Blue Mars(267)

“Yes yes.” Keep an open mind. This was easy for Sax, his mind was a lab that had burned down. Now he stood in the open air. And no one could refute the logic of Underhill, not Marina nor any of the rest of them. Those who objected were afraid, he thought— afraid of the power of the past. They did not want to acknowledge that power over them, they did not want to give themselves fully over to it. But that was what they needed to do. Certainly Michel would have supported the choice of Underhill, had he been still among them. Place was crucial, all their lives had served to show that. And even the people dubious, or skeptical, or afraid— i.e. all of them— had to admit that Underhill was the appropriate place, given what they were trying to do.

So in the end they agreed to meet there.

• • •



At this point Underhill was a kind of museum, kept in the state it had been in in 2138, the last year it had been a functioning piste stop. This meant that it did not look exactly as it had in the years of their occupancy, but the older parts were all still there, so the changes since wouldn’t affect their project much, Sax judged. After his arrival with several others he took a walk around to see, and there the old buildings all were: the original four habitats, dropped whole from space; their junk heaps; Nadia’s square of barrel vault chambers, with their domed center; Hiroko’s greenhouse framework, its enclosing bubble gone; Nadia’s trench arcade off to the northwest; Chernobyl; the salt pyramids; and finally the Alchemist’s Quarter, where Sax ended his walk, wandering around in the warren of buildings and pipes, trying to ready himself for the next day’s experience. Trying for an open mind.

Already his memory was seething, as if trying to prove that it needed no help to do its work. Here among these buildings he had first witnessed the transformative power of technology over the blank materiality of nature; they had started with just rocks and gases, really, and from that they had extracted and purified and transformed and recombined and shaped, in so many different ways that no one person could keep good track of them all, nor even imagine their effect. So he had seen but he had not understood: and they had acted perpetually in ignorance of their true powers, and with (perhaps as a result) very little sense of what they were trying for. But there in the Alchemist’s Quarter, he hadn’t been able to see that. He had been so sure that the world made green would be a fine place.

Now here he stood in the open, head free under a blue sky, in the heat of second August, looking around and trying to think, to remember. It was hard to direct the memory; things simply occurred to him. The objects in the old part of town felt distinctly familiar, as in the word’s root meaning “of the family.” Even the individual red stones and boulders around the settlement, and all the bumps and hollows in view, were perfectly familiar, all still in their proper places on the compass flower. Prospects for the experiment seemed very good to Sax; they were in their place, in their context, situated, oriented. At home.

He returned to the square of barrel vaults, where they were going to stay. Some cars had driven in during his walk, and some little excursion trains were parked on the sidings next to the piste. People were arriving. There were Maya and Nadia, hugging Tasha and Andrea, who had arrived together; their voices rang in the air like a Russian opera, like recitative on the edge of bursting into song. Of the hundred and one they had begun with, there were only fourteen of them going to show up: Sax, Ann, Maya, Nadia, Desmond, Ursula, Marina, Vasili, George, Edvard, Roger, Mary, Dmitri, Andrea. Not so many, but it was every one of them still alive and in contact with the world; all the rest were dead, or missing. If Hiroko and the other seven of the First Hundred who had disappeared with her were still alive, they had sent no word. Perhaps they would show up unannounced, as they had at John’s first festival on Olympus. Perhaps not.

So they were fourteen. Thus reduced, Underhill seemed underoccupied; though all of it was theirs to spread out in, they yet crowded together into the south wing of the barrel vaults. Nevertheless the emptiness of the rest of it was palpable. It was as if the place itself was an image of their failing memories, with their lost labs and lost lands and lost companions. Every single one of them was suffering from memory losses and disorders of one sort or another— between them they had experienced almost all the problems in mentation mentioned in the literature, as far as Sax could tell, and a good bit of their conversation was taken up in comparative symptomatology, in the recounting of various terrifying and/or sublime experiences that had afflicted them in the last decade. It made them jocular and somber by turns, as they milled around that evening in the little barrelvault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window looking out onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick glass dome, in its muted light. They ate a picnic dinner brought in coolers, talking, catching up, then spreading along the south wing, preparing the upstairs bedrooms for an uneasy night. They stayed up as late as they could, talking and talking; but eventually they gave up, in ones and twos, and tried to sleep. Several times that night Sax woke from dreams, and heard people stumbling down to the bathrooms, or whispering conversations in the kitchen, or muttering to themselves in the troubled sleep of the aged. Each time he managed to slip back under again, into a light dream-filled sleep of his own.