Blue Mars (76 page)

“That’s not indigo, it’s royal blue.”

“But they shouldn’t call it blue if it’s got some red in it.”

“Shouldn’t. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king’s blue, they
all have red in them.”

“But that color on the horizon isn’t any of those.”

“No, you’re right. Nondescript.”

They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206;
a new color. And so another evening passed.

Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost
bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate
of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun
dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked
up from her salade nicoise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and
she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient
veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed
hamburger in a lump, “Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue,
Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their
retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for
precisely that color, the home they had left forever.

Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and
more complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus
to the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on
the papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of
the problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible
both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical
activity, protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests
they had managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain
during mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain
included calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of
melatonin it produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the
longevity treatment, but of course it would be better to stop the calcification
from occurring in the first place, for it probably had other effects. Then
there was a clear growth in the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were
protein filament aggregates that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure
on them, perhaps the analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her
presque vus, who could say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the
cerebral blood vessels and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals,
again impeding function. And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and
hippocampus accumulated calpain, which meant they were vulnerable to calcium
influxes, which damaged them. And these were nondividing cells, the same age as
the organism itself; damage to them was permanent, as during Sax’s stroke. He
had lost a lot of his brain in that incident, he didn’t like to think of it.
And the ability of the molecules in these nondividing cells to replace
themselves could also be damaged, a smaller but over time equally significant
loss. Autopsies of people over two hundred who had died of the quick decline
regularly showed serious calcification of the pineal gland, coupled with
increases in calpain levels in the hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain
levels generally were both implicated in some of the leading current models of
how the memory worked. It was an interesting connection.

But all inconclusive. And no one was going to solve the mystery by
literature review alone. But the experiments that might clear things up were
not practical, given the inaccessibility of the living brain. You could kill
chicks and mice and rats and dogs and pigs and lemurs and chimps, you could
kill individuals of every species in creation, dissect the brains of their
fetuses and embryos as well, and still never find what you were looking for;
for it was autopsy itself that was insufficient to the task. And the various
live scans were likewise insufficient to the task, as the processes involved
were either more fine-grained than the scans could perceive, or more holistic,
or more combinatorial, or, probably, all three at once.

Still, some of the experiments and the resultant modeling were
suggestive; calpain buildup seemed to alter brain-wave function, for instance;
and this fact and others gave him ideas for further investigation. He began to
read intensively in the literature on the effects of calcium-binding protein
levels, on corticosteroids, on the calcium currents in the hippocampal
pyramidal neurons, and on the calcification of the pineal gland. It appeared
there were synergistic effects that might impact both memory and general
brainwave function, indeed all bodily rhythms, including heart rhythms. “Was
Michel experiencing any memory troubles?” Sax asked Maya. “Perhaps feeling that
he had lost entire trains of thought—even very useful trains of thought?”

Maya shrugged. By now Michel was almost a year gone. “I can’t
remember.”

It made Sax nervous. Maya seemed in retreat, her memory worse
every day. Even Nadia could do nothing for her. Sax met her down on the
corniche more and more frequently, it was a habit they both clearly must have
enjoyed, though they never spoke of that; they simply sat, ate a kiosk meal,
watched the sunset and pulled up their color charts to see if they would catch
another new one. But if it weren’t for the notations they made on the charts,
neither of them would have been sure whether the colors they saw were new or
not. Sax himself felt that he was experiencing his blank-outs more frequently,
perhaps some four to eight a day, although he couldn’t be sure. He took to
keeping his AI running a sound recorder permanently, activated by voice; and
rather than try to describe his complete train of thought, he just spoke a few
words that he hoped would later key a fuller recollection of what he had been
thinking. Thus at the end of the day he would sit down apprehensively or
hopefully, and listen to what the AI had captured during the day: and mostly it
was thought that he remembered thinking, but occasionally he would hear himself
say, “Synthetic melatonins may be a better antioxidant than natural ones, so
that there aren’t enough free radicals,” or “Viriditas is a fundamental
mystery, there will never be a grand unified theory,” without having any memory
of saying such things, or, often, what they might mean. But sometimes the
statements were suggestive, their meanings excavatable.

