The Martians

  Peter pulled the masks apart, gave one to Roger. They put them on and grinned at the odd look that resulted. As the waiter had predicted, the terrace and the whole complex—hotel, restaurant, outbuildings, co-op quarters—were all quickly filling with people. Most of the masks people had on were much more elaborate than Roger's and Peter's. Apparently their wearers were locals of the region, mostly Swiss in the mountaineering and tourist trade; also a lot of Arabs from Nectaris Fossae, and from roving caravans rolling in for the night. The equinoctial sunset poured light directly up the great gorge of the canyon, illuminating everything horizontally; indeed it appeared that the sun was well below them, the light shining upward. Their terrace the edge of the world; the sky dark, and filled now with twirling flakes of snow, like bits of mica.

  The band started to play. Trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, bass, drums. They were loud. From Munchen, down to the south in Protva Vallis. Clearly favorites of the local Swiss—a privilege to have them there, you could tell by the enthusiastic response. Hot jazz blaring in the cold dusk.

  Peter and Roger ordered a pitcher of dark beer and cheered them on with the rest of the crowd. Some maskers danced, many sat, some stood and wandered from table to table, chatting with seated people or each other. Some groups had their waiters take rounds of grappa up to the band between songs, and happily the band members downed them, until they were saturated, at which point they passed the drinks out to people in the front row; two or three times these medicinal toasts came to Roger and Peter, who drained them in tandem. Without intending to they got a bit drunk. In the frequent “kleines pauses” they continued talking, but the noise of the crowd obscured their hearing, and they often found themselves misunderstanding each other.

  Eventually, after a rousing final number ("King of the Zulus,” with spectacular trumpeting by “our star, Dieter Lauterbaun!"), the band ended their first set. The two men ordered another round of grappa, which at that point had actually begun to taste good to them, even to become the one true ambrosia. The dusky evening was still chill, but the terrace remained crowded with the chattering crowd of masked celebrants; these were not the kind of people to be driven indoors by a few flakes of snow drifting onto their tabletops. The slight breeze both Claybornes recognized as the feel of basically still air, falling under its own weight over the cliff into the black canyon below.

  “I love this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It must be nice, taking people out into these kinds of nights.”

  “Yeah. If they're nice.”

  “I suppose that's variable.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But when they're really nice—you know?”

  “Ah yeah. Fun.”

  “So sometimes you . . .”

  “Well, you know. Sometimes.”

  “Sure.”

  “It's not like teacher and student, or lawyer and client.”

  “Not a power relationship.”

  “No. Shouldn't be. I guide them—they can take it or leave it. They hire me. A matter of equals. If something else happens . . .”

  “Sure.”

  “But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I have to admit it's not happening as much lately, now I think of it. I don't know why.”

  They laughed.

  “Just chance.”

  “Or age!”

  More laughter at this horrible possibility.

  “Yeah—the tourists are getting too old.”

  “Ah ha ha. Exactly. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Well, the thing is, it's more trouble than it's worth.”

  “Ah yeah. Getting them to go back home.”

  “Yeah, sure. Or not getting to go home with them! I mean, either way. . . .”

  “Well, that way's worse, clearly.”

  “Yes it is. I remember the first time it happened. I was young, she was young. . . .”

  “It was love.”

  “It was! I mean really. But what were we supposed to do? She was a student, I was a guide. I couldn't just quit, even if I wanted to. And I didn't. I couldn't leave the land. And she couldn't leave her work either. So . . .”

  “That's tough. You hear about that kind of thing a lot. People's work taking them in different directions, what they do—”

  “What they are!”

  “Right. Keeping them apart even when they, when the feeling between them . . .”

  “It's hard.” Big sigh. “It was hard. That time it—I don't know. It was hard. Nothing since has really ever felt the same.”

  Long silence.

  “You never saw her again?”

  “I did, actually. We ran into each other, and then after that we've stayed in touch, sort of. I see her every few years. It's always the same. She's great, she really is. She even got into canyon guiding herself, for a while there. And I can still see why I felt that way about her, so long ago. And she even seems to feel sort of the same. But, you know. . . .”

  “No?”

  “Well, one or the other of us is always partnered with someone else! It never fails. She's been single when I've been partnered, and vice versa.” A shake of the head. “It keeps happening.”

  “I know that story.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. A long time ago. Like yours, sort of, though . . .”

  “Someone you met?”

  “Someone I grew up with, sort of. In Zygote. You know Jackie Boone?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, when she was a kid, she thought I was—well, I was it for her.” A shrug. “But she was just a kid. Even when she had grown up a bit, I thought she was just a kid. Then one time years later I ran into her when I was—when I had been alone a long time.”

  Deep nod.

  “And she was—grown-up. She'd been living in Sabishii and Dorsa Brevia. She had become one of the great ones. A power. And still interested. So finally I was ready, you know, and we got together, and it was incredible. I was . . . I was in love, sure. But the thing was, she wasn't really interested anymore. Not in the same way. It had just been settling old business. Like doing a climb just to show you can, but without the feeling you had when you couldn't do it.”

