I was left walking about the frosted hummocks of dead gray-green grass, feeling worse than before. I didn’t want to stay there, but there seemed no reason to leave, and nowhere to go. I wrapped my arms around a lichen-chewed standing stone and watched the gray clouds blow over, leaving a white sky that turned pale blue at dusk. At my feet were little flowers, specks of color scattered over the rock and heather, violet, yellow, pink, red, white. I began to feel very odd indeed, and I banged my forehead against the stone rhythmically, thump thump thump.
My hands were as blue as the sky. A thin crescent moon hung over the distant loaf hill across the loch to the west. A cutting breeze wafted off the ruffled dark silver water, and I was cold. Four thousand years before, humans had put up these stones to mark the strangeness of the place, and of their lives in it; I knew four thousand times what they knew, but the world was no less strange and harsh for that. With the sun down the standing stones, the island, the loch, the little ring on the land beyond, the bone-bare hills in the distance, they all gleamed under the rich dark blue sky, and I was frightened by their starkness. A world stripped bare.
Near dark I roused myself and walked stiffly back to the stone hotel near the passage grave of Maes Howe. I sat before the fireplace and held my hands over the flames for a good part of the night; but I could not get the chill from them.
* * *
Jökulhlaps—these glacial bursts occur in Iceland, where underground reservoirs heated by volcanic action melt through glacial caps in catastrophic floods.
Now I begin to see that I have underestimated the memory. Events keep piling into it beyond its natural capacity, and it becomes packed tight. The chambers of the hippocampus and amygdala are overwhelmed. What remains of the distant past is jammed under the weight of subsequence, so that recollection is stressed, then disabled. But the memories remain. To be able to recall them takes a particular form of intelligence; so that when I curse my poor memory, I am really lamenting my stupidity.
The other form of remembrance, the epiphanic recollection, is not really recollection at all. Under the right pressure the past bursts into consciousness, as a string of images we have created—so we see not the past, but a part of ourselves, a sweet fragment to make us ache with the poignancy of time lost, and the beauty of connection with it.
* * *
In the interregnum, in the naked moment between lives, we are most vulnerable to experience.
* * *
On the Earth events have a sheer physical weight of significance.
* * *
When we leave our natural span, and venture into the centuries, we are like climbers on Olympus Mons, hiking up out of the atmosphere. We must carry our air with us.
* * *
I don’t know what I am.
* * *
Valles Marineris—just south of the equator are several enormous interconnected canyons, extending some four thousand kilometers from the Tharsis bulge east to low-lying areas of chaotic terrain.
The Subcommittee for Planetary Affairs and the University Faculty Board and the Planetary Survey all denied me permission to visit the libraries at Alexandria—I suspected Satarwal was behind the refusals, exerting influence in Burroughs—and so I went to Shrike for help again, and got it. I knew it was bad to pile up too many debts to Shrike, but there was no other way to get the work done.
On the long train ride west I sat in a window seat in a nearly empty car. From the car ahead came the sound of a child playing, and I went up to have a look; it was a ten-year-old, flying plastic airplanes to his parents; and at the other end of the car was a crowd of spectators, watching curiously. The child ignored them as he retrieved his planes from under their hungry stares. I felt bad for him and returned to my seat. Outside, the train slid along the southern rims of Eos and then Coprates Chasma. Coprates, so simple and huge, gave me the feeling we were flying; the canyon floor was kilometers below us, and off to the north the other wall of the canyon made an abrupt horizon, as if Mars itself was rolling toward us in a fantastic tidal wave. It was like traveling in an optical illusion, and I could only watch it for moments at a time before it made me dizzy. The weather cooperated in this assault on my senses. High clouds topped a dusty sky, and the sunset was one of those extravaganzas of color too garish for art; but Nature knows no aesthetic restraint, and purples, pinks, and pale clear greens stained the tall dome of the sky, which altered imperceptibly from raspberry to blackberry above it all. Finally the sun fell, and in the mirror dusk the train crawled up the gentle slope of the bulge, appearing a filament of algae in the big barren world. I switched on my little overhead light and read for a bit—stared through my faint reflection at the canyon—read some more—looked out again.
