Blue Mars (75 page)

Now, however, he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go
back into the kitchen, past the table on which Michel’s scrapbooks were
spre’ad. Face up was a photo of Frank that Maya had treasured long ago; she had
had it taped to the kitchen cabinet by the sink, in the apartment down the
hall—Sax remembered that most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature of
those tense years: all of them struggling while the young Frank laughed at
them.

Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely.
Remembering their earlier dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very
long ago.

But she said, “What an interesting face.”

Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the
physiological manifestations of distress. To lose the substance of a
speculative train of thought, a venture into the metaphysical—that was one
thing. But this—her own past, their past—it was insupportable. Not to be
abided. He would not abide it.

Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had
tears in her eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing
something seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.

The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.

“More and more like that,” Michel muttered, looking haunted. “More
and more. I feel it myself. But for Maya. . . .” He shook his head, looking
deeply discouraged. Even Michel could make nothing good of this, Michel who had
worked his alchemy of optimism on all their previous reversals, making them
part of his great story, the myth of Mars that he had somehow wrenched out of
the daily morass. But this was the death of story. Thus hard to mythol-ogize.
No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.
Something was going to have to be done.

Sax was still thinking about this, sitting in a corner absorbed in
his wristpad, reading a collection of abstracts from recent experimental work
on the memory, when there came a thump from the kitchen and a cry from Nadia.
Sax rushed in to find Nadia and Art crouched over Michel, who lay white-faced
on the floor. Sax called the concierge, and faster than he would have imagined
possible an emergency crew had barged in with their equipment and shouldered
Art aside, big young natives who brusquely encased Michel into their compact
web of machinery, leaving the old ones as spectators only of their
friend’s—struggle.

Sax sat down among the medics, in their way, and put a hand to
Michel’s neck and shoulder. Michel’s breathing had stopped, his pulse as well.
White-faced. The resuscitation attempts were violent, the electrical shocks
tried at a variety of strengths, the subsequent shift to heart-lung machine
accomplished with a minimum of fuss; and the young medics worked in near
silence, talking among themselves only when necessary, seemingly unaware of the
old ones sitting against the wall. They did all they could; but Michel remained
stubbornly, mysteriously dead.

Of course he had been upset by Maya’s memory failure. But this did
not seem an adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya’s problem,
none more so, and he had-been worried; so any single display of her problem
shouldn’t have mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course
eventually—quite late that evening, actually, after the doctors had finally
given up, and taken Michel downstairs, and were clearing out their
equipment—Maya returned, and they had to tell her what had happened.

She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much
for one of the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won’t work, Sax
wanted to say, I’ve tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for
his pains, which made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.

Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.

“I can’t do this anymore,” the man said after a while. He shook
his head, seemingly apologetic. “It’s pointless. We come and do all we can and
it makes no difference. Nothing stops the quick decline.”

“Which is?” Sax said.

The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. “That’s the
problem. No one knows.”

“Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?”

“Heart arrhythmia,” said one of the other medics curtly as he
passed by with some equipment.

“That’s just the symptom,” the sitting man snarled, and sniffed
again. “Why does it go arrhythmic? And why doesn’t CPR restart it?”

No one answered.

Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya
crying on the couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax
realized that even if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.

Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped
at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline;
8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled
by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at
the stage of observation and initial hypothesis . .. flailing. In many ways it
resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long
they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel
himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained
their unexplainables—Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had
taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel
was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version .of his body
out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was
an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest,
this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense.

But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of
the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems
seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be
devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.

Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the
wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each
time it got worse for her. And the same for him.

Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a
pinch for return to Provence.

The literature on longevity
, and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it
difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work
on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles
on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller
understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had
never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively
because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject
very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to
Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and
Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major
modifications since then.

Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time
to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.

There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on
their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted
zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its
appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the
zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the
longevity treatments had been about—keeping various incursions of chaos (like
arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting
the organism.

But now something was causing the gerontologically treated
individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence—or,
even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at
all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone
of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one
very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he
could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the
mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the
order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one
of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math
gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been
too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all
was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical
science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be
something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had
resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically,
resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of
mysteries.. ..

Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks’
absorbed reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field
than he had ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the
longevity treatment consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the
subject’s own DNA, the artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones
already in the cells, so that the breaks and errors that crept in over time
were repaired, and the strands generally strengthened. This much was true; but
the longevity treatment was more than this, just as senescence itself was more
than cell-division error. It was, as one might have predicted, much more
complicated than just breaking chromosomes; it was an entire complex of
processes. And while some were well understood, others were not. Senes-cencial
action (aging) took place on every level: molecule, cell, organ, organism. Some
senescence resulted from hormonal effects that were positive for the young
organism in its reproductive phase, and only later negative for the
post-reproductive animal, when in evolutionary terms it no longer mattered.
Some cell lines were virtually immortal; bone-marrow cells and the mucus in the
gut went on replicating for as long as their surroundings were alive, with no
sign at all of time-related changes. Other cells, such as the nonreplaced
proteins in the lens of the eye, underwent change that was driven by exposure to
heat or light, regular enough to function as a kind of biological chronometer.
Each kind of cell line aged at a different speed, or did not age at all; thus
it was not just “a matter of time” in the sense of a kind of Newtonian absolute
time, working entropically on an organism; there was no such time. Rather it
was a great many trains of specific physical and chemical events, moving at
different speeds, and with varying effects. There was a fantastically large
number of cell-repair mechanisms inherent in any large organism, and an immune
system of great and various power; the longevity treatments often supplemented
these processes, or worked on them directly, or replaced them. The treatment
now included supplements of the enzyme photolyase, to correct DNA damage, and
supplements of the pineal hormone melatonin, and dehydroepiandrosterone, a
steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands. .. .There were about two
hundred components like these in the longevity treatment now.