  “People do that.”

  “All the time. So, well, I got over it. She's become, I don't know, kind of strange these days anyway. But I think that if we had ever been in the same place, you know, in the same frame of mind, at the same time. . . .”

  “Sure. That's just it with me and Eileen. I think we might have . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  The sodden, somber silence of the what-might-have-been.

  “Lost chances.”

  “Right. The fate of chance.”

  “Some fate is character.”

  “Sure. But most fate is fate. It's what picks you up and carries you off. Who you meet by accident, what happens—what you feel inside, no matter what you think. And it affects everything. Everything! Every thing. People argue about politics, and when people write history books they talk about politics, and policy, the reasons why people did this or that—but it's always the personal stuff that mattered.”

  “It's always the stuff they don't write about. The stuff they can't write about. The look in someone's eye.”

  “Right, the way something catches you. . . .”

  “The way it carries you away.”

  “Like falling in love. Whatever the hell that means.”

  “That's it, sure. Falling in love, being loved back—”

  “Or not.”

  “Right, or not! And everything changes.”

  “Everything.”

  “And no one knows why! And later on, or from anywhere on the outside, they look at your story and they say that story makes no sense.”

  “When if you only knew—”

  “Then it would make sense.”

  “Yes. Perfect sense.”

  “It would be the story of the heart, every time.”

  ??
?A history of the emotions. If you could do it.”

  “It would be the heart's story.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means . . . when you're trying to decide what to do—in the here and now, you know. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  Another long thoughtful silence. The band came back for its second set, and the two men watched them play, both lost in their own thoughts. Eventually they got up to go into the men's room, and afterward they went back out and wandered the milling crowd, and got separated and did not run into each other again. The band finished its second set, then played a third, and it was nearly sunrise before the crowd finally dispersed, the two men among them. And one of them left determined to act. And the other one didn't.

  Coyote Remembers

  I followed her everywhere she went, and then she was gone. You don't know what that does to you—loss. Or maybe you do. Sure, everyone does. Who hasn't lost someone they love? It's impossible to avoid. So you know how I felt.

  After that it's your friends who save you. Maya. Later on we couldn't sleep together because she was with Michel, but it wasn't like that with her anyway, except the once. She's like a sister, or something better than that, some ex-lover friend, who is for you no matter what who's there even when she's not. Like when those high-altitude climbers hallucinate companions who aren't there, keeping them company up in the jet stream, the death zone. She's my brother.

  And Nirgal. It is so strange to look at him and think that he in his genetic material is half me and half Hiroko. I don't see how that can be or how it might explain anything. Who knows how that works anyway. It could be that genes are the accidental sign of some deeper thing, some morphic resonance or implicate order—but nothing can be said, probably we shouldn't even use those names, because then it's just another level, with the real cause still left below, unexplained. Sax always worried about how much was unexplainable. But we are pattern dust devils in the unexplainable. Flying on an unknowable wind. Hiroko and I collided like two dust devils spinning into each other—that happens—and the resulting dust devil was Nirgal, golden boy that he is. Such a pleasure it is to me to watch him flow through his life, fly through it always high, in good spirits, active, inquisitive, interested, empathic. Lucky.

  But only when he was young, before the revolution succeeded. After that—things changed. Maybe it wasn't that simple. He was always looking for something. Hiroko—she's like a big hole in all our lives. The one that got away. And then Jackie was no help either. Let us not mince words here, that woman was a bitch. That was why I liked her, myself. She was tough, and she knew what she wanted. She and Nirgal were actually a lot alike in that sense, it should have worked. But it didn't, and that poor boy wandered the world as lonely as old Coyote himself. And he didn't have Maya—or he did, but for him she replaced Hiroko, not Jackie. Not motherless but partnerless. I felt for him. You see couples who have grown together like two old trees making one plant, trunks intertwined like the double helix itself, and you think, Yes that's the way it's supposed to be. It wouldn't be so lonely then. But there you are. You can't make partners by wanting them.

  So it's back to friends, and loneliness. And so I watched Nirgal live his lives like a second self cast loose on the wind. We all live the same stories. Nirgal is like a brother to me.

  And Sax is my brother in wonder. In all truth, there isn't a purer soul in the world. He's so innocent that you can't think of him as truly smart. All his intelligence is thrown in one deep hole, and as for the rest he's a newborn babe. The interesting thing is to watch a mind like that try to use its one talent to educate the rest of him. To get along. After his accident—after those fuckers torched his brain I should say—he had to do it all again from scratch too. And that second time he got it right. He got all round. Michel helped—hell, Michel threw him like a vase. And I helped too I think. I took that vase through the kiln, through the fiery furnace. Now he's my brother in arms, the person I love above all—but they all—well you know. There is no above and below in this realm. He is my brother.

  As for Michel, I can't speak of it yet. I miss him.

