He had taken it as a figure of speech. But now he recalled Kuhn, asserting that scientists who used different paradigms existed in literally different worlds, epistemology being such an integral component of reality. Thus Aristoteleans simply did not see the Galilean pendulum, which to them was a body falling with some difficulty; and in general, scientists debating the relative merits of competing paradigms simply talked right through each other, using the same words to discuss different realities.
He had considered that too to be a figure of speech. But thinking of it now, absorbing the hallucinatory clarity of the ice, he had to admit that it certainly described what his conversations with Ann had always felt like. It had been a frustration to both of them, and when Ann had cried out that he had never seen Mars, a statement that was obviously false on some levels, she had perhaps meant only to say that he hadn’t seen her Mars, the Mars created by her paradigm. And that was no doubt true.
Now, however, he was seeing a Mars he had never seen before. But the transformation had come by focusing for a matter of weeks on just those parts of the Martian landscape that Ann despised, the new life-forms. So he doubted that the Mars he was seeing, with its snow algae and ice lichen, and the enchanting little patches of Persian carpet fringing the glacier, was Ann’s Mars. Nor was it the Mars of his colleagues in terraforming. It was a function of what he believed, and what he wanted— it was his Mars, evolving right before his very eyes, always in the process of becoming something new. Like a stab to the heart he felt the wish that he could seize Ann at that very moment, and pull her by the arm down the western moraine crying, See? See? See?
• • •
Instead he had Phyllis, perhaps the least philosophical person he had ever known. He avoided her when he could do it without appearing to, and passed his days on the ice, in the wind under the vast northern sky, or on the moraines, crawling around studying plants. Back in the station he talked over dinner with Claire and Berkina and the rest about what they were finding out there, and what it meant. After dinner they retired to the observation room and talked some more, dancing on some nights, especially Fridays and Saturdays. The music they played was always nuevo calypso, guitars and steel drums in fast simultaneous melodies, creating complex rhythms that Sax had great difficulty analyzing. There were often measures of 5/4 time alternating or even coexisting with 4/4, a pattern seemingly designed to throw him out of step. Luckily the current dance style was a kind of free-form movement that had little relation to the beat anyway, so when he failed in his attempts to stay in rhythm, he was pretty sure he was the only one who noticed. In fact it made a pretty good entertainment just trying to keep time, off on his own, hopping around with a little jig added to the 5/4 measures. When he returned to the tables and Jessica said to him, “You’re really a good dancer, Stephen,” he burst out laughing, pleased even though he knew all it revealed was Jessica’s incompetence to judge dance, or her attempt to please him. Although perhaps the daily boulder-walking in the field was improving his balance and timing. Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.
He and Phyllis talked or danced together only as much as they did with everyone else; and only in the secrecy of their rooms did they embrace, kiss, make love. It was the old pattern of the hidden affair, and one morning around four A.M., returning to his room from hers, a flash of fear shook him; it seemed to him suddenly that his immediate undiscussed complicity in this behavior must tag him to Phyllis as suspiciously like one of the First Hundred. Who else would fall into such a bizarre pattern so readily, as if it were the natural thing to do?
But on consideration it did not seem that Phyllis was attentive to nuances of that kind. Sax had almost given up trying to understand her thinking and her motivations, as the data were contradictory and, despite the fact that they were spending nights together on a fairly regular basis, rather sparse. She seemed interested mostly in the intertransnational maneuvering that was going on in Sheffield, and back on Earth— shifts in executive personnel and subsidiaries and stock prices that were clearly ephemeral and meaningless, but to her utterly absorbing. As Stephen he remained brightly interested in all this, and asked her questions about it to show his interest when she brought it up, but when he asked about what the daily changes meant in any larger strategic sense, she was either unable or unwilling to give him good answers. Apparently it was interesting to her more for the personal fortunes of those she knew than for the system that their careers revealed. An ex-Consolidated executive now with Subarashii had been made head of elevator operations, a Praxis executive had disappeared in the outback, Armscor was going to explode scores of hydrogen bombs in the megaregolith under the north polar cap, to stimulate growth and warming of the northern sea; and this last fact was no more interesting to her than the two previous ones.