Blue Mars

  He tromped on at a steady pace. The caldera floor was fairly smooth, pocked by occasional lava bombs and late meteor hits, and curving shallow grabens. Some of these had to be circumvented, a beautifully apt word in this case, as they were circumvents, he was circumventing. But for the most part he could tramp directly toward the broken spill of cliff in the northwest quadrant of the caldera.

  It took six hours of steady walking to cross the floor of South Circle, which was less than ten percent of the caldera complex’s total area— all the rest of which was invisible to him for the entire hike. No sign of life, nor of any disturbance to the caldera floor or walls; the atmosphere was visibly thin, everything equally sharp to the eye, right around the primal ten millibars, he judged. The untouched nature of things made him feel uncertain about even his bootprints, and he tried to step on hard rock, and avoid dust patches. It was strangely satisfying to see the primal landscape— quite reddish— though the color was mostly an overlay on dark basalt. His color chart was not good at odd mixes.

  Sax had never descended into one of the big calderas before. And even many years spent inside impact craters did not prepare one, he found— for the depth of the chambers, the steepness of the walls, the flatness of the floor. The sheer size of things.

  Midafternoon he approached the foot of the northwest arc of the wall. The meeting of wall and floor came up over his horizon, and to his slight relief, the block shelter appeared directly before him; his APS setting had been quite accurate. Not a complicated bit of navigation, but in such an exposed place it was pleasant to be precisely on line. Ever since his experience in the storm so long ago, he had been a bit wary about getting lost. Although there would be no storms up here.

  As he approached the hut’s lock doors, a group of people appeared from out of the bottom of a stupendously huge steep gully in the vast broken cliff face, debouching onto the crater floor about a kilometer to the west of the refuge. Four figures, carrying big packs on their backs. Sax stopped, the sound of his breath loud in his helmet: he recognized the last figure immediately. Ann was coming in to resupply. Now he was going to have to think of something to say. And then remember it too.

  • • •

  Inside the hut Sax unclipped his helmet and took it off, feeling a familiar but most unwelcome tension in his stomach as he did. Every meeting with Ann it got worse. He turned around and waited. Finally Ann came in, and took off her helmet, and saw him. She started as if she were seeing a ghost. “Sax?” she cried.

  He nodded. He remembered when they had last met; long ago, on Da Vinci Island; it felt like a previous life. He had lost his tongue.

  Ann shook her head, smiled to herself. She crossed the room with an expression he couldn’t read, and held his arms in her two hands, and leaned forward and kissed his cheek gently. When she pulled back, one of her hands continued to clutch his left arm, sliding down to the wrist. She was staring right into him, and her grip was like metal. Sax was speechless again, although he very much wanted to speak. But there was nothing to say, or too much, he couldn’t even tell which it was; his tongue was again paralyzed. That hand on his wrist; it was more incapacitating than any glare or cutting remark had ever been.

  A wave seemed to pass through her, and she became somewhat more the Ann he knew, looking at him suspiciously, then with alarm. “Everyone’s okay?”

  “Yes yes,” Sax said. “I mean— you heard about Michel?”

  “Yes.” Her mouth tightened, for a second she became the black Ann of his dreams. Then another wave passed through her, and she was this new stranger, still clutching his wrist as if trying to snip his hand off. “But now you’re just here to see me.”

  “Yes. I wanted to”— he searched wildly for a finish to the sentence— “. . . to talk! Yes— to, to, to, to, to ask you some questions. I’m having some trouble with my memory. I wondered if I, if we could travel up here, and talk. Hike”— he gulped—”or climb. You could show me some of the caldera?”

  She was smiling. Again it was some other Ann. “You can climb with me if you want.”

  “I’m not a climber.”

  “We’ll go up an easy route. Up Wang’s Gully, and over the great circle to north circle, I’ve wanted to get up there while it’s still summer anyway.”

  “It’s Ls 200, actually. But I mean, it sounds good.” His heart was beating at about 150 beats a minute.

  • • •

  Ann had all the equipment they needed, it turned out. The next morning, as they were suiting up, she said to him, “Here, take that off.” Pointing at his wristpad.

  “Oh dear,” Sax said. “I— isn’t it really part of the suit’s system?”

  It was, but she shook her head. “The suit is autonomous.”

  “Semiautonomous, I hope.”

  She smiled. “Yes. But no wristpad is necessary. Look— that thing connects you to the whole world. It’s your manacle to spacetime. Today let’s just be in Wang’s Gully. It will be enough.”

