So that was already a kind of malign déjà vu. And then the real déjà vus came back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a day of it was torture; and a week, hell itself. The stereo-temporal state, Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the “always-already sensation.” Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repetition of some earlier identical day— this was how it felt— as if Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, the endless repetition of all possible spacetime continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the nonstereotemporal state— like double vision coming back into focus, giving things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.
“Ah good,” Michel said as she came out of one of these spells, obviously wondering which of the drugs he had been giving her had done the trick.
“Maybe if I could just get to the other side of a presque vu,” Maya said weakly. “Not déjà or presque or jamais, but just the vu.”
“A kind of enlightenment,” Michel guessed. “Satori. Or epiphany. A mystical oneness with the universe. It’s usually a short-lived phenomenon, I am told. A peak experience.”
“But with a residue?”
“Yes. Afterward you feel better about things. But, well, it’s said to usually come only if one achieves a certain. . . .”
“Serenity?”
“No, well . . . yes. Stillness of mind, you might say.”
“Not my kind of thing, you mean.”
Which cracked a grin. “But it could be cultivated. Prepared for, I mean. That’s what they do in Zen Buddhism, if I understand it correctly.”
So she read some Zen texts. But they all made it clear; Zen was not information, but behavior. If your behavior was right, then the mystic clarity might descend; or might not. And even if it did, it was usually a brief thing, a vision.
She was too stuck in her habits for that kind of change in her mental behavior. She was not in the kind of control of her thoughts that could prepare for a peak experience. She lived her life, and these mental breakdowns intruded on her. Thinking about the past helped to trigger them, it seemed; so she focused on the present as much as she could. That was Zen, after all, and she got fairly good at it; it had been an instinctive survival strategy for years. But a peak experience . . . sometimes she yearned for it, for the almost seen to be seen at last. A presque vu would descend on her, the world take on that aura of vague powerful meaning just outside her thoughts, and she would stand and push, or relax, or just try to follow it, to bring it on home; curious, fearful, hoping; and then it would fade, and pass. Still, someday . . . if only it would come clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was so curious; what would the insight be? What was that understanding which hovered just outside her mind, those times? It felt too real to be just an illusion. . . .
So, though it didn’t occur to her at first that this was what she was seeking, she accepted an invitation from Nirgal to go with him to the Olympus Mons festival. Michel thought it was a great idea. Once every m-year, in the northern spring, people met on the summit of Olympus Mons near Crater Zp, to hold a festival inside a cascade of crescent-shaped tents, over stone and tile mosaics, as during that first meeting there, the celebration of the end of the Great Storm, when the ice asteroid had blazed across the sky and John had spoken to them of the coming Martian society.
Which society, Maya thought as they ascended the great volcano in a train car, might be said to have arrived, at least in certain times and places. Now, here: here we are. On Olympus, on Ls 90 every year, to remember John’s promise and celebrate its achievement. By far the greater number of celebrants were young natives, but there were a lot of new immigrants as well, come up to see what the famous festival was like, intent on partying all week long, mostly by continuously playing music or dancing to it, or both. Maya preferred dance, as she still played no other instrument than the tambourine. And she lost Michel and all their other friends there, Nadia and Art and Sax and Marina and Ursula and Mary and Nirgal and Diana and all the rest, so that she could dance with strangers, and forget. Do nothing but focus on the passing faces luminous before her, each one like a pulsar of consciousness crying I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.
Great dancing, all night long; a sign that assimilation might be happening, the areophany working its invisible spell on everyone who came to the planet, so that their toxic Terran pasts would be diluted and forgotten, and the true Martian culture achieved at last in a collective creation. Yes, and fine. But no peak experience. This was not the place for it, not for her. It was too much the dead hand of the past, perhaps; things were much the same on the peak of Olympus Mons, the sky still black and starry with a purple band around the horizon. . . . There were hostels built around the immense rim, Marina said, for pilgrims to stay in as they made circumnavigations of the summit; and other shelters down in the caldera, for the red climbers who spent their existence down in that world of overlapping convex cliffs. Strange what people would do, Maya thought, strange what destinies were being enacted on Mars nowadays.
But not by her. Olympus Mons was too high, therefore too stuck in the past. It was not where she was going to have the kind of experience she was seeking.
She did, however, get a chance to have a long talk with Nirgal, on the train ride back to Odessa. She told him about Charlotte and Ariadne and their concerns, and he nodded and told her about some of his adventures in the outback, many illustrating progress in assimilation. “We’ll win in the end,” he predicted. “Mars right now is the battleground of past and future, and the past has its power, but the future is where we’re all going. There’s a kind of inexorable power in it, like a vacuum pull forward. These days I can almost feel it.” And he looked happy.
Then he pulled their bags off the overhead racks, he kissed her cheek. He was thin and hard, slipping away from her. “We’ll keep working on it, yes? I’ll come visit you and Michel in Odessa. I love you.”
• • •
Which made her feel better, of course. No peak experience; but a train trip with Nirgal, a chance to talk with that most elusive native, that most beloved son.
After her return from the mountain, however, she continued to be subject to her array of “mental events,” as Michel called them. He got more worried every time one of them happened. They were beginning to scare him, Maya saw, even though he tried to hide it. And no wonder. These “events,” and others like them, were happening to a lot of his aged clients. The gerontological treatments could not seem to help people’s memories hold on to their ever-lengthening pasts. And as their pasts slipped away, year by year, and their memories weakened, the incidence of “events” grew ever higher, until some people even had to be institutionalized.
