Blue Mars (80 page)

But Ann was alive, up there climbing the caldera walls of Olympus.
He could talk to her if he wanted. Although she would not come out. He would
have to hunt her down. But he could do it, that was the thing. The real sting
of John’s death lay in the death of that chance; he could no longer talk to
him. But he could still talk to Ann, the chance existed.

Work on the anamnestic package continued. Acheron was a joy that
way: days in the labs, talking with the lab directors about their experiments
and seeing if he could help. Weekly seminars, where they got together in front
of the screens and shared their.results, and talked about what they meant and
what they might try next. People interrupted their work to help with the farm,
or do other business or go on trips; but others were there to fill in, and when
people came back they often had new ideas, and always had a new charge of
energy. Sax sat in the seminar rooms after the weekly roundups, looking at the
coffee cups and the rings of brown coffee and black kava stains on the battered
wooden tabletops, the white shiny blackboard screens covered with schemata and
chemical diagrams and big looping arrows pointing to acronyms and alchemical
symbols that Michel would have loved, and something inside him would glow till
it hurt, some parasympathetic reaction spilling out of his limbic system—now
this was science, by God, this was Martian science, in the hands of the
scientists themselves, working together for some collective goal that made
sense, that was for the common good; pushing at the edge of what they knew,
theory and experiment bouncing back and forth like a blur of Ping-Pong balls,
week after week finding out more, going after more, extending the great
invisible parthenon right out into the uncharted territory of the human mind,
into life itself. It made him so happy that he almost didn’t care if they ever
figured things out; the search was all.

But his short-term memory was damaged. He was experiencing
blank-outs and tip-of-the-tongueism every day; sometimes in the seminars he had
to stop midsentence, almost, and sit down and wave at the others, asking them
to go on; and they would nod and the person at the blackboard would continue.
No, he needed the solution to this one. There would be other puzzles to pursue
afterward, without any doubt; the quick decline itself, for instance, or any of
the rest of the senescence problem. No, there was no lack of the unexplainable
to work on, and never would be. Meanwhile, the problem of the anamnestic was
hard enough.

The outlines of it were coming clear, however. One part of it
would be a drug cocktail, a mixture of protein-synthesis enhancers, including
even amphetamines and chemical relatives of strychnine, and then transmitters
like serotonin, glutamate receptor sensitizers, cholinesterase, cyclic AMP, and
so on. All of these would be there to help in different ways to reinforce the memory
structures when they were rehearsed. Others would be included from the general
brain plasticity treatment that Sax had received in the period following his
stroke, at much smaller doses. Then it seemed from the experiments in
electrical stimulation that a stimulus shock, followed by a continuous
oscillation at very rapid frequencies phased with the subject’s natural brain
waves, would serve to initiate the neurochemical processes augmented by the
drug package. After that subjects would have to direct the work of remembering
as best they could, perhaps moving from node to node if possible, with the idea
that as each node was recalled, the network surrounding the node would then be
flushed by the oscillations and reinforced accordingly. Moving from room to
room in the theater of memory, in essence. Experiments with all these various
aspects of the process were being run on volunteer subjects, often the young
native experimenters themselves; they were remembering a great many things,
they said with a kind of stunned awe, and the overall prospect was looking more
and more promising. Week by week they honed their techniques, and homed in on a
process.

For the work of recollection to best succeed, it was becoming
clear from the experiments that context was an important component. Lists
memorized underwater in diving suits could be recalled much better when the
subjects returned to the seafloor than when they tried to remember them on
land. Subjects hypnotically induced to feel happy or sad during memorization of
a list were better at remembering the list when again hypnotized to feel happy
or sad. Congruence of items in the lists helped, as did returning to rooms of
the same size or color when remembering them. These were of course all very
crude experiments, but the link between context and power of recollection was
demonstrated by them strongly enough to cause Sax to think hard about where he
might want to try the treatment when they finalized it; where, and with whom.

