Blue Mars

PART NINE Natural History

Afterward Nirgal went with Sax up to Da Vinci, and stayed with the old man in his apartment. One night Coyote dropped by, after the timeslip when no one else would have thought to visit.

Briefly Nirgal told him what had happened to the high basin.

“Yeah, so?” Coyote said.

Nirgal looked away.

Coyote went to the kitchen and started scrabbling through Sax’s refrigerator, shouting back into the living room through a full mouth. “What did you expect on a windy hillside like that? This world is not a garden, man. Some of it going to get buried every year, that’s just the way it is. Another wind come in a year or ten and blow all that dust off your hill.”

“Everything will be dead by then.”

“That’s life. Now it’s time to do something else. What were you doing before you set in there?”

“Looking for Hiroko.”

“Shit.” Coyote appeared in the doorway, pointing a big kitchen knife right at Nirgal. “Not you too.”

“Yes me too.”

“Oh come on. When you going to grow up. Hiroko is dead. You might as well get used to it.”

Sax came in from his office, blinking hard. “Hiroko is alive,” he said.

“Not you too!” Coyote cried. “You two are like children!”

“I saw her on the south flank ofArsia Mows, in a storm.”

“Join the fucking party, man.”

Sax blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Fuck.”

Coyote went back into the kitchen.

“There have been other sightings,” Nirgal said to Sax. “Reports are fairly common.”

“I know that — ”

“Reports are daily!” Coyote shouted from the kitchen. He charged back into the living room. “People see her every day! There’s a spot on the wrist to report sightings! Last week I see she appeared in two different places on the same night, in Noachis and on Olympus! Opposite sides of the world!”

“I don’t see that that proves anything,” Sax said stubbornly. “They say the same sort of thing about you, and I see you’re still alive.”

Coyote shook his head violently. “No. I am the exception that proves the rule. Anyone else, when they are reported in two places at once, that means they are dead. A sure sign.” He made a stop thrust to forestall Sax’s next remark, shouted “She’s dead! Face it! She died in the attack on Sabishii! Those UNTA storm troopers caught her and Iwao and Gene and Rya and all the rest of them, and they took them to some room and sucked the air or pulled the trigger. That’s what happens! Do you think it never happens? Do you think that secret police haven’t killed dissidents and then disappeared the bodies so that no one ever finds out? It happens! Fuck yes it happens, even on your precious Mars it happens, yes and more than once! You know it’s true! It happened. That’s how people are. They’ll do anything, they’ll kill people and figure they’re just earning their keep or feeding their children or making the world safe. And that’s what happened. They killed Hiroko and all the rest of them too.”

Nirgal and Sax stared. Coyote was quivering, he looked like he was going to stab the wall.

Sax cleared his throat. “Desmond — what makes you so sure?”

“Because I looked! I looked. I looked like no one else could look. She’s not in any of her places. She’s not anywhere. She didn’t get out. No one has really seen her since Sabishii. That’s why you’ve never heard from her. She’s not so inhuman she would let us go all this time without ever letting us know.”

“But I saw her,” Sax insisted.

“In a storm, you said. In a bit of trouble, I suppose. Saw her for a little while, just long enough to get you out of trouble. Then gone for good.”

Sax blinked.

Coyote laughed harshly. “So I thought. No, that’s fine. Dream about her all you want. Just don’t get that confused with reality. Hiroko is dead.”

Nirgal looked back and forth between the two silent men. “I’ve looked for her too,” he said. And then, seeing the blasted look on Sax’s face: “Anything’spossible.”

Coyote shook his head. He went back into the kitchen, muttering to himself. Sax looked at Nirgal, stared right through him.

“Maybe I’ll try looking for her again,” Nirgal told him.

Sax nodded.

“Beats farming,” Coyote said from the kitchen.

Recently Harry Whitebook had found a methodfor increasing animal tolerance to CO₂, by introducing into mammals a gene which coded for certain characteristics of crocodile hemoglobin. Crocodiles could hold their breath for a very long time underwater, and the CO₂ that should have built up in their blood actually dissolved there into bicarbonate ions, bound to amino acids in the hemoglobin, in a complex that caused the hemoglobin to release oxygen molecules. High CO₂ tolerance was thus combined with increased oxygen-ation efficiency, a very elegant adaptation, and as it turned out fairly easy (once Whitebook showed the way) to introduce into mammals by utilizing the latest trait transcription technology: designed strands of the DNA repair enzyme photolyase were assembled, and these would patch the descriptions for the trait into the genome during the geron-tological treatments, changing slightly the hemoglobin properties of the subject.

Sax was one of the first people to have this trait administered to him. He liked the idea because it would obviate the need for a face mask in the outdoors, and he was spending a lot of his time outdoors. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere were still at about 40 millibars of the 500 total at sea level, the rest consisting of 260 millibars nitrogen, 170 millibars oxygen, and 30 of miscellaneous noble gases.

