Blue Mars (50 page)

To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them
was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses.
Out here in the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge
of a cliff, and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered
by myriad chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were
banded by stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining
the basalt. Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the
gulfs of air below him.

As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites.
The Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a
walk along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick
grass grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax’s image of the
Irish coast. The land’s edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in
the cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one
walked over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare
rocks.

Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell,
steady deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air
steamed, the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy
squish. Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick
brown fox, seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra
juniper. Away from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its
own. Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference
patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics
wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well
to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at
the heart of the great unexplainable.

Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in
the upper atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by
the sun long after everything else was in twilight’s great shadow. So Sax would
sit on the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay
through the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun’s
shadow rose up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would
appear noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks
gleaming like abalone shells.

The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow.
The warmth of the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The
patterns of waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.

But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat
blurry stars, he grew uneasy. “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” Tennyson had
written just a few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this
hour that Phobos had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A
moment of the areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had
completed the desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military
base built on Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn’t remember. Some
kind of desire for symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality
prized more by mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still
orbiting the sun. “Hmm.” He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies
were starting out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning
them to create a gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.

A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read;
informal name for an asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and
shape. “Hmmm.” Sax tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was
superficial: a triaxial ellipsoid, but weren’t they all. Potato-shaped, right
size, banged hard on one end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been
a nice little settlement tucked into it. What’s in a name? Say they dropped the
pseudo. A couple of mass drivers and AIs, some side jets . . . that peculiar
moment, when Phobos had shot up over the western horizon. “Hmmmmm,” Sax said.

The days passed and the seasons. He did field studies and
meteorology. Effects of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives
out around the peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites.
Weather balloons these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than
ten grams, lofted by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the
exosphere.

Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or
grass, the top downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little
payload in his fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen
into thetoalloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to
the line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would
cut his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the
sand, watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a
pinprick and then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand
meters, depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479
meters, once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he
would read some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like
a little piece of him was sailing up into space. Strange what made one happy.

The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the
balloons, but a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew
strong and steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a
short run into the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite,
bobbing this way and that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it
stabilized, and he reeled it out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle
quiverings in his arms. Or else he wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the
resistance, and watched the kite soar up and away. The line was nearly
invisible. When the spool ran out the line hummed, and if he held it between
his fingers, the wind’s fluctuations were communicated to him as a kind of
music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a time, out of sight or, if he kept
it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw in the sky. Transmitting data all
the while. A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round
object of the same area. The mind was a funny animal.

Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the
hardest kind of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look
down and to the right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was
elsewhere, that he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.

“Come visit and go for a walk with me,” Sax said again. “I really
think you should.” How could one emphasize that? “I really think you should.”
Throw things together. “Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of
Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water.”

Michel nodded uncertainly.

Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in
Da Vinci. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Europe.”

“Good man.”

So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the
Shalbatana cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point.
Such a pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing
any of the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that
he treasured. The weeks would pass in their comfortable round, and then
suddenly one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming
without the home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sa-bishii or
Odessa someday, so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more
often.

And no one’s company pleased him more than Michel’s. Although on
this day Michel wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed
this, and wondered what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help
in the long months of his return to speech—had taught him to think again, had
taught him to see everything differently. It would be nice if he could do
something to repay such a gift, even partially.

Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they
stopped, and Sax got out the kite and assembled it, he handed the spool to
Michel.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That
way, into the wind.” And he held the kite as Michel walked across the grassy
mounds, until the line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started
running, and off it went, up up up.

Michel came back grinning. “Here, touch the line—you can feel the
wind.”

“Ah,” Sax said. “So you can.” And the nearly invisible line
thrummed against his fingers.

They sat down and opened Sax’s wicker basket, and took out the picnic
lunch he had packed. Michel became quiet once again.

“Something is troubling you?” Sax ventured as they ate.

Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. “I think I want to go
back to Provence.”

“For good?” Sax said, shocked.

Michel frowned. “Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just
beginning to enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave.”

“It’s heavy on Earth.”

“True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy.”

“Hmm.” Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly
evolution had adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g
caused an array of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g
now, to the point he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.

“Without Maya?” he said.

“I suppose it would have to be. She doesn’t want to go. She says
she will someday, but it’s always later, later. She’s working for the credit
co-op bank in Sabishii, and thinks she’s indispensable. Well, that’s not fair.
She just doesn’t want to miss any of it.”

“Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an
olive grove?”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, but. . . .”

Sax didn’t know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As
for living with Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine
living in a damaged erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus
perhaps Michel’s desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.

“You should go,” Sax said. “But wait just a little longer. If they
get these pulsed fusion engines on spaceships, then you could be there fairly
soon.”

“But that might cause real problems with Earth’s gravity. I think
you need the months of the trip to get prepared for it.”

Sax nodded. “What you would need is a kind of exoskel-eton. Inside
it you’d feel somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps.
Those new birdsuits I’ve heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to
something like an exoskeleton, or you’d never be able to hold the wings in
position.”

“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile.
“A flowing shell.”

“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around
in. It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear
walkers for a hundred years—then when we have changed everything, to the extent
that we can sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back
to Earth, where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”

“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”

Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like
that.” He shook his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”

The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the
grass. Each blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a
while, first complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good
qualities, the qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all
excitement in life. Sax nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how
much they contradicted the ones that had come before. It was like listening to
an addict, he imagined; but this was the way people were; and he was not so far
from such contradictions himself.

After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann
sees this kind of landscape now?”

Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”

“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”

“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this
world, I’m afraid. ...”

Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as
contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral
world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive
one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not
really.”

“I know.”

On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because
he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a
very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well,
and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an
experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite
firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond
said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming
to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as
Sax recalled.