allowed to remain, and the Chinese promised to send up a correspondingly smaller number of legal immigrants the following year. Very unsatisfactory, but there it was. Life went on under this new shadow.

Except she was walking home, one late-spring afternoon after work, and a line of rosebushes at the back of the corniche caught her attention, and she walked over to have a closer look. Behind the bushes people were walking on Harmakhis Avenue by the cafes, most of them in a hurry. The bushes had a lot of new leaves, their brown a mixture of green and red. The new roses were a pure dark red, their l.u.s.trous velvet petals glowing in the afternoon light. Lincoln, the tag on the trunk said. A kind of rose. Also the greatest American, a man who had been a kind of combination of John and Frank, as Maya understood him. One of the Group had written a great play about him, dark and troubling, the hero murdered senselessly, a real heartbreaker. They needed a Lincoln these days. The red of the roses was glowing brightly. Suddenly she couldn't see; for a moment everything dazzled, as if she had glanced into the sun.

Then she was looking at an array of things.

Shapes, colors- she was aware of that much, but what they were- who she was- wordlessly she struggled to recognize....

Then it all crashed back at once. Rose, Odessa, all of it just as if it had never been gone. But she staggered, she had to catch her balance. "Ah no," she said. "My G.o.d." She swallowed; throat dry, very dry. A physiological event. It had lasted quite some time. She hissed, choked back a cry. Stood rigid on the gravel path, the hedge brown green before her, spotted by livid red. She would have to remember that color effect for the next Jacobean play they did.

She had always known it was going to happen. She had always known. Habit, such a liar; she knew that. Inside her ticked a bomb. In the old days it had had three billion ticks, more or less. Now they had rigged it to have ten billion- or more- or less. The ticks kept ticking nevertheless. She had heard of a clock one could buy, which ran downward through a certain finite number of hours, presumably those you had left if you were to live to five hundred years, or whatever length of life you chose. Choose a million and relax. Choose one, and pay a little bit closer attention to the moment. Or dive into your habits and never think about it, like everyone else she knew.

She would have been perfectly happy to do that. She had done it before and would do it again. But now in this moment something had happened, and she was back in the interregnum, the stripped time between sets of habits, waiting for the next exfoliation. No, no! Why? She didn't want such a time, they were too hard- she could scarcely stand the raw sense of time pa.s.sing that came to her during these periods. The sense that everything was for the last time. She hated that feeling, hated it. And this time she hadn't changed her habits at all! Nothing was different; it had struck out of the blue. Maybe it had been too long since the last time, habits nonwithstanding. Maybe it would start happening now whenever it chose to, randomly, perhaps frequently.

She went home (thinking, I know where my home is) and tried to tell Michel what had happened, describing and sobbing and describing and then giving up. "We only do things once! Do you understand?"

He was very concerned, though he tried not to show it. Blank-outs or not, she had no trouble recognizing the moods of Monsieur Duval. He said that her little jamais vu jamais vu was perhaps a small epileptic fit or a tiny stroke, but he could not be sure, and even tests might not tell them. was perhaps a small epileptic fit or a tiny stroke, but he could not be sure, and even tests might not tell them. jamais vu jamais vu was poorly understood; a variation on deja vu, essentially its reverse: "It seems to be a kind of temporary interference in the brain's wave patterns. They go from alpha waves to delta waves, in a little dip. If you'll wear a monitor we could find out next time it happens, if it does. It's somewhat like a waking sleep, in which a lot of cognition shuts down." was poorly understood; a variation on deja vu, essentially its reverse: "It seems to be a kind of temporary interference in the brain's wave patterns. They go from alpha waves to delta waves, in a little dip. If you'll wear a monitor we could find out next time it happens, if it does. It's somewhat like a waking sleep, in which a lot of cognition shuts down."

"Do people ever get stuck there?"

"No. I don't know of any cases like that. It's rare, and always temporary."

"So far."

He tried to act as if that were a baseless fear.