So there was still too much CO₂ for humans to tolerate without filter masks. But after trait transcription he could walk free in the air, observing the wide array of animals with similar trait transcriptions already out there. All of them monsters together, settling into their ecological niches, in a very confusing flux of surges, die-offs, invasions and retreats — everything vainly seeking a balance that could not, given the changing climate, exist. No different than life on Earth had ever been, in other words; but here all happening at a much faster rate, pushed by the human-driven changes, modifications, introductions, transcriptions, translations — the interventions that worked, the interventions that backfired — the effects unintended, unforeseen, unnoticed — to the point where many thoughtful scientists were giving up any pretense of control. “Let happen what may,” as Spencer would say when he was in his cups. This offended Michel’s sense of meaning, but there was nothing to be done about that, except to alter Michel’s sense of what was meaningful. Contingency, the flux of life: in a word, evolution. From the Latin, meaning the unrolling of a book. And not directed evolution either, not by a long shot. Influenced evolution perhaps, accelerated evolution certainly (in some aspects, anyway), But not managed, nor directed. They didn’t know what they were doing. It took some getting used to.

So Sax wandered around on Da Vinci Peninsula, a rectangular chunk of land surrounding the round rim hill of Da Vinci Crater, and bounded by the Simud, Shalbatana, and Ravi fjords, all of which debouched onto the southern end of Chryse Gulf. Two islands, Copernicus and Galileo, lay to the west, in the mouths of the Ares and Tiu fjords. A very rich braiding of sea and land, perfect for the burgeoning of life — the Da Vinci lab techs could not have chosen a better site, although Sax was quite sure they had had no sense at all of their surroundings when they chose the crater for the underground’s hidden aerospace labs. The crater had had a thick rim and was located a good distance from Burroughs and Sabishii, and that had been that. Stumbled into paradise. More than a lifetime’s observations to be made, without ever leaving home.

Hydrology, invasion biology, areology, ecology, materials science, particle physics, cosmology: all these fields interested Sax extremely, but most of his daily work in these years concerned the weather. Da Vinci Peninsula got a lot of dramatic weather; wet storms swept south down the gulf, dry katabatic winds dropped off the southern highland and out the fjord canyons, initiating big northward waves at sea. Because they were so close to the equator, the perihelion-aphelion cycle affected them much more than the ordinary inclination seasons. Aphelion brought cold weather twenty degrees north of the equator at least, while perihelion cooked the equator as much as the south. In the Januaries and Februaries, sun-warmed southern air lofted into the stratosphere, turned east at the tropopause and joined the jet streams in their circumnavigations. The jet streams were difluent around the Tharsis Bulge; the southern stream carried moisture from Amazonis Bay, and dumped it on Daedalia and Icaria, sometimes even on the western wall of the Argyre Basin mountains, where glaciers were forming. The northern jet stream ran over the Tempe-Mareotis highlands, then blew over the North Sea, picking up the moisture for storm after storm. North of that, over the polar cap, air cooled and fell on the rotating planet, causing surface winds from the northeast. These cold dry winds sometimes shot underneath the warmer wetter air of the temperate westerlies, causing fronts of huge thunderheads to rise over the North Sea, thunderheads twenty kilometers high.

The southern hemisphere, being more uniform than the north, had winds that followed even more clearly the physics of air over a rotating sphere: southeast trades from the equator to latitude thirty; prevailing westerlies from latitude thirty down to latitude sixty; polar easterlies from there to the pole. There were vast deserts in the south, especially between latitudes fifteen and thirty, where the air that rose at the equator sank again, causing high air pressure and hot air that held a lot of water vapor without condensing; it hardly ever rained in this band, which included the hyperarid provinces of Solis, Noachis, and Hesperia. In these regions the winds picked up dust off the dry land, and the dust storms, while more localized than before, were also thicker, as Sax had witnessed himself, unfortunately, while up on Tyrrhena with Nirgal.

Those were the major patterns in Martian weather: violent around aphelion, gentle during the helionequinoxes; the south the hemisphere of extremes, the north of moderation. Or so some models suggested. Sax liked generating the simulations that created such models, but he was aware that their match with reality was approximate at best; every year on record was an exception of some kind, with conditions changing at each stage of the terraforming. And the future of their climate was impossible to predict, even if one froze the variables and pretended terraformation had stabilized, which it certainly had not. Over and over Sax watched a thousand years of weather, altering variables in the models, and every time a completely different millennium flitted past. Fascinating. The light gravity and the resulting scale height of the atmosphere, the vast vertical relief of the surface, the presence of the North Sea that might or might not ice over, the thickening air, the perihelion-aphelion cycle, which was an eccentricity that was slowly precessing through the inclination seasons; these had predictable effects, perhaps, but in combination they made Martian weather a very hard thing to understand, and the more he watched, the less Sax felt they knew. But it was fascinating, and he could watch the iterations play out all day long.

Or else just sit out on Simshal Point, watching clouds flow across hyacinth skies. Kasei Fjord, off to the northwest, was a wind tunnel for the strongest katabatic blows on the planet, winds pouring out of it onto Chryse Gulf at speeds that occasionally reached five hundred kilometers an hour. When these howlers struck Sax could see the cinnamon clouds marking them, over the horizon to the north. Ten or twelve hours later big swells would roll in from the north, and rise up and hammer the sea cliffs, fifty-meter-high wedges of water blasting to spray against the rock, until the air all over the peninsula was a thick white mist. It was dangerous to be at sea during a howler, as he had found out once while sailing the coastal waters of the southern gulf, in a little catamaran he had learned to operate.