So vast, so complex—sometimes Sax finished his day’s reading and
walked down to Odessa’s seafront, to sit on the corniche with Maya, and he
would pause in eating a burrito and stare at it—contemplate everything that
went into its digestion, everything that kept them alive—feel his breath which
he had never noted at all, before—and suddenly he would feel breathless—lose
his appetite—lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more
than a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of
astrophysics. Like a house of cards a hundred stories tall, in a wind. Tap it
anywhere.... It was lucky Maya did not require much in the way of active
companionship, because often he was rendered speechless for many minutes at a
time, rapt in the contemplation of his own evident impossibility.

But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with
an enigma. And there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on
the frontiers, and beside him in related fields, from the small—virology, where
the inquiries into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even
smaller forms, almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis,
vs, all of which might have relevance to the larger problem.... All the way up
to the large organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their
relationship to the heart and other organs, or the pineal gland’s
ever-decreasing secretions of melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many
aspects of aging. Sax followed them all, trying to glean a new view by his
later and hopefully larger perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what
seemed important, and study that.

Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the
subject blanked out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to
get these thought flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk
aloud to himself, frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would
help to forestall the blanks; but again, it didn’t work. It simply was not a
verbal process.

In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every
evening, if he noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the
staircase streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four
different benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the
harbor to the sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy
a burrito or a gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next
to her. She would nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they
sat and watched the sea. “How was your day?” “Okay. And yours?” He did not
attempt to talk much about his reading, and she didn’t say much about her
hydrology, or the theater productions that she would go off to after dusk had
fallen. Really they didn’t have much to say to each other. But it was
companionable anyway. And one evening the sunset flared to an unusual lavender
brilliance, and Maya said, “I wonder what color that is?” and Sax had ventured,
“Lavender?”

“But lavender is usually more pastel, isn’t it?”

Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help
him see the colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up
anyway, and compared various sample squares to the sky. “We need a bigger
screen.” And then they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or
somewhere between light violet and pale violet.

And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable
how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the
whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than
there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise
to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten
million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had
1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most
evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the
sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no
name. They made up names: 2 October the llth Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon
Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really
good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a
moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax
found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had
surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One
evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart
methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve,
amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo,
hyacinth, ultramarine—and then they were into the many words for the blues.
There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for
the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.

One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down
behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the
sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her
clawlike grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet
from space, what we saw from the Aresl Look! Quick, what color is that, what
color is that?”

They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika
red.” “Tomato red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s
affinity for iron makes that color after all.”

“But it’s way too dark, look.”

“True.”

“Brownish red.”

“Reddish brown.”

Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown,
Sahara, chrome orange . .. they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll
call it Martian orange,” Maya decided.

“Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors
than there are for the purples, why is that?”

Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the
chart, to see if they said anything about it. “Ah. It appears that the cones in
the retina contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around
those three have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites.”
Then in the empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he
read it aloud:

“Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived
simultaneously as components of the same color.”

“That’s not true,” Maya said immediately. “That’s just because
they’re using a color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides.”

“What do you mean? That there’s more colors than these?”

“Of course. Artists’ colors, theater colors; you put a green spot
and a red spot on someone and you get a color all right, and it’s not red or
green.”

“But what is it? Does it have a name?”

“I don’t know. Look in an artist’s color wheel.”

And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: “Here. Burnt
umber, Indian red, madder alizarin . . . those are all green-red mixes.”

“Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don’t you find that suggestive?”

She gave him a look. “We’re talking about colors here, Sax, not
politics.”

“I know, I know. But still. ...”

“No. Don’t be silly.”

“But don’t you think we need a red-green mix?”

“Politically? There’s a red-green mix already, Sax. That’s the
trouble. Free Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that’s why
they’re having such success. They’re teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth,
and soon after that we’ll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it
coming. We’re spiraling down into it again.”

“Hmm,” Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar
systemic politics these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye
for these things, was getting more and more worried about it—with her usual
mordant Mayan dash of satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps
not as bad as she thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon,
pay attention. But meanwhile—

“Look, it’s gone indigo, right over the mountains.” Intense saw
edge of black below, purple blue above....