Blue Mars (13 page)

Trying to see things Ann’s way. Glancing furtively at his
wristpad, behind her back. Stone, from Old English stdn, cognates everywhere,
back to proto-Indo-European sti, a pebble. Rock, from medieval Latin rocca,
origin unknown; a mass of stone. Sax abandoned the wristpad and fell away into
a kind of rock reverie, open and blank. Tabula rasa, to the point where
apparently he did not hear what Ann herself was saying to him; for she snorted
and walked on. Abashed, he followed, and steeled himself to ignore her
displeasure, and ask more questions.

There seemed to be a lot of displeasure in Ann. In a way this was
reassuring; lack of affect would have been a very bad sign; but she still
seemed quite emotional. At least most of the time. Sometimes she focused on the
rock so intently it was almost like watching her obsessed enthusiasm of old,
and he was encouraged; other times it seemed she was just going through the
motions, doing areology in a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment;
stave off history; or despair; or all of that. In those moments she was
aimless, and did not stop to look at obviously interesting features they
passed, and did not answer his questions about same. The little Sax had read
about depression alarmed him; not much could be done, one needed drugs to
combat it, and even then nothing was sure. But to suggest antidepressants was
more or less the same as suggesting the treatment itself; and so he could not
speak of it. And besides, was despair the same as depression?

Happily, in this context, plants were pitifully few. Tempe was not
like Tyrrhena, or even the banks of the Arena Glacier. Without active
gardening, this was what one got. The world was still mostly rock.

On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the
ice ocean just a few kilometers to the north and west. And various Johnny
Appleseed flights had passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new
sea—part of Biotique’s efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in
Burroughs. So there was some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small
patches of fellfield. And a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these
plants were in trouble in this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the
lichen of course. There was a fair bit of miniaturized fall color already,
there in the tiny leaves of the ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup,
and icegrass, and, yes, arctic saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind
of camouflage in the ambient redrock; often Sax didn’t see plants until he was
about to step on them. And of course he didn’t want to draw Ann’s attention to
them anyway, so when he did stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative
glance and walked on.

They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the
refuge, and there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late
light. It filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth
horizon, from southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck
out of the ice like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of
Tempe was going to be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the
lower ends of some fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one
coastal crater was right at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making
it a perfect round bay some fifteen kilometers across, with an entry channel
about two kilometers across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of
the Great Escarpment would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many
of the islands visible from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic
coastline. As one could see already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset
ice.

But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the
ice, the jagged bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed
by some process Sax wasn’t aware of, though he was curious—but it could not be
discussed. One could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a
cemetery.

Embarrassed, Sax knelt to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he
had almost stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.

Ann was looking over his shoulder. “Is it dead?”

“No.” He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the
floret, showed her the brighter ones beneath. “It’s hardening for the winter
already. Fooled by the drop in light.” Then Sax went on, as if to himself: “A
lot of the plants will die, though. The thermal overturn,” which was when air
temperatures turned colder than the ground temperatures, “came more or less
overnight. There won’t be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill.
Plants are better at handling it than animals would have been. And insects are
surprisingly good, considering they’re little containers of liquid. They have
supercooling cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.”

Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. It’s
alive, he wanted to say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each
other for existence, it is part of your body. How can you hate it?

But then again, she wasn’t taking the treatment.

The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was
setting, they would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black
silhouette, silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred
meters away, then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the
world. He did not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her
thoughts. But how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say
Ann, Ann, what are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.

The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this
was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax
would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share
thoughts. That alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.

But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have
had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these
little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the
rock must suffer. Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants
were scarcely visible anymore. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping
in, low over the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface;
mostly it was rock alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.

Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a
faint. On the way down she hit her head on the doorjamb. Sax caught her body as
she was landing on a bench against the inner wall. She was unconscious, and Sax
half carried her, half dragged her all the way into the lock. Then he pulled
the outer door shut, and when the lock was pumped, pulled her through the inner
door into the changing room. He must have been shouting over the common band,
because by the time he got her helmet off, five or six Reds were there in the
room, more than he had seen in the refuge so far. One of the young women who
had so impeded him, the short one, turned out to be the medical person of the
station, and when they got Ann up onto a rolling table that could be used as a
gurney, this woman led the way to the refuge’s medical clinic, and there took
over. Sax helped where he could, getting Ann’s walker boots off her long feet
with shaking hands. His pulse rate—he checked his wrist-pad—was 145 beats a
minute—and he felt hot, even lightheaded.

“Has she had a stroke?” he said. “Has she had a stroke?”

