“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there and see, eh?”
As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.”
“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim…” Michel shuddered.
“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”
“Well — we’ll hold down the fort for you.”
As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be there. “The cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.
Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.”
Sax frowned.
Before he left, he called Ann.
“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobiosphere, together?”
She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over — the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: “No.” And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.
Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the rocky first biomes of the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.
Well, one couldn’t make people see things.
He went to say good-bye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann.
As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it — to fall in love with all the objects of his “scientific study.” Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this un-Sax-like behavior, this “change in thinking.” Love, yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science — yes, that would be a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they cooperated in the study or not. In fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t cooperate, if they refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. “Be careful,” Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.
Sax took a solo roverand drove it down the steep bare southern slope of Pavonis Mons, then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around the great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down the southern flank of Arsia, and.of the Tharsis Bulge itself, until he was on the broken highlands of Daedalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a giant ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, by lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of the impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps but not in the landscape.
To the eye as one traveled over it, it looked like much of the rest of the southern highlands: rugged bumpy pitted cracked land. A wild rockscape. The old lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark rock, like tidal swells fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark marked the land, indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there were light long triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark chevrons to the northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless craters. The next big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.
Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down up, down down up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind chart. He was traveling not in a boulder car, with its low dark room and its cockroach scurry from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big boxy areologist’s camper, with windows on all four sides of the third-story driver’s compartment. It was a very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the thin bright daylight, down and up, down and up, down and up over the sand-streaked plain, the horizons very distant for Mars. There was no one to hide from; no one hunting for him. He was a free man on a free planet, and if he wanted to he could drive this car right around the world. Or anywhere he pleased.
The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of oppression or fear — but it seemed it had been there — since 2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always there — a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of things. “Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of fear on the wall!”
Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the wind-etched tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the cracks, gleaming aquatically in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was driving down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to continue this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and everybody else just as free as that!
It was quite a feeling.
Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would. Everywhere in fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was the sociology that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had cooperated despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now — with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation; and creation was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.
But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a — a civilization. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast indeed, and that knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could scarcely be comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers they were, understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it was not necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue — they were powers in the material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might allow — it looked to Sax as if these powers could — if rightly applied — make a decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying. And why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years, they could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance, from the Big Bang to the eskaton — all this was possible, it was technically achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of suffering to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies that Sax was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by friends, death, bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could continue the work of making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was amazing, really. They had reached that moment in history when one could say it was possible. Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique. The odds were against that, it suggested that it was an artifact of perspective, one had to assume that things were more or less constant and that one lived in average times — the so-called principle of mediocrity. Never a particularly attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps it only meant that justice had always been achievable; in any case, there it was, an extraordinary moment, right there outside his four windows, burnished under the light touch of the natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and powerful.