Blue Mars

PART THIRTEEN Experimental Procedures

At the last minute Nirgal went up to Sheffield. From the train station he took the subway out to the Socket, not seeing a thing. Inside the vast halls of the Socket he walked to the departure lounge. And there she was.

When she saw him she was pleased that he had come, but irritated that he had come so late. It was almost time for her to go. Up the cable, onto a shuttle, out to one of the new hollowed-out asteroids, this one particularly large and luxuriant; and then off, accelerating for a matter of months, until it could coast at several percent of the speed of light. For this asteroid was a star-ship; and they were off to a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like planet rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun. A new world, a new life. And fackie was going.

Nirgal still couldn’t quite believe it. He had gotten the message only two days before, had not slept as he tried to decide whether this mattered, whether it was part of his life, whether he ought to see her off, whether he ought to try to talk her out of it.

Seeing her now, he knew he could not talk her out of it. She was going. I want to try something new, she had said in her message, a voice record without a visual image. There coming from his wrist, her voice: There’s nothing for me here now anymore. I’ve done my part. I want to try something new.

The group in the starship asteroid were mostly from Dorsa Brevia. Nirgal had called Charlotte to try to find out why. It’s complicated, Charlotte said. There’s a lot of reasons. This planet they’re going to is relatively nearby, and it’s perfect for terraform-ing. Humanity going there is a big step. The first step to the stars.

I know, Nirgal had said. Quite a few starships had already left, off to other likely planets. The step had been taken.

But this planet is the best one yet. And in Dorsa Brevia, people are beginning to wonder if we don’t have to get that distance from Earth to get a fresh start. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind. And now it’s looking bad again. These unauthorized landings; it could be the start of an invasion. And if you think of Mars as being the new democratic society, and Earth the old feudalism, then the influx can look like the old trying to crush the new, before it gets too big. And they’ve got us outnumbered twenty billion to two. And part of that old feudalism is patriarchy itself. So the people in Dorsa Brevia wonder if they can get a little bit more distance. It’s only twenty years to Aldebaran, and they’re going to live a long time. So a group of them are doing it. Families, family groups, childless couples, childless single people. It’s like the First Hundred going to Mars, like the days ofBoone and Chalmers.

And so fackie sat on the carpeted floor of the departure lounge, and Nirgal sat next to her. She looked down. She was smoothing the carpet with the palm of her hand, and then drawing patterns in the nap, letters. Nirgal, she wrote.

He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but subdued. People looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going, some were seeing people off. Through a broad window they looked into the interior of the socket, where elevator cars levitated in silence against the walls, and the foot of the 37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten meters over the concrete floor.

So you’re going, Nirgal said.

Yes, fackie said. I want a new start.

Nirgal said nothing.

It will be an adventure, she said.

True. He didn’t know what else to say.

In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.

It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny. It’s what we ought to be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where Hiroko is — that she and her people joined one of the first starships, the one to Barnard’s star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.

It’s as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true; he could imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora, of humanity across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from there. A step out of the cradle. The end of prehistory.

He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This was the last time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the other were dying. That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently together in this room. That people should leave everyone they knew.

And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so strange — they had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with ninety-nine strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had had parents, presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them had had spouses, except for the six married couples who had been part of the hundred. Single childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That was who they were. And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.

Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the light. Fine-grained gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back down. Wherever you go, she wrote, there you are.

She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.

I don’t know.

They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable chamber, an elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved over a piste to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped its outer side.

Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave this world forever. Don’t leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the time we made love by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?

He said nothing. She remembered.

I don’t know.

He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased the second you. With his forefinger he wrote we.

She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?

The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing fackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.

Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.

The northern polarisland had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.

Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.

Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau was cut with tributary streams like the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the territory to a great depth.

It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast deserts of red shifting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the best.

He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more than ten meters away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.

Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, “behind him.” And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.

So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix on his position and his car’s. He had a very good map program in his wristpad these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees north latitude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so apt, this anthropomorphic analogizing) was some small purple saxifrage, stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.

Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in the light — the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him — the delicious weariness in his feet — and then something indefinable, he had to admit it — unexplainable — in that the individual elements of the experience were insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this was love. Spirit of place, love of place — the areophany, not only as Hiroko had described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko — could she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, to learn to feel it oneself… love of planet. Love of a planet’s life. Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one’s regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One’s regard focused, in the center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.

Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological scale something rather like Hiroko’s viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in “little bangs” at the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread was as far removed from the others as it was possible to be. Thus all the life islands were widely separated in timespace, making contact between any two islands very unlikely simply because they were all late phenomena, and at a great distance from the rest; there hadn’t been time for contact. This hypothesis, if true, seemed to Sax a more than adequate explanation for the failure of SETI, that silence from the stars that had been ongoing for nearly four centuries now. A blink of the eye compared to the billion light-years that Deleuze estimated separated all life islands each a tertiary emergent phenomenon.

So viriditas existed in the universe like this saxifrage on the great sand curves of the polar island: small, isolate, magnificent. Sax saw a curving universe before him; but Deleuze maintained that they lived in a flat universe, on the cusp between permanent expansion and the expand-contract model, in a delicate balance. And he also maintained that the turning point, when the universe would either start to shrink or else expand past all possibility of shrinking, appeared to be very close to the present time! This made Sax very suspicious, as did the implication in Deleuze that they could influence the matter one way or the other: stomp on the ground and send the universe flying outward to dissolution and heat death, or catch one’s breath, and pull it all inward to the unimaginable omega point of the eschaton: no. The first law of thermodynamics, among many other considerations, made this a kind of cosmological hallucination, a small god’s existentialism. Psychological result of humanity’s suddenly vastly increased physical powers, perhaps. Or Deleuze’s own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything.

In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth’s surface, but they did. Coincidences happened. Most of these anthropocentric features, however, seemed to Sax likely to be the mark of the limits of their understanding; very possibly there were things larger than the universe, and others smaller than strings — some even larger plenum, made of even smaller components — all beyond human perception, even mathematically. If that were true it might explain some of the inconsistencies in Bao’s equations — if one allowed that the four macrodimensions of timespace were in relation to some larger dimensions, like the six microdimensions were to their ordinary four, then the equations might work quite beautifully — he had a vision of one possible formulation, right there —

He stumbled, caught his balance. Another small bench of sand, about three times the size of the normal one. Okay — on and up to the car. Now what had he been thinking about?

He couldn’t remember. He had been thinking something interesting, he knew that. Figuring something out, it seemed like. But try as he might, he couldn’t recall what it was. It bulked at the back of his mind like a rock in his shoe, a tip-of-the-tongueism that never came through. Most uncomfortable; even maddening. It had happened to him before, he seemed to recall — and more frequently recently, wasn’t that true? He wasn’t sure, but that felt right. He had been losing his train of thought, and then been unable to retrieve it, no matter how hard he tried.

He reached his car without seeing his walk there. Love of place, yes — but one had to be able to remember things to love them! One had to be able to remember one’s thoughts! Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner together, then ate it without noticing.

This memory trouble would not do.

Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wristpad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several different strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the languages of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterize. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow — they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse — fast, coherent, effortless — the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others — the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.

So, well; these incidents were just one of the many conditions they had to adapt to in their unnaturally prolonged old age. It was very inconvenient, even irritating. No doubt the matter ought to be investigated, although memory was a notorious quagmire for brain science. And it was somewhat like the leaky-roof problem; immediately after such a lost train of thought, with the absent shape of it still in his mind, and the emotional excitation, it almost drove him mad; but as the content of the thought was forgotten, half an hour later it did not seem much more significant than the slipping away of dreams in the minutes after waking. He had other things to worry about.

Such as the death of his friends. Yeli Zudov this time, a member of the First Hundred he had never known well; nevertheless he went down to Odessa, and after a memorial service, a lugubrious affair during which Sax was frequently distracted by thoughts of Vlad, of Spencer, of Phyllis, and then of Ann — they returned to the Praxis building, and sat in Michel and Maya’s apartment. It was not the same apartment they had lived in before the second revolution, but Michel had taken pains to make it look much the same, as far as Sax could recall — something about Maya’s therapy, as she was having more and more mental trouble — Sax wasn’t sure what the latest was. He had never been able to deal with the more melodramatic aspects of Maya, and he hadn’t paid overmuch attention to Michel’s talk about her when the two of them last got together — it was always different, always the same.

Now, however, he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go back into the kitchen, past the table on which Michel’s scrapbooks were spre’ad. Face up was a photo of Frank that Maya had treasured long ago; she had had it taped to the kitchen cabinet by the sink, in the apartment down the hall — Sax remembered that most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature of those tense years: all of them struggling while the young Frank laughed at them.

Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely. Remembering their earlier dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very long ago.

But she said, “What an interesting face.”

Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the physiological manifestations of distress. To lose the substance of a speculative train of thought, a venture into the metaphysical — that was one thing. But this — her own past, their past — it was insupportable. Not to be abided. He would not abide it.

Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.

The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.

“More and more like that,” Michel muttered, looking haunted. “More and more. I feel it myself. But for Maya…” He shook his head, looking deeply discouraged. Even Michel could make nothing good of this, Michel who had worked his alchemy of optimism on all their previous reversals, making them part of his great story, the myth of Mars that he had somehow wrenched out of the daily morass. But this was the death of story. Thus hard to mythol-ogize. No — living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful. Something was going to have to be done.

Sax was still thinking about this, sitting in a corner absorbed in his wristpad, reading a collection of abstracts from recent experimental work on the memory, when there came a thump from the kitchen and a cry from Nadia. Sax rushed in to find Nadia and Art crouched over Michel, who lay white-faced on the floor. Sax called the concierge, and faster than he would have imagined possible an emergency crew had barged in with their equipment and shouldered Art aside, big young natives who brusquely encased Michel into their compact web of machinery, leaving the old ones as spectators only of their friend’s — struggle.

Sax sat down among the medics, in their way, and put a hand to Michel’s neck and shoulder. Michel’s breathing had stopped, his pulse as well. White-faced. The resuscitation attempts were violent, the electrical shocks tried at a variety of strengths, the subsequent shift to heart-lung machine accomplished with a minimum of fuss; and the young medics worked in near silence, talking among themselves only when necessary, seemingly unaware of the old ones sitting against the wall. They did all they could; but Michel remained stubbornly, mysteriously dead.

Of course he had been upset by Maya’s memory failure. But this did not seem an adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya’s problem, none more so, and he had-been worried; so any single display of her problem shouldn’t have mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course eventually — quite late that evening, actually, after the doctors had finally given up, and taken Michel downstairs, and were clearing out their equipment — Maya returned, and they had to tell her what had happened.

She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much for one of the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won’t work, Sax wanted to say, I’ve tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for his pains, which made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.

Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.

“I can’t do this anymore,” the man said after a while. He shook his head, seemingly apologetic. “It’s pointless. We come and do all we can and it makes no difference. Nothing stops the quick decline.”

“Which is?” Sax said.

The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. “That’s the problem. No one knows.”

“Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?”

“Heart arrhythmia,” said one of the other medics curtly as he passed by with some equipment.

“That’s just the symptom,” the sitting man snarled, and sniffed again. “Why does it go arrhythmic? And why doesn’t CPR restart it?”

No one answered.

Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya crying on the couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax realized that even if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.

Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of observation and initial hypothesis… flailing. In many ways it resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their unexplainables — Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version .of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense.

But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.

Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.

Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.

The literature on longevity, and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.

Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.

There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had been about — keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.

But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence — or, even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries…

Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks’ absorbed reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field than he had ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the longevity treatment consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the subject’s own DNA, the artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones already in the cells, so that the breaks and errors that crept in over time were repaired, and the strands generally strengthened. This much was true; but the longevity treatment was more than this, just as senescence itself was more than cell-division error. It was, as one might have predicted, much more complicated than just breaking chromosomes; it was an entire complex of processes. And while some were well understood, others were not. Senes-cencial action (aging) took place on every level: molecule, cell, organ, organism. Some senescence resulted from hormonal effects that were positive for the young organism in its reproductive phase, and only later negative for the post-reproductive animal, when in evolutionary terms it no longer mattered. Some cell lines were virtually immortal; bone-marrow cells and the mucus in the gut went on replicating for as long as their surroundings were alive, with no sign at all of time-related changes. Other cells, such as the nonreplaced proteins in the lens of the eye, underwent change that was driven by exposure to heat or light, regular enough to function as a kind of biological chronometer. Each kind of cell line aged at a different speed, or did not age at all; thus it was not just “a matter of time” in the sense of a kind of Newtonian absolute time, working entropically on an organism; there was no such time. Rather it was a great many trains of specific physical and chemical events, moving at different speeds, and with varying effects. There was a fantastically large number of cell-repair mechanisms inherent in any large organism, and an immune system of great and various power; the longevity treatments often supplemented these processes, or worked on them directly, or replaced them. The treatment now included supplements of the enzyme photolyase, to correct DNA damage, and supplements of the pineal hormone melatonin, and dehydroepiandrosterone, a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands… There were about two hundred components like these in the longevity treatment now.

So vast, so complex — sometimes Sax finished his day’s reading and walked down to Odessa’s seafront, to sit on the corniche with Maya, and he would pause in eating a burrito and stare at it — contemplate everything that went into its digestion, everything that kept them alive — feel his breath which he had never noted at all, before — and suddenly he would feel breathless — lose his appetite — lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more than a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of astrophysics. Like a house of cards a hundred stories tall, in a wind. Tap it anywhere… It was lucky Maya did not require much in the way of active companionship, because often he was rendered speechless for many minutes at a time, rapt in the contemplation of his own evident impossibility.

But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma. And there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on the frontiers, and beside him in related fields, from the small — virology, where the inquiries into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even smaller forms, almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis, vs, all of which might have relevance to the larger problem… All the way up to the large organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their relationship to the heart and other organs, or the pineal gland’s ever-decreasing secretions of melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many aspects of aging. Sax followed them all, trying to glean a new view by his later and hopefully larger perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what seemed important, and study that.

Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the subject blanked out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to get these thought flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk aloud to himself, frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would help to forestall the blanks; but again, it didn’t work. It simply was not a verbal process.

In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every evening, if he noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the staircase streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four different benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the harbor to the sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy a burrito or a gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next to her. She would nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they sat and watched the sea. “How was your day?” “Okay. And yours?” He did not attempt to talk much about his reading, and she didn’t say much about her hydrology, or the theater productions that she would go off to after dusk had fallen. Really they didn’t have much to say to each other. But it was companionable anyway. And one evening the sunset flared to an unusual lavender brilliance, and Maya said, “I wonder what color that is?” and Sax had ventured, “Lavender?”

“But lavender is usually more pastel, isn’t it?”

Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help him see the colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up anyway, and compared various sample squares to the sky. “We need a bigger screen.” And then they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or somewhere between light violet and pale violet.

And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 2 October the llth Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine — and then they were into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.

One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet from space, what we saw from the Aresl Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?”

They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika red.” “Tomato red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s affinity for iron makes that color after all.”

“But it’s way too dark, look.”

“True.”

“Brownish red.”

“Reddish brown.”

Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange… they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll call it Martian orange,” Maya decided.

“Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are for the purples, why is that?”

Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the chart, to see if they said anything about it. “Ah. It appears that the cones in the retina contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around those three have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites.” Then in the empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he read it aloud:

“Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived simultaneously as components of the same color.”

“That’s not true,” Maya said immediately. “That’s just because they’re using a color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides.”

“What do you mean? That there’s more colors than these?”

“Of course. Artists’ colors, theater colors; you put a green spot and a red spot on someone and you get a color all right, and it’s not red or green.”

“But what is it? Does it have a name?”

“I don’t know. Look in an artist’s color wheel.”

