Blue Mars(286)

She woke in a silence so still she could hear her heart. She couldn’t remember where she was. Then it came back. They were at Nadia and Art’s house, on the coast of the Hellas Sea, just west of Odessa. Tap tap tap. Dawn; the first nail of the day. Nadia was building outside. She and Art lived at the edge of their beach village, in their co-op’s complex of intertwined houses, pavilions, gardens, paths. A community of about a hundred people, linked to a hundred more like it. Apparently Nadia was always working on the infrastructure. Tap tap tap tap tap! Currently building a deck to surround a Zygote bamboo tower.In the next room someone was breathing. There was an open door between the rooms. She sat up. Drapes on the wall, she pulled them open a crack. Predawn. Grey on gray. A spare room. Sax was on a big bed in the next room, through the door. Under thick coverlets.

She was cold. She got up and padded through the door into his room. His face slack on a broad pillow. An old man. She crawled under the coverlets into bed with him. He was warm. He was shorter than she was, short and round. She knew that, she knew him: from the sauna and pool in Underhill, the baths in Zygote. Another part of their communal body. Tap tap tap tap tap. He stirred and she wrapped herself around him. He snuggled back into her, still deeply asleep.

• • •



During the memory experiment she had focused on Mars. Michel had once said it: Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. And seeing the same hillocks and hollows around Underhill had reminded her intensely of the early years, when over each horizon had been a new thing. The land. In her mind it endured. On Earth they would never know what it was like, never. The lightness, the tight intimacy of the horizon, everything almost within touch; then the sudden immense vistas, when one of Big Man’s neighborhoods hove into view: the vast cliffs, the canyons so deep, the continent volcanoes, the wild chaos. The giant calligraphy of areological time. The world-wrapping dunes. They would never know; it could not be imagined.

But she had known. And during the memory experiment she had kept her mind focused on it, throughout the entirety of a day that had seemed to last ten years. Never once thought of Earth. It was a trick, a tremendous effort; don’t think of the word elephant! But she hadn’t. It was a trick she had gotten good at, the single-mindedness of the great refuser, a kind of strength. Perhaps. And then Sax had come flying over the horizon, crying Remember Earth? Remember Earth? It was almost funny.

But that had been Antarctica. Immediately her mind, so tricky, so focused, had said That’s just Antarctica, a bit of Mars on Earth, a continent transposed. The year they had lived there, a snatched glimpse of their future. In the Dry Valleys they had been on Mars without knowing it. So that she could remember it and it did not lead back to Earth, it was only an ur-Underhill, an Underhill with ice, and a different camp, but the same people, the same situation. And thinking about it, all of it had indeed come back to her, in the magic of the anamnestic enchantment: those talks with Sax; how she had liked someone as solitary in science as she was, how she had been attracted to him. No one else had understood how far you could walk out into it. And out there in that pure distance they had argued. Night after night. About Mars. Aspects technical, aspects philosophical. They had not agreed. But they were out there together.

But not quite. He had been shocked by her touch. Poor flesh. So she had thought. Apparently she had been wrong. Which was too bad, because if she had understood; if he had understood; if they had understood; perhaps all history would have changed. Perhaps not. But they had not understood. And here they were.

And in all the rush into that past, she had never once thought of the Earth farther north, the Earth before. She had stayed inside the Antarctic convergence. Indeed for the most part she had stayed on Mars, the Mars in her mind, red Mars. Now the theory was that the anamnestic treatment stimulated the memory and caused the consciousness to rehearse the associational complexes of node and network, bounding through the years. This rehearsal reinforced the memories in their physical tracery, such as it was, an evanescent field of patterns formed by quantum oscillation. Everything recalled was reinforced; and what was not recalled was perhaps not reinforced; and what was not reinforced would continue to fall prey to breakage, error, quantum collapse, decay. And be forgotten.

So she was a new Ann now. Not the Counter-Ann, nor even that shadowy third person who had haunted her for so long. A new Ann. A fully Martian Ann at last. On a brown Mars of some new kind, red, green, blue, all swirled together. And if there was a Terran Ann still in there, cowering in a lost quantum closet of her own, that was life. No scar was ever fully lost until death and the final dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should be; one wouldn’t want to lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different kind. A balance had to be kept. Here, now, she was the Martian Ann, not issei any longer, but an elderly new native, a Terran-born yonsei. Martian Ann Clayborne, in the moment and the only moment. It felt good to lie there.