Blue Mars Part 41

Up at Acheron a new crowd was in place in the old labs, now vastly expanded, so that the entire high long fin of rock was excavated and occupied- it was a city now of some 200,000 people. At the same time it was still, of course, a spectacular fin of rock some fifteen kilometers long and six hundred meters high, while never more than a kilometer wide at any point; and it was still a lab, or a complex of labs, in a way that Echus Overlook had long since ceased to be- something more like Da Vinci, with a similar organization. After Praxis had renovated the infrastructure, Vlad and Ursula and Marina had led the formation of a new biological research station; now Vlad was dead, but Acheron had a life of its own, and did not seem to miss him. Ursula and Marina directed their own little labs, and lived still in the quarters they had shared with Vlad, just under the crest of the fin- a partially walled arboreal slot, very windy. They were as private as ever, withdrawn into their own world even more than they had been with Vlad; and they were certainly taken for granted in Acheron, treated by the younger scientists as local grandmothers or great-aunts, or simply as colleagues in the labs.

Sax, however, the younger scientists stared at, looking just as nonplussed as if they were being introduced to Archimedes. It was as disconcerting to be treated in such a way as it was to meet such an anachronism, and Sax struggled through several conversations of surpa.s.sing awkwardness as he tried to convince everyone that he did not know the magic secret of life, that he used words to stand for the same things as they did, that his mind was not yet altogether shattered by age, etc.

But this estrangement could also be an advantage. Young scientists as a cla.s.s tended to be naive empiricists, also idealistic energetic enthusiasts. So coming in from outside, both new and old at once, Sax was able to impress them in the seminars Ursula convened to discuss the current state of memory work. Sax laid out his hypotheses concerning the creation of a possible anamnestic, with suggestions for various lines of experimental work on these possibilities, and he could see that his suggestions had for the young scientists a kind of prophetic power, even (or perhaps especially) when they were quite general comments. If these vague suggestions happened to chime with some avenue these people were already exploring, then the response could be enthusiastic in the extreme. In fact it was a case of the more gnomic the better; which was not very scientific, but there it was.

As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting used to in Da Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian science more generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and power. In his day the resources necessary to do the work would have belonged to other people, to inst.i.tutions with their own interests and bureaucracies, creating a ponderous and often foolish clumsy scattering of effort; and even the coherent efforts were often devoted to trivial things, to the monetary profits of the inst.i.tution in control of the lab. Here, on the other hand, Acheron was a semiautonomous self-contained community, answerable to the environmental courts and to the const.i.tution of course, but to no one else. They chose among themselves what to work on, and when they were asked for help, if they were interested, they could respond immediately.

So he was not going to have to do all the work of developing a memory reinforcer himself, not by any means; the Acheron labs were highly interested, and Marina remained active in the city's lab of labs, and the city still had a close relationship with Praxis, with all its resources. And many labs there were already investigating memory. It was a big part of the longevity project now, for obvious reasons. Marina said that some twenty percent of all human effort was now being devoted, in one form or another, to the longevity project. And longevity itself was pointless without memory lasting as long as the rest of the system. So it made sense for a complex like Acheron to focus on it.

Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for breakfast in the dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them, surrounded by portable walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in pots. No remembrance of Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how unusual it was to be invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the matter at hand. He had known both these women from the beginning, and greatly respected both of them, Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but he didn't feel he knew them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating and looking at them, and out the open window walls. There to the north lay a narrow strip of blue, Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea- to the south, far beyond the first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons. In between, a devil's golf course of a land- hard gnarled eroded old lava flows, riven and pocked- and in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish waste of the plateau.

Marina said, "We've been thinking about why experimental psychologists in every generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly exceptional memories, but there is never any attempt to explain them by the memory models of the period."

"In fact they forget them as soon as they can," Ursula said.

"Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes them to be true. It's put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no one alive can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the tendency is to conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled. But a lot of the reports were perfectly well substantiated."

"Such as?" Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at organism-level real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably were. But of course it made sense to do so.

Marina said, "The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of every instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words and music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works."

"They tested this?"

"Spot checks, so to speak. A ba.s.soonist broke a key of his ba.s.soon and told Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn't have to play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without scores, and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on."

"Uh-huh...."