And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: “Here. Burnt umber, Indian red, madder alizarin… those are all green-red mixes.”

“Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don’t you find that suggestive?”

She gave him a look. “We’re talking about colors here, Sax, not politics.”

“I know, I know. But still…”

“No. Don’t be silly.”

“But don’t you think we need a red-green mix?”

“Politically? There’s a red-green mix already, Sax. That’s the trouble. Free Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that’s why they’re having such success. They’re teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth, and soon after that we’ll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it coming. We’re spiraling down into it again.”

“Hmm,” Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar systemic politics these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye for these things, was getting more and more worried about it — with her usual mordant Mayan dash of satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps not as bad as she thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon, pay attention. But meanwhile —

“Look, it’s gone indigo, right over the mountains.” Intense saw edge of black below, purple blue above…

“That’s not indigo, it’s royal blue.”

“But they shouldn’t call it blue if it’s got some red in it.”

“Shouldn’t. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king’s blue, they all have red in them.”

“But that color on the horizon isn’t any of those.”

“No, you’re right. Nondescript.”

They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206; a new color. And so another evening passed.

Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade nicoise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, “Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the home they had left forever.

Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and more complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus to the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on the papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of the problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical activity, protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests they had managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain during mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain included calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of melatonin it produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the longevity treatment, but of course it would be better to stop the calcification from occurring in the first place, for it probably had other effects. Then there was a clear growth in the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were protein filament aggregates that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure on them, perhaps the analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her presque vus, who could say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the cerebral blood vessels and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals, again impeding function. And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and hippocampus accumulated calpain, which meant they were vulnerable to calcium influxes, which damaged them. And these were nondividing cells, the same age as the organism itself; damage to them was permanent, as during Sax’s stroke. He had lost a lot of his brain in that incident, he didn’t like to think of it. And the ability of the molecules in these nondividing cells to replace themselves could also be damaged, a smaller but over time equally significant loss. Autopsies of people over two hundred who had died of the quick decline regularly showed serious calcification of the pineal gland, coupled with increases in calpain levels in the hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain levels generally were both implicated in some of the leading current models of how the memory worked. It was an interesting connection.

But all inconclusive. And no one was going to solve the mystery by literature review alone. But the experiments that might clear things up were not practical, given the inaccessibility of the living brain. You could kill chicks and mice and rats and dogs and pigs and lemurs and chimps, you could kill individuals of every species in creation, dissect the brains of their fetuses and embryos as well, and still never find what you were looking for; for it was autopsy itself that was insufficient to the task. And the various live scans were likewise insufficient to the task, as the processes involved were either more fine-grained than the scans could perceive, or more holistic, or more combinatorial, or, probably, all three at once.

Still, some of the experiments and the resultant modeling were suggestive; calpain buildup seemed to alter brain-wave function, for instance; and this fact and others gave him ideas for further investigation. He began to read intensively in the literature on the effects of calcium-binding protein levels, on corticosteroids, on the calcium currents in the hippocampal pyramidal neurons, and on the calcification of the pineal gland. It appeared there were synergistic effects that might impact both memory and general brainwave function, indeed all bodily rhythms, including heart rhythms. “Was Michel experiencing any memory troubles?” Sax asked Maya. “Perhaps feeling that he had lost entire trains of thought — even very useful trains of thought?”

Maya shrugged. By now Michel was almost a year gone. “I can’t remember.”

It made Sax nervous. Maya seemed in retreat, her memory worse every day. Even Nadia could do nothing for her. Sax met her down on the corniche more and more frequently, it was a habit they both clearly must have enjoyed, though they never spoke of that; they simply sat, ate a kiosk meal, watched the sunset and pulled up their color charts to see if they would catch another new one. But if it weren’t for the notations they made on the charts, neither of them would have been sure whether the colors they saw were new or not. Sax himself felt that he was experiencing his blank-outs more frequently, perhaps some four to eight a day, although he couldn’t be sure. He took to keeping his AI running a sound recorder permanently, activated by voice; and rather than try to describe his complete train of thought, he just spoke a few words that he hoped would later key a fuller recollection of what he had been thinking. Thus at the end of the day he would sit down apprehensively or hopefully, and listen to what the AI had captured during the day: and mostly it was thought that he remembered thinking, but occasionally he would hear himself say, “Synthetic melatonins may be a better antioxidant than natural ones, so that there aren’t enough free radicals,” or “Viriditas is a fundamental mystery, there will never be a grand unified theory,” without having any memory of saying such things, or, often, what they might mean. But sometimes the statements were suggestive, their meanings excavatable.

And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in his undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous parthenon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in the different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure. These standard models were somewhat like Kuhnian paradigms but in reality (paradigms being a model of modeling) more supple and various, a dialogic process in which thousands of minds had participated over the previous hundreds of years; so that figures like Newton or Einstein or Vlad were not the isolate giants of public perception, but the tallest peaks of a great mountain range, as Newton himself had tried to make clear with his comment about standing on the shoulders of giants. In truth the work of science was a communal thing, extending back even beyond the birth of modern science, back all the way into prehistory, as Michel had insisted; a constant struggle to understand. Now of course it was highly structured, articulated beyond the ability of any single individual to fully grasp. But this was only because of the sheer quantity of it; the spectacular efflorescence of structure was not in any particular incomprehensible, one could still walk around anywhere inside the parthenon, so to speak, and thus comprehend at least the shape of the whole, and make choices as to where to study, where to learn the current surface, where to contribute. One could first learn the dialect of the language relevant to the study; which in itself could be a formidable task, as in su-perstring theory or cascading recombinant chaos; then one could survey the background literature, and hopefully find some syncretic work by someone who had worked long on the cutting edge, and was able to give a coherent account of the status of the field for outsiders; this work, disparaged by most working scientists, called the “gray literature” and considered a vacation or a lowering of oneself on the part of the synthesist, was nevertheless often of great value for someone coming in from the outside. With a general overview (though it was better to think of it as an underview, with the actual workers up there lost in the dim rafters and entablatures of the edifice), one could then move up into the journals, the peer-reviewed “white literature,” where the current work was being recorded; and one could read the abstracts, and get a sense of who was attacking what part of the problem. So public, so explicit… And for any given problem in science, the people who were actually out there on the edge making progress constituted a special group, of a few hundred at most — often with a core group of synthesists and innovators that was no more than a dozen people in all the worlds — inventing a new jargon of their dialect to convey their new insights, arguing over results, suggesting new avenues of investigation, giving each other jobs in labs, meeting at conferences specially devoted to the topic — talking to each other, in all the media there were. And there in the labs and the conference bars the work went forward, as a dialogue of people who understood the issues, and did the sheer hard work of experimentation, and of thinking about experiments.

And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world. So Sax had always believed, and no analysis by social scientists, nor even the troubling experience of the Martian terraforming process, had ever caused him to waver in that belief. Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet had been right (they weren’t always).

And so Sax moved about in the great structure, comfortable, capable, and on some levels content.

But he began to understand that as beautiful and powerful as science was, the problem of biological senescence was perhaps too difficult. Not too difficult to be solved ever, nothing was that, but simply too difficult to be solved in his lifetime. Actually it was still an open question how hard a problem it was. Their understanding of matter, space and time was incomplete, and it might be that it would always necessarily shade off into metaphysics, like the speculations about the cosmos before the Big Bang, or things smaller than strings. On the other hand the world might be amenable to progressive explanations, until it all (at least from string to cosmos) would be brought someday within the realm of the great parthenon. Either result was possible, the court was still out, the next thousand years or so should tell the tale.

But in the meantime, he was experiencing several blank-outs a day. And sometimes he was short of breath. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat so hard. Seldom did he sleep at night. And Michel was dead, so that Sax’s sense of the meaning of things was becoming uncertain, and in great need of help. When he managed to think at all on the level of meaning, he found that he felt he was in a race. Him and everyone else, but especially the life scientists actually at work on the problem: they were in a race with death. To win it, they had to explain one of the greatest of the great unexplainables.

And one day, sitting down on a bench with Maya after a day in front of his screen, thinking of the vastness of that growing wing of the parthenon, he realized that it was a race he couldn’t win. The human species might win it, someday, but it looked to be a long way off still. It was no great surprise, really; he knew this; that is to say, he had always known it. Labeling the current largest manifestation of the problem had not disguised to him its profundity, “the quick decline” was just a name, inaccurate, over-simple — not science, in fact, but rather an attempt (like “the Big Bang”) to diminish and contain the reality, as yet not understood. In this case the problem was simply death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life and of time, this was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve. Postponements, yes; solutions, no. “Reality itself is mortal,” he said.

“Of course,” Maya said, absorbed in the sight of the sunset.

He needed a simpler problem. As a postponement, as a step toward the harder problems; or just as something he could solve. Memory, perhaps. Fighting the blank-outs; it was certainly a problem that stood at hand, ready for study. His memory was in need of help. Working on it might even cast light on the quick decline. And even if it didn’t, he had to try it, no matter how hard it was. Because they were all going to die; but they could at least die with their memories intact.

So he switched his emphasis to the memory problem, abandoning the quick decline and all the rest of the senescence issues. He was only mortal after all.

Recent memory work was fairly suggestiveof avenues of approach. This particular scientific front was related in some of its aspects to the work on learning that had enabled Sax to (partially) recover from his stroke. This was not surprising, as memory was the retention of learning. All brain science tended to move together in its understanding of consciousness. But in that progression, retention and recall remained recalcitrant crux issues, still imperfectly understood.

But there were indications, and more all the time. Clinical clues; a lot of the ancient ones were experiencing memory problems of varying kinds, and behind the ancient ones came a giant generation of nisei, who could see the problems manifesting in their elders, and hoped to avoid them. So memory was a hot topic. Hundreds, indeed thousands of labs were working on it in one way or another, and as a result many aspects of it were coming clear. Sax immersed himself in the literature in his usual style, reading intensively for several months on end; and at the end of that time he thought he could say, in general terms, how memory worked; although in the end he, like all the rest of the scientists working on the problem, ran into their insufficient understanding of the underlying basics — of consciousness, matter, time. And at this point, as detailed as their understanding was, Sax could not see how memory might be improved or reinforced. They needed something more.

The original Hebb hypothesis, first proposed by Donald Hebb in 1949, was still held to be true, because it was such a general principle; learning changed some physical feature in the brain, and after that the changed feature somehow encoded the event learned. In Hebb’s time the physical feature (the engram) was conceived of as occurring somewhere on the synaptic level, and as there could be hundreds of thousands of synapses for each of the ten billion neurons in the brain, this gave researchers the impression that the brain might be capable of holding some 1014 data bits; at the time this seemed more than adequate to explain human consciousness. And as it was also within the realm of the possible for computers, it led to a brief vogue in the notion of strong artificial intelligence, as well as that era’s version of the “machine fallacy,” a variant of the pathetic fallacy, in which the brain was thought of as being something like the most powerful machine of the time. The work of the twenty-first and twenty-second century, however, had made it clear that there were no specific “engram” sites as such. Any number of experiments failed to locate these sites, including one in which various parts of rat’s brains were removed after they learned a task, with no part of the brain proving essential; the frustrated experimenters concluded that memory was “everywhere and nowhere,” leading to the analogy of brain to hologram, even sillier than all the other machine analogies; but they were stumped, they were flailing. Later experiments clarified things; it became obvious that all the actions of consciousness were taking place on a level far smaller even than that of neurons; this was associated in Sax’s mind with the general miniaturization of scientific attention through the twenty-second century. In that finer-grained appraisal they had begun investigating the cytoskeletons of neuron cells, which were internal arrays of microtubules, with protein bridges between the microtubules. The microtubules’ structure consisted of hollow tubes made of thirteen columns of tubulin dimers, peanut-shaped globular protein pairs, each about eight-by-four-by-four nanometers, existing in two different configurations, depending on their electrical polarization. So the dimers represented a possible on-off switch of the hoped-for engrain; but they were so small that the electrical state of each dimer was influenced by the dimers around it, because of van der Waals interactions between them. So messages of all kinds could be propagated along each mi-crotubule column, and along the protein bridges connecting them. Then most recently had come yet another step in miniaturization: each dimer contained about 450 amino acids, which could retain information by changes in the sequences of amino acids. And contained inside the dimer columns were tiny threads of water in an ordered state, a state called vicinal water, and this vicinal water was capable of conveying quantum-coherent oscillations for the length of the tubule. A great number of experiments on living monkey brains, with miniaturized instrumentation of many different kinds, had established that while consciousness was thinking, amino-acid sequences were shifting, tub-ulin dimers in many different places in the brain were changing configuration, in pulsed phases; microtubules were moving, sometimes growing; and on a much larger scale, dendrite spines then grew and made new connections, sometimes changing synapses permanently, sometimes not.

So now the best current model had it that memories were encoded (somehow) as standing patterns of quantum-coherent oscillations, set up by changes in the microtubules and their constituent parts, all working in patterns inside the neurons. Although there were now researchers who speculated that there could be significant action at even finer ultramicroscopic levels, permanently beyond their ability to investigate (familiar refrain); some saw traces of signs that the oscillations were structured in the kind of spin-network patterns that Bao’s work described, in knotted nodes and networks that Sax found eerily reminiscent of the palace-of-memory plan, utilizing rooms and hallways, as if the ancient Greeks by introspection alone had intuited the very geometry of timespace.

In any case, it was sure that these ultramicroscopic actions were implicated in the brain’s plasticity; they were part of how the brain learned and then remembered. So memory was happening at a far smaller level than had been previously imagined, which gave the brain a much higher computational possibility than before, up to perhaps 1024 operations per second — or even 1043 in some calculations, leading one researcher to note that every human mind was in a certain sense more complicated that all the rest of the universe (minus its other consciousnesses, of course). Sax found this suspiciously like the strong anthropic phantoms seen elsewhere in cosmological theory, but it was an interesting idea to contemplate.

So, not only was there simply more going on, it was also happening at such fine levels that quantum effects were certainly involved. Experimentation had made it clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum reality were an integral part of consciousness. Indeed it was only very recently, by including the quantum effects in the cytoskeletons, that a team of French researchers had finally managed to put forth a plausible theory as to why general anesthetics worked, after all the centuries of blithely using them.

So they were confronted with yet another bizarre quantum world, in which there was action at a distance, in which decisions not made could affect events that really happened, in which certain events seemed to be triggered tel-eologically, that is to say by events that appeared to come after them in time… Sax was not greatly surprised by this development. It supported a feeling he had had all his life, that the human mind was deeply mysterious, a black box that science could scarcely investigate. And now that science was investigating it, it was coming up hard against the great unexplainables of reality itself.

Still, one could hold to what science had learned; and admit that reality at the quantum level behaved in ways that were simply outrageous at the level of human senses and ordinary experience. They had had three hundred years to get used to that, and eventually they had somehow to incorporate this knowledge into their worldviews, and forge on. Sax would have indeed said that he was comfortable with the familiar quantum paradoxes; things at the micros-cale were bizarre but explicable, quantifiable or at least describable, using complex numbers, Riemannian geometry, and all the rest of the armatures of the appropriate branches of mathematics. Finding such stuff in the very workings of the brain should have been no surprise at all. Indeed, compared to things like human history or psychology or culture, it was even somehow comforting. It was only quantum mechanics after all. Something that could be modeled by mathematics. And that was saying something.

So. At an extremely fine level of structure in the brain, much of one’s past was contained, encoded in a unique complex network of synapses, microtubules, dimers and vicinal water and amino-acid chains, all small enough and near enough together to have quantum effects on each other. Patterns of quantum fluctuation, diverging and collapsing; this was consciousness. And the patterns were clearly held or generated in specific parts of the brain; they were the result of a physical structure articulated on many levels. The hippocampus, for instance, was critically important, especially the dentate gyrus region and the perforant pathway nerves that led to it. And the hippocampus was extremely sensitive to action in the limbic system, directly underneath it in the brain; and the limbic system was in many ways the seat of the emotions, what the ancients would have called the heart. Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experience changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best — or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.