Nicer by far to observe storms from the sea cliffs. No howler today; just a steady stiff wind, and the distant black broom of a squall on the water north of Copernicus, and the heat of sun on skin. Global average temperature changed every year, up and down, mostly up. With time as the horizontal axis, a rising mountain range. The Year Without Summer, now an old chasm; actually it had lasted three years, but people would not disturb such a name for a mere fact. Three Unusually Cold Years — no. It didn’t have what people wanted, some kind of compression of the truth, to create a strong trace in the memory, perhaps. Symbolic thinking; people needed things thrown together. Sax knew this because he spent a lot of time in Sabishii visiting Michel and Maya. People loved drama. Maya more than most, perhaps, but it served to show. Limit-case demonstration of the norm. He worried about her effect on Michel. Michel seemed not to be enjoying life. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, “a return home,” and algos, “pain.” Pain of the return home. A very accurate description; despite their blurs, words could sometimes be so exact. It was a paradox until you looked into how the brain worked, then it became less surprising. A model of the mind’s interaction with physical reality, blurred at the edges. Even science had to admit it. Not that this meant giving up trying to explain things!

“Come out and do some field studies with me,” he would urge Michel.

“Soon.”

“Concentrate on the moment,” Sax suggested. “Each moment is its own reality. It has its particular thisness. You can’t predict, but you can explain. Or try. If you are observant, and lucky, you can say, this is why this is happening! It’s very interesting!”

“Sax. When did you become such a poet?”

Sax did not know how to answer that. Michel was still stuffed with his immense nostalgia. Finally Sax said, “Make time to come out into the field.”

In the mild winters when the winds were gentle, Sax took sailing trips around the south end of Chryse Gulf. The golden gulf. The rest of the year he stayed on the peninsula, and went out from Da Vinci Crater on foot, or in a little car for overnighters. Mostly he did meteorology, though of course he looked at everything. On the water he would sit and feel the wind in the sail as he wandered into one little convolution of the coast after another. On the land he would drive in the mornings, looking at the view until he saw a good spot. Then he would stop the car and go outside.

Pants, shirt, windbreaker, hiking boots, his old hat; all he needed on this day of m-year 65. A fact that never ceased to amaze him. Usually it was in the 280s — bracing, but he liked it. Global averages were bouncing around the mid-270s. A good average, he felt — above freezing — sending a thermal pulse down into the permafrost. On its own this pulse would melt the permafrost in about ten thousand years. But of course it was not on its own.

He wandered over tundra moss and samphire, kedge and grass. Life on Mars. An odd business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it should appear. This was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche — in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order. Sax had been surprised to hear such an interesting cosmological notion from Spencer, but Spencer was a surprising man. Although he drank too much alcohol.

Lying on the grass looking at tundra flowers, one couldn’t help thinking about life. In the sunlight the little flowers stood on their stems glowing with their anthracyins, dense with color. Ideograms of order. They did not look like a mere difference in entropic levels. Such a fine texture to a flower petal; drenched in light, it was almost as if it were visible molecule by molecule: there a white molecule, there lavender, there clematis blue. These pointillist dots were not molecules, of course, which were well below visible resolution. And even if molecules had been visible, the ultimate building blocks of the petal were so much smaller than that that they were hard to imagine — finer than one’s conceptual resolution, one might say. Although recently the theory group at Da Vinci had begun buzzing about developments in superstring theory and quantum gravity they were making; it had even gotten to the point of testable predictions, which historically had been string theory’s great weakness. Intrigued by this reconnection with experiment, Sax had recently started trying to understand what they were doing. It meant foregoing sea cliffs for seminar rooms, but in the rainy seasons he had done it, sitting in on the group’s afternoon meetings, listening to the presentations and the discussions afterward, studying the scrawled math on the screens and spending his mornings working on Riemann surfaces, Lie algebras, Euler numbers, the topologies of compact six-dimensional spaces, differential geometries, Grassmannian variables, Vlad’s emergence operators, and all the rest of the mathematics necessary to follow what the current generation was talking about.

Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into before. The theory had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been proposed speculatively long before there was either the math or the experimental ability to properly investigate it. The theory described the smallest particles of spacetime not as geometrical points but as ul-tramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions, six of which were compactified around the loops, making them somewhat exotic mathematical objects. The space they vibrated in had been quantized by twenty-first-century theorists, into loop patterns called spin networks, in which lines of force in the finest grain of the gravitational field acted somewhat like the lines of magnetic force around a magnet, allowing the strings to vibrate only in certain harmonics. These supersymmetrical strings, vibrating harmonically in ten-dimensional spin networks, accounted very elegantly and plausibly for the various forces and particles as perceived at the subatomic level, all the bosons and fermions, and their gravitational effects as well. The fully elaborated theory therefore claimed to mesh successfully quantum mechanics with gravity, which had been the problem in physical theory for over two centuries.

