Blue Mars(260)

But Ann was alive, up there climbing the caldera walls of Olympus. He could talk to her if he wanted. Although she would not come out. He would have to hunt her down. But he could do it, that was the thing. The real sting of John’s death lay in the death of that chance; he could no longer talk to him. But he could still talk to Ann, the chance existed.

• • •



Work on the anamnestic package continued. Acheron was a joy that way: days in the labs, talking with the lab directors about their experiments and seeing if he could help. Weekly seminars, where they got together in front of the screens and shared their results, and talked about what they meant and what they might try next. People interrupted their work to help with the farm, or do other business or go on trips; but others were there to fill in, and when people came back they often had new ideas, and always had a new charge of energy. Sax sat in the seminar rooms after the weekly roundups, looking at the coffee cups and the rings of brown coffee and black kava stains on the battered wooden tabletops, the white shiny blackboard screens covered with schemata and chemical diagrams and big looping arrows pointing to acronyms and alchemical symbols that Michel would have loved, and something inside him would glow till it hurt, some parasympathetic reaction spilling out of his limbic system— now thiswas science, by God, this was Martian science, in the hands of the scientists themselves, working together for some collective goal that made sense, that was for the common good; pushing at the edge of what they knew, theory and experiment bouncing back and forth like a blur of Ping-Pong balls, week after week finding out more, going after more, extending the great invisible parthenon right out into the uncharted territory of the human mind, into life itself. It made him so happy that he almost didn’t care if they ever figured things out; the search was all.

But his short-term memory was damaged. He was experiencing blank-outs and tip-of-the-tongueism every day; sometimes in the seminars he had to stop midsentence, almost, and sit down and wave at the others, asking them to go on; and they would nod and the person at the blackboard would continue. No, he needed the solution to this one. There would be other puzzles to pursue afterward, without any doubt; the quick decline itself, for instance, or any of the rest of the senescence problem. No, there was no lack of the unexplainable to work on, and never would be. Meanwhile, the problem of the anamnestic was hard enough.

The outlines of it were coming clear, however. One part of it would be a drug cocktail, a mixture of protein-synthesis enhancers, including even amphetamines and chemical relatives of strychnine, and then transmitters like serotonin, glutamate receptor sensitizers, cholinesterase, cyclic AMP, and so on. All of these would be there to help in different ways to reinforce the memory structures when they were rehearsed. Others would be included from the general brain plasticity treatment that Sax had received in the period following his stroke, at much smaller doses. Then it seemed from the experiments in electrical stimulation that a stimulus shock, followed by a continuous oscillation at very rapid frequencies phased with the subject’s natural brain waves, would serve to initiate the neurochemical processes augmented by the drug package. After that subjects would have to direct the work of remembering as best they could, perhaps moving from node to node if possible, with the idea that as each node was recalled, the network surrounding the node would then be flushed by the oscillations and reinforced accordingly. Moving from room to room in the theater of memory, in essence. Experiments with all these various aspects of the process were being run on volunteer subjects, often the young native experimenters themselves; they were remembering a great many things, they said with a kind of stunned awe, and the overall prospect was looking more and more promising. Week by week they honed their techniques, and homed in on a process.

For the work of recollection to best succeed, it was becoming clear from the experiments that context was an important component. Lists memorized underwater in diving suits could be recalled much better when the subjects returned to the seafloor than when they tried to remember them on land. Subjects hypnotically induced to feel happy or sad during memorization of a list were better at remembering the list when again hypnotized to feel happy or sad. Congruence of items in the lists helped, as did returning to rooms of the same size or color when remembering them. These were of course all very crude experiments, but the link between context and power of recollection was demonstrated by them strongly enough to cause Sax to think hard about where he might want to try the treatment when they finalized it; where, and with whom.