Maya knew better, and went into the kitchen to start a meal. Bang the pots, open the refrigerator, pull out vegetables, chop them and throw them in the pan. Chop chop chop chop. Chop chop chop chop. Stop to cry, stop to stop crying; even this had happened ten thousand times before. The disasters one couldn't avoid, the habit of hunger. In the kitchen, trying to ignore everything and make a meal; how many times. Well, here we are. Stop to cry, stop to stop crying; even this had happened ten thousand times before. The disasters one couldn't avoid, the habit of hunger. In the kitchen, trying to ignore everything and make a meal; how many times. Well, here we are.

After that she avoided the row of rosebushes, fearful of another incident. But of course they were visible from anywhere on that stretch of the corniche, right out to the seawall. And they were in bloom almost all the time, roses were amazing that way. And once, in that same afternoon light, pouring over the h.e.l.lespontus and making everything to the west somewhat washed out, darkened to pastel opacities, her eye caught the pinp.r.i.c.k reds of the roses in the hedge, even though she was walking the seawall- and seeing the tapestry of foam on the black water to one side of her, and the roses and Odessa rising up to the other side, she stopped, stilled by something in the double vision, by a realization- or almost- the edge of an epiphany- she felt some vast truth pushing at her, just outside her- or inside her body, even, inside her skull but outside her thoughts, pushing at the dura that encased the brain- everything explained, everything come clear at last, for once.... "Presque vu." "Presque vu." Almost seen. "I get that one a lot," he said. With a characteristic look of secret sorrow. Almost seen. "I get that one a lot," he said. With a characteristic look of secret sorrow.

But the epiphany never made it through the barrier. A feeling only, cloudy and huge- then the pressure on her mind pa.s.sed, and the afternoon took on its ordinary pewter luminance. She walked home feeling full, oceans of clouds in her chest, full to bursting with something like frustration, or a kind of anguished joy. Again she told Michel what had happened, and he nodded; he had a name for this too: But all of his symptomatic categories suddenly seemed to Maya only to mask what was really happening to her. Sometimes she got very confused; sometimes she thought she understood things that did not exist; sometimes she forgot things, forever; and sometimes she got very, very scared. And these were the things Michel was trying to contain with his names and his combinatoires.

Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of light and time. And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went. Enough days pa.s.sed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how frightened she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing that it was easy to forget. Just live in la vie quotidienne, la vie quotidienne, pay attention to daily life with its work, friends, visitors. pay attention to daily life with its work, friends, visitors.

Among other visitors were Charlotte and Ariadne, who came down from Mangala to consult with Maya about the worsening situation with Earth. They went out to breakfast on the corniche, and talked about Dorsa Brevia's concerns. Essentially, despite the fact that the Minoans had left the Free Mars coalition because they disliked its attempt to dominate the outer satellite settlements, among other things, the Dorsa Brevians had come to think Jackie had been right about immigration, at least to an extent.

"It's not that Mars is approaching its human carrying capacity," Charlotte said, "they're wrong about that. We could tighten our belts, densify the towns. And these new floating towns on the North Sea could accommodate a lot of people, they're a sign of how many more could live here. They have practically no impact, except on harbor towns, in some senses. But there's room for more harbor towns, on the North Sea anyway."

"Many more," Maya said. Despite the Terran incursions, she did not like to hear anti-immigrant talk in any form. But Charlotte was back on the executive council, and for years she had supported a close relation to Earth, so this was hard for her to say: "It isn't the numbers. It's who they are, what they believe. The a.s.similation troubles are getting really severe."

Maya nodded. "I've read about them on the screen."

"Yes. We've tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but they clump, naturally, and you can't just break them up."

"No."

"But so many problems are rising- cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives- usually men attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, hara.s.sing the new settlements and so on. It's big trouble. And this with immigration already much reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us about that, they want to send up even more. And if they do we'll become a kind of human disposal site, and all our work will have gone to waste."