All very well; indeed, exciting. But the problem, for Sax and many other skeptics, came with the difficulty of confirming any of this beautiful math by experiment, a difficulty caused by the very, very, very small sizes of the loops and spaces being theorized. These were all in the 10~33 centimeter range, the so-called Planck length, and this length was so much smaller than subatomic particles that it was hard to imagine. A typical atomic nucleus was about 1(T13 centimeter in diameter, or one millionth of a billionth of a centimeter. First Sax had tried very hard to contemplate that distance for a while; hopeless, but one had to try, one had to hold that hopelessly inconceivable smallness in the mind for a moment. And then remember that in string theory they were talking about a distance twenty magnitudes smaller still — about objects one thousandth of one billionth of one billionth the size of an atomic nucleus! Sax struggled for ratio; a string, then, was to the size of an atom, as an atom was to the size of … the solar system. A ratio which rationality itself could scarcely comprehend.

Worse yet, it was too small to detect experimentally. This to Sax was the crux of the problem. Physicists had been managing experiments in accelerators at energy levels on the order of one hundred GeV, or one hundred times the mass energy of a proton. From these experiments they had worked up, with great effort, over many years, the so-called revised standard model of particle physics. The revised standard model explained a lot, it was really an amazing achievement, and it made predictions that could be proved or disproved by lab experiment or cosmological observations, predictions that were so varied and had been so well fulfilled that physicists could speak with confidence about much of what had gone on in the history of the universe since the Big Bang, going as far back as the first millionth of a second of time.

String theorists, however, wanted to make a fantastic leap beyond the revised standard model, to the Planck distance which was the smallest realm possible, the minimum quantum movement, which could not be decreased without contradicting the Pauli exclusion principle. It made sense, in a way, to think about that minimum size of things; but actually seeing events at this scale would take experimental energy levels of at least 1019 GeV, and they could not create those. No accelerator would ever come close. The heart of a supernova would be more like it. No. A great divide, like a vast chasm or desert, separated them from the Planck realm. It was a level of reality fated to remain unknown to them in any physical sense.

Or so skeptics maintained. But those interested in the theory had never been dissuaded from studying it. They searched for indirect confirmation of the theory at the subatomic level, which from this perspective now seemed gigantic, and from cosmology. Anomalies in phenomena that the revised standard could not explain, might be explained by predictions made by string theory about the Planck realm. These predictions had been few, however, and the predicted phenomena very difficult to see. No real clinchers had been found. But as the decades passed, a few string enthusiasts had always continued to explore new mathematical structures, which might reveal more ramifications of the theory, might predict more detectable indirect results.

This was all they could do; and it was a very chancy road for physics to take, Sax felt. He believed in the experimental testing of theories with all his heart. If it couldn’t be tested, it remained math only, and its beauty was irrelevant; there were lots of bizarrely beautiful exotic fields of mathematics, but if they weren’t modeling the phenomenal world, Sax wasn’t interested.

Now, however, after all the decades of work, they were beginning to make progress in ways that Sax found interesting. At the new supercollider in Rutherford Crater’s rim, they had found the second Z particle that string theory had long predicted would be there. And a magnetic monopole detector, orbiting the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what looked to be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a bacterium — a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,” or WIMP. String theory had predicted WIMPs would be out there, while the revised standard did not call for them. That was thought provoking, because the shapes of galaxies showed that they had gravitational masses ten times as large as their visible light revealed; if the dark matter could be explained satisfactorily as weakly interacting massive particles, Sax thought, then the theory responsible would have to be called very interesting indeed.

Interesting in a different way was the fact that one of the leading theorists in this new stage of development was working right there in Da Vinci, part of the impressive group Sax was sitting in on. Her name was Bao Shuyo. She had been born and raised in Dorsa Brevia, her ancestry Japanese and Polynesian. She was small for one of the young natives, though still half a meter taller than Sax. Black hair, dark skin, Pacific features, very regular and somewhat plain. She was shy with Sax, shy with everyone; she even sometimes stuttered, which Sax found extremely endearing. But when she stood up in the seminar room to give a i presentation, she became quite firm in hand if not in voice, [ writing her equations and notes on the screen very quickly, j as if doing speed calligraphy. Everyone in these moments – attended to her very closely, in effect mesmerized; she had been working at Da Vinci for a year now, and everyone ; there smart enough to recognize such a thing knew that they were watching one of the pantheon at work, discovering reality right there before their eyes.

The other young turks would interrupt her to ask questions, of course — there were many good minds in that group — and if they were lucky, off they would all go together, mathematically modeling gravitons and graviti-nos, dark matter and shadow matter — all personality and indeed all persons forgotten. Very productive exciting sessions; and clearly Bao was the driving force in them, the one they relied on, the one they had to reckon with.

It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics departments before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had ever even heard of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which, now that he thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair. Was there anything in life as male as mathematics had been? And why was that?

Disconcerting in a different way was the fact that areas of Bao’s work were based on the unpublished papers of a Thai mathematician of the previous century, an unstable young man named Samui, who had lived in Bangkok brothels and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind several “last problems” in the manner of Fermat, and insisting to the end that all of his math had been dictated to him by telepathic aliens. Bao had ignored all that and explained some of Samui’s more obscure innovations, and then used them to develop a group of expressions called advanced Rovelli-Smolin operators, which allowed her to establish a system of spin networks that meshed with su-perstrings very beautifully. In effect this was the complete uniting of quantum mechanics and gravity at last, the great problem solved — if it were true. And true or not, it had been powerful enough to allow Bao to make several specific predictions in the larger realms of the atom and the cosmos; and some of these had since been confirmed.