"The musicologist Tovey had a similar power," Ursula added. "It isn't uncommon in musicians. It's as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are sometimes possible."

"Hmm."

Marina went on. "A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts- again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. 'Interest is the thing,' he was reported to have said. 'Interest focuses the attention.'"

"True," Sax said.

"He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on."

"I'd like to learn more about him."

"Yes," Ursula said. "He was less of a freak than some of the others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images presented to them in great detail- they're often impaired in other parts of their lives."

Marina nodded. "Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who remembered truly huge quant.i.ties of random fact, in tests and in general. But both of them experienced synesthesia."

"Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps."

"Perhaps."

They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 1930s. Talmudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.

"These extraordinary abilities don't seem to be the same as ordinary memory," Sax observed.

"Eidetic memory," Marina said. "Based on images that return in great detail. It's said to be the way that most children remember. Then at p.u.b.erty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It's as if these people don't ever metamorphose away from the children's way."

"Hmm," Sax said. "Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal distribution."

Marina shrugged. "We don't know. But we have one here to study."

"You do!"

"Yes. It's Zeyk. He and n.a.z.ik have moved here so that we can study him. He's being very cooperative; she's encouraging him. There might as well be some good that comes of it, she says. He doesn't like his ability, you see. In him it doesn't have much to do with computational tricks, although he's better at that than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail."

"I think I remember hearing about this," Sax said. The two women laughed, and startled, he joined in. "I'd like to see what you're doing with him."

"Sure. He's down in Smadar's lab. It's interesting. They view vids from events that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he talks about what he remembers while they've got all the latest scans running on his brain."

"Sounds very interesting."

Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating beds were occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored images flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds were empty, and somehow ominous.

After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he looked to Sax like a specimen of h.o.m.o habilis h.o.m.o habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be tested for mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points on its inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary in bruise-colored, withered skin. n.a.z.ik sat on the other side of his bed, holding his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was a detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk's brain; through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning, creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman, presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.

"So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?"

"Yes. Or they were fighting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the windows."

"Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?"

"At that time they did. But why on that night, I don't know. Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy."

Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. "Russell was there also."

"Were you," Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.

"Yes."

It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the a.s.sa.s.sination. They had been friends. "I saw him attacked," he said, surprising them all.

"Did you!" Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and n.a.z.ik and Ursula were staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.

"What did you see?" Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk's brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.

"There was fighting," Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image as if into a crystal ball. "In a little plaza, where a side street met the central boulevard. Near the medina."

"Were they Arab?" the young woman asked.

"Possibly," Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. "Yes, I think so."

He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. "Did you know them?" Zeyk croaked. "Can you tell me what they looked like?"

Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like the thought in Zeyk's brain. "A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself."

Zeyk and n.a.z.ik were looking at each other. "Yussuf," Zeyk said. "Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn't say I killed Boone; he said Boone killed me." He stared again at Sax: "But what happened then? What did you do?"

Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been afraid. "I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn't know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I- I watched. Then- then I was in a group running after them, I don't know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group... our group lost them."

"There were probably friends of the a.s.sailants in your group," Zeyk said. "There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit."

"Ah," Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. "Possibly."

He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk's cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.

"So it was not Selim," Zeyk said to n.a.z.ik. "Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers."

"We should tell Maya," n.a.z.ik said. "We must tell her."

Zeyk shrugged. "She won't care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?"

"But you think it was someone else?" Smadar said.

"Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each other. Nejm, perhaps...."

"Who is dead."

"And Yussuf as well," Zeyk said grimly. "And whoever started the rioting that night...." He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.

"Tell me what happened next," Smadar said, looking down at her screen.

"Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. Unsi... well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had come back in by it."

"Do you remember the lock code?" Smadar asked.

Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. "They were part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one."

Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. "Go on."

"Then a woman I didn't know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle."

Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait... an image of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the gla.s.s-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn't you stop them? Didn't you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn't stopped them- that he had failed to help his friend- that he had stood there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been a.s.saulted and dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn't.

But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the whole rest of that night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the lids shut as if that might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The memory was odd that way; he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when these realizations had stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the limbic system and the emotional charge of every incident must be crucially involved in the entrainment or encoding or embedding of a memory.