And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in
his undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was
surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of
stupendous parthenon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a
symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a
giant ongoing collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because
this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to
explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical
expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family
of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in the
different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to
explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of
particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so
that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger
structure. These standard models were somewhat like Kuhnian paradigms but in
reality (paradigms being a model of modeling) more supple and various, a
dialogic process in which thousands of minds had participated over the previous
hundreds of years; so that figures like Newton or Einstein or Vlad were not the
isolate giants of public perception, but the tallest peaks of a great mountain
range, as Newton himself had tried to make clear with his comment about
standing on the shoulders of giants. In truth the work of science was a
communal thing, extending back even beyond the birth of modern science, back
all the way into prehistory, as Michel had insisted; a constant struggle to
understand. Now of course it was highly structured, articulated beyond the
ability of any single individual to fully grasp. But this was only because of
the sheer quantity of it; the spectacular efflorescence of structure was not in
any particular incomprehensible, one could still walk around anywhere inside
the parthenon, so to speak, and thus comprehend at least the shape of the
whole, and make choices as to where to study, where to learn the current
surface, where to contribute. One could first learn the dialect of the language
relevant to the study; which in itself could be a formidable task, as in
su-perstring theory or cascading recombinant chaos; then one could survey the
background literature, and hopefully find some syncretic work by someone who
had worked long on the cutting edge, and was able to give a coherent account of
the status of the field for outsiders; this work, disparaged by most working
scientists, called the “gray literature” and considered a vacation or a
lowering of oneself on the part of the synthesist, was nevertheless often of
great value for someone coming in from the outside. With a general overview
(though it was better to think of it as an underview, with the actual workers
up there lost in the dim rafters and entablatures of the edifice), one could
then move up into the journals, the peer-reviewed “white literature,” where the
current work was being recorded; and one could read the abstracts, and get a
sense of who was attacking what part of the problem. So public, so explicit. .
. . And for any given problem in science, the people who were actually out
there on the edge making progress constituted a special group, of a few hundred
at most—often with a core group of synthesists and innovators that was no more
than a dozen people in all the worlds—inventing a new jargon of their dialect
to convey their new insights, arguing over results, suggesting new avenues of
investigation, giving each other jobs in labs, meeting at conferences specially
devoted to the topic—talking to each other, in all the media there were. And
there in the labs and the conference bars the work went forward, as a dialogue
of people who understood the issues, and did the sheer hard work of
experimentation, and of thinking about experiments.

And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in
the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing
and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and
if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics;
and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the
mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world. So Sax had
always believed, and no analysis by social scientists, nor even the troubling
experience of the Martian terraforming process, had ever caused him to waver in
that belief. Science was a social construct, but it was also and most
importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty.
Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the
poet had been right (they weren’t always).

And so Sax moved about in the great structure, comfortable,
capable, and on some levels content.

But he began to understand that as beautiful and powerful as
science was, the problem of biological senescence was perhaps too difficult.
Not too difficult to be solved ever, nothing was that, but simply too difficult
to be solved in his lifetime. Actually it was still an open question how hard a
problem it was. Their understanding of matter, space and time was incomplete,
and it might be that it would always necessarily shade off into metaphysics,
like the speculations about the cosmos before the Big Bang, or things smaller
than strings. On the other hand the world might be amenable to progressive
explanations, until it all (at least from string to cosmos) would be brought
someday within the realm of the great parthenon. Either result was possible,
the court was still out, the next thousand years or so should tell the tale.

But in the meantime, he was experiencing several blank-outs a day.
And sometimes he was short of breath. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat so
hard. Seldom did he sleep at night. And Michel was dead, so that Sax’s sense of
the meaning of things was becoming uncertain, and in great need of help. When
he managed to think at all on the level of meaning, he found that he felt he
was in a race. Him and everyone else, but especially the life scientists
actually at work on the problem: they were in a race with death. To win it,
they had to explain one of the greatest of the great unexplainables.

And one day, sitting down on a bench with Maya after a day in
front of his screen, thinking of the vastness of that growing wing of the
parthenon, he realized that it was a race he couldn’t win. The human species
might win it, someday, but it looked to be a long way off still. It was no
great surprise, really; he knew this; that is to say, he had always known it.
Labeling the current largest manifestation of the problem had not disguised to
him its profundity, “the quick decline” was just a name, inaccurate,
over-simple—not science, in fact, but rather an attempt (like “the Big Bang”)
to diminish and contain the reality, as yet not understood. In this case the
problem was simply death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life
and of time, this was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve.
Postponements, yes; solutions, no. “Reality itself is mortal,” he said.