So now she was the queen of physics — the first queen of physics — and experimentalists in labs all over were on-line to Da Vinci, anxious to have more suggestions from her. The afternoon sessions in the seminar room were invested with a palpable sense of tension and excitement; Max Schnell would start the meeting, and at some point call on Bao; and she would stand and go to the screen at the front of the room, plain, graceful, demure, firm, pen flying over the screen as she gave them a way to calculate precisely the neutrino mass, or described very specifically the ways strings vibrated to form the different quarks, or quantized space so that gravitinos were divided into three families, and so on; and her colleagues and friends, perhaps twenty men and one other woman, would interrupt to ask questions, or add equations that explained side issues, or tell the rest of them about the latest results from Geneva or Palo Alto or Rutherford; and during that hour, they all knew they were at the center of the world.

And in labs on Earth and Mars and in the asteroid belt, following her work, unusual gravity waves were noted, in very difficult delicate experiments; particular geometric patterns were revealed in the fine fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation; dark-matter WIMPs and shadow-matter WISPs were being sought out; the various families of leptons and fermions and leptoquarks were explained; galactic clumping in the first inflation was provisionally solved; and so on. It seemed as if physics might be on the brink of the Final Theory at last. Or at least in the midst of the Next Big Step.

Given the significance of what Bao was doing, Sax felt shy about speaking to her. He did not want to waste her time on trivial things. But one afternoon at a kava party, out on one of the arc balconies overlooking Da Vinci’s crater lake, she approached him — even more shy and stumbling than he was — so much so that he was forced into the very unusual position of trying to put someone else at ease, finishing sentences for her and the like. He did that as best he could, and they stumbled along, talking about his old Russell diagrams for gravitinos, useless now he would have thought, though she said they still helped her to see gravitational action. And then when he asked a question about that day’s seminar, she was much more relaxed. Yes, clearly that was the way to put her at ease; he should have thought of it immediately. It was what he liked himself.

After that, they got in the habit of talking from time to time. He always had to work to draw her out, but it was interesting work. And when the dry season came, in the fall helionequinox, and he started going out sailing again from the little harbor Alpha, he asked her haltingly if she would like to join him, and they stuttered their way through a deeply awkward interaction, which resulted in her going out with him the next nice day, sailing in one of the lab’s many little catamarans.

When day sailing, Sax stayed in the little bay called the Florentine, southeast of the peninsula, where Ravi Fjord widened but before it became Hydroates Bay. This was where Sax had learned to sail, and where he still felt best acquainted with the winds and currents. On longer trips he had explored the delta of fjords and bays at the bottom end of the Marineris system, and three or four times he had sailed up the eastern side of the Chryse Gulf, all the way to Mawrth Fjord and along the Sinai Peninsula.

On this special day, however, he confined himself to the Florentine. The wind was from the south, and Sax tacked down into it, enlisting Bao’s help at every change of tack. Neither of them said much. Finally, to get things started, Sax was forced to ask about physics. They talked about the ways in which strings constituted the very fabric of space-time itself, rather than being replacements for points in some absolute abstract grid.

Thinking it over, Sax said, “Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of cards — knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?”

“No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”

“Hmm,” Sax said, glancing at her. “I must admit I’d rather have something solid crop up. Something like Einstein’s Mercury — a known discrepancy in the previous theory, which the new theory resolves.”

“Some people would say that the missing shadow matter fills that bill.”

“Possibly.”

She laughed. “You need more, I can see. Perhaps some kind of thing we can do.”

“Not necessarily,” Sax said. “Although it would be nice, of course. Convincing, I mean. If something were better understood, so that we could manipulate it better. Like the plasmas in fusion reactors.” This was an ongoing problem in another lab at Da Vinci.

“Plasmas might very well be better understood if you modeled them as having patterns imposed by spin networks.”

“Really?”

“I think so.”

She closed her eyes — as if she could see it all written down, on the inside of her eyelids. Everything in the world. Sax felt a piercing stab of envy, of — loss. He had always wanted that kind of insight; and there it was, right in the boat beside him. Genius was a strange thing to witness.

“Do you think this theory will mean the end of physics?” he asked.

“Oh no. Although we might work out the fundamentals. You know, the basic laws. That might be possible, sure. But then every level of emergence above that creates its own problems. Taneev’s work only scratches the surface there. It’s like chess — we might learn all the rules, but still not be able to play very well because of emergent properties. Like, you know, pieces are stronger if they’re out in the center of the board. That’s not in the rules, it’s a result of all the rules put together.”

“Like weather.”

“Yes. We already understand atoms better than weather. The interactions of the elements are too complex to follow.”

“There’s holonomy. Study of whole systems.”

“But it’s just a bunch of speculation at this point. The start of a science, if it turns out to work.”

“And so plasmas, though?”

“Those are very homogeneous. There’s only a very few factors involved, so it might be amenable to spin-network analysis.”

“You should talk to the fusion group about that.”

“Yes?” She looked surprised.

“Yes.”