After that initial change in the brain, however, the slow process of degradation began. For one thing, the power of recollection was different in different people, but always less powerful than memory storage, it appeared, and very hard to direct. So much was patterned into the brain but never retrieved. And then if one never remembered a pattern, never recollected and rehearsed it, then they never got the reinforcement of another run-through; and after about 150 years of storage, experiments suggested, the pattern began to degrade more and more rapidly, due apparently to the accumulated quantum effects of free radicals collecting randomly in the brain. This was apparently what was happening to the ancient ones; a breakdown process which began immediately after an event was patterned into the brain, eventually hit a cumulative level where the effects were catastrophic for the oscillatory patterns involved, and thus for the memories. It was probably about as clocklike, Sax thought glumly, as the thermodynamic clouding of the lens of the eye.

However — if one could rehearse all one’s memories, ecphorize them as some called it in the literature on the subject — from the Greek, meaning something like “echo transmission” — then it would reinforce the patterns, giving them a fresh start and setting the clock of degradation back to zero. A sort of longevity treatment for dimer patterns, in effect, sometimes referred to in the literature as anamnesis, or loss of forgetting. And after such treatment it would be easier to recall any given event, or at least as easy as it had been soon after the event happened. This was the general direction that work in memory reinforcement was taking. Some called the drugs and electrical devices involved in this process nootropics, a word which Sax read as “acting upon mind.” There were a lot of terms for the process being bandied about in the current literature, people scrambling through their Greek and Latin lexicons in the hope of becoming the namer of the phenomenon: Sax had seen mnemonics and mnemonistics, and mnemosynics, after the goddess of memory; also mimenskesthains, from the Greek verb “to remember.” Sax preferred memory reinforcer, although he also liked anamnesis, which seemed the most accurate term for what they were trying to do. He wanted to concoct an anamnestic.

But the practical difficulties of ecphorization — of remembering all one’s past, or even some particular part of it — were great. Not just finding the anamnestics that might stimulate such a process, but finding as well the time it would take! When one had lived two centuries, it seemed possible that it might take years to ecphorize all the significant events of one’s life.

Clearly a sequential chronological run-through was impractical, in more ways than one. What would be preferable was some kind of simultaneous flushing of the system, strengthening the entire network without consciously remembering every component of it. Whether such a flushing was electrochemically possible was unclear; and what such a flushing might feel like was impossible to imagine. But if one were to electrically stimulate the perforant pathway to the hippocampus, and get a great deal of adenosine tri-phosphate past the blood-brain barrier, for instance, thus stimulating the long-term potentiation that aided learning in the first place; and then impose a brain-wave pattern stimulating and supporting the quantum oscillations of the microtubules; and then direct one’s consciousness to review the memories that felt most important to one, while the rest were being reinforced as well, unconsciously…

He ran through another accelerando of thought on this issue, then crashed blank on it. There he was, sitting in his apartment living room, blanked, cursing himself for not at least trying to mutter something into his AI. It seemed that he had been onto something — something about ATP, or was it LTP? Well. If it was a genuinely useful thought, it would come back. He had to believe that. It seemed probable.

As it did, more and more as he studied the issues, that the shock of Maya’s amnesiac moment had somehow propelled Michel into the quick decline. Not that such an explanation could ever be proved, or that it even really mattered. But Michel would not have wanted to survive either his memory or hers; he had loved her as his life project, his definition of himself. The shock of Maya blanking on something so basic, so important (like the key to memory restoration)… And the mind-body connection was so strong — so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one’s body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone. So Michel must have felt, in that final traumatic half hour, as his self tumbled into a fatal arrhythmia, under the anguish of grieving for his love’s death-of-mind.

They had to remember to be truly alive. And so ecphorization, if he could figure out the appropriate anamnestic methodology, was going to have to be tried.

Of course it might be dangerous. If he did manage to work up a memory reinforcer, it would flush the system all at once, perhaps, and no one could predict what that would feel like subjectively. One would just have to try it. It would be an experiment. Self-experimentation. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Vlad had given himself the first geronto-logical treatment, though it could have killed him; Jennings had inoculated himself with live smallpox vaccine; Arkady’s ancestor Alexander Bogdanov had exchanged his blood for that of a young man suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and had died while the young man had lived for thirty more years. And of course there was the story of the young physicists at Los Alamos, who had set off the first nuclear explosion wondering among themselves whether it might not burn up the entire atmosphere of the Earth, a somewhat disturbing case of self-experimentation, one had to admit. Compared to that ingesting a few amino acids seemed no very great thing, something more like Dr. Hoffman trying LSD on himself. Presumably ecphorizing would be less disorienting than an LSD experience, for if all one’s memories were being reinforced at once, consciousness would surely not be capable of being aware of it. The so-called stream of consciousness was fairly unilinear, it seemed to Sax on introspection. So that at most one might experience a quick associative train of recollections, or a random jumble — not unlike Sax’s everyday mentation, to tell the truth. He could handle that. And he was willing to risk something more traumatic, if that was what it happened to take. He flew to Acheron.

Up at Acheron a new crowdwas in place in the old labs, now vastly expanded, so that the entire high long fin of rock was excavated and occupied — it was a city now of some 200,000 people. At the same time it was still, of course, a spectacular fin of rock some fifteen kilometers long and six hundred meters high, while never more than a kilometer wide at any point; and it was still a lab, or a complex of labs, in a way that Echus Overlook had long since ceased to be — something more like Da Vinci, with a similar organization. After Praxis had renovated the infrastructure, Vlad and Ursula and Marina had led the formation of a new biological research station; now Vlad was dead, but Acheron had a life of its own, and did not seem to miss him. Ursula and Marina directed their own little labs, and lived still in the quarters they had shared with Vlad, just under the crest of the fin — a partially walled arboreal slot, very windy. They were as private as ever, withdrawn into their own world even more than they had been with Vlad; and they were certainly taken for granted in Acheron, treated by the younger scientists as local grandmothers or great-aunts, or simply as colleagues in the labs.

Sax, however, the younger scientists stared at, looking just as nonplussed as if they were being introduced to Archimedes. It was as disconcerting to be treated in such a way as it was to meet such an anachronism, and Sax struggled through several conversations of surpassing awkwardness as he tried to convince everyone that he did not know the magic secret of life, that he used words to stand for the same things as they did, that his mind was not yet altogether shattered by age, etc.

But this estrangement could also be an advantage. Young scientists as a class tended to be naive empiricists, also idealistic energetic enthusiasts. So coming in from outside, both new and old at once, Sax was able to impress them in the seminars Ursula convened to discuss the current state of memory work. Sax laid out his hypotheses concerning the creation of a possible anamnestic, with suggestions for various lines of experimental work on these possibilities, and he could see that his suggestions had for the young scientists a kind of prophetic power, even (or perhaps especially) when they were quite general comments. If these vague suggestions happened to chime with some avenue these people were already exploring, then the response could be enthusiastic in the extreme. In fact it was a case of the more gnomic the better; which was not very scientific, but there it was.

As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting used to in Da Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian science more generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and power. In his day the resources necessary to do the work would have belonged to other people, to institutions with their own interests and bureaucracies, creating a ponderous and often foolish clumsy scattering of effort; and even the coherent efforts were often devoted to trivial things, to the monetary profits of the institution in control of the lab. Here, on the other hand, Acheron was a semiautonomous self-contained community, answerable to the environmental courts and to the constitution of course, but to no one else. They chose among themselves what to work on, and when they were asked for help, if they were interested, they could respond immediately.

So he was not going to have to do all the work of developing a memory reinforcer himself, not by any means; the Acheron labs were highly interested, and Marina remained active in the city’s lab of labs, and the city still had a close relationship with Praxis, with all its resources. And many labs there were already investigating memory. It was a big part of the longevity project now, for obvious reasons. Marina said that some twenty percent of all human effort was now being devoted, in one form or another, to the longevity project. And longevity itself was pointless without memory lasting as long as the rest of the system. So it made sense for a complex like Acheron to focus on it.

Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for breakfast in the dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them, surrounded by portable walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in pots. No remembrance of Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how unusual it was to be invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the matter at hand. He had known both these women from the beginning, and greatly respected both of them, Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but he didn’t feel he knew them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating and looking at them, and out the open window walls. There to the north lay a narrow strip of blue, Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea — to the south, far beyond the first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons. In between, a devil’s golf course of a land — hard gnarled eroded old lava flows, riven and pocked — and in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish waste of the plateau.

Marina said, “We’ve been thinking about why experimental psychologists in every generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly exceptional memories, but there is never any attempt to explain them by the memory models of the period.”

“In fact they forget them as soon as they can,-” Ursula said.

“Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes them to be true. It’s put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no one alive can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the tendency is to conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled. But a lot of the reports were perfectly well substantiated.”

“Such as?” Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at organism-level real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably were. But of course it made sense to do so.

Marina said, “The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of every instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words and music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works.”

“They tested this?”

“Spot checks, so to speak. A bassoonist broke a key of his bassoon and told Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn’t have to play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without scores, and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on.”

“Uh-huh…”

“The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It isn’t uncommon in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are sometimes possible.”

“Hmm.”

Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts — again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. ‘Interest is the thing,’ he was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the attention.’“

“True,” Sax said.

“He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”

“I’d like to learn more about him.”

“Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images presented to them in great detail — they’re often impaired in other parts of their lives.”

Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in general. But both of them experienced synesthesia.”

“Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 1930s. Tal-mudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.

“These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as ordinary memory,” Sax observed.

“Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in great detail. It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at puberty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these people don’t ever metamorphose away from the children’s way.”

“Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal distribution.”

Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”

“You do!”

“Yes. It’s Zeyk. He and Nazik have moved here so that we can study him. He’s being very cooperative; she’s encouraging him. There might as well be some good that comes of it, she says. He doesn’t like his ability, you see. In him it doesn’t have much to do with computational tricks, although he’s better at that than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail.”

“I think I remember hearing about this,” Sax said. The two women laughed, and startled, he joined in. “I’d like to see what you’re doing with him.”

“Sure. He’s down in Smadar’s lab. It’s interesting. They view vids from events that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he talks about what he remembers while they’ve got all the latest scans running on his brain.”

“Sounds very interesting.”

Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating beds were occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored images flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds were empty, and somehow ominous.

After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he looked to Sax like a specimen of Homo habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be tested for mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points on its inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary in bruise-colored, withered skin. Nazik sat on the other side of his bed, holding his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was a detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk’s brain; through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning, creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman, presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.

“So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?”

“Yes. Or they were righting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the windows.”

“Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?”

“At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know. Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”

“Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.

“Yes.”

It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said, surprising them all.

“Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula were staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.

“What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk’s brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.

“There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side street met the central boulevard. Near the medina.”

“Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.

“Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”

He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know them?” Zeyk croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”

Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said. “Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he said Boone killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What did you do?”

Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn’t know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I — I watched. Then — then I was in a group running after them, I don’t know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group… our group lost them.”

“There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,” Zeyk said. “There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”

“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”

He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.

“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers.”

“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”

Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”

“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.

“Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each other. Nejm, perhaps…”

“Who is dead.”

“And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the rioting that night…” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.

“Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her screen.

“Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. Unsi… well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had come back in by it.”

“Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.

Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”

Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”

“Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”

Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait… an image of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you stop them? Didn’t you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn’t stopped them — that he had failed to help his friend — that he had stood there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been assaulted and dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.

But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the whole rest of that night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the lids shut as if that might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The memory was odd that way; he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when these realizations had stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the limbic system and the emotional charge of every incident must be crucially involved in the entrainment or encoding or embedding of a memory.

And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in the clinic waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face of the doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone’s death. “She said, ‘He’s dead. Too long out there.’ And Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he jumped.”

“We have to tell Maya,” Nazik whispered.

“He said to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ which I thought was odd. She said something to him about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And Frank even agreed, but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he said ‘What do you know about what I like or don’t like.’ So bitter. He didn’t like her presumption. The idea that she knew him.” Zeyk shook his head.

“Was I there during this?” Sax said.

“…Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But you were distracted. You were crying.”

Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!

And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning. The appearance of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and Nazik had left Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that he could go on in that amount of detail for every week of his life.

But now Nazik stopped the session. “This one is too hard,” she said to Smadar. “Let’s start again tomorrow.”

Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine beside her. Zeyk stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw that among the many dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include memories that worked too well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of Zeyk’s brain, replicating in another medium the patterns of quantum activity — lightning flickering around in his cortex … a mind that held the past far better than the rest of the ancient ones, impervious to the affliction of breaking memory, which Sax had believed to be an inexorable clocklike breakdown … well, they were giving that brain every test they could think of. But it was quite possible the secret would remain unsolved; there was simply too much happening of which they were completely unaware. As on that night in Nicosia.

Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land around Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and now he was very happy to have a place to get away.

He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about memory had come when he was walking down to this seashore, over routes so circuitous that he could never find the same way twice, partly because the old lava plateau was so fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was never paying attention to the larger topography — he was either lost in his thoughts or lost in the immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around to see where he was. In fact it was a region in which one could not get lost; ascend any small ridge, and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense dragon; and in the other direction, visible from more places as one approached it, the wide blue expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million micro-environments, the rocky plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack filled with plants. It was very unlike the melting landscape on the polar shore across the sea; this rocky plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed immemorial, despite the gardening that was certainly being done by the Acheron ecopoets. Many of these oases were experiments, and Sax treated them as such, staying out of them, peering down into one steep-walled alas after another, wondering what the ecopoet responsible was trying to discover with his or her work. Here soil could be spread with no fear of it being washed into the sea, although the startling green of the estuaries extending back into the valleys showed that some fertile soil was making its way down the streams. These estuarine marshes would fill with eroded soils, while at the same time they were getting saltier, along with the North Sea itself…

This time out, however, his observations were broken repeatedly by thoughts of John. John Boone had worked for him for the last several years of John’s life, and they had had many a conference as they discussed the rapidly developing Martian situation; vital years; and through them John had been always happy, cheerful, confident — trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent — no, no, not exactly — he had also been abrupt, impatient, arrogant, lazy, slipshod, drug dependent, proud. But how Sax had come to rely on him, how he had loved him — loved him like a big brother who had protected him out in the world at large. And then they had killed him. Those are the ones the killers always go after. They can’t stand that courage. And so they had killed him and Sax had stood on watching and hadn’t done a thing. Frozen in shock and personal fear. You didn’t stop them? Maya had cried; he remembered it now, her sharp voice. No, I was afraid. No, I did nothing. Of course it was unlikely that there was anything he could have done at that point. Before, when the attacks on John had first started, Sax might have been able to talk him into another assignment, gotten him some bodyguards, or, since John would never have accepted that, hired some bodyguards to follow him in secret, to protect him while his friends froze and stared in shocked witness. But he hadn’t hired anyone. And so his brother had been killed, his brother who had laughed at him but who had loved him as well, loved him before anyone else thought of him at all.

Sax wandered over the fractured plain, distraught — distraught at the loss of a friend 153 years before. Sometimes it seemed there was no such thing as time.

Then he stopped short, brought back to the present by the sight of life. Small white rodents, sni’ffing around on the green of a sunken meadow. They were no doubt snow pika or something like, but in their whiteness they looked enough like lab rats to give Sax a start. White lab rats, yes, but tailless — mutant lab rats, yes — free at last, out of their cages and into the world, wandering over the intense green meadow grass like surreal hallucinatory objects, all ablink and sniff-whiskered as they checked out the ground between grass clumps for tasties. Munching away on seeds and nuts and flowers. John had been greatly amused at the myth of Sax as the hundred lab rats. Sax’s mind, now free and scattered. This is our body.

