Part Thirteen
Experimental Procedures
At the last minute Nirgal went up to Sheffield. From the train station he took the subway out to the Socket, not seeing a thing. Inside the vast halls of the Socket he walked to the departure lounge. And there she was.
When she saw him she was pleased that he had come, but irritated that he had come so late. It was almost time for her to go. Up the cable, onto a shuttle, out to one of the new hollowed-out asteroids, this one particularly large and luxuriant; and then off, accelerating for a matter of months, until it could coast at several percent of the speed of light. For this asteroid was a starship; and they were off to a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like planet rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun. A new world, a new life. And Jackie was going.
Nirgal still couldn’t quite believe it. He had gotten the message only two days before, had not slept as he tried to decide whether this mattered, whether it was part of his life, whether he ought to see her off, whether he ought to try to talk her out of it.
Seeing her now, he knew he could not talk her out of it. She was going. I want to try something new, she had said in her message, a voice record without a visual image. There coming from his wrist, her voice: There’s nothing for me here now anymore. I’ve done my part. I want to try something new.
The group in the starship asteroid were mostly from Dorsa Brevia. Nirgal had called Charlotte to try to find out why. It’s complicated, Charlotte said. There’s a lot of reasons. This planet they’re going to is relatively nearby, and it’s perfect for terraforming. Humanity going there is a big step. The first step to the stars.
I know, Nirgal had said. Quite a few starships had already left, off to other likely planets. The step had been taken.
But this planet is the best one yet. And in Dorsa Brevia, people are beginning to wonder if we don’t have to get that distance from Earth to get a fresh start. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind. And now it’s looking bad again. These unauthorized landings; it could be the start of an invasion. And if you think of Mars as being the new democratic society, and Earth the old feudalism, then the influx can look like the old trying to crush the new, before it gets too big. And they’ve got us outnumbered twenty billion to two. And part of that old feudalism is patriarchy itself. So the people in Dorsa Brevia wonder if they can get a little bit more distance. It’s only twenty years to Aldebaran, and they’re going to live a long time. So a group of them are doing it. Families, family groups, childless couples, childless single people. It’s like the First Hundred going to Mars, like the days of Boone and Chalmers.
And so Jackie sat on the carpeted floor of the departure lounge, and Nirgal sat next to her. She looked down. She was smoothing the carpet with the palm of her hand, and then drawing patterns in the nap, letters. Nirgal, she wrote.
He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but subdued. People looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going, some were seeing people off. Through a broad window they looked into the interior of the socket, where elevator cars levitated in silence against the walls, and the foot of the 37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten meters over the concrete floor.
So you’re going, Nirgal said.
Yes, Jackie said. I want a new start.
Nirgal said nothing.
It will be an adventure, she said.
True. He didn’t know what else to say.
In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.
It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny. It’s what we ought to be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where Hiroko is— that she and her people joined one of the first starships, the one to Barnard’s star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.
It’s as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true; he could imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora, of humanity across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from there. A step out of the cradle. The end of prehistory.
He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This was the last time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the other were dying. That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently together in this room. That people should leave everyone they knew.
And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so strange— they had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with ninety-nine strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had had parents, presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them had had spouses, except for the six married couples who had been part of the hundred. Single childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That was who they were. And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.
Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the light. Fine-grained gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back down. Wherever you go, she wrote, there you are.
She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.
I don’t know.
They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable chamber, an elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved over a piste to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped its outer side.
Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave this world forever. Don’t leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the time we made love by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?
He said nothing. She remembered.
I don’t know.
He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased the second you. With his forefinger he wrote we.
She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?
The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing Jackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.
Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.
The northern polar island had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.
Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.
Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau was cut with tributary streams like
the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the territory to a great depth.
It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast deserts of red shifting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the best.
He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more than ten meters away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.
Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, “behind him.” And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.
So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix on his position and his car’s. He had a very good map program in his wristpad these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees north latitude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so apt, this anthropomorphic analogizing) was some small purple saxifrage, stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.
Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in the light— the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him— the delicious weariness in his feet— and then something indefinable, he had to admit it— unexplainable— in that the individual elements of the experience were insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this was love. Spirit of place, love of place— the areophany, not only as Hiroko had described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko— could she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, to learn to feel it oneself . . . love of planet. Love of a planet’s life. Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one’s regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One’s regard focused, in the center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.
Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological scale something rather like Hiroko’s viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in “little bangs” at the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread was as far removed from the others as it was possible to be. Thus all the life islands were widely separated in timespace, making contact between any two islands very unlikely simply because they were all late phenomena, and at a great distance from the rest; there hadn’t been time for contact. This hypothesis, if true, seemed to Sax a more than adequate explanation for the failure of SETI, that silence from the stars that had been ongoing for nearly four centuries now. A blink of the eye compared to the billion light-years that Deleuze estimated separated all life islands each a tertiary emergent phenomenon.
So viriditas existed in the universe like this saxifrage on the great sand curves of the polar island: small, isolate, magnificent. Sax saw a curving universe before him; but Deleuze maintained that they lived in a flat universe, on the cusp between permanent expansion and the expand-contract model, in a delicate balance. And he also maintained that the turning point, when the universe would either start to shrink or else expand past all possibility of shrinking, appeared to be very close to the present time! This made Sax very suspicious, as did the implication in Deleuze that they could influence the matter one way or the other: stomp on the ground and send the universe flying outward to dissolution and heat death, or catch one’s breath, and pull it all inward to the unimaginable omega point of the eschaton: no. The first law of thermodynamics, among many other considerations, made this a kind of cosmological hallucination, a small god’s existentialism. Psychological result of humanity’s suddenly vastly increased physical powers, perhaps. Or Deleuze’s own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything.
In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth’s surface, but they did. Coincidences happened. Most of these anthropocentric features, however, seemed to Sax likely to be the mark of the limits of their understanding; very possibly there were things larger than the universe, and others smaller than strings— some even larger plenum, made of even smaller components— all beyond human perception, even mathematically. If that were true it might explain some of the inconsistencies in Bao’s equations— if one allowed that the four macrodimensions of timespace were in relation to some larger dimensions, like the six microdimensions were to their ordinary four, then the equations might work quite beautifully— he had a vision of one possible formulation, right there—
He stumbled, caught his balance. Another sm
all bench of sand, about three times the size of the normal one. Okay— on and up to the car. Now what had he been thinking about?
He couldn’t remember. He had been thinking something interesting, he knew that. Figuring something out, it seemed like. But try as he might, he couldn’t recall what it was. It bulked at the back of his mind like a rock in his shoe, a tip-of-the-tongueism that never came through. Most uncomfortable; even maddening. It had happened to him before, he seemed to recall— and more frequently recently, wasn’t that true? He wasn’t sure, but that felt right. He had been losing his train of thought, and then been unable to retrieve it, no matter how hard he tried.
He reached his car without seeing his walk there. Love of place, yes— but one had to be able to remember things to love them! One had to be able to remember one’s thoughts! Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner together, then ate it without noticing.
This memory trouble would not do.
• • •
Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wristpad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several different strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the languages of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterize. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow— they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse— fast, coherent, effortless— the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others— the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.