Then a hard gust hit, and they spent a few minutes watching the boat respond, the mast sucking in sails with a bit of humming until they were reset, and running across the strengthening breeze, into the sun. Light flaked off the fine black hair gathered at the back of Bao’s neck; beyond that, the sea cliffs of Da Vinci. Networks, trembling at the touch of the sun — no. He could not see it, with eyes open or closed.

Cautiously he said, “Do you ever wonder about being, you know. Being one of the first great women mathematicians?”

She looked startled, then turned her head away. She had thought about it, he saw. “The atoms in a plasma move in patterns that are big fractals of the spin-network patterns,” she said.

Sax nodded, asked more questions about that. It seemed possible to him that she would be able to help Da Vinci’s fusion group with the problems they were having engineering a lightweight fusion apparatus. “Have you ever done any engineering? Or physics?”

Affronted: “I am a physicist.”

“Well, a mathematical physicist. I was thinking of the engineering side.”

“Physics is physics.”

“True.”

Only once more did he push, and this time indirectly. “When did you first learn math?”

“My mom gave me quadratic equations at four, and all kinds of math games. She was a statistician, very keen about it all.”

“And the Dorsa Brevia schools… .”

She shrugged. “They were fair. Math was mostly something I did by reading, and correspondence with the department in Sabishii.”

“I see.”

And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN; about weather; about the sailboat’s ability to point to within a few degrees of the wind. And then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his walks on the peninsula’s sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit of the tundra. And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed to convince him that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was happening at the Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit this level, and then make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it out and understand it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm that was so very small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really. The fabric of reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all earlier theories, many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was inevitable. So that they could lie side by side in the grass in the sun, staring as deeply into the petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no matter what was happening at the Planck level, in the here and now the petals glowed blue in the light with a quite mysterious power to catch the eye.

Actually, lying on the grass made it clear how much the permafrost was melting. And the melt lay on a hardpan of still-frozen ground, so that the surface became saturated and boggy. When Sax stood up, his ventral side chilled instantly in the breeze. He spread his arms to the sunlight. Photon rain, vibrating across the spin networks. In many regions heat exhaust from nuclear power plants was being directed down into capillary galleries in the permafrost, he told Bao as they walked back to the rover. This was causing trouble in some wet areas, which were tending to saturate at the surface. The land melting, so to speak. Instant wetlands. A very active biome, in fact. Though the Reds objected. But most of the land that would have been affected by permafrost melt was now under the North Sea anyway. What little remained above the sea was to be treasured as swamps and marshes.

The rest of the hydrosphere was almost equally transformative of the surface. It couldn’t be helped; water was a very effective carver of rock, hard though it was to believe when watching a gossamer waterfall drift down a sea cliff, turning to white mist long before it hit the ocean. Then again there was the sight of the massive giant howler waves, battering the cliffs so hard that the ground shook underfoot. A few million years of that and those cliffs would be significantly eroded.

“Have you seen the riverine canyons?” she asked.

“Yes, I saw Nirgal Vallis. Remarkable how satisfying it was to see water down at its bottom. So apt.”

“I didn’t know there was so much tundra out here.”

Tundra was the dominant ecology for much of the southern highlands, he told her. Tundra and desert. In the tundra, fines were fixed very effectively to the ground; no wind could lift mud, or quicksand, of which there was a good quantity, making it dangerous to travel in certain regions. But in the deserts the powerful winds ripped great quantities of dust into the sky, cooling temperatures while they darkened the day, and causing problems where they landed, as they had for Nirgal. Suddenly curious, he said, “Have you ever met Nirgal?”

The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten Great Storm of course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert pavement formed by microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it tended to fix only the top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the edge of the pavement, what was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not an easy problem. Dust storms would be with them for centuries.

Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.

Bao’s mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest daughter had to go home and take care of things, including possession of the family home. Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was told. Bao wasn’t sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she wouldn’t be. She was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to be done. Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye to her and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen and expressed something like this, and Michel said, “It’s because culture keeps progressing.”

Sax thought he could see what Michel meant — there were rapid changes in attitudes to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god like a cartoon parent… “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress at all,” he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.

“But Sax,” Michel protested, “right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest achievements in human history.”

“If true.”

“Don’t you think women have as much power as men now?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction.”

“That would make sense.”

“And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone.

We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every day.”

So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been in the old days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes, perhaps it was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being dismantled. At least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might take a long time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who had no prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at work. Or, to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly hypnotized, so to speak, along with every other man in the theory group — to the point of being rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said, “On Earth people seem to be fighting just as much as before.”

Even Michel had to admit it. “Population pressures,” he said, trying to wave them away. “There are too many people down there, and more all the time. You saw what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in that situation, Mars is under threat. And so we fight up here too.”

Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not as irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one’s offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at reason, a first approximation.

“It’s not as bad as it was, anyway,” Michel was saying. “Even on Earth people are having far fewer children. And they’re reorganizing into collectives pretty well, considering the flood and all the trouble that preceded it. A lot of new social movements down there, a lot of them inspired by what we’re doing here. And by what Nirgal does. They’re still watching him and listening to him, even when Tie doesn’t speak. What he said during our visit there is still having a big effect.”

“I believe it.”

“Well, there you are! It’s getting better, you have to admit it. And when the longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births and deaths.”

“We’ll hit that time soon,” Sax predicted glumly.

“Why do you say so?”

“Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other. Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in — it’s a wonder we’ve done as much as we have. There’s probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material.”

“That bodes poorly for us.”

“We’re already over two hundred percent the old average lifetime.”

“Granted, but even so. One doesn’t want it to end just because of that.”

“No. But we have to focus on the moment. Speaking of which, why don’t you come out into the field with me? I’ll be as upbeat as you want out there. It’s very interesting.”

“I’ll try to free up some time. I’ve got a lot of clients.”

“You’ve got a lot of free time. You’ll see.”

In this particular moment, the sun was high. Rounded white clouds were piling up in the air overhead, forming great masses that would never come again, though at the moment they were as solid as marble, and darkening at their bottoms. Cumulonimbus. He was standing on Da Vinci Peninsula’s western cliff again, looking across Shalbatana Fjord to the cliff edging the east side of Lunae Planum. Behind him rose the flat-topped hill that was the rim of Da Vinci Crater. Home base. He had lived there a long time now. These days their co-op was making many of the satellites being put up into orbit, and the boosters as well, in collaboration with Spencer’s lab in Odessa, and a great number of other places. A Mondragon-style cooperative, operating the ring of labs and homes in the rim, and the fields and lake filling the crater floor. Some of them chafed at restrictions imposed by the courts on projects they had in mind, involving new power plants that would put out too much heat. In the last few years the GEC had been issuing K rations, as they were called, giving communities the right to add some fraction of a degree Kelvin to the global warming. Some Red communities were doing their best to get assigned K rations and then not use them. This action, along with ongoing incidences of ecotage, kept the global temperature from rising very fast no matter what other communities did. Or so the other communities argued. But the ecocourts were still parsimonious with the K rations. Cases were judged by a provincial ecocourt, then the judgment was approved by the GEC, and that was it: no appeals, unless you could get a petition signed by fifty other communities, and even then the appeal was only dropped into the morass of the global legislature, where its fate was up to the undisciplined crowd in the duma.

Slow progress. Just as well. With the global average temperatures above freezing, Sax was content. Without the constraint of the GEC, things could easily get too warm. No, he was in no further hurry. He had become an advocate of stabilization.

Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating 281 K, and he was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at alpine flowers in the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant quantum sheen of the fjord’s sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking his way came a tall woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking boots: Ann. He recognized her instantly — that stride, no doubt about it — Ann Clayborne, in the flesh.

This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory — of Hiroko, emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover — then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to meet him — but for what?

Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image — a fleet single image —

Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.

He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though she had before. But that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That time in Antarctica — he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what to say.

“Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face mask.

He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”

“Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”

“A hundred rats.”

“Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.

“Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.

“Yes.”

“So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.

“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you… ?”

“No. I did not.”

So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.

Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of it.

“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.

“Yes.”

Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.

She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”

He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!

She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.

But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.

Sax returned to Da Vinci Craterfeeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.

The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”

Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics in its most common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing that ahead; Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited by recent developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Cor tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellei of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power things.

“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yanand off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for emission afterward.”

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once, but there also had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of i which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politic please.”

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians. There was something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he ha to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised, a process that went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could try to regar politics as a kind of science — a long series of experiments i communal living, say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, the changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear — on Mars at least — that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.

Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.

But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this –annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now — make trouble for rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory board — all that network of small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.

They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were lining up at big pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in talkative groups so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as at any cocktail party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of talk — it was a music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he could tell; but as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of it, heard unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so happy and gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that each conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they made!

So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact that the citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been less happy. Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition of good government was the government you could safely ignore, “to finally get back to my own work!” as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now saying. Self-government not being considered part of one’s own work!

Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving, the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift, the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once. Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of labs, but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which always had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to him: “Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?”

“Oh undoubtedly, assuredly. They are simply so big. And they have packed the courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to control all the new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that matter. All the politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like bees to the flower.”

“Trying to dominate other settlements…”

“Yes?”

“It sounds like trouble.”

“Yes it does.”

“Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they’re talking about?”

“Yes, a little.”

“You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines like that into spaceships…”

“Yes? Sax?”

“Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination by any one party.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well, it would make it a hard situation to control.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further.”

“Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember.”

“Indeed it is! Indeed it is.” And Bela went off to the beer kegs, muttering to himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.

So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic class that had been the terror of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of the polity, and supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would they relinquish it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela could stay on the advirsory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters.

Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.

Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.

Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann. If only he had been able to think! Why, he had gone completely incoherent! If only he had thought to become Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what was she thinking? What had she been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars now, like a ghost, moving from one Red station to another? What were the Reds doing now, how did they live? Had they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his chance encounter stopped a raid? No no. There were ecoteurs still out there monkey-wrenching projects, but with the legal limits on terraform-ing, most Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was one mainstream political strand among the rest, vigilant, quick to litigate — indeed much more interested in taking on political work than less ideological citizens — but still, and by that very tendency, normalized. Where then would Ann fit in? With whom did she associate?

Well, he could call her and ask.

But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her! At least by wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she thought of him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse; nothing. What did she think? What was she thinking?

He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.

Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in ecopoesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.

Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was a deep violet blue — clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high altitudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-altitude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the successive positions of a finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.

To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses. Out here in the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge of a cliff, and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered by myriad chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were banded by stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining the basalt. Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the gulfs of air below him.