For the final work on the treatment Sax called up Bao Shuyo and
asked her to come join them in Acheron for some consulations. Again, her work
was much more theoretical, and very much more fine-grained, but after her work
with the fusion group in Da Vinci, he had a healthy respect for her ability to
help in any problem that involved quantum gravity and the ultramicrostructure
of matter. Just to have her run through what they had done and comment on it
would be valuable, he was sure.

Unfortunately, Bao’s obligations in Da Vinci were heavy, as they
had been ever since her much-heralded return from Dorsa Brevia. Sax was put in
the unusual position of manipulating his home labs in order to extricate- one
of their best theorists, but he did it without compunction, getting Bela’s help
to put the arm on the current administration, to twist their arms as hard as
ever he could. “Ka, Sax,” Bela exclaimed during one call, “I never would have
guessed that you would turn out to be such a fierce headhunter.” “It’s my own
head I’m hunting,” Sax replied.

Usually tracking someone down
was as simple as contacting their wristpad, and looking to see
where the person was. Ann’s wristpad, however, had been left on the rim of the
Olympus Mons caldera, at the descent station near the festival grounds at
Crater Zp. This struck Sax as peculiar, since they had worn wristpads of some
kind or another since the very beginning in Underbill, Ann as much as anyone,
as he recalled. Hadn’t she? He called Peter to ask, but Peter did not know, of
course, having been born well after the Underbill years. In any case, to go
without a wristpad now was to borrow a behavior from the neoprimitive nomads
wandering the canyonlands and the North Sea coast—not a lifestyle he would have
expected Ann to take any interest in. One couldn’t live in anything like the
Paleolithic style up on Olympus Mons, indeed it required the kind of continuous
technological support that was no longer necessary in most places, with
wristpads an integral part of it. Perhaps she only wanted to get away. Peter
didn’t know.

But he did know how to contact her: “You have to go in and find
her.”

At Sax’s expression he laughed. “It isn’t so bad. There’s only a
couple hundred people in the caldera, and when they’re not staying in one of
their huts, they’re on the cliff walls.”

“She’s become a climber?”

“Yes.”

“She climbs for—for recreation?”

“She climbs. Don’t ask me why.”

“So I just go look at all the cliffs?”

“That’s how I had to do it when Marion died.”

The summit of Olympus Mons had for the most part been left alone.
Oh there were a few low boulder hermitages on rim overlooks, and a piste had
been built on the northeast lava flow that broke the escarpment ring
surrounding the volcano, for easy access to the festival complex at Crater Zp;
but other than that, there was nothing to show what had happened to the rest of
Mars, which from the rim of the caldera was entirely invisible, under the
horizon of the encircling escarpment. From its rim Olympus Mons appeared to be
the world entire. The local Reds had decided against putting a protective
molecular dome over the caldera, something they had done over Arsia Mons; so no
doubt there were bacteria, and perhaps some lichens that had blown over on
winds and floated down into the caldera and survived; but at pressures little
higher than the original ten millibars, they were not going to flourish.
Probably the survivors were mostly endochasmoliths, so there would be no sign
of them. It was a lucky thing for the Red project that Mars’s stupendous
vertical scale kept air pressures so low on the big volcanoes; a free and
effective sterilization technique.

Sax took the train up to Zp, and then a car on up to the rim, a
taxi van driven by the Reds who controlled access into the caldera. The car
came to the edge of the rim, and Sax looked down.

The caldera was multiringed, and big: ninety kilometers by sixty,
about the same size as Luxembourg, Sax recalled hearing. The main central
circle, by far the largest, was marred by overlapping smaller circles to the
northeast, center, and south. The southernmost circle cut in half a slightly
older, higher circle to the southeast; the meeting of these three arcuate walls
was considered one of the finest climbing areas on the planet, Sax was told,
with the greatest height anywhere in the caldera, a drop from 26 kilometers
above the datum (they used the old term rather than sea level) down to 22.5
kilometers on the southernmost crater floor. A ten-thousand-foot cliff, the
young Coloradoan in Sax mused.

