Blue Mars (79 page)

Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black
and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with
light like the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black
mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting
at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”

Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said.
“Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than
any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying,
he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he
said Boone killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What
did you do?”

Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia,
never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had
hesitated. He had been afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a
distance away, and I didn’t know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled
him away. I—I watched. Then—then I was in a group running after them, I don’t
know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging
him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group . . . our group lost
them.”

“There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,”
Zeyk said. “There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”

“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group.
“Possibly.”

He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on
the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with
microscopic colored lightning.

“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not
Frank Chalmers.”

“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”

Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John,
and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”

“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.

“Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people
on each other. Nejm, perhaps…”

“Who is dead.”

“And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the
rioting that night....” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered
slightly.

“Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her
screen.

“Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been
attacked. Unsi... well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to
see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw
you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no
one had come back in by it.”

“Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.

Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were
part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that.
Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”

Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”

“Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been
found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was
new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you
were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and
Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”

Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait.. . an image
of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a
bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He
had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you
stop them? Didn’t you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he
hadn’t stopped them—that he had failed to help his friend—that he had stood
there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been assaulted and
dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.

But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the
whole rest of that night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the
lids shut as if that might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The
memory was odd that way; he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when
these realizations had stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the
limbic system and the emotional charge of every incident must be crucially
involved in the entrainment or encoding or embedding of a memory.

And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in
the clinic waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face
of the doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone’s death. “She
said, ‘He’s dead. Too long out there.’ And Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder,
and he jumped.”

“We have to tell Maya,” Nazik whispered.

“He said to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ which I thought was odd. She said
something to him about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And
Frank even agreed, but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he
said ‘What do you know about what I like or don’t like.’ So bitter. He didn’t
like her presumption. The idea that she knew him.” Zeyk shook his head.

“Was I there during this?” Sax said.

“. . . Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But
you were distracted. You were crying.”

Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with
a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else
would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others
remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!

And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning.
The appearance of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and
Nazik had left Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that
he could go on in that amount of detail for every week of his life.

But now Nazik stopped the session. “This one is too hard,” she
said to Smadar. “Let’s start again tomorrow.”

Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine
beside her. Zeyk stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw
that among the many dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include
memories that worked too well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of
Zeyk’s brain, replicating in another medium the patterns of quantum
activity—lightning flickering around in his cortex ... a mind that held the
past far better than the rest of the ancient ones, impervious to the affliction
of breaking memory, which Sax had believed to be an inexorable clocklike
breakdown ... well, they were giving that brain every test they could think of.
But it was quite possible the secret would remain unsolved; there was simply
too much happening of which they were completely unaware. As on that night in
Nicosia.

Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land
around Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and
now he was very happy to have a place to get away.

He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about
memory had come when he was walking down to this seashore, over routes so
circuitous that he could never find the same way twice, partly because the old
lava plateau was so fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was
never paying attention to the larger topography—he was either lost in his
thoughts or lost in the immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around
to see where he was. In fact it was a region in which one could not get lost;
ascend any small ridge, and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense
dragon; and in the other direction, visible from more places as one approached
it, the wide blue expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million
micro-environments, the rocky plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack
filled with plants. It was very unlike the melting landscape on the polar shore
across the sea; this rocky plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed
immemorial, despite the gardening that was certainly being done by the Acheron
ecopoets. Many of these oases were experiments, and Sax treated them as such,
staying out of them, peering down into one steep-walled alas after another,
wondering what the ecopoet responsible was trying to discover with his or her
work. Here soil could be spread with no fear of it being washed into the sea,
although the startling green of the estuaries extending back into the valleys
showed that some fertile soil was making its way down the streams. These
estuarine marshes would fill with eroded soils, while at the same time they
were getting saltier, along with the North Sea itself. . . .