As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites. The Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a walk along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick grass grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax’s image of the Irish coast. The land’s edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in the cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one walked over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare rocks.

Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell, steady deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air steamed, the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy squish. Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick brown fox, seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra juniper. Away from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its own. Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.

Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in the upper atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by the sun long after everything else was in twilight’s great shadow. So Sax would sit on the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay through the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun’s shadow rose up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would appear noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks gleaming like abalone shells.

The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow. The warmth of the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The patterns of waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.

But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat blurry stars, he grew uneasy. “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” Tennyson had written just a few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this hour that Phobos had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A moment of the areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had completed the desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military base built on Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn’t remember. Some kind of desire for symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality prized more by mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still orbiting the sun. “Hmm.” He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies were starting out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning them to create a gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.

A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read; informal name for an asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and shape. “Hmmm.” Sax tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was superficial: a triaxial ellipsoid, but weren’t they all. Potato-shaped, right size, banged hard on one end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been a nice little settlement tucked into it. What’s in a name? Say they dropped the pseudo. A couple of mass drivers and AIs, some side jets… that peculiar moment, when Phobos had shot up over the western horizon. “Hmmmmm,” Sax said.

The days passed and the seasons. He did field studies and meteorology. Effects of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives out around the peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites. Weather balloons these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than ten grams, lofted by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the exosphere.

Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or grass, the top downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little payload in his fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen into thetoalloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to the line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would cut his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the sand, watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a pinprick and then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand meters, depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479 meters, once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he would read some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like a little piece of him was sailing up into space. Strange what made one happy.

The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the balloons, but a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew strong and steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a short run into the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite, bobbing this way and that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it stabilized, and he reeled it out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle quiverings in his arms. Or else he wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the resistance, and watched the kite soar up and away. The line was nearly invisible. When the spool ran out the line hummed, and if he held it between his fingers, the wind’s fluctuations were communicated to him as a kind of music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a time, out of sight or, if he kept it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw in the sky. Transmitting data all the while. A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area. The mind was a funny animal.

Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the hardest kind of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look down and to the right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was elsewhere, that he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.

“Come visit and go for a walk with me,” Sax said again. “I really think you should.” How could one emphasize that? “I really think you should.” Throw things together. “Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water.”

Michel nodded uncertainly.

Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in Da Vinci. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Europe.”

“Good man.”

So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the Shalbatana cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point. Such a pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing any of the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that he treasured. The weeks would pass in their comfortable round, and then suddenly one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming without the home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sa-bishii or Odessa someday, so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more often.

And no one’s company pleased him more than Michel’s. Although on this day Michel wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed this, and wondered what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help in the long months of his return to speech — had taught him to think again, had taught him to see everything differently. It would be nice if he could do something to repay such a gift, even partially.

Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they stopped, and Sax got out the kite and assembled it, he handed the spool to Michel.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That way, into the wind.” And he held the kite as Michel walked across the grassy mounds, until the line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started running, and off it went, up up up.

Michel came back grinning. “Here, touch the line — you can feel the wind.”

“Ah,” Sax said. “So you can.” And the nearly invisible line thrummed against his fingers.

They sat down and opened Sax’s wicker basket, and took out the picnic lunch he had packed. Michel became quiet once again.

“Something is troubling you?” Sax ventured as they ate.

Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. “I think I want to go back to Provence.”

“For good?” Sax said, shocked.

Michel frowned. “Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just beginning to enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave.”

“It’s heavy on Earth.”

“True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy.”

“Hmm.” Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly evolution had adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g caused an array of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g now, to the point he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.

“Without Maya?” he said.

“I suppose it would have to be. She doesn’t want to go. She says she will someday, but it’s always later, later. She’s working for the credit co-op bank in Sabishii, and thinks she’s indispensable. Well, that’s not fair. She just doesn’t want to miss any of it.”

“Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an olive grove?”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, but…”

Sax didn’t know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As for living with Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine living in a damaged erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus perhaps Michel’s desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.

“You should go,” Sax said. “But wait just a little longer. If they get these pulsed fusion engines on spaceships, then you could be there fairly soon.”

“But that might cause real problems with Earth’s gravity. I think you need the months of the trip to get prepared for it.”

Sax nodded. “What you would need is a kind of exoskeleton. Inside it you’d feel somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps. Those new birdsuits I’ve heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to something like an exoskeleton, or you’d never be able to hold the wings in position.”

“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile. “A flowing shell.”

“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear walkers for a hundred years — then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”

“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”

Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that.” He shook his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”

The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the grass. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions himself.

After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?”

Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”

“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”

“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m afraid…”

Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”

“I know.”

On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled.

“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.

“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking — it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’ — and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”

But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.

And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!

But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.

He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.

Well — still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.

“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something — good. See how beautiful it is — in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere… It’s self-organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”

“Well…” Michel demurred.

“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”

“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”

“Life?”

“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow consciousness?”

“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.

“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”

“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What are you thinking? “I mean — here it all is. Still here.”

“But not the same.”

“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically opposed to mysticism, but still…”

Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”

“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a … such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”

“You always want to know.”

“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”

“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”

They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.