Or, alternatively, they died. The First Settlers’ Institute that Michel continued to work with had a smaller group of subjects every year. Even Vlad died, one year. After that Marina and Ursula moved from Acheron to Odessa. Nadia and Art had already moved to west Odessa, after their daughter Nikki had grown up and moved there. Even Sax Russell took an apartment in town, though he spent most of the year in Da Vinci still.
For Maya these moves were both good and bad. Good because she loved all these people, and it felt like they were clustering around her, which pleased her vanity. And it was a great pleasure to see their faces. So she helped Marina, for
instance, to help Ursula to deal with Vlad’s loss. It seemed that Ursula and Vlad had been the true couple, in some sense— though Marina and Ursula . . . well, there were no terms for the three points of a ménage à trois, no matter how it was constituted. Anyway Marina and Ursula were now the remainder, a couple very close in their grieving, otherwise much like the young native same-sex couples one saw in Odessa, men arm in arm on the street (a comforting sight), women hand in hand.
So she was happy to see the two of them, or Nadia, or any of the rest of the old gang. But she couldn’t always remember the incidents they discussed as if unforgettable, and this was irritating. Another kind of jamais vu; her own life. No, it was better to focus on the moment, to go down and work on water, or the lighting for the current play, or sit chatting in the bars with new friends from work, or with complete strangers. Waiting for that enlightenment to someday come. . . .
Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus— Terran nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”
“What? No— oh no.”
“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”
“Oh my God.”
Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining First Hundred— lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy smile . . . no. She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.
“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.
He sighed. “Maybe.”
Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to Lasswitz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Montes without disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn’t been able to revive him.
So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all people, made a provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that Hiroko’s band was still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy, obvious wishful thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not prone to wishful thinking, so maybe there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain, however, and the youngest of them, Mary (unless Hiroko were alive) was now 212 years old. The oldest, Ann, was 226. Maya herself was 221, an obvious absurdity, but there it was, year 2206 in the Terran news reports. . . .
“But there are people in their two-fifties,” Michel noted, “and the treatments may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may just be a bad coincidence.”
“Maybe.”
Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker and darker, which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have stayed in Provence— that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home that persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had been from the moment they had landed— or from the moment he had joined Hiroko— or perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her breasts his hills, her belly his valley, her sex his beach and ocean. Of course it was an impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner; but as it was all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relationship. Though sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.
Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly he felt that death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the great unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it was a scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the various manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except for the speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave collapse like her jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre— theories were endless, it was a vital concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected to become old— for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely studied. But so far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if it was any one thing; and the deaths kept happening.
For Yeli’s service they cast some portion of his ashes off in another swiftly rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the breakwater they had launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back and see all Odessa. Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel’s apartment. Praxis indeed, the way they held each other then. They went through Michel’s scrapbooks, talking about Olympus Mons, ‘61, Underhill. The past. Maya ignored all that and served them tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia remained in the apartment. The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at the kitchen table, put her hand on Michel’s shoulder, and looked over it at a grainy black-and-white photo, stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti sauce and coffee. A faded picture of a young man grinning right at the camera, grinning with a confident knowing smile.
“What an interesting face,” she said.
Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya knew she had said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost distraught. Maya stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared. Nothing came to her.
She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa, past all the whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the terra-cotta flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out over the indigo plate of the Hellas Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she cried, but without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had happened before.
Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the up
per town. There was the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot, or had it been The Winter’s Tale. Yes, The Winter’s Tale. But there would be no coming back to life for them.
Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long staircase alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays, her spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at the apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her, she veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.
She walked up and down the corniche, until she was too tired to walk. Then she sat on a bench. Across from her in a sidewalk café a man was playing a wheezy bandoneon, a bald man with a white mustache, bags under his eyes, round cheeks, red nose. His sad music was right there in his face. The sun was setting and the sea was nearly still, each broad facet glistening with the viscous glassy luster that liquid surfaces sometimes display, all of it as orange as the sun winking out over the mountains to the west. She sat back, relaxing, and felt the sea breeze on her skin. Gulls planed overhead. Suddenly the sea’s color looked familiar to her, and she remembered looking down from the Ares at the mottled orange ball that Mars had been, the untouched planet rolling below them after their arrival in orbit, symbol of every potential happiness. She had never been happier than that, in all the time since.
And then the feeling came on her again, the pre-epileptic aura of the presque vu, the sea glittering, a vast significance suffusing everything, immanent everywhere but just beyond reach, pressing in on things— and with a little pop she got it— that that very aspect of the phenomenon was itself the meaning— that the significance of everything always lay just out of reach, in the future, tugging them forward— that in special moments one felt this tidal tug of becoming as a sensation of sharp happy anticipation, as she had when looking down on Mars from the Ares, the unconscious mind filled not with the detritus of a dead past but with the unforeseeable possibilities of the live future, ah, yes— anything could happen, anything, anything. And so as the presque vu washed slowly away from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time comprehended, she sat back on the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after all, and the potential for happiness would always be in her.