The floor of the main caldera was marked by a great number of
curving fault patterns, concentric with the caldera walls: arcing ridges and
canyons, across which ran some straighter escarpments. These features were all
explicable, they had been caused by recurrent caldera collapses following the
sideslope drainage of magma from the main chamber under the volcano; but as he
looked down from their perch on the rim, it seemed to Sax a mysterious
mountain— a world of its own—nothing visible but the vast embayed rim, and the
five thousand square kilometers of the caldera. Ring on ring of high curved
walls and flat round floors, under a black starry sky. Nowhere were the
encircling cliffs less than a thousand meters tall. As a rule they were not
completely vertical; their average slope appeared to be just steeper than
forty-five degrees. But there were steeper sections all over the place. No
doubt the climbers flocked to the very steepest sections, given the nature of
their interest. There looked to be some very vertical faces out there, even an
overhang or two, as right under them, over the confluence of the three walls.

“I’m looking for Ann Clayborne,” Sax said to the drivers, who were
rapt with the view. “Do you know where I could find her?”

“You don’t know where she is?” one asked.

“I’ve heard she’s climbing in the Olympus caldera.”

“Does she know you’re looking for her?”

“No. She’s not answering her calls.”

“Does she know you?”

“Oh yes. We’re old—friends.”

“And who are you?”

“Sax Russell.”

They stared at him. One said, “Old friends, eh?”

Her companion elbowed her.

They called the spot they were at Three Walls, sensibly enough.
Directly under their car, on a little slump terrace, there was an elevator
station. Sax peered at it through binoculars: outer-lock doors, reinforced
roofing—it could have been a structure from the early years. The elevator was
the only way down into this part of the caldera, if you did not care to rappel.

“Ann resupplies at Marion Station,” the elbower finally said,
shocking her codriver. “See it, there? That square dot, where the lava channels
from the main floor cut down into South Circle.”

This was on the opposite rim of the southernmost circle, which
Sax’s map named “6.” Sax had trouble making out any square dot, even with the
binocular’s magnification. But then he saw it—a tiny block just a bit too
regular to be natural, although it had been painted the rusty gray of the local
basalt. “I see it. How do I get there?”

“Take the elevator down, then walk on over.”

So he showed the elevator attendants the pass the el-bower had
given him, and took the long elevator ride down the wall of South Circle. The
elevator ran on a track affixed to the cliffside, and it had windows; it was
like dropping in a helicopter, or coming down the last bit of the space
elevator over Sheffield. By the time he got down to the caldera floor it was
late afternoon; he checked into the spartan lodge at the bottom and ate a big
leisurely dinner, thinking from time to time what he might say to Ann. It came
to him, slowly: a coherent and it seemed convincing self-explication, or
confession, or cri de coeur, piece by piece. Then to his great chagrin he
blanked the whole thing. And there he was on the floor of a volcanic caldera,
the blinkered circle of sky dark and starry above. On Olympus. Searching for
Ann Clayborne, with nothing to say to her. Very chagrined.

The next morning after breakfast, he pushed his way into a walker.
Although the materials were improved, the elastic fabric necessarily clasped
the limbs and torso just as tightly as their old suits had. Strange how the
kinetics of it evoked trains of thought, flashes of memory: the look of
Underbill as they were building the foursquare dome; even a kind of somatic
epiphany, which seemed to be a recollection of his very first walk out of the
landing craft, with the surprise of the close horizons and the textured pink of
the sky. Context and memory, again.

He walked out across the floor of South Circle. This morning the
sky was a dark indigo very near black—marine blue, the chart said, an odd
choice of name considering how dark it was. Many stars were visible. The
horizon was a round cliff, rising on all sides: the southern semicircle three
kilometers tall, the northeast quadrant two kilometers, the northwest quadrant
one kilometer only, and shattered. Astonishing sight, actually—the roundness of
it. Thermodynamics of cooling rock in magma chambers, magma throats. Out in the
middle the encircling walls were a dizzying sight. The walls looked much the
same height in all directions, a textbook example of foreshortening’s ability
to telescope the perception of vertical distances.

