Blue Mars(265)
“But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my past. Some people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible the palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved. But if you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So, I’ll run across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance, and try to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever, and the whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never happened.”
“A problem with the palace.”
“Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my— my incident— I was sure nothing would ever happen to my ability to— to think.”
“You still seem to think okay.”
Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-outs, the gaps in memory, the presque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical or cognitive ability, but something more general. . . . He tried to describe what had been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be listening closely. “So you see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done on memory. It’s gotten interesting— pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and the Acheron labs have been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something that might help us.”
“A memory drug, you mean?”
“Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So. My notion is to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a number of the First Hundred gathered at Underhill, and take it together. Context is very important to recollection, and the sight of each other might help. Not everyone is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining First Hundred are, actually.”
“Not so surprising. Who?”
He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of them left; a dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I know I would like it more than anything.”
“It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross this caldera.”
• • •
Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of their world. The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on this day, and no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The stretch of ten minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The feeling in one’s legs.
And there were the rings of the calderas around them, jutting far into the sky even when the two walkers were out in the center of the central circle, out where the later, deeper calderas appeared as big embayments in a single wall’s roundness. Out here the planet’s sharp curvature had no effect on one’s perspective, the curve was for once invisible, the cliffs free and clear even thirty kilometers away. The net effect, it seemed to Sax, was of a kind of enclosure. A park, a stone garden, a maze with only one wall separating it from the world beyond, the world which, though invisible, conditioned everything here. The caldera was big but not big enough. You couldn’t hide here. The world poured in and overflowed the mind, no matter its hundred-trillion-bit capacity. No matter how big the neural array there was still just a single thread of awed mentation, consciousness itself, a living wire of thought saying rock, cliff, sky, star.
• • •
The rock became heavily cracked by fissures, each one an arc of a circle with its center point back in the middle of the central circle: old cracks relative to the big new holes of the north and south circles, old cracks filled with rubble and dust. These rock crevasses made their walk into a wandering ramble— in a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls, yet just as difficult of passage as a walled one.
But they threaded it, and finally reached the rim of north circle, number 2 on Sax’s map. Looking down into it gave them a new perspective— a proper shape to the caldera and its circular embayments, a sudden drop to a heretofore hidden floor, a thousand meters below.
Apparently there was a climbing route down onto the floor of north circle; but when Ann saw the look on his face as she pointed it out— achievable only by rappelling— she laughed. They would only have to climb up out of it again, she said easily, and the main caldera wall was already tall enough. They could hike around north circle to another route instead.
Surprised by this flexibility, and thankful for it, Sax followed her around the north circle on its west circumference. Under the great wall of the main caldera they stopped for the night, popped the tent, ate in silence.
After sunset Phobos shot up over the western wall of the caldera like a little gray flare. Fear and dread, what names.