This time out, however, his observations were broken repeatedly by
thoughts of John. John Boone had worked for him for the last several years of
John’s life, and they had had many a conference as they discussed the rapidly
developing Martian situation; vital years; and through them John had been
always happy, cheerful, confident—trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous
kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent—no, no, not exactly—he
had also been abrupt, impatient, arrogant, lazy, slipshod, drug dependent,
proud. But how Sax had come to rely on him, how he had loved him—loved him like
a big brother who had protected him out in the world at large. And then they
had killed him. Those are the ones the killers always go after. They can’t
stand that courage. And so they had killed him and Sax had stood on watching
and hadn’t done a thing. Frozen in shock and personal fear. You didn’t stop
them? Maya had cried; he remembered it now, her sharp voice. No, I was afraid.
No, I did nothing. Of course it was unlikely that there was anything he could
have done at that point. Before, when the attacks on John had first started,
Sax might have been able to talk him into another assignment, gotten him some
bodyguards, or, since John would never have accepted that, hired some
bodyguards to follow him in secret, to protect him while his friends froze and
stared in shocked witness. But he hadn’t hired anyone. And so his brother had
been killed, his brother who had laughed at him but who had loved him as well,
loved him before anyone else thought of him at all.

Sax wandered over the fractured plain, distraught—distraught at
the loss of a friend 153 years before. Sometimes it seemed there was no such
thing as time.

*
     
*
       
*

Then he stopped short, brought back to the present by the sight of
life. Small white rodents, sni’ffing around on the green of a sunken meadow.
They were no doubt snow pika or something like, but in their whiteness they
looked enough like lab rats to give Sax a start. White lab rats, yes, but
tailless—mutant lab rats, yes—free at last, out of their cages and into the
world, wandering over the intense green meadow grass like surreal hallucinatory
objects, all ablink and sniff-whiskered as they checked out the ground between
grass clumps for tasties. Munching away on seeds and nuts and flowers. John had
been greatly amused at the myth of Sax as the hundred lab rats. Sax’s mind, now
free and scattered. This is our body.

He crouched and watched the little rodents until he got cold.
There were greater creatures out on that plain, and they always stopped him
short: deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, reindeer, caribou, black bear, grizzly
bear—even packs of wolves, like swift gray shadows—and all to Sax like citizens
out of a dream, so that every time he spotted even a single creature he felt
startled, disconnected, even stunned; it did not seem possible; it was
certainly not natural. Yet here they were. And now these little snow pika,
happy in their oasis. Not nature, not culture: just Mars.

He thought of Ann. He wanted her to see them.

He often thought of her these days. So many of his friends were
dead now, but Ann was alive, he could still talk to her, it was at least
possible. He had looked into the matter, and found that she now lived in the
caldera of Olympus Mons, as part of the small community of red climbers that
occupied it. Apparently they took turns in the caldera, to keep the population
low despite the big holes’ steep walls and primeval conditions, both so attractive
to them. But Ann stayed as long as she liked, Sax had heard, and only left
infrequently. This was what Peter had told him, although Peter had only heard
it secondhand. Sad how those two were estranged; pointless; but family
estrangements seemed to be the most intransigent of all.

Anyway, she was on Olympus Mons. Therefore almost in sight, just
over the horizon to the south. And he wanted to talk to her. All his
reflections on what happened to Mars, he thought, were framed as an internal
conversation with Ann. Not so much as an argument, or so he hoped, but as an
endless persuasion. If he could be so changed by the reality of blue Mars,
could not Ann as well? Was it not almost inevitable, even necessary? Might it
have already happened? Sax felt he had come over the years to love what Ann
loved in Mars; and now he wanted her to reciprocate, if possible. She had
become for him, in a most uncomfortable way, his measure of the worth of what
they had done. The worth, or the acceptability. It was a strange feeling to
have settled in him, but there it was.

Another uncomfortable lump in his mind, like the suddenly
rediscovered guilt about John’s death, which he would try again to forget. If
he could blank out on the interesting thoughts he ought to be able to blank out
on the awful ones, oughtn’t he? John had died, and nothing Sax could have done
would have prevented it. Very probably. There was no way to say. And no way to
go back. John had been killed and Sax had failed to help him; and here they
were, Sax alive and John dead, nothing now but a powerful node-and-network
system in the minds of all the people who had known him. And nothing to be
done.