  It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting up through steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day Sax followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one, scrambling up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom with the feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an ankle. “This isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this the kind of climbing you always do?”

  “This isn’t climbing at all.”

  “Ah.”

  So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly speaking, unjustifiable.

  And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by horizontal fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and gritting his teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his boot tips and gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down Wang’s Gully, which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it had in any given section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of fatigued excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk his position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer just as he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly pitted, its dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on one crack over a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that crack; was it deep enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to try to find out. So he took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it turned out it was not really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull, groaning involuntarily at the effort, he was up and past it, using holds he never even consciously saw; and then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann, breathing very heavily. She sat serenely on a narrow ledge.

  “Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.

  “Ah.”

  “Got your attention, did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “No memory problems, I trust?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I like about climbing.”

  Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up, Sax said, “So have you been having memory problems?”

  “Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this crack here.”

  “Indeed.”

  • • •

  That night they lay in sleeping bags, in a clear mushroom tent big enough to hold ten. At this altitude, with its superthin atmosphere, it was impressive to consider the strength of the tent fabric, holding in 450 millibars of air with no sign of untoward bulging at any point; the clear material was nice and taut, but not rock hard; no doubt it was holding many bars of air less than would test its holding capacity. When Sax recalled the meters of rock and sandbags they had had to pile on their earliest habitats to keep them from exploding, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the subsequent advancements in materials science.

  Ann nodded when he spoke of this. “We’ve moved beyond our abil
ity to understand our technology.”

  “Well. It’s understandable, I think. Just hard to believe.”

  “I suppose I see the distinction,” she said easily.

  Feeling more comfortable, he brought up memory again. “I’ve been having what I call blank-outs, where I can’t remember my thoughts of the previous several minutes, or up to say an hour. Short-term-memory failures, having to do with brain-wave fluctuations, apparently. And the long-term past is getting very uncertain as well, I’m afraid.”

  For a long time she didn’t reply, except to grunt that she’d heard him. Then:

  “I’ve forgotten my whole self. I think there’s someone else in me now. In partway. A kind of opposite. My shadow, or the shadow of my shadow. Seeded, and growing inside me.”

  “How do you mean?” Sax said apprehensively.

  “An opposite. She thinks just what I wouldn’t have thought.” She turned her head away, as if shy. “I call her Counter-Ann.”

  “And how would you— characterize her?”

  “She is . . . I don’t know. Emotional. Sentimental. Stupid. Cries at the sight of a flower. Feels that everyone is doing their best. Crap like that.”

  “You weren’t like that before, at all?”

  “No no no. It’s all crap. But I feel it as though it’s real. So . . . now there’s Ann and Counter-Ann. And . . . maybe a third.”

  “A third?”

  “I think so. Something that isn’t either of the other two.”

  “And what do you— I mean, do you call that one anything?”

  “No. She doesn’t have a name. She’s elusive. Younger. Fewer ideas about things, and those ideas are— strange. Not Ann or Counter-Ann. Somewhat like that Zo, did you know her?”

  “Yes,” Sax said, surprised. “I liked her.”

  “Did you? I thought she was awful. And yet . . . there’s something like that in me as well. Three people.”

  “It’s an odd way to think of it.”

  She laughed. “Aren’t you the one who had a mental lab that contained all your memories, filed by room and cabinet number or something?”

  “That was a very effective system.”

  She laughed again, harder. It made him grin to hear it. Though he was frightened too. Three Anns? Even one had been more than he could understand.

  “But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my past. Some people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible the palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved. But if you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So, I’ll run across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance, and try to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever, and the whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never happened.”

  “A problem with the palace.”

  “Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my— my incident— I was sure nothing would ever happen to my ability to— to think.”

  “You still seem to think okay.”

  Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-outs, the gaps in memory, the presque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical or cognitive ability, but something more general. . . . He tried to describe what had been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be listening closely. “So you see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done on memory. It’s gotten interesting— pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and the Acheron labs have been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something that might help us.”

  “A memory drug, you mean?”

  “Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So. My notion is to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a number of the First Hundred gathered at Underhill, and take it together. Context is very important to recollection, and the sight of each other might help. Not everyone is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining First Hundred are, actually.”

  “Not so surprising. Who?”

  He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of them left; a dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I know I would like it more than anything.”

  “It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross this caldera.”

  • • •

  Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of their world. The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on this day, and no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The stretch of ten minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The feeling in one’s legs.