He crouched and watched the little rodents until he got cold. There were greater creatures out on that plain, and they always stopped him short: deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, reindeer, caribou, black bear, grizzly bear — even packs of wolves, like swift gray shadows — and all to Sax like citizens out of a dream, so that every time he spotted even a single creature he felt startled, disconnected, even stunned; it did not seem possible; it was certainly not natural. Yet here they were. And now these little snow pika, happy in their oasis. Not nature, not culture: just Mars.

He thought of Ann. He wanted her to see them.

He often thought of her these days. So many of his friends were dead now, but Ann was alive, he could still talk to her, it was at least possible. He had looked into the matter, and found that she now lived in the caldera of Olympus Mons, as part of the small community of red climbers that occupied it. Apparently they took turns in the caldera, to keep the population low despite the big holes’ steep walls and primeval conditions, both so attractive to them. But Ann stayed as long as she liked, Sax had heard, and only left infrequently. This was what Peter had told him, although Peter had only heard it secondhand. Sad how those two were estranged; pointless; but family estrangements seemed to be the most intransigent of all.

Anyway, she was on Olympus Mons. Therefore almost in sight, just over the horizon to the south. And he wanted to talk to her. All his reflections on what happened to Mars, he thought, were framed as an internal conversation with Ann. Not so much as an argument, or so he hoped, but as an endless persuasion. If he could be so changed by the reality of blue Mars, could not Ann as well? Was it not almost inevitable, even necessary? Might it have already happened? Sax felt he had come over the years to love what Ann loved in Mars; and now he wanted her to reciprocate, if possible. She had become for him, in a most uncomfortable way, his measure of the worth of what they had done. The worth, or the acceptability. It was a strange feeling to have settled in him, but there it was.

Another uncomfortable lump in his mind, like the suddenly rediscovered guilt about John’s death, which he would try again to forget. If he could blank out on the interesting thoughts he ought to be able to blank out on the awful ones, oughtn’t he? John had died, and nothing Sax could have done would have prevented it. Very probably. There was no way to say. And no way to go back. John had been killed and Sax had failed to help him; and here they were, Sax alive and John dead, nothing now but a powerful node-and-network system in the minds of all the people who had known him. And nothing to be done.

But Ann was alive, up there climbing the caldera walls of Olympus. He could talk to her if he wanted. Although she would not come out. He would have to hunt her down. But he could do it, that was the thing. The real sting of John’s death lay in the death of that chance; he could no longer talk to him. But he could still talk to Ann, the chance existed.

Work on the anamnestic package continued. Acheron was a joy that way: days in the labs, talking with the lab directors about their experiments and seeing if he could help. Weekly seminars, where they got together in front of the screens and shared their.results, and talked about what they meant and what they might try next. People interrupted their work to help with the farm, or do other business or go on trips; but others were there to fill in, and when people came back they often had new ideas, and always had a new charge of energy. Sax sat in the seminar rooms after the weekly roundups, looking at the coffee cups and the rings of brown coffee and black kava stains on the battered wooden tabletops, the white shiny blackboard screens covered with schemata and chemical diagrams and big looping arrows pointing to acronyms and alchemical symbols that Michel would have loved, and something inside him would glow till it hurt, some parasympathetic reaction spilling out of his limbic system — now this was science, by God, this was Martian science, in the hands of the scientists themselves, working together for some collective goal that made sense, that was for the common good; pushing at the edge of what they knew, theory and experiment bouncing back and forth like a blur of Ping-Pong balls, week after week finding out more, going after more, extending the great invisible parthenon right out into the uncharted territory of the human mind, into life itself. It made him so happy that he almost didn’t care if they ever figured things out; the search was all.

But his short-term memory was damaged. He was experiencing blank-outs and tip-of-the-tongueism every day; sometimes in the seminars he had to stop midsentence, almost, and sit down and wave at the others, asking them to go on; and they would nod and the person at the blackboard would continue. No, he needed the solution to this one. There would be other puzzles to pursue afterward, without any doubt; the quick decline itself, for instance, or any of the rest of the senescence problem. No, there was no lack of the unexplainable to work on, and never would be. Meanwhile, the problem of the anamnestic was hard enough.

The outlines of it were coming clear, however. One part of it would be a drug cocktail, a mixture of protein-synthesis enhancers, including even amphetamines and chemical relatives of strychnine, and then transmitters like serotonin, glutamate receptor sensitizers, cholinesterase, cyclic AMP, and so on. All of these would be there to help in different ways to reinforce the memory structures when they were rehearsed. Others would be included from the general brain plasticity treatment that Sax had received in the period following his stroke, at much smaller doses. Then it seemed from the experiments in electrical stimulation that a stimulus shock, followed by a continuous oscillation at very rapid frequencies phased with the subject’s natural brain waves, would serve to initiate the neurochemical processes augmented by the drug package. After that subjects would have to direct the work of remembering as best they could, perhaps moving from node to node if possible, with the idea that as each node was recalled, the network surrounding the node would then be flushed by the oscillations and reinforced accordingly. Moving from room to room in the theater of memory, in essence. Experiments with all these various aspects of the process were being run on volunteer subjects, often the young native experimenters themselves; they were remembering a great many things, they said with a kind of stunned awe, and the overall prospect was looking more and more promising. Week by week they honed their techniques, and homed in on a process.

For the work of recollection to best succeed, it was becoming clear from the experiments that context was an important component. Lists memorized underwater in diving suits could be recalled much better when the subjects returned to the seafloor than when they tried to remember them on land. Subjects hypnotically induced to feel happy or sad during memorization of a list were better at remembering the list when again hypnotized to feel happy or sad. Congruence of items in the lists helped, as did returning to rooms of the same size or color when remembering them. These were of course all very crude experiments, but the link between context and power of recollection was demonstrated by them strongly enough to cause Sax to think hard about where he might want to try the treatment when they finalized it; where, and with whom.

For the final work on the treatment Sax called up Bao Shuyo and asked her to come join them in Acheron for some consulations. Again, her work was much more theoretical, and very much more fine-grained, but after her work with the fusion group in Da Vinci, he had a healthy respect for her ability to help in any problem that involved quantum gravity and the ultramicrostructure of matter. Just to have her run through what they had done and comment on it would be valuable, he was sure.

Unfortunately, Bao’s obligations in Da Vinci were heavy, as they had been ever since her much-heralded return from Dorsa Brevia. Sax was put in the unusual position of manipulating his home labs in order to extricate– one of their best theorists, but he did it without compunction, getting Bela’s help to put the arm on the current administration, to twist their arms as hard as ever he could. “Ka, Sax,” Bela exclaimed during one call, “I never would have guessed that you would turn out to be such a fierce headhunter.” “It’s my own head I’m hunting,” Sax replied.

Usually tracking someone downwas as simple as contacting their wristpad, and looking to see where the person was. Ann’s wristpad, however, had been left on the rim of the Olympus Mons caldera, at the descent station near the festival grounds at Crater Zp. This struck Sax as peculiar, since they had worn wristpads of some kind or another since the very beginning in Underbill, Ann as much as anyone, as he recalled. Hadn’t she? He called Peter to ask, but Peter did not know, of course, having been born well after the Underbill years. In any case, to go without a wristpad now was to borrow a behavior from the neoprimitive nomads wandering the canyonlands and the North Sea coast — not a lifestyle he would have expected Ann to take any interest in. One couldn’t live in anything like the Paleolithic style up on Olympus Mons, indeed it required the kind of continuous technological support that was no longer necessary in most places, with wristpads an integral part of it. Perhaps she only wanted to get away. Peter didn’t know.

But he did know how to contact her: “You have to go in and find her.”

At Sax’s expression he laughed. “It isn’t so bad. There’s only a couple hundred people in the caldera, and when they’re not staying in one of their huts, they’re on the cliff walls.”

“She’s become a climber?”

“Yes.”

“She climbs for — for recreation?”

“She climbs. Don’t ask me why.”

“So I just go look at all the cliffs?”

“That’s how I had to do it when Marion died.”

The summit of Olympus Mons had for the most part been left alone. Oh there were a few low boulder hermitages on rim overlooks, and a piste had been built on the northeast lava flow that broke the escarpment ring surrounding the volcano, for easy access to the festival complex at Crater Zp; but other than that, there was nothing to show what had happened to the rest of Mars, which from the rim of the caldera was entirely invisible, under the horizon of the encircling escarpment. From its rim Olympus Mons appeared to be the world entire. The local Reds had decided against putting a protective molecular dome over the caldera, something they had done over Arsia Mons; so no doubt there were bacteria, and perhaps some lichens that had blown over on winds and floated down into the caldera and survived; but at pressures little higher than the original ten millibars, they were not going to flourish. Probably the survivors were mostly endochasmoliths, so there would be no sign of them. It was a lucky thing for the Red project that Mars’s stupendous vertical scale kept air pressures so low on the big volcanoes; a free and effective sterilization technique.

Sax took the train up to Zp, and then a car on up to the rim, a taxi van driven by the Reds who controlled access into the caldera. The car came to the edge of the rim, and Sax looked down.

The caldera was multiringed, and big: ninety kilometers by sixty, about the same size as Luxembourg, Sax recalled hearing. The main central circle, by far the largest, was marred by overlapping smaller circles to the northeast, center, and south. The southernmost circle cut in half a slightly older, higher circle to the southeast; the meeting of these three arcuate walls was considered one of the finest climbing areas on the planet, Sax was told, with the greatest height anywhere in the caldera, a drop from 26 kilometers above the datum (they used the old term rather than sea level) down to 22.5 kilometers on the southernmost crater floor. A ten-thousand-foot cliff, the young Coloradoan in Sax mused.

The floor of the main caldera was marked by a great number of curving fault patterns, concentric with the caldera walls: arcing ridges and canyons, across which ran some straighter escarpments. These features were all explicable, they had been caused by recurrent caldera collapses following the sideslope drainage of magma from the main chamber under the volcano; but as he looked down from their perch on the rim, it seemed to Sax a mysterious mountain — a world of its own — nothing visible but the vast embayed rim, and the five thousand square kilometers of the caldera. Ring on ring of high curved walls and flat round floors, under a black starry sky. Nowhere were the encircling cliffs less than a thousand meters tall. As a rule they were not completely vertical; their average slope appeared to be just steeper than forty-five degrees. But there were steeper sections all over the place. No doubt the climbers flocked to the very steepest sections, given the nature of their interest. There looked to be some very vertical faces out there, even an overhang or two, as right under them, over the confluence of the three walls.

“I’m looking for Ann Clayborne,” Sax said to the drivers, who were rapt with the view. “Do you know where I could find her?”

“You don’t know where she is?” one asked.

“I’ve heard she’s climbing in the Olympus caldera.”

“Does she know you’re looking for her?”

“No. She’s not answering her calls.”

“Does she know you?”

“Oh yes. We’re old — friends.”

“And who are you?”

“Sax Russell.”

They stared at him. One said, “Old friends, eh?”

Her companion elbowed her.

They called the spot they were at Three Walls, sensibly enough. Directly under their car, on a little slump terrace, there was an elevator station. Sax peered at it through binoculars: outer-lock doors, reinforced roofing — it could have been a structure from the early years. The elevator was the only way down into this part of the caldera, if you did not care to rappel.

“Ann resupplies at Marion Station,” the elbower finally said, shocking her codriver. “See it, there? That square dot, where the lava channels from the main floor cut down into South Circle.”

This was on the opposite rim of the southernmost circle, which Sax’s map named “6.” Sax had trouble making out any square dot, even with the binocular’s magnification. But then he saw it — a tiny block just a bit too regular to be natural, although it had been painted the rusty gray of the local basalt. “I see it. How do I get there?”

“Take the elevator down, then walk on over.”

So he showed the elevator attendants the pass the el-bower had given him, and took the long elevator ride down the wall of South Circle. The elevator ran on a track affixed to the cliffside, and it had windows; it was like dropping in a helicopter, or coming down the last bit of the space elevator over Sheffield. By the time he got down to the caldera floor it was late afternoon; he checked into the spartan lodge at the bottom and ate a big leisurely dinner, thinking from time to time what he might say to Ann. It came to him, slowly: a coherent and it seemed convincing self-explication, or confession, or cri de coeur, piece by piece. Then to his great chagrin he blanked the whole thing. And there he was on the floor of a volcanic caldera, the blinkered circle of sky dark and starry above. On Olympus. Searching for Ann Clayborne, with nothing to say to her. Very chagrined.

The next morning after breakfast, he pushed his way into a walker. Although the materials were improved, the elastic fabric necessarily clasped the limbs and torso just as tightly as their old suits had. Strange how the kinetics of it evoked trains of thought, flashes of memory: the look of Underbill as they were building the foursquare dome; even a kind of somatic epiphany, which seemed to be a recollection of his very first walk out of the landing craft, with the surprise of the close horizons and the textured pink of the sky. Context and memory, again.

He walked out across the floor of South Circle. This morning the sky was a dark indigo very near black — marine blue, the chart said, an odd choice of name considering how dark it was. Many stars were visible. The horizon was a round cliff, rising on all sides: the southern semicircle three kilometers tall, the northeast quadrant two kilometers, the northwest quadrant one kilometer only, and shattered. Astonishing sight, actually — the roundness of it. Thermodynamics of cooling rock in magma chambers, magma throats. Out in the middle the encircling walls were a dizzying sight. The walls looked much the same height in all directions, a textbook example of foreshortening’s ability to telescope the perception of vertical distances.

He tromped on at a steady pace. The caldera floor was fairly smooth, pocked by occasional lava bombs and late meteor hits, and curving shallow grabens. Some of these had to be circumvented, a beautifully apt word in this case, as they were circumvents, he was circumventing. But for the most part he could tramp directly toward the broken spill of cliff in the northwest quadrant of the caldera. ‘

It took six hours of steady walking to cross the floor of South Circle, which was less than ten percent of the caldera complex’s total area — all the rest of which was invisible to him for the entire hike. No sign of life, nor of any disturbance to the caldera floor or walls; the atmosphere was visibly thin, everything equally sharp to the eye, right around the primal ten millibars, he judged. The untouched nature of things made him feel uncertain about even his boot-prints, and he tried to step on hard rock, and avoid dust patches. It was strangely satisfying to see the primal landscape — quite reddish — though the color was mostly an overlay on dark basalt. His color chart was not good at odd mixes.

Sax had never descended into one of the big calderas before. And even many years spent inside impact craters did not prepare one, he found — for the depth of the chambers, the steepness of the walls, the flatness of the floor. The sheer size of things.

Midafternoon he approached the foot of the northwest arc of the wall. The meeting of wall and floor came up over his horizon, and to his slight relief, the block shelter appeared directly before him; his APS setting had been quite accurate. Not a complicated bit of navigation, but in such an exposed place it was pleasant to be precisely on line. Ever since his experience in the storm so long ago, he had been a bit wary about getting lost. Although there would be no storms up here.

As he approached the hut’s lock doors, a group of people appeared from out of the bottom of a stupendously huge steep gully in the vast broken cliff face, debouching onto the crater floor about a kilometer to the west of the refuge. Four figures, carrying big packs on their backs. Sax stopped, the sound of his breath loud in his helmet: he recognized the last figure immediately. Ann was coming in to resupply. Now he was going to have to think of something to say. And then remember it too.

Inside the hut Sax undipped his helmet and took it off, feeling a familiar but most unwelcome tension in his stomach as he did. Every meeting with Ann it got worse. He turned around and waited. Finally Ann came in, and took off her helmet, and saw him. She started as if she were seeing a ghost. “Sax?” she cried.

He nodded. He remembered when they had last met; long ago, on Da Vinci Island; it felt like a previous life. He had lost his tongue.

