“You don’t approve?” Diana asked.
She cursed again.
An insulated pipeline ran down the midline of the ice, under the pontoon and down toward Low Point. They were still draining the bottom of the broken aquifer. Maya had overseen the building of Low Point, she had lived there for years and years, with an engineer whose name she could not now recall— and now they were pumping up what was left at the bottom of Niesten aquifer, to add to the water over that drowned city. The great outburst of ‘61 was now reduced to a slender pipeline’s worth of water, channelized and regulated.
Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen . . . ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer— drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.
“Things are changing,” she told Michel and Spencer. “I don’t think we understand things anymore.”She settled back into her life in Odessa, happy to be back but also disturbed, inquisitive, seeing everything anew. On the wall above her desk at the office she kept a drawing by Spencer, of an alchemist flinging a big volume into a turbulent sea. At the bottom he had written, “I’ll drown my book.”
She left the apartment every morning early, and walked down the corniche to the Deep Waters offices near the dry waterfront, next to another Praxis firm called Séparation de L’Atmosphère. There she worked through the days directing the synthesis team, coordinating the field units, and concentrating now on the small mobile operations that were moving around the basin floor, doing last-minute mineral mining and rearrangement of the ice. Occasionally she worked on the design of these little roving hamlets, enjoying the return to ergonomics, her oldest skill aside from cosmonautics itself. Working one day on changing room cabinets, she looked down at her sketches and felt a wash of déjà vu, and wondered if she had done exactly this bit of work before, sometime in the lost past. She wondered also why it was that skills were so robust in the memory, while knowledge was so fragile. She could not for the life of her recall the education that had given her this ergonomic expertise, but she had it nevertheless, despite the many decades that had passed since she had last put it to use.
But the mind was strange. Some days the sense of déjà vu returned as palpably as an itch, such that every single event of that day felt like something that had happened before. It was a sensation that became more and more uncomfortable the longer it persisted, she found, until the world became an acute frightful prison, and she nothing more than a creature of fate, a clockwork mechanism unable to do anything that she had not done before in some forgotten past. Once, when it lasted almost a week, she was almost paralyzed by it; she had never had the meaning of life assaulted so viciously, never. Michel was quite concerned about it, and assured her it was probably the mental manifestation of a physical problem; this Maya believed, sort of, but as nothing he prescribed helped to ease the feeling, it was of little practical help. She could only endure, and hope for the sensation to pass.
When it did pass, she did her best to forget the experience. And then when it recurred, she would say to Michel “Oh my God, I’m feeling it again,” and he would say “Hasn’t this happened before?” and they would laugh, and she would do her best to make do. She would dive into the particulars of her current work, planning for the dowsing teams, giving them their assignments based on the areographers’ reports from the rim, and the results of other dowsing teams coming back in. It was interesting, even exciting work, a sort of gigantic treasure hunt, which necessitated a continuing education in areography, in the secret habits of submartian water. This absorption helped with the déjà vu quite a bit, and after a while it became just another of the odd sensations with which her mind afflicted her, worse than the exhilarations but better than the depressions, or the occasional moments when rather than feeling that something had happened before, she was struck by the sense that nothing like this had ever happened ever, even though she might be doing something like stepping onto a tram. Jamais vu, Michel called it, looking concerned. Quite dangerous, apparently. But nothing to be done about it. Sometimes it was less than helpful, living with someone trained in psychological problems. One could easily become nothing more than a spectacular case study. They would need several pseudonyms to describe her.