Blue Mars

  • • •

  Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for breakfast in the dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them, surrounded by portable walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in pots. No remembrance of Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how unusual it was to be invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the matter at hand. He had known both these women from the beginning, and greatly respected both of them, Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but he didn’t feel he knew them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating and looking at them, and out the open window walls. There to the north lay a narrow strip of blue, Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea— to the south, far beyond the first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons. In between, a devil’s golf course of a land— hard gnarled eroded old lava flows, riven and pocked— and in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish waste of the plateau.

  Marina said, “We’ve been thinking about why experimental psychologists in every generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly exceptional memories, but there is never any attempt to explain them by the memory models of the period.”

  “In fact they forget them as soon as they can,” Ursula said.

  “Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes them to be true. It’s put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no one alive can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the tendency is to conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled. But a lot of the reports were perfectly well substantiated.”

  “Such as?” Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at organism-level real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably were. But of course it made sense to do so.

  Marina said, “The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of every instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words and music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works.”

  “They tested this?”

  “Spot checks, so to speak. A bassoonist broke a key of his bassoon and told Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn’t have to play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without scores, and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on.”

  “Uh-huh. . . .”

  “The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It isn’t uncommon in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are sometimes possible.”

  “Hmm.”

  Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts— again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. ‘Interest is the thing,’ he was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the attention.’ ”

  “True,” Sax said.

  “He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”

  “I’d like to learn more about him.”

  “Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images presented to them in great detail— they’re often impaired in other parts of their lives.”

  Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in general. But both of them experienced synesthesia.”

  “Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps.”

  They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 1930s. Talmudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.

  “These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as ordinary memory,” Sax observed.

  “Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in great detail. It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at puberty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these people don’t ever metamorphose away from the children’s way.”

  “Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal distribution.”

  Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”

  “You do!”

  “Yes. It’s Zeyk. He and Nazik have moved here so that we can study him. He’s being very cooperative; she’s encouraging him. There might as well be some good that comes of it, she says. He doesn’t like his ability, you see. In him it doesn’t have much to do with computational tricks, although he’s better at that than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail.”

  “I think I remember hearing about this,” Sax said. The two women laughed, and startled, he joined in. “I’d like to see what you’re doing with him.”

  “Sure. He’s down in Smadar’s lab. It’s interesting. They view vids from events that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he talks about what he remembers while they’ve got all the latest scans running on his brain.”

  “Sounds very interesting.”

  • • •

  Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating beds were occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored images flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds were empty, and somehow ominous.

  After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he looked to Sax like a specimen of Homo habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be tested for mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points on its inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary in bruise-colored, withered skin. Nazik sat on the other side of his bed, holding his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was a detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk’s brain; through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning, creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman, presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.

  “So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?”

  “Yes. Or they were fighting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the windows.”

  “Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?”

  “At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know. Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

  Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”

  “Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.

  “Yes.”

  It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said, surprising them all.

  “Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula wer
e staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.

  “What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk’s brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.

  “There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side street met the central boulevard. Near the medina.”

  “Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.

  “Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”

  He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know them?” Zeyk croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

  Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”

  Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said. “Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he said Boone killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What did you do?”

  Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn’t know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I— I watched. Then— then I was in a group running after them, I don’t know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group . . . our group lost them.”

  “There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,” Zeyk said. “There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”

  “Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”

  He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.

  “So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers.”

  “We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”

  Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”

  “But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.

  “Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each other. Nejm, perhaps. . . .”

  “Who is dead.”

  “And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the rioting that night. . . .” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.

  “Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her screen.

  “Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. Unsi . . . well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had come back in by it.”

  “Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.

  Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”

  Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”

  “Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”

  Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait . . . an image of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you stop them? Didn’t you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn’t stopped them— that he had failed to help his friend— that he had stood there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been assaulted and dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.

  But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the whole rest of that night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the lids shut as if that might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The memory was odd that way; he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when these realizations had stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the limbic system and the emotional charge of every incident must be crucially involved in the entrainment or encoding or embedding of a memory.

  And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in the clinic waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face of the doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone’s death. “She said, ‘He’s dead. Too long out there.’ And Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he jumped.”

  “We have to tell Maya,” Nazik whispered.

  “He said to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ which I thought was odd. She said something to him about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And Frank even agreed, but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he said ‘What do you know about what I like or don’t like.’ So bitter. He didn’t like her presumption. The idea that she knew him.” Zeyk shook his head.

  “Was I there during this?” Sax said.

  “. . . Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But you were distracted. You were crying.”

  Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!

  And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning. The appearance of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and Nazik had left Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that he could go on in that amount of detail for every week of his life.

  But now Nazik stopped the session. “This one is too hard,” she said to Smadar. “Let’s start again tomorrow.”

  Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine beside her. Zeyk stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw that among the many dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include memories that worked too well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of Zeyk’s brain, replicating in another medium the patterns of quantum activity— lightning flickering around in his cortex . . . a mind that held the past far better than the rest of the ancient ones, impervious to the affliction of breaking memory, which Sax had believed to be an inexorable clocklike breakdown . . . well, they were giving that brain every test they could think of. But it was quite possible the secret would remain unsolved; there was simply too much happening of which they were completely unaware. As on that night in Nicosia.

  • • •

  Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land around Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and now he was very happy to have a place to get away.

  He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about memory had come when he was walking down to this seashore, over routes so circuitous that he could never find the same way twice, partly because the old lava plateau was so fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was never paying attention to the larger topogra
phy— he was either lost in his thoughts or lost in the immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around to see where he was. In fact it was a region in which one could not get lost; ascend any small ridge, and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense dragon; and in the other direction, visible from more places as one approached it, the wide blue expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million micro-environments, the rocky plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack filled with plants. It was very unlike the melting landscape on the polar shore across the sea; this rocky plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed immemorial, despite the gardening that was certainly being done by the Acheron ecopoets. Many of these oases were experiments, and Sax treated them as such, staying out of them, peering down into one steep-walled alas after another, wondering what the ecopoet responsible was trying to discover with his or her work. Here soil could be spread with no fear of it being washed into the sea, although the startling green of the estuaries extending back into the valleys showed that some fertile soil was making its way down the streams. These estuarine marshes would fill with eroded soils, while at the same time they were getting saltier, along with the North Sea itself. . . .

  This time out, however, his observations were broken repeatedly by thoughts of John. John Boone had worked for him for the last several years of John’s life, and they had had many a conference as they discussed the rapidly developing Martian situation; vital years; and through them John had been always happy, cheerful, confident— trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent— no, no, not exactly— he had also been abrupt, impatient, arrogant, lazy, slipshod, drug dependent, proud. But how Sax had come to rely on him, how he had loved him— loved him like a big brother who had protected him out in the world at large. And then they had killed him. Those are the ones the killers always go after. They can’t stand that courage. And so they had killed him and Sax had stood on watching and hadn’t done a thing. Frozen in shock and personal fear. You didn’t stop them? Maya had cried; he remembered it now, her sharp voice. No, I was afraid. No, I did nothing. Of course it was unlikely that there was anything he could have done at that point. Before, when the attacks on John had first started, Sax might have been able to talk him into another assignment, gotten him some bodyguards, or, since John would never have accepted that, hired some bodyguards to follow him in secret, to protect him while his friends froze and stared in shocked witness. But he hadn’t hired anyone. And so his brother had been killed, his brother who had laughed at him but who had loved him as well, loved him before anyone else thought of him at all.