And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in the clinic waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face of the doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone's death. "She said, 'He's dead. Too long out there.' And Maya put a hand on Frank's shoulder, and he jumped."

"We have to tell Maya," n.a.z.ik whispered.

"He said to her, 'I'm sorry,' which I thought was odd. She said something to him about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And Frank even agreed, but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he said 'What do you know about what I like or don't like.' So bitter. He didn't like her presumption. The idea that she knew him." Zeyk shook his head.

"Was I there during this?" Sax said.

"...Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But you were distracted. You were crying."

Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!

And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning. The appearance of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and n.a.z.ik had left Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that he could go on in that amount of detail for every week of his life.

But now n.a.z.ik stopped the session. "This one is too hard," she said to Smadar. "Let's start again tomorrow."

Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine beside her. Zeyk stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw that among the many dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include memories that worked too well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of Zeyk's brain, replicating in another medium the patterns of quantum activity- lightning flickering around in his cortex... a mind that held the past far better than the rest of the ancient ones, impervious to the affliction of breaking memory, which Sax had believed to be an inexorable clocklike breakdown... well, they were giving that brain every test they could think of. But it was quite possible the secret would remain unsolved; there was simply too much happening of which they were completely unaware. As on that night in Nicosia.

Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land around Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and now he was very happy to have a place to get away.

He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about memory had come when he was walking down to this seash.o.r.e, over routes so circuitous that he could never find the same way twice, partly because the old lava plateau was so fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was never paying attention to the larger topography- he was either lost in his thoughts or lost in the immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around to see where he was. In fact it was a region in which one could not get lost; ascend any small ridge, and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense dragon; and in the other direction, visible from more places as one approached it, the wide blue expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million micro-environments, the rocky plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack filled with plants. It was very unlike the melting landscape on the polar sh.o.r.e across the sea; this rocky plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed immemorial, despite the gardening that was certainly being done by the Acheron ecopoets. Many of these oases were experiments, and Sax treated them as such, staying out of them, peering down into one steep-walled alas after another, wondering what the ecopoet responsible was trying to discover with his or her work. Here soil could be spread with no fear of it being washed into the sea, although the startling green of the estuaries extending back into the valleys showed that some fertile soil was making its way down the streams. These estuarine marshes would fill with eroded soils, while at the same time they were getting saltier, along with the North Sea itself....

This time out, however, his observations were broken repeatedly by thoughts of John. John Boone had worked for him for the last several years of John's life, and they had had many a conference as they discussed the rapidly developing Martian situation; vital years; and through them John had been always happy, cheerful, confident- trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent- no, no, not exactly- he had also been abrupt, impatient, arrogant, lazy, slipshod, drug dependent, proud. But how Sax had come to rely on him, how he had loved him- loved him like a big brother who had protected him out in the world at large. And then they had killed him. Those are the ones the killers always go after. They can't stand that courage. And so they had killed him and Sax had stood on watching and hadn't done a thing. Frozen in shock and personal fear. You didn't stop them? Maya had cried; he remembered it now, her sharp voice. No, I was afraid. No, I did nothing. Of course it was unlikely that there was anything he could have done at that point. Before, when the attacks on John had first started, Sax might have been able to talk him into another a.s.signment, gotten him some bodyguards, or, since John would never have accepted that, hired some bodyguards to follow him in secret, to protect him while his friends froze and stared in shocked witness. But he hadn't hired anyone. And so his brother had been killed, his brother who had laughed at him but who had loved him as well, loved him before anyone else thought of him at all.

Sax wandered over the fractured plain, distraught- distraught at the loss of a friend 153 years before. Sometimes it seemed there was no such thing as time.

Then he stopped short, brought back to the present by the sight of life. Small white rodents, sniffing around on the green of a sunken meadow. They were no doubt snow pika or something like, but in their whiteness they looked enough like lab rats to give Sax a start. White lab rats, yes, but tailless- mutant lab rats, yes- free at last, out of their cages and into the world, wandering over the intense green meadow gra.s.s like surreal hallucinatory objects, all ablink and sniff-whiskered as they checked out the ground between gra.s.s clumps for tasties. Munching away on seeds and nuts and flowers. John had been greatly amused at the myth of Sax as the hundred lab rats. Sax's mind, now free and scattered. This is our body.

