Kim Stanley Robinson - Blue Mars

‘Where did she go?’ he managed to say.

‘She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,’ the tall one declared.

‘Maybe you should wait and try later,’ the other advised.

‘Oh shut up!’ Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was like rage. ‘I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill herself!’

‘It’s her right,’ the tall one pontificated.

‘Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal. Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.’

‘You’re no friend of hers.’

‘I most certainly am.’ He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed. He approached her, slowing like Apollo in Zeno’s paradox.

She swivelled and glared at him.

‘It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,’ she snarled. ‘So don’t you give me that shit about not being interested in science!’

‘True,’ Sax said. ‘It’s true.’ He held out both hands. ‘But now I need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.’

But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had almost to jog. His bones hurt.

‘Perhaps we could go out here,’ Sax suggested. ‘It doesn’t matter where we go out.’

‘Because the whole planet is wrecked,’ she muttered.

‘You must still go out for sunsets occasionally.’ Sax persisted. ‘I could join you for that, perhaps.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Ann.’ She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his cheek still hurt. ‘Please, Ann.’

She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.

Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.

Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not a hunt, a pursuit. Nevertheless: ‘I huff, I puff, I blow your house down.’ he muttered. He blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring hard at him.

One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the changing room and suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimetres. ‘I was just going out,’ he stammered. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘It’s a free country.’ she said heavily.

And they went out of the lock together, into the land. The young women would have been amazed.

* * *

He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there with her to show to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to mention plants, or snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves. This was perhaps true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could only walk over the land, and let it speak for itself.

Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual route, he suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.

It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And Ann stopped often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at those times to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was finding. They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough to have allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO 2filter mask. Thus conversations consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.

So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe Terra was indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of the southern highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the northern plains – a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis bulge to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossae surrounding them now.

The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-coloured in the sunset light.

To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it. Something to behold, really – something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or treasure – a love beyond science, or something into the realm of Michel’s mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s, really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an odd concept – abiologic life – but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned, moving through the universe in its great systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one might say. Sunset somehow made it easier to see that.

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-Eurdpean 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 anti-depressants 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.