Ann shook her head, smiled to herself. She crossed the room with an expression he couldn’t read, and held his arms in her two hands, and leaned forward and kissed his cheek gently. When she pulled back, one of her hands continued to clutch his left arm, sliding down to the wrist. She was staring right into him, and her grip was like metal. Sax was speechless again, although he very much wanted to speak. But there was nothing to say, or too much, he couldn’t even tell which it was; his tongue was again paralyzed. That hand on his wrist; it was more incapacitating than any glare or cutting remark had ever been.

A wave seemed to pass through her, and she became somewhat more the Ann he knew, looking at him suspiciously, then with alarm. “Everyone’s okay?”

“Yes yes,” Sax said. “I mean — you heard about Michel?”

“Yes.” Her mouth tightened, for a second she became the black Ann of his dreams. Then another wave passed through her, and she was this new stranger, still clutching his wrist as if trying to snip his hand off. “But now you’re just here to see me.”

“Yes. I wanted to” — he searched wildly for a finish to the sentence — ”… to talk! Yes — to, to, to, to, to ask you some questions. I’m having some trouble with my memory. I wondered if I, if we could travel up here, and talk. Hike” — he gulped — “or climb. You could show me some of the caldera?”

She was smiling. Again it was some other Ann. “You can climb with me if you want.”

“I’m not a climber.”

“We’ll go up an easy route. Up Wang’s Gully, and over the great circle to north circle, I’ve wanted to get up there while it’s still summer anyway.”

“It’s Ls 200, actually. But I mean, it sounds good.” His heart was beating at about 150 beats a minute.

Ann had all the equipment they needed, it turned out. The next morning, as they were suiting up, she said to him, “Here, take that off.” Pointing at his wristpad.

“Oh dear,” Sax said. “I — isn’t it really part of the suit’s system?”

It was, but she shook her head. “The suit is autonomous.”

“Semiautonomous, I hope.”

She smiled. “Yes. But no wristpad is necessary. Look — that thing connects you to the whole world. It’s your manacle to spacetime. Today let’s just be in Wang’s Gully. It will be enough.”

It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting up through steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day Sax followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one, scrambling up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom with the feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an ankle. “This isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this the kind of climbing you always do?”

“This isn’t climbing at all.”

“Ah.”

So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly speaking, unjustifiable.

And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by horizontal fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and gritting his teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his boot tips and gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down Wang’s Gully, which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it had in any given section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of fatigued excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk his position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer just as he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly pitted, its dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on one crack over a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that crack; was it deep enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to try to find out. So he took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it turned out it was not really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull, groaning involuntarily at the effort, he was up and past it, using holds he never even consciously saw; and then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann, breathing very heavily. She sat serenely on a narrow ledge.

“Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.

“Ah.”

“Got your attention, did it?”

“Yes.”

“No memory problems, I trust?”

“No.”

“That’s what I like about climbing.”

Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up, Sax said, “So have you been having memory problems?”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this crack here.”

“Indeed.”

That night they lay in sleeping bags, in a clear mushroom tent big enough to hold ten. At this altitude, with its su-perthin atmosphere, it was impressive to consider the strength of the tent fabric, holding in 450 millibars of air with no sign of untoward bulging at any point; the clear material was nice and taut, but not rock hard; no doubt it was holding many bars of air less than would test its holding capacity. When Sax recalled the meters of rock and sandbags they had had to pile on their earliest habitats to keep them from exploding, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the subsequent advancements in materials science.

Ann nodded when he spoke of this. “We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.”

“Well. It’s understandable, I think. Just hard to believe.”

“I suppose I see the distinction,” she said easily.

Feeling more comfortable, he brought up memory again. “I’ve been having what I call blank-outs, where I can’t remember my thoughts of the previous several minutes, or up to say an hour. Short-term-memory failures, having to do with brain-wave fluctuations, apparently. And the long-term past is getting very uncertain as well, I’m afraid.”

For a long time she didn’t reply, except to grunt that she’d heard him. Then:

“I’ve forgotten my whole self. I think there’s someone else in me now. In partway. A kind of opposite. My shadow, or the shadow of my shadow. Seeded, and growing inside me.”

“How do you mean?” Sax said apprehensively.

“An opposite. She thinks just what I wouldn’t have thought.” She turned her head away, as if shy. “I call her Counter-Ann.”

“And how would you — characterize her?”

“She is … I don’t know. Emotional. Sentimental. Stupid. Cries at the sight of a flower. Feels that everyone is doing their best. Crap like that.”

“You weren’t like that before, at all?”

“No no no. It’s all crap. But I feel it as though it’s real. So… now there’s Ann and Counter-Ann. And… maybe a third.”

“A third?”

“I think so. Something that isn’t either of the other two.”

“And what do you — I mean, do you call that one anything?”

“No. She doesn’t have a name. She’s elusive. Younger. Fewer ideas about things, and those ideas are — strange. Not Ann or Counter-Ann. Somewhat like that Zo, did you know her?”

“Yes,” Sax said, surprised. “I liked her.”

“Did you? I thought she was awful. And yet… there’s something like that in me as well. Three people.”

“It’s an odd way to think of it.”

She laughed. “Aren’t you the one who had a mental lab that contained all your memories, filed by room and cabinet number or something?”

“That was a very effective system.”

She laughed again, harder. It made him grin to hear it. Though he was frightened too. Three Anns? Even one had been more than he could understand.

“But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my past. Some people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible the palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved. But if you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So, I’ll run across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance, and try to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever, and the whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never happened.”

“A problem with the palace.”

“Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my — my incident — I was sure nothing would ever happen to my ability to — to think.”

“You still seem to think okay.”

Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-cuts, the gaps in memory, thepresque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical or cognitive ability, but something more general… He tried to describe what had been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be listening closely. “So you see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done on memory. It’s gotten interesting — pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and the Acheron labs have been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something that might help us.”

“A memory drug, you mean?”

“Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So. My notion is to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a number of the First Hundred gathered at Underbill, and take it together. Context is very important to recollection, and the sight of each other might help. Not everyone is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining First Hundred are, actually.”

“Not so surprising. Who?”

He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of them left; a dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I know I would like it more than anything.”

“It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross this caldera.”

Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of their world. The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on this day, and no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The stretch of ten minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The feeling in one’s legs.

And there were the rings of the calderas around them, jutting far into the sky even when the two walkers were out in the center of the central circle, out where the later, deeper calderas appeared as big embayments in a single wall’s roundness. Out here the planet’s sharp curvature had no effect on one’s perspective, the curve was for once invisible, the cliffs free and clear even thirty kilometers away. The net effect, it seemed to Sax, was of a kind of enclosure. A park, a stone garden, a maze with only one wall separating it from the world beyond, the world which, though invisible, conditioned everything here. The caldera was big but not big enough. You couldn’t hide here. The world poured in and overflowed the mind, no matter its hundred-trillion-bit capacity. No matter how big the neural array there was still just a single thread of awed mentation, consciousness itself, a living wire of thought saying rock, cliff, sky, star.

The rock became heavily cracked by fissures, each one an arc of a circle with its center point back in the middle of the central circle: old cracks relative to the big new holes of the north and south circles, old cracks filled with rubble and dust. These rock crevasses made their walk into a wandering ramble — in a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls, yet just as difficult of passage as a walled one.

But they threaded it, and finally reached the rim of north circle, number 2 on Sax’s map. Looking down into it gave them a new perspective — a proper shape to the caldera and its circular embayments, a sudden drop to a heretofore hidden floor, a thousand meters below.

Apparently there was a climbing route down onto the floor of north circle; but when Ann saw the look on his face as she pointed it out — achievable only by rappelling — she laughed. They would only have to climb up out of it again, she said easily, and the main caldera wall was already tall enough. They could hike around north circle to another route instead.

Surprised by this flexibility, and thankful for it, Sax followed her around the north circle on its west circumference. Under the great wall of the main caldera they stopped for the night, popped the tent, ate in silence.

After sunset Phobos shot up over the western wall of the caldera like a little gray flare. Fear and dread, what names.

“I heard that putting the moons back in orbit was your idea?” Ann said from her sleeping bag.

“Yes, it was.”

“Now that’s what I call landscape restoration,” she said, sounding pleased.

Sax felt a little glow. “I wanted to please you.”

After a silence: “I like seeing them.”

“And how did you like Miranda?”

“Oh, it was very interesting.” She talked about some of the geological features of the odd moon. Two planetesimals, impacted, joined together imperfectly…

“There’s a color between red and green,” Sax said when it appeared she was done talking about Miranda. “A mixture of the two. Madder alizarin, it’s sometimes called. You see it in plants sometimes.”

“Uh-huhn.”

“It makes me think of the political situation. If there couldn’t be some kind of red-green synthesis.”

“Browns.”

“Yes. Or alizarins.”

“I thought that’s what this Free Mars-Red coalition was, Irishka and the people who tossed out Jackie.”

“An anti-immigration coalition,” Sax said. “The wrong kind of red-green combination. In that they’re embroiling us in a conflict with Earth that isn’t necessary.”

“No?”

“No. The population problem is soon going to be eased. The issei — we’re hitting the limit, I think. And the nisei aren’t far behind.”

“Quick decline, you mean.”

“Exactly. When it gets our generation, and the one after, the human population of the solar system will be less than half what it is now.”

“Then they’ll figure out a different way to screw it up.”

“No doubt. But it won’t be the Hypermalthusian Age anymore. It’ll be their problem. So, worrying so much about immigration, to the point of causing conflict, threatening interplanetary war… it just isn’t necessary. It’s shortsighted. If there was a red movement on Mars pointing that out, offering to help Earth through the last of the surge years, it might keep people from killing each other, needlessly. It would be a new way of thinking about Mars.”

“A new areophany.”

“Yes. That’s what Maya called it.”

She laughed. “But Maya is crazy.”

“Why no,” Sax said sharply. “She certainly is not.”

Ann said no more, and Sax did not press the issue. Phobos moved visibly across the sky, backward through the zodiac.

They slept well. The next day they made an arduous climb up a steep gully in the wall, which apparently Ann and the other red climbers considered the walker’s route out. Sax had never had such a hard day’s work in his life; and even so they didn’t make it all the way out, but had to pitch the tent in haste at sunset, on a narrow ledge, and finish their emergence the following day, around noon.

On the great rim of Olympus Mons, all was as before. A giant cored circle of flat land; the violet sky in a band around the horizon so far below, a black zenith above; little hermitages scattered in boulder ejecta that had been hollowed out. A separate world. Part of blue Mars, but not.

The hut they stopped at first was inhabited by very old red mendicants of some sort, apparently living there while waiting for the quick decline to strike them, after which their bodies would be cremated, and the ashes cast into the thin jet stream.

This struck Sax as overfatalistic. Ann apparently was likewise unimpressed: “All right,” she said, watching them eat their meager meal. “Let’s go try this memory treatment then.”

Many of the First Hundredargued for sites other than Underhill, arguing in a way that they didn’t even recognize as part of their group nature; but Sax was adamant, shrugging off requests for Olympus Mons, low orbit, Pseudophobos, Sheffield, Odessa, Hell’s Gate, Sabishii, Senzeni Na, Acheron, the south polar cap, Mangala, and on the high seas. He insisted that the setting for such a procedure was a critical factor, as experiments on context had proved. Coyote brayed most inappropriately at his description of the experiment with students in scuba gear learning word lists on the floor of the North Sea, but data were data, and given the data, why not do their experiment in the place where they would get the best results? The stakes were high enough to justify doing everything they could to get it right. After all, Sax pointed out, if their memories were returned to them intact, anything might be possible — anything — breakthroughs on other fronts, a defeat of the quick decline, health that lasted centuries more, an ever-expanding community of garden worlds, from thence perhaps up again in some emergent phase change to a higher level of progress, into some realm of wisdom that could not even be imagined at this point — they teetered on the edge of some such golden age, Sax told them. But it all depended on wholeness of mind. Nothing could continue without wholeness of mind. And so he insisted on Underhill.

“You’re too sure,” Marina complained; she had been arguing for Acheron. “You have to keep more of an open mind about things.”

“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, Underbill 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 barrel-vault 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.

Finally morning came. They were up at dawn; in the horizontal light they ate a quick breakfast, fruit and croissants and bread and coffee. Long shadows cast west from every rock and hillock. So familiar.

Then they were ready. There was nothing else to do. There was a kind of collective deep breath — uneasy laughter — an inability to meet the others’ eyes.

Maya, however, was still refusing to take the treatment. She was unswayed by every argument they tried. “I won’t,” she had said over and over the night before. “You’ll need a keeper in any case, in case you go crazy. I’ll do that.”

Sax had thought she would change her mind, that she was just being Maya. Now he stood before her, baffled. “I thought you were haying the worst memory troubles of all.”

“Perhaps.”

“So it would make sense to try this treatment. Michel gave you lots of different drugs for mental trouble.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, looking him in the eye.

He sighed. “I don’t understand you, Maya.”

“I know.”

And she went into the old med clinic in the corner, and took on her role as their keeper for the day. Everything in there was ready, and she called them in one by one, and took up little ultrasound injectors and put them to their necks, and with a little click-hiss administered one part of the drug package, and gave them the pills that contained the rest of it, and then helped them insert the earplugs that were custom-designed for each of them, to broadcast the silent electromagnetic waves. In the kitchen they waited for everyone to finish their preparations, in a nervous silence. When they were all done Maya ushered them to the door and guided them outside. And they were off.

Sax saw and felt an image: bright lights, a feeling of his skull being crushed, choking, gasping, spitting. Chill air and his mother’s voice, like an animal’s yelp, “Oh? Oh? Oh! Oh!” Then lying wet on her chest, cold.

“Oh my.”

The hippocampus was one of several specific brain regions that had been very strongly stimulated by the treatment. This meant that his limbic system, spread under the hippocampus like a net under a walnut, was likewise stimulated, as if the nut were bouncing up and down on a trampoline of nerves, causing the trampoline to resonate or even to jangle. Thus Sax felt the start of what would no doubt be a flood of emotions — registering not any single emotion, he noted, but many at once and at nearly the same intensity, and free of any cause — joy, grief, love, hate, exhilaration, melancholy, hope, fear, generosity, jealousy — many of which of course did not match with their opposite or with most of the others present in him. The result of this overcrowded mix, for Sax at any rate, sitting on a bench outside the barrel vault, breathing hard, was a kind of adrenalized breath-stopping growth in his sensation of significance. A suffusion of meaning through everything — it was heartbreaking, or heart filling — as if oceans of clouds were stuffed in his chest, so that he could scarcely breathe — a kind of nostalgia to the nth power, a fullness, even bliss — pure sublimity — just sitting there, just the fact that they were alive! But all of it with a sharp edge of loss, with regret for lost time, with fear of death, fear of everything, grief for Michel, for John, for all of them really. This was so unlike Sax’s usual calm, steady, one might even say phlegmatic state, that he was almost incapacitated; he could not move well, and for several minutes he bitterly regretted ever initiating any such experiment as this. It was very foolish — idiotically foolhardy — no doubt everyone would hate him forever.

Stunned, nearly overwhelmed, he decided to try to walk, to see if that would clear his head. He found he could walk; push off the bench, stand, balance, walk, avoiding others who were wandering by in their own worlds, as oblivious to him as he was to them, everyone getting past each other like objects to be avoided. And then he was out in the open space of the Underbill environs, out in the chilly morning breeze, walking toward the salt pyramids, under a strangely blue sky.

He stopped and looked around — considered — grunted in surprise, came to a halt — could not walk. For all of a sudden he could remember everything.