I had purchased a book in the train’s store called Secrets of Icehenge Revealed, by a Theophilus Jones. The introduction began, “Let us look at the case reasonably,” which made me laugh outright. I flipped ahead. “The academic scientists have also ignored all signs indicating Icehenge’s extreme age, so that they may explain it as an artifact of modern civilization. They find these explanations preferable to the one most clearly indicated by the facts—for all that we find points to the existence of a prehistoric space technology; evidence of it lies scattered over the Earth from Stonehenge to Easter Island. Icehenge was built by that antediluvean culture, whose language was Sanskrit, and whose spaceship designs can be found on Mayan temple walls. Over the years the ice liths have become pitted with age (see photos), and one has even been struck by a meteorite, an event that almost defies probability, and indicates the passing of eons.”
Atlantis as home of this prehistoric high technology—Sanskrit as mathematical code, as well as the first language—Tibet as refuge of this ancient wisdom—the lost continent of Mu—the Nazca Plains “spaceport”—the “Great Pyramid” on Ios: this book had them all. I read it with a peculiar mixture of satisfaction and anger. On the one hand I found its utter stupidity reassuring; the primacy of my explanation was not threatened by this pap. On the other hand, my long letter pointing out the connection between the megalith and the Davydov expedition, as revealed in Emma’s journal, had been published in Marscience without comment; while there were ten copies of this ragged collection of exotica in the train’s bookrack.
I put the book down and looked out the window again. Now the mirror suns were setting, repeating the true sunset in muted tones of mauve and olive and dusky turquoise. When the mirrors blinked out over the bulge the shadowed sky darkened instantly, and the great black chasm lay obscured until Deimos (Dread) shot over the western horizon like a flare. The retrograde moon.… I leaned my head against the window, depression falling across me like the long shadows across the canyon floor.
I have always feared that one of these depressions will not end, that it will shift my biochemistry and help drive me into a funk. I know many people who have fallen into funks for years, or stayed in one until they died. The malady is fairly common among people my age. The purpose of life eludes them, and though they continue to exist their chemical balance shifts, and they lapse into trancelike indifference to the world, for ten, twenty, thirty years. Rip Van Winkle’s disease, a comedian called it. Reduced Affectual Function, say the medicos, but it is more than that. And once or twice I have felt the depression, the complete lassitude and indifference, that I imagine leads one into the empty world of a funk. This is one reason I pursue my projects so fiercely, I know—out of dread. We cannot live in a world without meaning! And yet so often that just is the sort of world it looks as though we’ve been placed in. When I pass people in funks being helped down the street, or sitting in doorways like zombies, I can barely look at them, afraid that they will convince me with their eyes that they are right. And their lives: they can be trained to minimal functioning, and left to wander like beggars—or they are kept in special asylums, full of kindergarten stimulation—or they are helped by a friend or relative or therapist—or they die.
Or, if they catch themselv
es sliding down the long slope soon enough, they move to Alexandria.
* * *
For Alexandria is a city of the senses, and one can live a full life there with the senses alone; this despite the libraries and the archives. I understood this anew as I debarked from the train and walked out of the station into the broad central boulevard—and part of me was relieved. The city is at the western end of Noctis Labyrinthus, and because it is nearly at the top of Tharsis (eleven kilometers above the datum), it is still tented. So the greenhouse air is warm, and pungent with smells. And the public buildings in the heart of town each are fronted with a different stone, so that the eye is surprised at every turn. As I walked across town toward the campus I passed a skyscraper of purple marble, another of rose quartz, both anchoring parts of the dome tent and blending into the color of the sky; the blocks of archival buildings alternated between serpentine, chalcedony and jaspar; the police station was a square tower of obsidian reflecting the buildings around it; and in the big central park were bathhouses of coral and olivine, turquoise and jade and chert. I cut through the park looking only at the Martian juniper and Hokkaido pine, and walked onto campus feeling virtuous. My rooms in the visiting scholars’ apartment would be ready, but I hesitated, already feeling the spell of the city. Perhaps it would be all right to go to a bathhouse; perhaps it was just what I needed. From a dusk-dark kiosk shone a white handprint. This city looked nothing like the Egyptian sink of the old novelist, but in every way that mattered it was the same place—such is the power of naming. I shook off the attraction of the bathhouse, and took an escalator to the roof patio of the scholars’ apartment. Off to the west the three great volcanoes appeared over the horizon like peaks of another planet entirely, their upper halves in full sun though I stood in murk. Ascraeus Mons, the one farthest north, had snow on its middle slopes. I felt as though my heart had expanded to fill my chest, and I recognized the emotion: Alexandria.…
* * *
It was a marvelous Idea they had had, to bring together all of the material of Martian history in a single spot, and create a Planetary Archives, and add to it a collection of libraries and galleries and conservatories and a campus of the university. (Chairman Sarionovich, trying to be Alexander the Great.) Alexandria, the Capital of Memory: but it could not be said that the idea had been realized with any success. A hothouse tented city full of money, on the route from Burroughs to Olympus Mons, from Arcadia to Argyre, Alexandria had drawn a whole other city into itself, and now co-existing with the city of libraries was the city of banks and brothels, bazaars and bathhouses, dorms and slum tenements.
In the archives there were failures caused chiefly by the Unrest itself. The rebels had destroyed all the records they could in the final days of the revolt, to hamper the ferreting of them; so data of all kinds for the years before 2248 were patchy. Another problem, almost as serious, was that each regime of archivists had used a different filing system, using different programs; one had to become a historian of programming to work through the records.
I set to work in the archival labyrinth in a fever of energy, as if struggling against a spell. I spent days typing before a screen, for most of the records were on disks: files of the Soviet mining fleet (fragmentary); minutes of the Mars Corporations Co-op for the Outer Satellites (trivial); records for all the people mentioned in Emma’s journal. These last were the most interesting, for they confirmed that all those named in Emma’s account had disappeared in the Unrest; and for most, there was no explanation nor any definite last locations. This was common in the annals of the Unrest, but still, it was something.
When I got sick of staring at screens I walked across a park to the Physical Records annex. Here were all the remaining documents. Some of them were originals for what I had found on disk, others had never been recorded. At first it was a relief to deal with the actuality of paper. I am happier with things than with facts, I know this. But in a few weeks the big rooms lined with file cabinets and shelves, filled with the excrement of bureaucracy, were more frustrating and depressing than the computer screens. In these rooms I could see the extent of my task, and I could finger the results of endless hours of wasted labor. And I could see the disorganization and the gaps, not merely as bad results on a screen, but as whole drawers and cabinets and rooms of botched filing, un-catalogued documents—unknown material. Eventually I was forced back to the computers, and I shuttled between them like that, driven by frustration.
In neither building could I find any mention of a Mars Starship Association. Three months after I came to Alexandria I hadn’t found a thing. And there was still no response to my letter in Marscience.
Emma searched;
We research.
The city pulled at me. The smooth face of a young man, in a bathhouse door. On a sidewalk cafe table, lying in coffee stains face down: the Martian translation of Cavafy’s poems. How well the old poet’s work fit this namesake city. I saw the collected edition everywhere—on trolley seats, on the leafstrewn paths of the parks, in libraries misshelved under Astronomy or Polynesia; and from the back of every dog-eared copy, Cavafy’s sad weird bespectacled gaze, which said: the scholar melts in Alexandria. I tried to ignore it. Same with the white handprint, glowing out of every dark alley. Mornings and afternoons I spent in the archives; evenings I ate in the plaza cafes, watching the poor who lived in great crowds around the big public buildings, eking a living from those inside. Nights I stayed in my apartment, blank as a computer screen turned off.
One night I glanced at my kitchen calendar and understood that I had lived a week without knowing it. If the thalamus breaks down, we are incapable of laying down new memories. Fearfully I dressed and took a late trolley downtown. I stood on the curb of the broad sidewalk before the skyscraper containing Shrike’s apartment. Up there were his big rooms with all their windows, above the dome. I wanted to go into the foyer and ring his bell, I wanted him to be home, to ask me up. I went into the foyer and stood before the console. Alexander Selkirk, 8008. But he wouldn’t want me calling him from the building, would he? If he were in town, he would have someone else with him. He wouldn’t care what shape I was in; he wouldn’t want to know I needed him. The idea would make him very polite—as unlike Shrike as it was possible to be. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.
Under the curious eye of a policeman I left the building and walked around the corner into the nearest bathhouse. I paid my fee, shed my clothes and stuffed them into a locker, walked out into the tight network of red hallways, to one of the steamrooms. Sat in the hot water and tried to calm myself and feel sensually. In the dim red light bodies moved languorously, skin wet and gleaming, ruddy and smooth. Muscle definition of male backs. Smooth curves of female legs. Breasts and cocks, wet hair, parted lips. I took one of the hoses snaking about the bottom of the bath, ran the cold stream over my body. Across the room two lithe bodies tangled, slid together in a slow rhythm. They sloshed off, seeking one of the niches in the hallway corners. Another pair coupled in the corner of the steaming pool; blind eyes stared through me. I ran the cold spurt from the hose over my cock, felt nothing. Leaving the bath I wandered the halls, looking into niches. In one a woman straddled a man, slid up and down on him; she looked up and saw me, smiled, leaned forward to cover him; I felt a faint stir in my pelvis.
In a distant niche beyond the last bath Emma sat crosslegged, alone. She gestured to me—she crooked a finger at me. I knelt beside her in the niche, heart pounding. Up close I saw she only looked like Emma, but I banished the thought and kissed her. Our hands explored each other, I slid into her and we copulated right there where passers-by would trip over my feet. When we were spent she rolled me to one side, got to her knees; she put a finger to my lips, kissed my forehead, left.
So I added a new component to my life. Every night I visited bathhouses. Sometimes I met my Emma-partner, and we made love with ever-increasing facility. Most nights our paths didn’t cross, and I merely soaked and watched, or found another partner.
But what happened with her was different. We never said a word; that was what created the passion, we knew. Days now passed when I read Emma’s journal and thought only of her, and on some nights I walked from bathhouse to bathhouse, searching for her. Once in front of the Physical Annex, we crossed paths; neither of us acknowledged the other by more than a meeting of the eye. But that night, in the bathhouse where we had met, we almost fused in our mute passion. We understood.
And I felt I was coming to life: when actually I was only coming to Alexandria.
* * *
We lead our lives as if perpetually waking from a long coma. What really happened to me in my first lives, to lead me to Alexandria? Some midnights on the streets, with all the poor, I would stop and ask myself that. How had I gotten to this strange state? What had my life been like? I knew I had been a child, a student, a driver for the Planetary Survey—but what had happened, what had it been like? “I only know it got me here, and here I am.”
* * *
During the long days in the Archives I chatted with the people who worked there, solicited their help and their opinions, and told them about my task and my theory concerning the Pluto megalith and the Unrest. I am a very social person, you see; I need to talk to people every day, perhaps more than I have ever gotten a chance to. One day over an after-lunch Turkish coffee I asked an archivist I had just met, Vadja Sandor, if he knew of any records for the mining subcommittee that had been labelled confidential, and hidden in the data banks by a secret code. “Especially records for the years between the Committee takeover and the Unrest.”