Blue Mars(248)

But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma. And there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on the frontiers, and beside him in related fields, from the small— virology, where the inquiries into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even smaller forms, almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis, vs, all of which might have relevance to the larger problem. . . . All the way up to the large organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their relationship to the heart and other organs, or the pineal gland’s ever-decreasing secretions of melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many aspects of aging. Sax followed them all, trying to glean a new view by his later and hopefully larger perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what seemed important, and study that.

Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the subject blanked out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to get these thought flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk aloud to himself, frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would help to forestall the blanks; but again, it didn’t work. It simply was not a verbal process.

In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every evening, if he noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the staircase streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four different benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the harbor to the sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy a burrito or a gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next to her. She would nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they sat and watched the sea. “How was your day?” “Okay. And yours?” He did not attempt to talk much about his reading, and she didn’t say much about her hydrology, or the theater productions that she would go off to after dusk had fallen. Really they didn’t have much to say to each other. But it was companionable anyway. And one evening the sunset flared to an unusual lavender brilliance, and Maya said, “I wonder what color that is?” and Sax had ventured, “Lavender?”

“But lavender is usually more pastel, isn’t it?”

Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help him see the colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up anyway, and compared various sample squares to the sky. “We need a bigger screen.” And then they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or somewhere between light violet and pale violet.

And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 2 October the 11th Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine— and then they were into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.

One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet from space, what we saw from the Ares! Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?”

They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika red.” “Tomato red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s affinity for iron makes that color after all.”