Not everything everything. He could not recall what he had had for breakfast on 2 August 13 in 2029, for instance; that was in accord with experiments which suggested that daily habitual activities were not differentiated enough on entrainment to allow for individual recall. But as a class… in the late 2020s he had started his days back in the barrel vault, at the southeast corner, where he had shared an upstairs bedroom with Hiroko, Evgenia, Rya, and Iwao. Experiments, incidents, conversations flickered in his mind as he saw that bedroom in his mind’s eye. A node in timespace, vibrating a whole network of days. Rya’s pretty back across the room as she washed under her arms. Things people said that hurt in their carelessness. Vlad talking about clipping genes. He and Vlad had stood out here together on this very spot, in their very first minute on Mars, looking around at everything without a word for each other, just absorbing the gravity and the pink of the sky and the close horizons, looking just as they looked now, so many years later: areological time, as slow and long as the great systolis itself. In the walkers one had felt hollow. Chernobyl had required more concrete than could be cured in the thin dry cold air. Nadia had fixed it somehow, how? Heating it, that’s right. Nadia had fixed a lot of things in those years — the barrel vaults, the manufactories, the arcade — who would have suspected a person so quiet on the Ares would prove so competent and energetic? He hadn’t remembered that Ares impression of her for ages. She had been so pained when Tatiana Durova was killed by a falling crane, it was a shock to them all, all except Michel, who had been revealed as amazingly dissociated by the disaster, their first death. Would Nadia remember that now? Yes, she would if she thought about it. Nothing unique about Sax, or to be more accurate, if the treatment was working on him, it would work on all of them. There was Vasili, who had fought for UNOMA in both revolutions; what was he remembering? He looked stricken, but it could have been rapture — anything or everything — very likely it was the everything emotion, the fullness, apparently one of the first effects of the treatment. Perhaps he was remembering Tatiana’s death as well. Once Sax and Tatiana had gone out on a hike in Antarctica during their year there, and Tatiana had slipped on a loose boulder and sprained an ankle, and they had had to wait on Nussbaum Riegel for a helicopter from McMurdo to lift them back to camp. He had forgotten that for years, and then Phyllis had reminded him of it the night she had had him arrested, and he had promptly forgotten it again until this very moment. Two rehearsals in two hundred years; but now it was back, the low sun, the cold, the beauty of the Dry Valleys, Phyllis’s jealousy of Tatiana’s great dark beauty. That their beauty should die first — it was like a sign, a primal curse, Mars as Pluto, planet of fear and dread. And now that day in Antarctica, the two women long dead — he was the only carrier of that day so precious, without him it would be gone. Ah yes — what one could remember was precisely the part of the past that one had felt the most, the events spiked by emotion above a certain threshold — the great joys, the great crises, the great disasters. And the small ones as well. He had been cut from the seventh-grade basketball team, had cried alone after reading the list, at a drinking fountain at the far edge of the school, thinking You will remember this forever. And by God he had. Great beauty. The first times one did things had that special charge, first love — who had that been, though? A blank, back there in Boulder, a face — some friend of a friend — but that wasn’t love; and he couldn’t recall her name. No — now he was thinking of Ann Clayborne, standing before him, looking at him closely, sometime long ago. What had he been trying to recall? The rush of thought was so dense and rapid he would not be able to remember some of this remembering, he was pretty sure. A paradox, but only one of many caused by the single thread of consciousness in the huge field of the mind. Ten to the forty-third power, the matrix in which all big bangs flowered. Inside the skull was a universe as vast as the one outside. Ann — he had taken a walk with her in Antarctica as well. She was strong. Curious, during the walk across Olympus Mons caldera he had never once remembered this walk across Wright Valley in Antarctica, despite the similarities, a walk during which they had argued so earnestly over the fate of Mars, and he had wanted so much to take her hand, or for her to take his, why he had had a kind of crush on her! And him in his lab-rat mode, having never before risen to such feelings, now stifled for no better reason than shyness. She had looked at him curiously but had not understood his import, only wondered that he should stammer so. He had stammered a fair bit when a boy, it was a biochemical problem apparently solved by puberty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann — Ann — he saw her face as he argued with her on the Ares, in Underbill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the warehouse on Pavonis. Why always this assault on a woman he had been attracted to, why? She was so strong. And yet he had seen her so depressed that she lay helplessly on the floor, in that boulder car, for many days as her red Mars died. Just lay there. But then she had pried herself off the floor and gone on. She had stopped Maya from yelling at him. She had helped bury her partner Simon. She had done all these things, and never, never, never had Sax been anything but a burden to her. Part of her pain. That was what he was for her. Angry with her in Zygote or Gamete — Gamete — both, really — her face so drawn — and then he hadn’t seen her for twenty years. And then later, after he had forced the longevity treatment on her, he hadn’t seen her for thirty years. All that time, wasted. If they lived for a thousand years it wouldn’t be long enough to justify such waste.

Wandering in the Alchemist’s Quarter. He came on Vasili again, sitting in the dust with the tears running down his face. The two of them had botched the Underbill algae experiment together, right there inside this very building, but Sax doubted very much that this was what Vasili was crying about. Something from the many years he had worked for UNOMA, perhaps, or something else — no way to know — well, he could ask — but wandering around Underhill seeing faces, and then remembering in a rush everything about them that one knew, was not a situation conducive to follow-up inquiries. No — walk on, leave Vasili to his own past. Sax did not want to know what Vasili regretted. Besides, halfway to the horizon to the north a figure was striding away alone — Ann. Odd to see her head free of a helmet, white hair coursing back in the wind. It was enough to stop the flow of memories — but then he had seen her that way before, in Wright Valley, yes, her hair light then too, dishwater blond they called that color, not very generously. So dangerous to develop any bond under the watchful eyes of the psychologists. They were there on business, under pressure, there was no room for personal relations which were dangerous indeed, as Natasha and Sergei had proved. But still it happened. Vlad and Ursula became a couple, solid, stable; and same with Hiroko and Iwao, Nadia and Arkady. But the danger, the risk. Ann had looked at him across the lab table, eating lunch, and there was something in her eye, some regard — he didn’t know, he couldn’t read people. They were all such mysteries. The day he got his letter of acceptance, selection to the First Hundred, he had felt so sad; why was that? No way of knowing. But now he saw that letter in the fax box, the maple tree outside the window; he had called Ann to see if she had been included — she had, a bit of a surprise, her such a loner, but he had been a bit happier, but still — sad. The maple had been red-leafed; autumn in Princeton, traditionally a melancholy time, but that hadn’t been it, not at all. Just sad. As if accomplishment were nothing but a certain number of the body’s three billion heartbeats passed. And now it was ten billion, and counting. No, there was no explanation. People were mysteries. So when Ann had said, “Do you want to hike out to Lookout Point?” in that dry valley lab, he had agreed instantly, without a stammer. And without really arranging to, they had walked out separately; she had left the camp and hiked out to Lookout Point, and he had followed, and out there — oh yes — looking down at the cluster of huts and the greenhouse dome, a kind of proto-Underhill, he had taken her gloved hand in his, as they sat side by side arguing over terraforming in a perfectly friendly way, no stakes involved. And she had pulled her hand away as if shocked, and shuddered (it was very cold, for Terra anyway) and he had stammered just as badly as he had after his stroke. A limbic hemorrhage, killing on the spot certain elements, certain hopes, yearnings. Love dead. And he had harried her ever since. Not that these events functioned as proper causal explanations, no matter what Michel would have said! But the Antarctic cold of that walk back to the base. Even in the eidetic clarity of his current power of recollection he could not see much of that walk. Distracted. Why, why had he repelled her so? Little man. White lab coat. There was no reason. But it had happened. And left its mark forever. And even Michel had never known.

Repression. Thinking of Michel made him think of Maya. Ann was on the horizon now, he would never catch her; he wasn’t sure he wanted to at that moment, still stunned by this so-surprising, so-painful memory. He went looking for Maya. Past where Arkady had laughed at their tawdriness when he came down from Phobos, past Hiroko’s greenhouse where she had seduced him with her impersonal friendliness, like primates on the savanna, the alpha female grabbing one male among the others, an alpha, a beta, or that class of could-be-alpha-but-not-interested which struck him as the only decent way to behave; past the trailer park where they had all slept on the floor together, a family. With Desmond in a closet somewhere. Desmond had promised to show them how he had lived then, all his hiding places. Jumble of Desmond images, the flight over the burning canal, then the flight over burning Kasei, the fear in Kasei as the security people strapped him into their insane device; that had been the end of Saxifrage Russell. Now he was something else, and Ann was Counter-Ann, also the third woman that was neither Ann nor Counter-Ann. He could perhaps speak to her on that basis: as two strangers, meeting. Rather than the two who had met in the Antarctic.

Maya was sitting in the barrel-vault kitchen, waiting for a big teapot to boil. She was making tea for them.

“Maya,” Sax said, feeling the words like pebbles in his mouth, “You should try it. It’s not so bad.”

She shook her head. “I remember everything that I want to. Even now, without your drugs, even now when I hardly remember anything, I still remember more than you ever will. I don’t want any more than that.”

It was possible that minute quantities of the drugs had gotten into the air and thus onto her skin, giving her a small fraction of the hyperemotional experience. Or perhaps this was just her ordinary state.

“Why shouldn’t now be enough?” she was saying. “I don’t want my past back, I don’t want it. I can’t bear it.”

“Maybe later,” Sax said.

What could one say to her? She had been like this in Underbill as well — unpredictable, moody. It was amazing what eccentrics had been selected to the First Hundred. But what choice had the selection committee had? People were all like that, unless they were stupid. And they hadn’t sent stupid people to Mars, or not at first, or not too many. And even the dull-witted had their complexities.

“Maybe,” she said now, and patted his head, and took the teapot off the burner. “Maybe not. I remember too much as it is.”

“Frank?” Sax said.

“Of course. Frank, John — they’re all there.” She stabbed her chest with a thumb. “It hurts enough. I don’t need more.”

“Ah.”

He walked back outside, feeling stuffed, uncertain of anything, off balance. Limbic system vibrating madly under the impact of his whole life, under the impact of Maya, so beautiful and damned. How he wished her happy, but what could one do? Maya lived her unhappiness to the full, it made her happy one might say. Or complete. Perhaps she felt this acutely uncomfortable emotional overfullness all the time! Wow. So much easier to be phlegmatic. And yet she was so alive. The way she had flailed them onward out of the chaos, south to the refuge in Zygote… such strength. All these strong women. Actually to face up to life’s awfulness, awefullness, to face it and feel it without denial, without defenses, just admit it and carry on. John, Frank, Arkady, even Michel, they had all had their great optimism, pessimism, idealism, their mythologies to mask the pain of existence, all their various sciences, and still they were dead — killed off one way or another — leaving Nadia and Maya and Ann to carry on and carry on. No doubt he was a lucky man to have such tough sisters. Even Phyllis — yes, somehow — with the toughness of the stupid, making her way, pretty well at least, fairly well, well at least making it, for a while. Never giving up. Never admitting anything.

She had protested his torture, Spencer had told him so, Spencer and all their hours of aerodynamics together, telling him over too many whiskeys how she had gone to the security chief in Kasei and demanded his release, his decent treatment, even after he had knocked her cold, almost killed her with nitrous oxide, lied to her in her own bed. She had forgiven him apparently, and Spencer had never forgiven Maya for killing her, though he pretended he had; and Sax had forgiven her, even though for years he had acted as if he hadn’t, to get some kind of hold on her. Ah the strange recombinant tangle they had made of their lives, result of the overextension, or perhaps it was that way in every village always. But so much sadness and betrayal! Perhaps memory was triggered by loss, as everything was inevitably lost. But what about joy? He tried to remember: could one cast back by emotional category, interesting idea, was that possible? Walking through the halls of the terraforming conference, for instance, and seeing the poster board that estimated the heat contribution of the Russell Cocktail at twelve kelvins. Waking up in Echus Overlook and seeing that the Great Storm was gone, the pink sky radiant with sunlight. Seeing the faces on the train as they slid out of Libya Station. Being kissed in the ear by Hiroko, in the baths one winter day in Zygote, when it was evening all afternoon. Hiroko! Ah — ah — He had been huddling in the cold, quite vexed to think he would be killed by a storm just when things were getting interesting, trying to work out how he might call his car to him, as it seemed he would not be able to get to it, and then there she had appeared out of the snow, a short figure in a rust-red spacesuit, bright in the white storm of wind and horizontal snow, the wind so loud that even the intercom mike in his helmet was no more than a whisper: “Hiroko?” he cried as he saw her face through the slush-smeared faceplate; and she said “yes.” And pulled him up by the wrist — helped him up. That hand on his wrist! He felt it. And up he came, like viriditas itself, the green force pouring through him, through the white noise, the white static sleeting by, her grip warm and hard, as full as the plenum itself. Yes. Hiroko had been there. She had led him back to the car, had saved his life, had then disappeared again, and no matter how certairj Desmond was of her death in Sabishii, no matter how convincing his arguments were, no matter how often second climbers had been hallucinated by solo climbers in distress, Sax knew better, because of that hand on his wrist, that visitation in the snow — Hiroko herself in the hard compact flesh, as real as rock. Alive! So that he could rest in that knowledge, he could know something — in the inexplicable seeping of the unexplainable into everything, he could rest in that known fact. Hiroko lived. Start with that and go on, build on it, the axiom of a lifetime of joy. Perhaps even convince Desmond of it, give him that peace.

He was back outside, looking for the Coyote. Not an easy task, ever. What did Desmond recall of Underhill — hiding, whispers, the lost farm crew, then the lost colony, slipping away with them — out there driving around Mars in disguised boulder cars, being loved by Hiroko, flying over the night surface in a stealthed plane, playing the demimonde, knitting the underground together — Sax could almost remember it himself, it was so vivid to him. Telepathic transfer of all their stories to all of them; one hundred squared, in the square of barrel vaults. No. That would be too much. Just the imagination of someone else’s reality was stunning enough, was all the telepathy one required or could handle.

But where had Desmond gone? Hopeless. One could never find Coyote; one only waited for him to find you. He would show up when he chose. For now, out northwest of the pyramids and the Alchemist’s Quarter, there was a very ancient lander skeleton, probably from the original pre-landing-equipment drop, its metal stripped of paint and encrusted with salt. The beginning of their hopes, now a skeleton of old metal, nothing really. Hiroko had helped him unload this one.

Back into the Alchemist’s Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank God for Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit bulldozer to run.

But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, slowly, gasping.

“Ann? Ann?”

She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. “I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the — the beauty until it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined — and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.

But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry — his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so — just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal — which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together — I mean one after the next — but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean — you know how it was then — that Russian couple had fought and been sent home — we all hid everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not ever.

And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the …” He waved at the blue sky.

“I remember,” she said.

She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn’t get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

“Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said, frowning. “It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might become… but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still” — sharp laugh — “no. It was you. You didn’t — it wasn’t your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn’t mine either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn’t. And then I forgot about it.”

“No,” Sax said.

He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought, to re-remember. He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant at Lookout Point, the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move, it’s a net gain in order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of science; and she had said, for that you would destroy the entire face of a planet. He remembered it.

But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the upwelling — clearly she remembered it too — and yet remembered something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

“Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out — intending to — to reveal ourselves — ”

Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She laughed again. “Why sure.”

He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.

But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had happened — well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.

Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these upwelling memories to be true — if one so crucial as this one was now cast in doubt — what then of the others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading him to his car, hand on his wrist — could that too be… No. That hand on his wrist. But Ann’s hand had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true.

And so?

So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future — his life — what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there nothing they could hold to?

He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.

“Well,” Ann said, apparently understanding him. “At least we remember that much. I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they didn’t work out. Something happened that we probably neither understood at the time, so it’s no surprise we can’t remember it properly now, or that we recall it differently. We have to understand something to remember it.”

“Is that true?”

