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, bypassing 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 passed. 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 cafés, 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 lustrous 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 God.” 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 passing 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 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 was poorly understood; a variation on déjà 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.”