“But it’s way too dark, look.”
“True.”
“Brownish red.”
“Reddish brown.”
Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange . . . they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll call it Martian orange,” Maya decided.
“Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are for the purples, why is that?”
Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the chart, to see if they said anything about it. “Ah. It appears that the cones in the retina contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around those three have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites.” Then in the empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he read it aloud:
“Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived simultaneously as components of the same color.”
“That’s not true,” Maya said immediately. “That’s just because they’re using a color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides.”
“What do you mean? That there’s more colors than these?”
“Of course. Artists’ colors, theater colors; you put a green spot and a red spot on someone and you get a color all right, and it’s not red or green.”
“But what is it? Does it have a name?”
“I don’t know. Look in an artist’s color wheel.”
And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: “Here. Burnt umber, Indian red, madder alizarin . . . those are all green-red mixes.”
“Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don’t you find that suggestive?”
She gave him a look. “We’re talking about colors here, Sax, not politics.”
“I know, I know. But still. . . .”
“No. Don’t be silly.”
“But don’t you think we need a red-green mix?”
“Politically? There’s a red-green mix already, Sax. That’s the trouble. Free Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that’s why they’re having such success. They’re teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth, and soon after that we’ll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it coming. We’re spiraling down into it again.”
“Hmm,” Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar systemic politics these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye for these things, was getting more and more worried about it— with her usual mordant Mayan dash of satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps not as bad as she thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon, pay attention. But meanwhile—
“Look, it’s gone indigo, right over the mountains.” Intense saw edge of black below, purple blue above. . . .
“That’s not indigo, it’s royal blue.”
“But they shouldn’t call it blue if it’s got some red in it.”
“Shouldn’t. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king’s blue, they all have red in them.”
“But that color on the horizon isn’t any of those.”
“No, you’re right. Nondescript.”
They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206; a new color. And so another evening passed.
Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade niÃsect;oise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, “Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the home they had left forever.
• • •
Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and more complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus to the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on the papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of the problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical activity, protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests they had managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain during mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain included calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of melatonin it produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the longevity treatment, but of course it would be better to stop the calcification from occurring in the first place, for it probably had other effects. Then there was a clear growth in the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were protein filament aggregates that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure on them, perhaps the analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her presque vus, who could say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the cerebral blood vessels and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals, again impeding function. And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and hippocampus accumulated calpain, which meant they were vulnerable to calcium influxes, which damaged them. And these were nondividing cells, the same age as the organism itself; damage to them was permanent, as during Sax’s stroke. He had lost a lot of his brain in that incident, he didn’t like to think of it. And the ability of the molecules in these nondividing cells to replace themselves could also be damaged, a smaller but over time equally significant loss. Autopsies of people over two hundred who had died of the quick decline regularly showed serious calcification of the pineal gland, coupled with increases in calpain levels in the hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain levels generally were both implicated in some of the leading current models of how the memory worked. It was an interesting connection.