“I think so. It’s why two-year-olds can’t remember. They feel things like crazy, but they don’t remember them because they don’t really understand them.”

“Perhaps.”

He wasn’t sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood memories Were eidetic images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was true, then he was perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko’s appearance in the storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in the violence of the storm… .

Ann stepped forward and gave him a hug. He turned his face to the side, his ear pressed against her collarbone. She was tall. He felt her body against his, and he hugged her back, hard. You will remember this forever, he thought. She held him away from her, held him by the arms. “That’s the past,” she said. “It doesn’t explain what happened between us on Mars, I don’t think. It’s a different matter.”

“Perhaps.”

“We haven’t agreed, but we had the same — the same terms. The same things were important to us. I remember when you tried to make me feel better, in that boulder car in Marineris, during the outbreak flood.”

“And you me. When Maya was yelling at me, after Frank died.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking back. Such power of recall they had in these amazing hours! That car had been a crucible, they had all metamorphosed in it, in their own ways. “I suppose I did. It wasn’t fair, you were just trying to help her. And that look on your face…”

They stood there, looking back at the scattering of low structures that was Underbill.

“And here we are,” Sax said finally.

“Yes. Here we are.”

Awkward instant. Another awkward instant. This was life with the other: one awkward instant after the next. He would have to get used to it, somehow. He stepped back. He reached out and held her hand, squeezed it hard. Then let go. She wanted to walk out past Nadia’s arcade, she said, into the untouched wilderness west of Underbill. She was experiencing a rush of memory too strong to concentrate on the present. She needed to walk.

He understood. Off she went, with a wave. With a wave! And there was Coyote, over there near the salt pyramids so brilliant in the afternoon light. Feeling Mars’s gravity for the first time in decades, Sax hopped over to the little man. The only one of the First Hundred’s men who had been shorter than Sax. His brother in arms.

Stumbling here and there through his life, step-by-step shocked elsewhere, it was actually quite difficult to focus on Coyote’s asymmetrical face, faceted like Deimos — but there it was, most vibrantly there, pulsing it seemed with all its past shapes as well. At least Desmond had more or less resembled himself throughout. God knew what Sax looked like to the others, or what he would see if he looked in a mirror — the idea was dizzying, it might even be interesting to test it, look in a mirror while remembering something from his youth, the view might distort. Desmond, a Toba-gonian of Indian descent, now saying something difficult to comprehend, something about rapture of the deeps, unclear if he was referring to the memory drug or to some nautical incident from his youth. Sax wanted so much to tell him that Hiroko was alive, but just as the words were on the tip of his tongue, he stopped himself. Desmond looked so happy at this moment; and he would not believe Sax. So it would only upset him. Knowledge by experience is not always translatable into discursive knowledge, which was a shame, but there it was. Desmond would not believe him because he had not felt that hand on his wrist. And why should he, after all?

They walked out toward Chernobyl, talking about Arkady and Spencer. “We’re getting old,” Sax said.

Desmond hooted. He still had a most alarming laugh — infectious, however, and Sax laughed too. “Getting old? Getting old?”

The sight of their little Rickover put them into paroxysms. Though it was pathetic as well, and brave, and stupid, and clever. Their limbic systems were overloaded still, Sax noted, jangling with all the emotions at once. All his past was coming clearer and clearer, in a kind of simultaneous overlay of sequences, each event with its unique emotional charge, now firing all at once: so full, so full. Perhaps fuller than the, the what — the mind? the soul? — fuller than it was capable of being. Overflowing, yes, that was the way it felt. “Desmond, I’m overflowing.”

Desmond only laughed harder.

His life had exceeded his capacity to feel it all at once. Except what was this, then, this feeling? A limbic hum, the roaring hum of the wind in conifers high in the mountains, lying in a sleeping bag at night in the Rockies, with the wind thrumming through the pine needles… Very interesting. Possibly an effect of the drug, which would pass, although he was hoping that there were effects of the drug that would last, and who could say if this aspect might not as well, as an integral part of the whole? Thus: if you can remember your past, and it is very long, then you will necessarily feel very full, full of experiences and emotions, perhaps to the point where it might not be easy to feel much more. Wasn’t that possible? Or perhaps everything would feel more intensely than was appropriate; perhaps he had inadvertently turned them all into horribly sentimental people, stricken with grief if they stepped on an ant, weeping with joy at the sight of sunrise, etc. That would be unfortunate. Enough was enough, or more than enough. In fact Sax had always believed that the amplitude of emotional response exhibited in the people around him could be turned down a fair bit with no very .great loss to humanity. Of course it wouldn’t work to try consciously to damp one’s emotions, that was repression, sublimation, with a resulting overpressure elsewhere. Curious how useful Freud’s steam-engine model of the mind remained, compression, venting, the entire apparatus, as if the brain had been designed by James Watt. But reductive models were useful, they were at the heart of science. And he had needed to blow off steam for a long time.

So he and Desmond walked around Chernobyl, throwing rocks at it, laughing, talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a simultaneous transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts. Thus very dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and reassuring to hear someone else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel so close to this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now babbling together with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar region, the parks in the Ares; and they were so similar anyway.

“We all go through the same things.”

“It’s true! It’s true!”

Curious that this fact didn’t affect people’s behavior more.

Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as they passed through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past association. It was near sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on dinner. Most had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug appeared to be a mild appetite suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya had been cooking a big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing them in. Borscht? Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a breadmaker in the morning, and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the barrel vaults.

They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to say Here we are — the others are away tonight — otherwise everything is the same. An ordinary night in Underbill. Talk about work, the various sites — food — the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the others — just as always.

But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a Provencal stew that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a problem.

Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at once — and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, even while speaking — under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said:

“Where are you going after this?”

“Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues invited me to, to, to — to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me, for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse — on Chryse Gulf.”

“Ah.”

Terrible silence, despite all the noise.

“Can I come with you?”

Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”

And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya’s tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.

Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds — and that too was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

They sailed out of the Florentineon a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quantity of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally —

“Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to sail.”

“So I am.”

Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most general command; he could say for instance “Go to Rhodes,” and there would be nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to another time, and made his way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.

“Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”

“So it is.”

The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci Island still visible over the water, though they weren’t more than twenty kilometers away. There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very fast; it hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls had underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike shapes, which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts kept the windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from driving too far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their unfurled mast sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it like an iceboat over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the wind itself. Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage of the hulls were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder and the outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight. He saw the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated horizon no more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was clutching the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their wake. Sax said, “Have you been at sea before?” meaning, entirely out of the sight of land.

“No.”

“Ah.”

They sailed on north, out into Chryse Gulf. Copernicus Island appeared over the water to their right, then Galileo Island behind it. Then both receded under the blue horizon again. The swells on the horizon were individually distinct, so that the horizon was not a straight blue line against the sky, but rather a shifting array of swell tops, one after another in swift succession. The groundswell was coming out of the north, almost directly ahead of them, so that looking to port or starboard the horizon line was particularly jagged, a wavy line of blue water against the blue sky, in a too-small circle surrounding the ship — as if the proper Terran distance to the horizon were stubbornly embedded in the brain’s optics, so that when they saw things clearly here, they would always appear to stand on a planet too small for them. Certainly there was a look of the most extreme discomfort on Ann’s face; she glared at the waves, groundswell after groundswell lifting the bow and then the stern. There was a cross chop nearly at right angles to the groundswell, pushed by the west wind and ruffling the bigger broader swells. Wavetank physics; one could see it all laid out; it reminded Sax of the physics lab on the second story of the northeasternmost building in his high school, where hours had passed like minutes, the flat little wavetank full of marvels. Here the groundswell originated in the North Sea’s perpetual eastward motion around the globe; the swell was greater or smaller depending on whether local winds reinforced it or interfered with it. The light gravity made for big broad waves, quickly generated by strong winds; if today’s wind got very much stronger, for instance, then the wind-chop from the west would quickly grow bigger than the groundswell from the north, and obscure it completely. Waves on the North Sea were notorious for their size and mutability, their recombinant surprises, though it was also true that they moved fairly slowly through the water; big slow hills, like the giant dunes of Vastitas far underneath them, migrating around the planet. Sometimes they could get very big indeed; in the aftermath of the typhoons that blew over the North Sea, waves seventy meters high had been reported.

This lively cross chop seemed enough for Ann, who was looking a bit distressed. Sax could not think what to say to her. He doubted that his thoughts on wave mechanics would be appropriate, though it was very interesting of course, and would be to anyone interested in the physical sciences. As Ann was. But perhaps not now. Now the sheer sensory array of water, wind, sky — it looked like it was enough for her. Perhaps silence was in order.

Whitecaps began to roll down the faces of some of the cross-chop waves, and Sax immediately checked into the ship’s weather system to see what the wind speed was. The ship had it at thirty-two kilometers per hour. So this was about the speed at which the crests of waves were first knocked over. A simple matter of surface tension against wind speed, calculable, in fact… yes, the appropriate equation in fluid dynamics suggested they should start to collapse at a wind speed cr thirty-five kilometers per hour, and here they were: whitecaps, startlingly white against the water, which was a dark blue, Prussian blue Sax thought it might be. The sky today was almost sky blue, slightly empurpled at the zenith, and somewhat whitened around the sun, with a metallic sheen between sun and the horizon under it.

“What are you doing?” Ann said, sounding annoyed.

Sax explained, and she listened in stony silence. He didn’t know what she might be thinking. That the world was somewhat explicable — he always found that a comfort. But Ann… well, it could be as simple as seasickness. Or something from her past, distracting her; Sax had found in the weeks since the experiment at Underhill that he was often distracted by some past incident, rising unbidden from a great bulk of them in his mind. Involuntary memory. And for Ann, that might include negative incidents of one kind or another; Michel had said she had been mistreated as a child. It still seemed to Sax too shocking to believe. On Earth men had abused women; on Mars, never. Was that true? Sax did not know for sure, but he felt it was true. This was what it meant to live in a just and rational society, this was one of the main reasons it was a good thing, a value. Possibly Ann would know more about the reality of the situation these days. But he did not feel comfortable asking her. It was clearly contraindicated.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

“Enjoying the view,” he said quickly. Perhaps he had better talk about wave mechanics after all. He explained the groundswell, the cross chop, the negative and positive interference patterns that could result. But then he said, “Did you remember much about Earth, during the Underhill experiment?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

This was probably some kind of repression, and exactly the opposite of the psychotherapeutic method that Michel would probably have recommended. But they were not steam engines. And some things were no doubt better forgotten. He would have to work on once again forgetting John’s death, for instance; also on remembering better those parts of his life when he had been most social, as during the years of work for Biotique in Burroughs. So that across the cockpit from him sat Counter-Ann, or that third woman she had mentioned — while he was, at least in part, Stephen Lindholm. Strangers, despite that startling encounter at Underhill. Or because of it. Hello; nice to meet you.

Once they got out from among the fjords and islands at the bottom of Chryse Gulf, Sax turned the tiller and the boat swooped northeast, rushing across the wind and the whitecaps. Then the wind was behind them, and with a • following wind the mast sail bloomed into its own splayed-wing version of a spinnaker, and the hulls surfed on the mushy crests of the waves before losing to their superior speed. The eastern shore of the Chryse Gulf appeared before them; it was less spectacular than the western shore, but in many ways prettier. Buildings, towers, bridges: it was a well-populated coast, as were most of them these days. Coming off Olympus all the towns must be a bit of a shock.

After they passed the broad mouth of the Ares Fjord, Soo-chow Point emerged over the horizon, and then beyond it the Oxia Islands, one by one. Before the water’s arrival these had been the Oxia Colles, an array of round hills that stood at just the height to become an archipelago. Sax sailed into the narrow waterways between these islands, each a low round brown hump, standing forty or fifty meters out of the sea. By far the larger percentage of them were uninhabited, except perhaps by goats, but on the largest ones, especially kidney-shaped ones with bays, the stones covering the hills had been gathered up into walls, which split the slopes into fields and pastures; these islands were irrigated, green with orchards laden with fruit, or pastures dotted with white sheep or miniature cows. The ship’s maritime chart named these islands — Kipini, Wahoo, Wabash, Nau-kan, Libertad — and reading the map Ann snorted. “These are the names of the craters out in the middle of the gulf, underwater.”

“Ah.”

Still, they were pretty islands. The fishing villages on the bays were whitewashed, with blue shutters and doors: the Aegean model again. Indeed, on one high point bluff there stood a little Doric temple, square and proud. The boats down below in the bays were small sloops, or simply row-boats and dories. As they sailed past Sax pointed out a hilltop windmill here, a pasture of llamas there. “It seems a nice life.”

They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden tension. About Zo; about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer city-shopper lifestyle; about the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like migrant laborers who owned the farms; about the cross-fertilization of all these styles; about the new Terran settlements elbowing into the landscape; about the increasing number of harbor towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they spotted one of the new big townships, a floating island of a seacraft, with a population in the thousands; it was too big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and looked to be headed across the gulf to Ni-lokeras, or down to the southern fjords. As the land all over Mars was becoming more crowded, and the possibility of settling on it more and more restricted by the courts, more and more people were moving onto the North Sea, making townships like these their permanent home.

“Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can certainly catch it.”

He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the township, pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the township.

The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circumference of the deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one might say. A small group of the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled — they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to go, it’s a good fair walk.”

This was a small township, they were told. Population, five thousand. Since its launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. “We grow most of our food, and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with other townships about overfishing certain species. We’re doing perennial polycul-ture, growing new strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so on, all intermixed and harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking work. We’ve finally got the technology to go home to gathering, that’s what it comes down to. There are a lot of onboard cottage industries. We’ve got wineries, see the vineyards out there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That we do by hand. Also special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop.”

“Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some really violent storms sometimes, but we’re so big that we ride them out pretty easily. Most of us have lived here for all ten years the ship has existed. It’s a great life. The ship is all you need. Although it’s great fun to make landfall from time to time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the spring festival. We sell what we’ve made and resupply, and party all night long. Then back out to sea.”

“We don’t use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The environmental courts like us, they agree we’re minimum impact. The population of the North Sea’s area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land. There are hundreds of townships now.”

“Thousands. And the harbor towns with the shipyards, and the seaports we visit to do business, they’re doing very well indeed.”

Ann said, “And you think this is one way we can take on some of Earth’s surplus population.”

“Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It’s a big ocean, it could take a lot more ships like this.”

“As long as they didn’t rely too much on fishing.”

As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, “That’s another reason that it just isn’t worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue.”

Ann didn’t reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water, then up at one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail. The town looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by earth. A floating island.

“So many different kinds of nomads,” Sax commented.

“It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in a single place.”

“Unlike us.”

“Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are inclined to a certain redness. If you know what I mean.”

“I do not.”

Sax tried to explain. “It seems to me that nomads in general tend to make use of the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and live off what they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course even more so, given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change it.”

“Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt content. Have you heard about them?”

“Yes. But they’re not going to have much luck with that, I would guess. The mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood.”

“If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species.”

“True. But the saltwater species will be happy.”

They walked across the middle of the township toward the plaza over the dock, passing between long rows of grapevines pruned to the shape of waist-high T’s, the intermingled horizontal vines heavy with grape clusters of dusty indigo, and bracken, and clear viridine. Beyond the vineyards the ground was covered with a mix of plants, like a kind of prairie, with narrow foot trails cutting through it.

At a restaurant fronting the plaza they were treated to a meal of pasta and shrimp. The conversation ranged everywhere. But then someone came rushing out of the kitchen, pointing at his wrist: news had just come in of trouble on the space elevator. The UN troops who had been sharing the customs duties on New Clarke had taken over the whole station, and sent all the Martian police down, charging them with corruption and declaring that the UN would administer the upper end of the elevator by itself from now on. The UN’s Security Council was now saying that their local officers had overstepped their instructions, but this backpedaling did not include an invitation to the Martians to come back up the cable again, so it looked like a smoke screen to Sax. “Oh my,” he said. “Maya will be very angry, I fear.”