He crouched and watched the little rodents until he got cold. There were greater creatures out on that plain, and they always stopped him short: deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, reindeer, caribou, black bear, grizzly bear- even packs of wolves, like swift gray shadows- and all to Sax like citizens out of a dream, so that every time he spotted even a single creature he felt startled, disconnected, even stunned; it did not seem possible; it was certainly not natural. Yet here they were. And now these little snow pika, happy in their oasis. Not nature, not culture: just Mars.

He thought of Ann. He wanted her to see them.

He often thought of her these days. So many of his friends were dead now, but Ann was alive, he could still talk to her, it was at least possible. He had looked into the matter, and found that she now lived in the caldera of Olympus Mons, as part of the small community of red climbers that occupied it. Apparently they took turns in the caldera, to keep the population low despite the big holes' steep walls and primeval conditions, both so attractive to them. But Ann stayed as long as she liked, Sax had heard, and only left infrequently. This was what Peter had told him, although Peter had only heard it secondhand. Sad how those two were estranged; pointless; but family estrangements seemed to be the most intransigent of all.

Anyway, she was on Olympus Mons. Therefore almost in sight, just over the horizon to the south. And he wanted to talk to her. All his reflections on what happened to Mars, he thought, were framed as an internal conversation with Ann. Not so much as an argument, or so he hoped, but as an endless persuasion. If he could be so changed by the reality of blue Mars, could not Ann as well? Was it not almost inevitable, even necessary? Might it have already happened? Sax felt he had come over the years to love what Ann loved in Mars; and now he wanted her to reciprocate, if possible. She had become for him, in a most uncomfortable way, his measure of the worth of what they had done. The worth, or the acceptability. It was a strange feeling to have settled in him, but there it was.

Another uncomfortable lump in his mind, like the suddenly rediscovered guilt about John's death, which he would try again to forget. If he could blank out on the interesting thoughts he ought to be able to blank out on the awful ones, oughtn't he? John had died, and nothing Sax could have done would have prevented it. Very probably. There was no way to say. And no way to go back. John had been killed and Sax had failed to help him; and here they were, Sax alive and John dead, nothing now but a powerful node-and-network system in the minds of all the people who had known him. And nothing to be done.

But Ann was alive, up there climbing the caldera walls of Olympus. He could talk to her if he wanted. Although she would not come out. He would have to hunt her down. But he could do it, that was the thing. The real sting of John's death lay in the death of that chance; he could no longer talk to him. But he could still talk to Ann, the chance existed.

Work on the anamnestic package continued. Acheron was a joy that way: days in the labs, talking with the lab directors about their experiments and seeing if he could help. Weekly seminars, where they got together in front of the screens and shared their results, and talked about what they meant and what they might try next. People interrupted their work to help with the farm, or do other business or go on trips; but others were there to fill in, and when people came back they often had new ideas, and always had a new charge of energy. Sax sat in the seminar rooms after the weekly roundups, looking at the coffee cups and the rings of brown coffee and black kava stains on the battered wooden tabletops, the white shiny blackboard screens covered with schemata and chemical diagrams and big looping arrows pointing to acronyms and alchemical symbols that Michel would have loved, and something inside him would glow till it hurt, some parasympathetic reaction spilling out of his limbic system- now this thiswas science, by G.o.d, this was Martian science, in the hands of the scientists themselves, working together for some collective goal that made sense, that was for the common good; pushing at the edge of what they knew, theory and experiment bouncing back and forth like a blur of Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s, week after week finding out more, going after more, extending the great invisible parthenon right out into the uncharted territory of the human mind, into life itself. It made him so happy that he almost didn't care if they ever figured things out; the search was all.

But his short-term memory was damaged. He was experiencing blank-outs and tip-of-the-tongueism every day; sometimes in the seminars he had to stop midsentence, almost, and sit down and wave at the others, asking them to go on; and they would nod and the person at the blackboard would continue. No, he needed the solution to this one. There would be other puzzles to pursue afterward, without any doubt; the quick decline itself, for instance, or any of the rest of the senescence problem. No, there was no lack of the unexplainable to work on, and never would be. Meanwhile, the problem of the anamnestic was hard enough.