"Hmm." Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But it was depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the other side, just because the problem was getting hard. "Still, whatever you do has to take the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate anyway, and back it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That's what's been happening with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to keep it at the lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with the immigrants as they come."

The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out at the fresh blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, "The exmetas are a problem as well. They want to come here even more than the UN."

"Of course." It was no surprise to Maya that the old metanationals were still such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the Praxis model to survive, and so with that fundamental change in their nature, they were no longer like totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but they were still big and strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of capital acc.u.mulated; and they still wanted to do business, to make their members' livings. Strategies for doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes not: one could make things that people really needed, in a new and better way; or one could play the angles, try to press advantages, try to inflate false needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of strategies, of course, trying to stabilize by diversification as in their old investment days. But that made fighting the bad strategies even harder in a way, because everyone was pursuing them to some extent. And now a lot of exmetas were pursuing very active Martian programs, working for the Terran governments and shipping people up from Earth, building cities and starting farms, mining, production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that emigration from Earth to Mars would not cease until there was an exact balance in their fullnesses; which given the hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would be a disaster for Mars.

"Yes yes," Maya said impatiently. "Nevertheless, we have to try to help, and we have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis a vis Earth. Or else it will be war."

So Charlotte and Ariadne went away, both looking as worried as Maya felt. And it suddenly occurred to Maya, very grimly, that if they were coming to her for help, then they were in deep trouble indeed.

So her direct political work picked up again, although she tried to keep a limit on it. She seldom traveled away from Odessa, except for AWT business. She did not stop working with her theater group, which in any case was now the true heart of her political work. But she started going to meetings again, and rallies, and sometimes she took the stage and spoke. Werteswandel Werteswandel took many forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for Odessa's seat in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of Friends, if they couldn't find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a chance to think it over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in the end they decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group, who worked in the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped that, and went on doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less actively- feeling more and more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a planet's carrying capacity without disaster following- that was what Earth's history since the nineteenth century existed to prove. So they had to be careful, and not let too many people up- it was a tightrope act- but coping with a limited period of overpopulation was better than dealing with an outright invasion, and this was a point she made in meeting after meeting. took many forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for Odessa's seat in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of Friends, if they couldn't find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a chance to think it over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in the end they decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group, who worked in the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped that, and went on doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less actively- feeling more and more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a planet's carrying capacity without disaster following- that was what Earth's history since the nineteenth century existed to prove. So they had to be careful, and not let too many people up- it was a tightrope act- but coping with a limited period of overpopulation was better than dealing with an outright invasion, and this was a point she made in meeting after meeting.

And all this time Nirgal was out there in the outback, wandering in his nomadic life and talking to the ferals and the farmers, and, she hoped, having his usual effect on the Martian worldview, on what Michel called its collective unconscious. She pinned a lot of her hopes on Nirgal. And did her best to deal with this other strand in her life, to face up to history, in some ways the darkest strand of all, as it st.i.tched its course through her life and bunched it up, in a big twisting loop, back into the foreboding that had prevailed during her previous life in Odessa.

So that was already a kind of malign deja vu. And then the real deja vus came back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a day of it was torture; and a week, h.e.l.l itself. The stereo-temporal state, Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the "always-already sensation." Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repet.i.tion of some earlier identical day- this was how it felt- as if Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence, the endless repet.i.tion of all possible s.p.a.cetime continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the nonstereotemporal state- like double vision coming back into focus, giving things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.

"Ah good," Michel said as she came out of one of these spells, obviously wondering which of the drugs he had been giving her had done the trick.

"Maybe if I could just get to the other side of a presque vu presque vu," Maya said weakly. "Not deja deja or or presque presque or or jamais jamais, but just the vu vu."

"A kind of enlightenment," Michel guessed. "Satori. Or epiphany. A mystical oneness with the universe. It's usually a short-lived phenomenon, I am told. A peak experience."

"But with a residue?"

"Yes. Afterward you feel better about things. But, well, it's said to usually come only if one achieves a certain...."

"Serenity?"

"No, well... yes. Stillness of mind, you might say."