Ann rolled her eyes. “That isn’t really the most important ramification, if you ask me.” She looked shocked, and for the first time since Sax had found her in Olympus caldera, fully engaged in the current situation. Drawn out of her distance. It was fairly shocking, now that he thought of it. Even these seafarers were visibly shaken, though before they like Ann had seem distanced from whatever circumstances obtained on land. He could see the news tearing through the restaurant’s conversations, and throwing them all into the same space: upheaval, crisis, the threat of war. Voices were incredulous, faces were angry.

The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious as to their reaction. “You’ll have to do something about this,” one of their guides noted.

“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do something about it, if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just a couple of old issei.”

Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But you’re right, we will be watching, and talking with the other townships about how to respond. We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”

Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found he wanter! to talk to Maya.

The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.

Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked like a good life. But something about… he chased the thought, and then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-cuts these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?

He said, “Sometimes I regret — when I see those seafarers, and the lives they lead — it seems ironic that we — that we stand on the brink of a — of a kind of golden age — ” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “ — which will only come to pass when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives, and then we have to die before it will come.”

“Like Moses outside Israel.”

“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old stories — ” Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s — it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”

Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”

“True.”

And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.

They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit, and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder about the possibility of some kind of browns.” Ann glanced at him. “And where’s the red in it?” “Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land untouched. The areophany.”

“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis.”

“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds.”

“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.

Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.

“Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?” Ann asked one night as they were retiring to their hulls.

“It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening gesture only, because if it’s serious it would be so — unintelligent. They must know that Clarke is very vulnerable to — removal from the scene.”

“Kasei and Dao didn’t find it that easy to remove.”

“No, but — ” Sax did not want to say that their attempt had been botched, but he was afraid that she would read the comment out of his silence. “We in Da Vinci set up an X-ray laser complex in Arsia Mons caldera, buried behind a rock curtain in the north wall, and if we set it off the cable will be melted right at about the areosynchronous point. There isn’t a defensive system that could stop it.”

Ann stared at him; he shrugged. He wasn’t personally responsible for Da Vinci actions, no matter what people thought.

“But bringing down the cable,” she said, and shook her head. “It would kill a lot of people.”

Sax remembered how Peter had survived the fall of the first cable, by jumping out into space. Rescued by chance. Perhaps Ann was less likely to write off the lives that would inevitably be lost. “It’s true,” he said. “It isn’t a good solution. But it could be done, and I would think the Terrans know that.”

“So it may just be a threat.”

“Yes. Unless they’re prepared to go further.”

North of the Oxia archipelago they passed McLaughlin Bay, the eastern side of a drowned crater. North again was Mawrth Point, and behind it the inlet to Mawrth Fjord, one of the narrowest and longest fjords of all. It was a matter of constant tacking to sail up it, pushed this way and that by tricky winds, swirling between steep convolute walls; but Sax did it anyway, because it was a pretty fjord, at the bottom of a very deep and narrow outbreak channel, widening as one sailed farther into it; and beyond and above the end of the water, the rock-floored canyon continued inland for as far as one could see, and many kilometers beyond that. He hoped to show Ann that the existence of the fjords did not necessarily mean the drowning of all the outbreak channels; Ares and Kasei also retained very long canyons above sea level, and Al-Qahira and Ma’adim as well. But he said nothing of this, and Ann made no comment.

After the maneuvering in Mawrth, he sailed them almost directly west. To get out of the Chryse Gulf into the Acidalia region of the North Sea, it was necessary to work around a long arm of land called the Sinai Peninsula, sticking out into the ocean from the west side of Arabia Terra. The strait beyond it connecting Chryse Gulf with the North Sea was 500 kilometers wide; but it would have been 1,500 kilometers wide if it were not for the Sinai Peninsula.

So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not talking. Many times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. “Perhaps the combination should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new.”

“Maybe we should.”

At night after dinner, and some time looking at the stars swimming over the sloppy sea surface, they said good night, and Sax retired to the starboard hull cabin, Ann to the port; and the AI sailed them slowly through the night, dodging the occasional icebergs that began to appear at this latitude, pushed into the gulf from the North Sea. It was quite pleasant.

One morning Sax woke early, stirred by a strong swell under the hull, which pitched his narrow bed up and down in a way that his dreaming mind had interpreted as a giant pendulum, swinging them this way and that. He dressed with some difficulty and went abovedeck, and Ann, standing at the shrouds, called out, “It seems the groundswell and the windchop are in a positive interference pattern.”

“Are they!” He tried to join her, and was slammed down into a cockpit seat by a sudden rise of the boat. “Ah!”

She laughed. He grabbed the cockpit handrail, pulled himself up to her side. He saw immediately what she meant; the wind was strong, perhaps sixty-five kilometers per hour, and the whine in the boat’s minimal rigging was loud and sustained. There were whitecaps everywhere on the blue sea, and the sound of the wind coursing through all that broken water was very unlike what it would be pouring over rock — there it would be a high keening shriek — here, among the trillions of bursting bubbles, it was a deep solid roar. Every wave was whitecapped, and the great hills of the ground swells were obscured by foam flying off the crests and rolling in the troughs. The sky was a dirty opaque raw umber, very ominous looking, the sun a dim old coin, everything else dark, as if in shadow, though there were no clouds. Fines in the air: a dust storm. And now the waves were picking up, so that they spent many long seconds shooting up the side of one, then almost as many schussing down into the trough of the next one. Up and down in a long rhythm. The positive interference Ann had spoken of made some waves doubly big. The water not foaming was turning the color of the sky, brownish and dull, dark, though there was still not a cloud to be seen — only this ominous color of the sky; not the old pink, but more like the dust-choked air of the Great Storm. The whitecaps ceased in their area and the sound of water against the boat grew louder, a slushy rumble; the sea here was coated with frazil ice, or the thicker elastic layer of ice crystals called nilas. Then the whitecaps returned, twice as thick as before.

Sax climbed down into the cockpit and checked the weather report on the AI. A katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf. A howler, as the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them.

732 Blue Mars

But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was still a fairly local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a roller-coaster ride, shimmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down on the huge groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being knocked over by the wind, but the boat’s skittering flights up and down showed that they underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had contracted almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned over to check the AI more closely; the volume knob on the beeper was turned all the way down. So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.

A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers away didn’t help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in all the years of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through some invisible fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken pancake ice of a sea surface that had been about to freeze over in the night; difficult to spot in all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger chunk, bergy bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse Strait on a current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee shore of the southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for that matter.

They were forced to cover the cockpit with its clear shell, rolling up out of the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof cover they were immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a true howler, Kasei Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast of air; the AI listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180 and 220 kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as they crossed the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160 kilometers an hour at the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating now, crests flattened by gusts, torn apart. The ship was shutting down in response to all that, mast retracting, cockpit covered, hatches battening; then the sea anchor went out, a tube of material like a wind sock, dragging underwater upwind of them, slowing their drift to leeward, and mitigating the jarring impacts against small icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they all clustered against the lee shore. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was the brash ice and bergy bergs that were floating downwind faster than they were, and knocking against the windward hull, even as the leeward hull still slammed against a thickening ice mass. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in effect the boat was becoming a kind of submarine, lying at the surface and just under it. The strength of the materials of the boat could sustain any shock that even a howler and a lee shore of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could sustain forces several magnitudes stronger. But the weak point, as Sax reflected as he was thrown hard against his seat belt and shoulder harness, holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, was their bodies. The catamaran lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening swoop, crashed to a halt against a big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into the restraints. It seemed they might be in danger of being shaken to death, an unpleasant way to go, as he was beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged by seat belts; but if they freed themselves they would be flung around the cockpit, into each other or into something sharp, until something broke or burst. No. It was not a tenable situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen on his bed’s frame would be gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck the ice mass were so abrupt that he doubted being horizontal would help much.

“I’m going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay,” he shouted in Ann’s ear. She nodded that she had heard. He shouted the instruction right into the AI’s pickup, and the computer heard and understood, which was good, as it would have been hard to type accurately with the boat soaring and plunging and shuddering as it slammed into the ice. In all that jarring it was not possible to feel the boat’s engine, which had been running all along, but a slight change in their angle to the groundswell convinced him that it was pushing harder as the AI tried to get them farther west.

Down near the point of the Sinai Peninsula, on the southern side, a large inundated crater called Arigato made a round bay. The entrance of the bay was about sixty degrees of the circle of the crater, facing southwest. The wind and waves were both also from the southwest; so the mouth of the bay, quite shallow, as-it was a low part of the old crater rim, was bound to be broken water, a difficult crossing no doubt. But once inside the bay the groundswell would be cut off by that same rim, and both waves and wind much reduced, especially when they got behind the western cape of the bay. There they would wait out the howler, and be on their way again when it was done. In theory it was an excellent plan, although Sax worried about conditions in the mouth of the bay; the chart showed it was only ten meters deep, which was certain to cause the groundswells to break. On the other hand, in a boat that became a kind of submarine (and yet drawing less than two meters of water for all that) negotiating broken surf might not be much of a problem; just go with it. The AI appeared to consider his instructions within the realm of the possible. And indeed the boat had pulled in the sea anchor, and with its powerful little engines was making its way across the wind and waves toward the bay, which was not visible; nothing of the lee shore could be seen through the dirty air.

So they held to the cockpit railings and waited out the reach, speechless; there was little to say, and the booming howl of the howler made it difficult to communicate. Sax’s hands and arms got very tired from holding on, but there was no help for that except to abandon the cockpit and go below and strap himself into his bed, which he did not want to do. Despite the discomfort, and the nagging worry about the bay entrance, it was an extraordinary experience to watch the wind pulverize the surface of the water the way it was.

A short while later (though the AI indicated it had been seventy-two minutes), he caught sight of land, a dark ridge over the whitecaps to the lee side of them. Seeing it meant they were probably too close to it, but there ahead it disappeared, and reappeared farther west: the entrance to Arigato Bay. The tiller shifted against his knee, and he noted a change in the boat’s direction. For the first time he could hear the hum of the little engines at the sterns of the two hulls. The jarring against the ice got rougher, and they had to hold on tight. Now the groundswells were getting taller, their crests torn off, but the bulk of every wave remaining, its face surging up as it encountered the sea bottom. And now he could see in the foam rolling over the water ice chunks, and larger bergy bits — clear, blue, jade, aquamarine — pitted, rough, glassy. A great deal of ice must have been driven against the lee shore ahead of them. If the bay mouth was choked with ice, and waves were breaking over the bar nevertheless, it would be a nasty passage indeed. And yet that looked like what the situation would be. He shouted a question or two at the AI, but its replies were unsatisfactory. It seemed to be saying that the boat could sustain any shocks the situation could inflict, but that the engines could not dnve it through pack ice. And in fact the ice was thickening rapidly; they seemed in the process of being enveloped by a loose mass of bergy bits, driven onshore by the wind from all over the gulf. Their grinding and knocking was now a big component of the overwhelming noise of the storm. Indeed it looked like it would now be difficult to motor out of the situation, straight offshore into the wind and waves and out to sea. Not that he really wanted to be out there, tossed up and down on waves that were growing ever larger and more unruly; capsizing would be a very real possibility; but because of the unexpected density of ice inshore, it was beginning to look like getting offshore had been their better option. Now closed to them. They were in for a hard pummeling.

Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the cockpit rail for dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax’s mind satisfaction: she showed no inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so that she could shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.

“We can’t stay here!” she shouted. “When we tire — the impacts are going to tear us up — ah! — like dolls!”

“We can strap ourselves to our beds,” Sax shouted.

She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints might not be any better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem of getting secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind was — shrieking wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger and larger; when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve heart-stopping seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there they saw chunks of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the flying foam to crash down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the boat’s hulls and decking, and even the clear thin cockpit shell, with a force they could feel all through their bodies.

Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann’s ear. “I believe this is one of those situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!”

“… lifeboat?” Ann said.

Sax nodded. “The boat is its own lifeboat!” he shouted. “It flies!”

“What do you mean?”

“It flies!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No! It becomes a — a blimp!” He leaned over and put his mouth right to her ear. “The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the cockpit empty their ballast. They fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They told me about it back in Da Vinci, but I’ve never seen it! I didn’t think we’d be using it!” The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da Vinci, quite pleased with themselves at the new craft’s versatility. But the ice packing against the lee shore made that option unavailable to them, something that Sax did not regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going down in the boat didn’t appeal to him.

Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. “Do you know how to fly it!” she shouted.

“No!”

Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it into the air. Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the right toggles. He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then leaned forward to shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and mouth hard, and then he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of his nose like water from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked, tasting his blood. “I love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.

“How do we launch it?” Ann cried.

He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the emergency board under a protective bar.

If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course, there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. Still — whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or the other.

Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a bloody mess. “Worth a try!” she shouted.

So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final look at Ann — their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not articulate, but which warmed him — he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent more time flying.

As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the falldown into the next icy trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar — then bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to back — oops then all the way over again, topsyturvy — then righted, and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on — his shoulder harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had been pressed against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it. Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impassive. Up they shot into the sky.

His collarbone hurt, where Ann’s forehead or elbow had struck it. But they were flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was accelerated to something nearer the wind’s speed, the turbulence lessened greatly. The balloons seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast. Then just when Sax was beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike stability, even to expect it, the boat shot straight up and began its horrible tumbling again. Updraft no doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it was all too possible they were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail ball. On Mars there were thun-derheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by howlers from far to the south, and balls of hail flew up and down in these thunderheads for a long time. Sometimes hail the size of cannonballs had come crashing down, devastating crops and even killing people. And if they were pulled up too high they might die of altitude, like those early balloonists in France, was it the Montgolfiers themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn’t remember. Up and up, tearing through wind and red haze, no chance to see very far —

BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down hard. Thunder. Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130 decibels. Ann seemed limp against him, and he shifted sideways, reached up awkwardly and twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her face. “Hey!” she cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of the wind. “Sorry,” he said, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him. It was too loud to talk. They were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force. The boat was shrieking as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his eardrums hurt to bursting, he wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth. Then up again and they popped, painfully. He wondered how high they would go; very possible they would die of thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had thought to pressurize the cockpit, who knew. It behooved him to try to understand the boat as blimp, or at least master the altitude adjustment system. Not that there was much to be done against the force of such updrafts and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against the cockpit shell. There were small toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment of less violent tumbling he was able to put his face down near the bar and read the display terminal embedded in it. Altitude … not obvious. He tried to calculate how high the boat would go before its weight caused it to level off. Hard when he wasn’t actually sure of the boat’s weight, or the amount of helium deployed.

Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up, down, up; then down, for many seconds in a row. Sax’s stomach was in his throat, or so it felt. His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding continuously. Then up. Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they were, and whether they were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen outside the shell of the cockpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no danger of fainting. Ann was motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear again to see if she was conscious, but couldn’t move his arm. He elbowed her side. She elbowed back; if he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to remember to go lighter next time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a less violent prod in return. Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had learned it as a boy for no reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could hear it all, every dit and dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this was no time for lessons.

The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to say.

“We’re in a thunderhead!”

“Yes!”

Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes — the surface of the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first time.

Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Altitude adjusters. He pushed them both gently down.

They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.

But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia.

Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards — irrigation canals and curving streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little villages, only outbuildings in the fields — barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann’s hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.

He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. He pushed down the adjusters hard.

Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the adjusters full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in their faces.

Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the cockpit shell. Brown water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the Arabian countryside. The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann’s face was wet and her hair stood out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She smiled a crooked smile. “Nicely done,” she said.