  And there were the rings of the calderas around them, jutting far into the sky even when the two walkers were out in the center of the central circle, out where the later, deeper calderas appeared as big embayments in a single wall’s roundness. Out here the planet’s sharp curvature had no effect on one’s perspective, the curve was for once invisible, the cliffs free and clear even thirty kilometers away. The net effect, it seemed to Sax, was of a kind of enclosure. A park, a stone garden, a maze with only one wall separating it from the world beyond, the world which, though invisible, conditioned everything here. The caldera was big but not big enough. You couldn’t hide here. The world poured in and overflowed the mind, no matter its hundred-trillion-bit capacity. No matter how big the neural array there was still just a single thread of awed mentation, consciousness itself, a living wire of thought saying rock, cliff, sky, star.

  • • •

  The rock became heavily cracked by fissures, each one an arc of a circle with its center point back in the middle of the central circle: old cracks relative to the big new holes of the north and south circles, old cracks filled with rubble and dust. These rock crevasses made their walk into a wandering ramble— in a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls, yet just as difficult of passage as a walled one.

  But they threaded it, and finally reached the rim of north circle, number 2 on Sax’s map. Looking down into it gave them a new perspective— a proper shape to the caldera and its circular embayments, a sudden drop to a heretofore hidden floor, a thousand meters below.

  Apparently there was a climbing route down onto the floor of north circle; but when Ann saw the look on his face as she pointed it out— achievable only by rappelling— she laughed. They would only have to climb up out of it again, she said easily, and the main caldera wall was already tall enough. They could hike around north circle to another route instead.

  Surprised by this flexibility, and thankful for it, Sax followed her around the north circle on its west circumference. Under the great wall of the main caldera they stopped for the night, popped the tent, ate in silence.

  After sunset Phobos shot up over the western wall of the caldera like a little gray flare. Fear and dread, what names.

  “I heard that putting the moons back in orbit was your idea?” Ann said from her sleeping bag.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Now that’s what I call landscape restoration,” she said, sounding pleased.

  Sax felt a little glow. “I wanted to please you.”

  After a silence: “I like seeing them.”

  “And how did you like Miranda?”

  “Oh, it was very interesting.” She talked about some of the geological features of the odd moon. Two planetesimals, impacted, joined together imperfectly. . . .

  “There’s a color between red and green,” Sax said when it appeared she was done talking about Miranda. “A mixture of the two. Madder alizarin, it’s sometimes called. You see it in plants sometimes.”

  “Uh-huhn.”

  “It makes me think of the political situation. If there couldn’t be some kind of red-green synthesis.”

  “Browns.”

  “Yes. Or alizarins.”

  “I thought that’s what this Free Mars-Red coalition was, Irishka and the people who tossed out Jackie.”

  “A
n anti-immigration coalition,” Sax said. “The wrong kind of red-green combination. In that they’re embroiling us in a conflict with Earth that isn’t necessary.”

  “No?”

  “No. The population problem is soon going to be eased. The issei— we’re hitting the limit, I think. And the nisei aren’t far behind.”

  “Quick decline, you mean.”

  “Exactly. When it gets our generation, and the one after, the human population of the solar system will be less than half what it is now.”

  “Then they’ll figure out a different way to screw it up.”

  “No doubt. But it won’t be the Hypermalthusian Age anymore. It’ll be their problem. So, worrying so much about immigration, to the point of causing conflict, threatening interplanetary war . . . it just isn’t necessary. It’s shortsighted. If there was a red movement on Mars pointing that out, offering to help Earth through the last of the surge years, it might keep people from killing each other, needlessly. It would be a new way of thinking about Mars.”

  “A new areophany.”

  “Yes. That’s what Maya called it.”

  She laughed. “But Maya is crazy.”

  “Why no,” Sax said sharply. “She certainly is not.”

  Ann said no more, and Sax did not press the issue. Phobos moved visibly across the sky, backward through the zodiac.

  They slept well. The next day they made an arduous climb up a steep gully in the wall, which apparently Ann and the other red climbers considered the walker’s route out. Sax had never had such a hard day’s work in his life; and even so they didn’t make it all the way out, but had to pitch the tent in haste at sunset, on a narrow ledge, and finish their emergence the following day, around noon.

  • • •

  On the great rim of Olympus Mons, all was as before. A giant cored circle of flat land; the violet sky in a band around the horizon so far below, a black zenith above; little hermitages scattered in boulder ejecta that had been hollowed out. A separate world. Part of blue Mars, but not.