Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [212]
“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. “Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.
“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking— it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hiroko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’— and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”
But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.
And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!
But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.
He clicked his teeth together nervously.