  And Hiroko too, God damn her. If she ever reads this, if she really is alive and out there hiding as they all say, which I doubt, may she get the message: God damn you. Come back.

  Sax Moments

  When Sax was pretending to be Stephen Lindholm, he often asked the lab's computer to display articles from The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and though most of the articles were silly, some made him laugh. He was still spluttering one day when he came into Claire and Berkina's lab to describe to them Henry Lewis's “Data Enrichment Method."

  “Say you do an experiment to see if sounds can be detected at various decibel levels, and you have your data in a table. Then since you want more data but don't actually want to do more experiments, you assume that if a sound isn't heard at decibel level a, it wouldn't be heard at any lower levels either, and so you add the result of test a to all the trials at lower decibels.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Then say you're trying to prove that coin tosses are more likely to turn up heads the higher the altitude you make the toss at—”

  “What?”

  “That's your hypothesis, and you make your trial and arrange your data in the same kind of table, see here” (he had printed it out) “and it looks a little ambiguous, sure, but you just use the data enrichment method as described with the decibels, so that every time you get heads, you add it to all the tests higher up the stairs, and there you have it—the higher on the stairs you toss the coin, the more heads you get! Very convincing!” And he collapsed on a chair, giggling. “It's exactly how Simons showed that CO

  levels were going to drop after they got them to two bar.”

  Claire and Berkina stared at him, nonplussed. Claire said, “Stephen likes the reductio ad absurdum."

  “I do,” Sax admitted, “I definitely do.”

  “It's science,” Berkina said. “Science in a nutshell.”

  And they all sat there grinning.

  "Nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."

  Sax read that in a book and went out for a walk to think it over.

  When he came back he read on. “If one has character one also has one's typical experience, which recurs repeatedly.”

  Sax found this Nietzsche an interesting writer.

  The more Sax studied memory, the more worried he got that there would be anything they could ever do to improve it. During one night's reading early on, the worry turned to cold fear.

  He was reviewing the classic Rose papers on memory in chicks whose intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrales had been burned away before or after training sessions with sweet or bitter pellets of food. Chicks that had been given left-hemisphere IMHV lesions forgot later lessons to avoid a bitter pellet; chicks with right-side lesions remembered. This gave one the impression that it was the left IMHV that was necessary to memory. But if the training was done before the lesions, the chicks needed neither IMHV to recall the lesson. Perhaps, Rose postulated, the memory was actually stored in the lobus parolfactorius, left or right, so that once learned, neither IMHV was needed. Further lesions seemed to confirm this hypothesis, eventually justifying a pathway model, in which lessons are first registered in the left IMHV, then move to the right IMHV, and then move on to both the left and right LPOs. And if this model were correct, then a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, already shown not to be amnestic by itself, would disrupt this flow, and post-training LPO lesions, otherwise amnestic, would no longer be so because the memory would have been stranded in the left IMHV. And that proved to be the case. It followed, then, that a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, followed by a posttraining left-IMHV lesion, would also produce amnesia, for first the transfer path would be blocked, and then the only repository destroyed.

  Except it wasn't so. Right lesion; train chick; recall displayed; left le
sion; and the chick still recalled the lesson. The memory had escaped.

  Sax left his desk and took a walk down to the corniche to think this over. Also to recover from the stab of fear that had struck him: that they would never understand. Darkness, voices from restaurants, clanking dishes, starlight on the still sea. He couldn't find Maya, she was in none of her usual haunts.

  He sat on one of their benches anyway. The mind was a mystery. Memories were nowhere and everywhere: The brain had a tremendous equipotentiality, it was a hugely complex dynamic system, almost anything was possible.

  In theory that should be a cause for hope. Surely with such a flexible, versatile system, they could shore up the failing parts, shunt the memories elsewhere. If that was the right way to state it. Very possibly; but in such an immensity, how could they learn (quickly enough) what to do? Didn't the very power of the system place it beyond their comprehension? So that the greatness of the human mind actually added to the great unexplainable, rather than lessened it?

  Dark sky, dark sea. Sax got up and walked, clutched the railing of the corniche, teeth clenched as he suddenly thought of Michel. Michel would have welcomed this great unexplainable inside them. He had to learn to consider it as Michel had.

  A clenching of all one's muscles did not actually impede or redirect one's thoughts. He groaned and took off again in search of Maya.

  Another time, thinking about aspects of this same problem, he went down to the corniche and found Maya in one of her usual haunts, and they went out to a bench to sit and watch the sunset, bags of food in hand, and Sax announced to her, “The thing that makes us specifically human doesn't exist."

  “How so?”

  “Well, we are just animals, mostly. But we have a consciousness which sets us apart, because we have language and memory.”

  “Those exist.”

  “True, but the only reason they work is because of the past. We remember the past, we learn from it, and everything we have learned is in the past. And the past, being past, properly speaking does not exist. Its presence in us is an illusion only. So the thing that makes us human does not exist!”