He tromped on at a steady pace. The caldera floor was fairly
smooth, pocked by occasional lava bombs and late meteor hits, and curving
shallow grabens. Some of these had to be circumvented, a beautifully apt word
in this case, as they were circumvents, he was circumventing. But for the most
part he could tramp directly toward the broken spill of cliff in the northwest
quadrant of the caldera. ‘

It took six hours of steady walking to cross the floor of South
Circle, which was less than ten percent of the caldera complex’s total area—all
the rest of which was invisible to him for the entire hike. No sign of life,
nor of any disturbance to the caldera floor or walls; the atmosphere was
visibly thin, everything equally sharp to the eye, right around the primal ten
millibars, he judged. The untouched nature of things made him feel uncertain
about even his boot-prints, and he tried to step on hard rock, and avoid dust
patches. It was strangely satisfying to see the primal landscape—quite
reddish—though the color was mostly an overlay on dark basalt. His color chart
was not good at odd mixes.

Sax had never descended into one of the big calderas before. And
even many years spent inside impact craters did not prepare one, he found—for
the depth of the chambers, the steepness of the walls, the flatness of the
floor. The sheer size of things.

Midafternoon he approached the foot of the northwest arc of the
wall. The meeting of wall and floor came up over his horizon, and to his slight
relief, the block shelter appeared directly before him; his APS setting had
been quite accurate. Not a complicated bit of navigation, but in such an
exposed place it was pleasant to be precisely on line. Ever since his
experience in the storm so long ago, he had been a bit wary about getting lost.
Although there would be no storms up here.

As he approached the hut’s lock doors, a group of people appeared
from out of the bottom of a stupendously huge steep gully in the vast broken
cliff face, debouching onto the crater floor about a kilometer to the west of
the refuge. Four figures, carrying big packs on their backs. Sax stopped, the
sound of his breath loud in his helmet: he recognized the last figure
immediately. Ann was coming in to resupply. Now he was going to have to think
of something to say. And then remember it too.

Inside the hut Sax undipped his helmet and took it off, feeling a
familiar but most unwelcome tension in his stomach as he did. Every meeting
with Ann it got worse. He turned around and waited. Finally Ann came in, and
took off her helmet, and saw him. She started as if she were seeing a ghost.
“Sax?” she cried.

He nodded. He remembered when they had last met; long ago, on Da
Vinci Island; it felt like a previous life. He had lost his tongue.

Ann shook her head, smiled to herself. She crossed the room with
an expression he couldn’t read, and held his arms in her two hands, and leaned
forward and kissed his cheek gently. When she pulled back, one of her hands
continued to clutch his left arm, sliding down to the wrist. She was staring
right into him, and her grip was like metal. Sax was speechless again, although
he very much wanted to speak. But there was nothing to say, or too much, he
couldn’t even tell which it was; his tongue was again paralyzed. That hand on
his wrist; it was more incapacitating than any glare or cutting remark had ever
been.

A wave seemed to pass through her, and she became somewhat more
the Ann he knew, looking at him suspiciously, then with alarm. “Everyone’s
okay?”

“Yes yes,” Sax said. “I mean—you heard about Michel?”

“Yes.” Her mouth tightened, for a second she became the black Ann
of his dreams. Then another wave passed through her, and she was this new
stranger, still clutching his wrist as if trying to snip his hand off. “But now
you’re just here to see me.”

“Yes. I wanted to”—he searched wildly for a finish to the
sentence—”... to talk! Yes—to, to, to, to, to ask you some questions. I’m
having some trouble with my memory. I wondered if I, if we could travel up
here, and talk. Hike”— he gulped—”or climb. You could show me some of the
caldera?”

She was smiling. Again it was some other Ann. “You can climb with
me if you want.”

“I’m not a climber.”

“We’ll go up an easy route. Up Wang’s Gully, and over the great
circle to north circle, I’ve wanted to get up there while it’s still summer
anyway.”

“It’s Ls 200, actually. But I mean, it sounds good.” His heart was
beating at about 150 beats a minute.

*
     
*
       
*

Ann had all the equipment they needed, it turned out. The next
morning, as they were suiting up, she said to him, “Here, take that off.”
Pointing at his wristpad.