The short woman looked surprised. “I don’t think so. She fainted.
Then struck her head.”

“But why did she faint?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at the tall young woman, who sat next to the door. Sax
understood that they were the senior authorities in the refuge. “Ann left
instructions for us not to put her on any kind of life-support mechanism, if
she were ever incapacitated like this.”

“No,” Sax said.

“Very explicit instructions. She forbade it. She wrote it down.”

“You put her on whatever it takes to keep her alive,” Sax said,
his voice harsh with strain. Everything he had said since Ann’s collapse had
been a surprise to him; he was a witness to his actions just as much as they
were. He heard himself say, “It doesn’t mean you have to keep her on it, if she
doesn’t come around. It’s just a reasonable minimum, to make sure she doesn’t
go for nothing.”

The doctor rolled her eyes at this distinction, but the tall woman
sitting in the doorway looked thoughtful.

Sax heard himself go on: “I was on life support for some four
days, as I understand it, and I’m glad no one decided to turn it off. It’s her
decision, not yours. Anyone who wants to die can do it without having to make a
doctor compromise her Hippocratic oath.”

The doctor rolled her eyes even more disgustedly than before. But
with a glance at her colleague, she began to pull Ann onto the life-support
bed; Sax helped her; and then she was turning on the medical AI, and getting
Ann out of her walker. A rangy old woman, now breathing with an oxygen mask
over her face. The tall woman stood and began to help the doctor, and Sax went
and sat down. His own physiological symptoms were amazingly severe, marked
chiefly by heat all through him, and a kind of incompetent hyperven-tilation;
and an ache that made him want to cry.

After a time the doctor came over. Ann had fallen into a coma, she
said. It looked like a small heart-rhythm abnormality had caused her to faint
in the first place. She was stable at the moment.

Sax sat in the room. Much later the doctor returned. Ann’s
wristpad had recorded an episode of rapid irregular heartbeat, at the time she
fainted. Now there was still a small arrhythmia. And apparently anoxia, or the
blow to the head, or both, had initiated a coma.

Sax asked what exactly a coma was, and felt a sinking feeling when
the doctor shrugged. It was a catchall term, apparently, for unconscious states
of a certain kind. Pupils fixed, body insensitive, and sometimes locked into
decorticate postures. Ann’s left arm and leg were twisted. And unconsciousness
of course. Sometimes odd vestiges of re-sponsiveness, clenching hands and the
like. Duration of coma varied widely. Some people never came out of them.

Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in
the room until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Ann’s side,
looking down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did
not clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he
was unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.

He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He
called up Ann’s medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the
incident in the lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed
the data into the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his
own. There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that
Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long
QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the
electrocardiogram. He called up Ann’s genome, and instructed the AI to run a
search in the relevant regions of chromosomes 3, 7, and 11. In the gene called
HERG, in her chromosome 7, the AI identified a small mutation: one reversal of
adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions
for the assembly of a protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the
surface of heart cells, and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off
contracting heart cells. Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and
beat too fast to pump blood effectively.

Ann also appeared to have another problem, with a gene on
chromosome 3 called SCN5A. This gene encoded a different regulatory protein,
which provided a sodium ion channel on the surface of heart cells. This channel
functioned as an accelerator, and mutations here could add to the problem of
rapid heartbeat. Ann had a CG bit missing.

These genetic conditions were rare, but for the diagnostic AI that
was not an issue. It contained a symptomology for all known problems, no matter
how rare. It seemed to consider Ann’s case to be fairly straightforward, and it
listed the treatments that existed to counteract the problems presented by the
condition. There were a lot of them.

One of the treatments suggested was the receding of the problem
genes, in the course of the standard gerontological treatments. Persistent gene
recodings through several longevity treatments should erase the cause of the
problem right at the root, or rather in the seed. It seemed strange that this
hadn’t been done already, but then Sax saw that the recommendation was only about
two decades old; it came from a period after the last time Ann had taken the
treatments.

For a long time Sax sat there, staring at the screen. Much later
he got up. He began to inspect the Reds’ medical clinic, instrument by
instrument, room by room. The nursing attendants let him wander; they thought
he was distraught.

This was a major Red refuge, and it seemed likely to him that one
of the rooms might contain the equipment necessary to administer the
gerontological treatments. Indeed it was so. A small room at the back of the
clinic appeared to be devoted to the process. It didn’t take much: a bulky AI,
a small lab, the stock proteins and chemicals, the incubators, the MRIs, the IV
equipment. Amazing, when you considered what it did. But that had always been
true. Life itself was amazing: simple protein sequences only, at the start, and
yet here they were.