Blue Mars (72 page)

“Hmm.” Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But
it was depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the
other side, just because the problem was getting hard. “Still, whatever you do
has to take the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate
anyway, and back it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That’s what’s
been happening with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to
keep it at the lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with
the immigrants as they come.”

The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out
at the fresh blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, “The exmetas are a problem
as well. They want to come here even more than the UN.”

“Of course.” It was no surprise to Maya that the old
meta-nationals were still such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the
Praxis model to survive, and so with that fundamental change in their nature,
they were no longer like totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but
they were still big and strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of
capital accumulated; and they still wanted to do business, to make their
members’ livings. Strategies for doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes
not: one could make things that people really needed, in a new and better way;
or one could play the angles, try to press advantages, try to inflate false
needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of strategies, of course, trying to stabilize
by diversification as in their old investment days. But that made fighting the
bad strategies even harder in a way, because everyone was pursuing them to some
extent. And now a lot of exmetas were pursuing very active Martian programs,
working for the Terran governments and shipping people up from Earth, building
cities and starting farms, mining, production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that
emigration from Earth to Mars would not cease until there was an exact balance
in their fullnesses; which given the hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would
be a disaster for Mars.

“Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently. “Nevertheless, we have to try to
help, and we have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis a
vis Earth. Or else it will be war.”

So Charlotte and Ariadne went away, both looking as worried as
Maya felt. And it suddenly occurred to Maya, very grimly, that if they were
coming to her for help, then they were in deep trouble indeed.

So her direct political work picked up again, although she tried
to keep a limit on it. She seldom traveled away from Odessa, except for AWT
business. She did not stop working with her theater group, which in any case
was now the true heart of her political work. But she started going to meetings
again, and rallies, and sometimes she took the stage and spoke. Werteswandel
took many forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for
Odessa’s seat in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of
Friends, if they couldn’t find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a
chance to think it over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in
the end they decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group,
who worked in the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped
that, and went on doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less
actively—feeling more and more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a
planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following—that was what Earth’s
history since the nineteenth century existed to prove. So they had to be
careful, and not let too many people up—it was a tightrope act—but coping with
a limited period of overpopulation was better than dealing with an outright
invasion, and this was a point she made in meeting after meeting.

And all this time Nirgal was out there in the outback, wandering
in his nomadic life and talking to the ferals and the farmers, and, she hoped,
having his usual effect on the Martian worldview, on what Michel called its
collective unconscious. She pinned a lot of her hopes on Nirgal. And did her
best to deal with this other strand in her life, to face up to history, in some
ways the darkest strand of all, as it stitched its course through her life and
bunched it up, in a big twisting loop, back into the foreboding that had
prevailed during her previous life in Odessa.

So that was already a kind of malign deja vu. And then the real
deja 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 spa-cetime 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
non-stereotemporal 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 deja 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 cresent-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 menage a
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....