Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on east Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defense of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-meter rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.
Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.
“There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” he said as he put water on to boil.
“The Big Bang?” Michel suggested.
“As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the— the clumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier— clumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.”
“I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.”
“Singularities are strange— outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.” Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. “But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.”
“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there and see, eh?”
As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.”
“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim. . . .” Michel shuddered.
“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”
“Well— we’ll hold down the fort for you.”
As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be there. “The cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.
Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.”
Sax frowned.
Before he left, he called Ann.
“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobiosphere, together?”
She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over— the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: “No.” And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.
Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the rocky first biomes of the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.
Well, one couldn’t make people see things.
He went to say good-bye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann. As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it— to fall in love with all the objects of his “scientific study.” Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew.
Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this un-Sax-like behavior, this “change in thinking.” Love, yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science— yes, that would be a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they cooperated in the study or not. In fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t cooperate, if they refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. “Be careful,” Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.