Blue Mars(164)
• • •
This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory— of Hiroko, emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover— then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to meet him— but for what?
Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image— a fleet single image—
Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.
• • •
He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though she had before. But that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That time in Antarctica— he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what to say.
“Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face mask.
He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”
“Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”
“A hundred rats.”
“Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their own rigorous logic, as Lévi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.
“Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.
“Yes.”
“So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.
“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you . . . ?”
“No. I did not.”
So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.
Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of it.
“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.
“Yes.”
Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.
She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”
He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!
She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.
But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.
Sax returned to Da Vinci Crater feeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Mangala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”