Red Mars(90)

Phlegmatics and melancholics would naturally not get along, both being introverted and quick to withdraw, and the stabile one put off by the unpredictability of the labile, so that they would withdraw from each other, like Sax and Ann. There were not many melancholics among them. Ann, yes; and probably by the fate of her brain’s structure, although it did not help that she had been mistreated as a child. She had fallen in love with Mars for the same reason that Michel hated it: because it was dead. And Ann was in love with death.

A few of the alchemists were melancholics as well. And, unfortunately, Michel himself. Perhaps five all told. Along both axes they had been selected against, as neither introversion nor lability had been considered desirable by the selection committee. Only people quite clever at concealing their real nature from the committee could have slipped through, people with great control over their personas, those larger-than-life masks that conceal all the wild inconsistencies within. Perhaps only a certain kind of persona had been selected to the colony, with a wide variety of persons behind it. Was that true? The selection committees had made impossible demands, it was important to remember that. They had wanted stabiles and yet they had wanted people who cared about going to Mars so passionately and monomaniacally that they would devote years of their lives to achieving the goal.

Was that consistent? They wanted extroverts and they wanted brilliant scientists who necessarily had had to dive deep into solitary study for years and years. Was that consistent? No! Never. It went on like that all down the list. They had created double bind after double bind, no wonder the first hundred had hidden from them, had hated them! He recalled with a shudder that moment in the great solar storm on the Ares when everyone had realized how much lying and hiding they had had to do, when they had all turned and stared at him with all that pent-up fury, as if it were all his fault, as if he were all psychology, and had concocted the criteria and conducted the tests and made the selections all by himself. How he had cringed at that moment, how alone he had felt! It had shocked him, frightened him, so much that he had not been able to think fast enough to confess that he too had lied, of course he had, more than any of the rest of them!

But why had he lied, why?

This was what he could not quite recall. Melancholia as a failure of memory, an acute sensation of the irreality of the past, its nonexistence . . . He was a melancholic: withdrawn, out of control of his feelings, inclined to depression. He shouldn’t have been chosen to go, and now he could not remember why he had fought so passionately to be chosen. The memory had gone away, overwhelmed perhaps by the poignant, aching, fragmented images of the life he had lived in the interstices of his desire to go to Mars. So minuscule and so precious; the evenings in the plazas, the summer days on the beaches, the nights in women’s beds. The olive trees of Avignon. The green flame cypress.

He found he had left the Alchemists’ Quarter. He was at the foot of the Great Salt Pyramid. He stepped slowly up the 400 stairs, putting his feet carefully on the blue no-slip pads. Each step gave him a wider view of Underhill Plain, but it was still the same sere and barren rockpile, no matter how large it got. From the square white pavilion at the pyramid’s summit one could just see Chernobyl, and the spaceport. Other than that, nothing. Why had he come to this place? Why had he worked so hard to get here, sacrificing so many of the pleasures of life, family, home, leisure, play. . . . He shook his head. So far as he could recall, it had simply been what he had wanted to do, the definition of his life. A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference? Moonlit nights in the fragrant olive grove, the ground dotted with small black circles and the electric warm brush of the mistral rustling the leaves in quick soft waves, flat on his back, arms spread wide, the leaves flickering silver and gray under the black bowl of stars; and one of those stars would be steady, faint, red, and he would seek it out and watch it, there among the windswept olive leaves; and he had been eight years old! My God, what were they? Nothing explained that, nothing explained them! As well explain why they had painted in Lascaux, why they had built stone cathedrals into the sky. Why coral polyps built reefs.

He had had an ordinary youth, moved often, lost what friends he made, went to the University of Paris to study psychology, did his degree work on space-station depression and went to work for Ariane, and then Glavkosmos. Along the way got married and divorced: Françoise had said he “was not there.” All those nights with her in Avignon, all those days in Villefranche-sur-Mer, living in the most beautiful place on Earth, and he had walked about in a fog of desire for Mars! It was absurd! Worse, it was stupid. A failure of the imagination, of memory, of, finally, intelligence itself: he had not been able to see what he had had, or to imagine what he would get. And now he was paying for it, trapped on an icefloe in the Arctic night with ninety-nine foreigners, not one of whom spoke French worth a damn. Only three who could even try, and Frank’s French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet.