Green Mars

  I’ll have to think about that.

  Observation is never enough. Besides it wasn’t their experiment anyway. Desmond came to Dorsa Brevia, and Sax went to find him. “Is Peter still flying?”

  “Why yes. He spends a fair amount of time in space, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes. Can you get me in touch with him?”

  “Sure I can.” Quizzical expression on Desmond’s cracked face. “Your speech is getting better and better, Sax. What have they been doing to you?”

  “Gerontological treatments. Also growth hormone, L-dopa, serotonin, other chemicals. Stuff out of starfish.”

  “Grew you a new brain, did they?”

  “Yes. Parts anyway. Synergic synaptic stimulus. Also a lot of talking with Michel.”

  “Uh-oh!”

  “It’s still me.”

  Desmond’s laugh was an animal noise. “I can see that. Listen, I’ll be off again in a couple days, and I’ll take you to Peter’s airport.”

  “Thanks.”

  Grew a new brain. Not an accurate way of putting it. The lesion had been sustained in the posterior third of the inferior frontal convolution. Tissues dead as a result of interruption of focused ultrasound memory-speech stimulation during interrogation. A stroke. Broca’s aphasia. Difficulty with motor apparatus of speech, little melody, difficulty in initiating utterances, reduction to tele-gramese, mostly nouns and simplest forms of verbs. A battery of tests determined that most other cognitive functions were unimpaired. He wasn’t so sure; he had understood people speaking to him, his thinking had been much the same as far as he could tell, and he had had no trouble with the spatial and other nonlinguistic tests. But when he tried to talk, sudden betrayal—in the mouth and in the mind. Things lost their names.

  Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.

  But it turned out that remembering without words was hard. A method had to be borrowed, the palace-of-memory method, spatial to begin with. A space in the mind was established to resemble the inside of the Echus Overlook labs, which he recalled well enough to walk around in in his mind, names or no. And in each place an object. Or another place. On one counter, all the Acheron labs. On top of the refrigerator, Boulder, Colorado. And so he remembered all the shapes he thought by their location in the mental lab.

  And then sometimes the name would come. But when he knew the name and tried to say it, it was very possible that the wrong one would come out of his mouth. He had always had a tendency this way. After sessions of his best thinking, when everything had been quite clear to him, it had sometimes been difficult to translate his thoughts onto the plane of language, which did not match well the kind of thinking he had been doing. So that talking had been work. But nothing like this, this halting, erratic, treacherous groping, which usually either failed or betrayed. Frustrating in the extreme. Painful. Although preferable to Wernicke’s aphasia, certainly, in which one babbled volubly, unaware that one was making no sense at all. Just as he had had a premorbid tendency to lose the words for things, there were people who tended towards Wernicke’s without the excuse of brain damage. As Art had noted. Sax preferred his own problem.

  Ursula and Vlad had come to him. “Aphasia is different for every person,” Ursula said. “There are patterns, and clusters of symptoms that usually go with certain lesion patterns in right-handed adults. But in extraordinary minds there are a lot of exceptions. Already we see that your cognitive functions have remained very high for someone with your degree of language difficulties. Probably a lot of your thought in math and physics did not take place using language.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if it was geometrical thinking rather than analytical, it probably took place in the right hemisphere of the brain rather than the left. And your right hemisphere was spared.”

  Sax nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  “So, prospects for recovery vary widely. There is almost always improvement. Children in particular are very adaptable. When they have head injuries even a circumscribed lesion may cause serious problems, but there is almost always recovery. A whole hemisphere of the brain can be removed from a child if a problem makes it necessary, and all the functions be relearned by the remaining half. This is because of the incredible growth in the child’s brain. For adults it is different. Specialization has occurred, so that circumscribed lesions cause a specific limited damage. But once a skill has been destroyed in a mature brain, you don’t often see significant improvement.”

  “The treat. The treatment.”

  “Exactly. But you see, the brain is precisely one of the places where the gerontological treatment has the most trouble penetrating. We’ve been working on that, however. We’ve designed a stimulus package to be used in concert with the treatment, when faced with cases of brain damage. It may become a regular part of the treatment, if the trials continue to have good results. We haven’t done this in too many human trials yet, you see. The injection increases brain plasticity by stimulating axon and dendritic spine growth, and the sensitivity of Hebb synapses. The corpus callosum is particularly affected, and the hemisphere opposite to the lesioned side. Learning can build whole new neural networks there.”

  “Do it,” Sax said.

  Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color’s wavelength, by number. That sand is orange, tan, blond, yellow, sienna, umber, burnt umber, ochre. That sky is cerulean, cobalt, lavender, mauve, violet, Prussian, indigo, egglant, midnight. Just to look at color charts with words, the rich intensity of colors, the sounds of the words—he wanted more. A name for every wavelength of the visible spectrum, why not? Why be so stingy? The .59-micron wavelength is so much more blue than .6, and .61 is so much more red. . . . They needed more words for purples, the way Eskimos needed more words for snow. People always used that example, and Eskimos did have about twenty words for snow; but scientists had over three hundred words for snow, and who ever gave scientists credit for paying attention to their world? No two snowflakes alike. Thisness. Buh, buh. Bean, bear, bun, burr, bent, bomb. Buh. That place where my arm bends is my elbow! Mars looks like a pumpkin! The air is cold. And poisoned by carbon dioxide.

  There were parts of his inner speech which were composed entirely of old clichés, coming no doubt from what Michel called “overlearned” activities in his past, which had so permeated his mind that they had survived the damage. Clean design, good data, parts per billion, bad results. Then cutting through these comfortable formulations, as if from a separate language entirely, were the new perceptions, and the new phrases groping to express them. Synaptic synergies. Actual speech from either realm was still welcome. The exhilaration of normality. How he had taken it for granted. Michel came by to talk every day, helping him to build this new brain. Michel harbored some very alarming beliefs for a man of science. The four elements, the four temperaments, alchemical formulations of all kinds, philosophical positions parading as science. . . . “Didn’t you once ask me if I could change lead to gold?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you spend so much time talking to me, Michel?”

  “I like talking to you, Sax. You say something new every day.”

  “I like this throwing things with my left hand.”

  “I can see that. It’s possible you may end up a left-hander. Or ambidextrous, because your left brain is so powerful, I can’t imagine it will lag much, no matter the lesion.”

  “Mars looks like an iron
-cored ball of old planetesimals.”

  Desmond flew him to the Red sanctuary in Wallace Crater, where Peter often stayed. And Peter was there, Peter son of Mars, tall fast and strong, graceful, friendly although impersonal, distant, absorbed in his own work and his own life. Simonlike. Sax told him what he wanted to do, and why. He still stumbled in his speech occasionally. But it was so much better than it had been before that he hardly minded when he did. Forge on! Like talking in a foreign language. All languages were foreign languages to him now. Except his idiolect of shapes. But it was no aggravation—on the contrary, such a relief to do even so well. To have the fog clearing away from the names, have the mind-mouth connections restored. Even if in a new and chancy way. A chance to learn. Sometimes he liked the new way. One’s reality might indeed depend on one’s scientific paradigm, but it mostly definitely depended on one’s brain structure. Change that and your paradigms might as well follow. You can’t fight progress. Nor progressive differentiation. “Do you understand?”

  “Oh, I understand,” Peter said, grinning widely. “I think it’s a very good idea. Very important. It will take me a few days to get the plane ready.”

  Ann arrived at the shelter, looking tired and old. She greeted Sax curtly, her old antipathy as strong as ever. Sax did not know what to say to her. Was this a new problem?

  He decided to wait until Peter had talked to her, and see if that made any difference. He waited. Nowadays if he didn’t talk no one bothered him. Advantages everywhere.

  She came back from a talk with Peter, to eat a meal with the other Reds in their little commons, and yes she stared at him curiously. Looking over the heads of the others at him as if inspecting a new cliff on the Martian landscape. Intent and objective. Evaluative. A status change in a dynamic system is a data point that speaks to a theory. Supporting or troubling. What are you? Why are you doing this?

  He met her stare calmly, tried to field it, to turn it around. Yes I am still Sax. I have changed. Who are you? Why haven’t you changed? Why do you still look at me like that? I have experienced an injury. The premorbid individual is not there anymore, not quite. I have been given an experimental treatment, I feel fine, I am not the man you knew. And why haven’t you changed?

  If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.

  She sat down to eat. It was doubtful she had read his mind in that much detail. But a great pleasure nevertheless, to be able to meet her eye!

  He got in the little cockpit with Peter and just after the timeslip they bounced down the bedrock runway, accelerating hard and tilting up at the black sky, the big streamlined space plane vibrating under them. Sax lay back, crushed into his seat, and waited for the plane to curve over that asymptotic hill at the top of its course, slowing as it rose less steeply, until it was in a gentle rise through the high stratosphere, making the transition from plane to rocket as the atmosphere thinned to its last attenuated level, a hundred kilometers high, where the gases of the Russell cocktail were annihilated daily by incoming UV rays. The plane’s skin was glowing with heat. Through the filtered glass of the cockpit it was the color of the sun at sunset. No doubt it was affecting their night vision. Below the planet was all dark, except for very faint patches of starlit glaciers in Hellas Basin. They were rising still. A widening gyre. Stars packed the blackness of what looked like an enormous black hemisphere, standing on an enormous black plane. Night sky, night Mars. They rose and rose again. The incandescent rocket was translucent yellow, hallucinatorily bright and sleek. The latest thing from Vishniac, designed in part by Spencer, and made of an inter-metallic compound, chiefly gamma titanium aluminum, rendered superplastic for the manufacture of heat-resistant engine parts as well as the exterior skin, which dimmed a bit as they rose higher and it cooled. He could imagine the beautiful latticework of the gamma titanium aluminum, patterned in a tapestry of nodoids and catenoids like hooks and eyes, vibrating madly with the heat. They were building such things these days. Ground-to-space planes. Walk out into your backyard and fly to Mars in an aluminum can.

  Sax described what he wanted to do next after this. Peter laughed.

  “Do you think Vishniac can do it?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “There are some design problems.”

  “I know, I know. But they’ll solve them. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist.”

  “That’s very true.”

  Peter sang to pass the hours. Sax joined in when he knew the words—as in “Sixteen Tons,” a satisfying song. Peter told the story of how he had escaped from the falling elevator. What it had been like to float in an EVA suit, alone for two days. “Somehow it gave me a taste for it, that’s all. I know that sounds strange.”

  “I understand.” The shapes out here were so big and pure. The color of things.

  “What was it like to learn to talk again?”

  “I have to concentrate to do it. I have to think hard. Things surprise me all the time. Things I used to know and forgot. Things I never knew. Things I learned just before the injury. That period is usually occluded forever. But it was so important. When I was working around the glacier. I have to talk to your mom about that. It isn’t like she thinks. You know, the land. The new plants out there. The yellow butterfly sun. It doesn’t have to be . . . ”

  “You should talk to her.”

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Talk to her when we get back.”

  The altimeter indicated 250 kilometers above the surface. The plane plowed up toward Cassiopeia. Every star had a distinct color, different from any other. Or there were at least fifty of them. Below them, on the eastern edge of the black disk, the terminator appeared, zebra-banded sandy ochre and shadowy black. The thin crescent of sunlit Mars gave him the sudden clear perception of the disk as a great spheroid. A ball spinning through the galaxy of stars. The great huge continent-mountain of Elysium bulked over the horizon, its shape perfectly delineated by the horizontal shadows. They were looking down the length of its long saddleback, Hecates Tholus almost hidden behind the cone of Elysium Mons, Albor Tholus off to the side.

  “There it is,” Peter said, and pointed up through the clear cockpit. Above them, to the east, the eastern edge of the aerial lens was silver in the morning light, the rest of it still in the planets shadow.

  “Are we close enough yet?” Sax asked.

  “Almost.”

  Sax looked down again at the thickening crescent of the morning. There on the dark rough highlands of Hesperia, a cloud of smoke was billowing up from the dark surface just beyond the terminator, into the morning light. Even at their height they were in that cloud still, in the part that was no longer visible. The lens itself was surfing on that invisible thermal, using its lift and the pressure of sunlight to hold its position over the burn zone.

  Now the entire lens was in the sunlight, looking like an enormous silver parachute with nothing underneath it. Its silver was also violet, sky-colored. The cup was a section of a sphere, a thousand kilometers across, its center some fifty kilometers above its rim. Spinning like a Frisbee. There was a hole at the peak, where the sunlight poured straight through. Everywhere else the circular mirror strips that made up the cup were reflecting the light from the sun and the soletta, inward and down onto a moving point on the surface below, bringing to bear so much light that it was igniting basalt. The lens mirrors heated up to almost 900°K, and the liquefied rock down there was reaching 5,000°K. Degassing vola-tiles.

  Into Sax’s mind, as he considered the great object flying over them, came the image of a magnifying glass, held over dry weeds and an aspen branch. Smoke, flame, fire. The concentrated rays of the sun. Photon assault. “Aren’t we close enough yet? It looks like it’s right over us.”

  “No, we’re well out from under the edge. It wouldn’t do to get under that thing, although I suppose the focus wouldn’t be right to fry us. Anyway it’s moving
over the burn zone at almost a thousand kilometers an hour.”

  “Like jets when I was young.”

  “Uh.” Green lights blinked on one of his consoles. “Okay, here we go.”

  He pulled back on the stick and the plane stood on its tail, rising straight at the lens, which was still another hundred kilometers higher than they were, and well to the west of them. Peter pushed a button on the console. The whole plane jerked as a bank of fletched missiles appeared from under the plane’s stubby wings, lofting with them and then igniting like magnesium flares and shooting up and away, toward the lens. Pinpricks of yellow fire against that huge silvery UFO, eventually disappearing from sight. Sax waited, lips pursed, and tried to stop his blinking.

  The front edge of the lens began to unravel. It was a flimsy thing, nothing but a great spinning cup of solar sail bands, and it came apart with startling rapidity, its front edge rolling under it until it was tumbling forward and down, trailing long looping streamers which looked like the tangled tails of several broken kites, all falling together. A billion and a half kilograms of solar sail material, in fact, all unraveling as it fluttered down in its long trajectory, looking slow because it was so big, though probably the great mass of material was still moving at well above terminal velocity. A good portion of it would burn up before it hit the surface. Silica rain.

  Peter turned and followed it in its descent, keeping well to the east of it. And so they could still see it below them, there in the violet morning sky, as the main mass of it heated to an incandescent glare and caught fire, like a great yellow comet with a hairy tangled silver tail, dropping down to the tawny planet. All fall down.

  “Good shot,” Sax said.