Blue Mars (74 page)

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 an-thropic 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 small 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.

So, well; these incidents were just one of the many conditions
they had to adapt to in their unnaturally prolonged old age. It was very
inconvenient, even irritating. No doubt the matter ought to be investigated,
although memory was a notorious quagmire for brain science. And it was somewhat
like the leaky-roof problem; immediately after such a lost train of thought,
with the absent shape of it still in his mind, and the emotional excitation, it
almost drove him mad; but as the content of the thought was forgotten, half an
hour later it did not seem much more significant than the slipping away of
dreams in the minutes after waking. He had other things to worry about.

Such as the death of his friends. Yeli Zudov this time, a member
of the First Hundred he had never known well; nevertheless he went down to
Odessa, and after a memorial service, a lugubrious affair during which Sax was
frequently distracted by thoughts of Vlad, of Spencer, of Phyllis, and then of
Ann—they returned to the Praxis building, and sat in Michel and Maya’s
apartment. It was not the same apartment they had lived in before the second
revolution, but Michel had taken pains to make it look much the same, as far as
Sax could recall—something about Maya’s therapy, as she was having more and
more mental trouble—Sax wasn’t sure what the latest was. He had never been able
to deal with the more melodramatic aspects of Maya, and he hadn’t paid overmuch
attention to Michel’s talk about her when the two of them last got together—it
was always different, always the same.