Blue Mars(238)

“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,” Maya said weakly. “Not déjà or presque or jamais, but just the 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.”

“Not my kind of thing, you mean.”

Which cracked a grin. “But it could be cultivated. Prepared for, I mean. That’s what they do in Zen Buddhism, if I understand it correctly.”

So she read some Zen texts. But they all made it clear; Zen was not information, but behavior. If your behavior was right, then the mystic clarity might descend; or might not. And even if it did, it was usually a brief thing, a vision.

She was too stuck in her habits for that kind of change in her mental behavior. She was not in the kind of control of her thoughts that could prepare for a peak experience. She lived her life, and these mental breakdowns intruded on her. Thinking about the past helped to trigger them, it seemed; so she focused on the present as much as she could. That was Zen, after all, and she got fairly good at it; it had been an instinctive survival strategy for years. But a peak experience . . . sometimes she yearned for it, for the almost seen to be seen at last. A presque vu would descend on her, the world take on that aura of vague powerful meaning just outside her thoughts, and she would stand and push, or relax, or just try to follow it, to bring it on home; curious, fearful, hoping; and then it would fade, and pass. Still, someday . . . if only it would come clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was so curious; what would the insight be? What was that understanding which hovered just outside her mind, those times? It felt too real to be just an illusion. . . .

So, though it didn’t occur to her at first that this was what she was seeking, she accepted an invitation from Nirgal to go with him to the Olympus Mons festival. Michel thought it was a great idea. Once every m-year, in the northern spring, people met on the summit of Olympus Mons near Crater Zp, to hold a festival inside a cascade of crescent-shaped tents, over stone and tile mosaics, as during that first meeting there, the celebration of the end of the Great Storm, when the ice asteroid had blazed across the sky and John had spoken to them of the coming Martian society.

Which society, Maya thought as they ascended the great volcano in a train car, might be said to have arrived, at least in certain times and places. Now, here: here we are. On Olympus, on Ls 90 every year, to remember John’s promise and celebrate its achievement. By far the greater number of celebrants were young natives, but there were a lot of new immigrants as well, come up to see what the famous festival was like, intent on partying all week long, mostly by continuously playing music or dancing to it, or both. Maya preferred dance, as she still played no other instrument than the tambourine. And she lost Michel and all their other friends there, Nadia and Art and Sax and Marina and Ursula and Mary and Nirgal and Diana and all the rest, so that she could dance with strangers, and forget. Do nothing but focus on the passing faces luminous before her, each one like a pulsar of consciousness crying I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.

Great dancing, all night long; a sign that assimilation might be happening, the areophany working its invisible spell on everyone who came to the planet, so that their toxic Terran pasts would be diluted and forgotten, and the true Martian culture achieved at last in a collective creation. Yes, and fine. But no peak experience. This was not the place for it, not for her. It was too much the dead hand of the past, perhaps; things were much the same on the peak of Olympus Mons, the sky still black and starry with a purple band around the horizon. . . . There were hostels built around the immense rim, Marina said, for pilgrims to stay in as they made circumnavigations of the summit; and other shelters down in the caldera, for the red climbers who spent their existence down in that world of overlapping convex cliffs. Strange what people would do, Maya thought, strange what destinies were being enacted on Mars nowadays.

But not by her. Olympus Mons was too high, therefore too stuck in the past. It was not where she was going to have the kind of experience she was seeking.