Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [337]
So they were fourteen. Thus reduced, Underhill seemed underoccupied; though all of it was theirs to spread out in, they yet crowded together into the south wing of the barrel vaults. Nevertheless the emptiness of the rest of it was palpable. It was as if the place itself was an image of their failing memories, with their lost labs and lost lands and lost companions. Every single one of them was suffering from memory losses and disorders of one sort or another— between them they had experienced almost all the problems in mentation mentioned in the literature, as far as Sax could tell, and a good bit of their conversation was taken up in comparative symptomatology, in the recounting of various terrifying and/or sublime experiences that had afflicted them in the last decade. It made them jocular and somber by turns, as they milled around that evening in the little barrelvault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window looking out onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick glass dome, in its muted light. They ate a picnic dinner brought in coolers, talking, catching up, then spreading along the south wing, preparing the upstairs bedrooms for an uneasy night. They stayed up as late as they could, talking and talking; but eventually they gave up, in ones and twos, and tried to sleep. Several times that night Sax woke from dreams, and heard people stumbling down to the bathrooms, or whispering conversations in the kitchen, or muttering to themselves in the troubled sleep of the aged. Each time he managed to slip back under again, into a light dream-filled sleep of his own.
Finally morning came. They were up at dawn; in the horizontal light they ate a quick breakfast, fruit and croissants and bread and coffee. Long shadows cast west from every rock and hillock. So familiar.
Then they were ready. There was nothing else to do. There was a kind of collective deep breath— uneasy laughter— an inability to meet the others’ eyes.
Maya, however, was still refusing to take the treatment. She was unswayed by every argument they tried. “I won’t,” she had said over and over the night before. “You’ll need a keeper in any case, in case you go crazy. I’ll do that.”
Sax had thought she would change her mind, that she was just being Maya. Now he stood before her, baffled. “I thought you were having the worst memory troubles of all.”
“Perhaps.”
“So it would make sense to try this treatment. Michel gave you lots of different drugs for mental trouble.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, looking him in the eye.
He sighed. “I don’t understand you, Maya.”
“I know.”
And she went into the old med clinic in the corner, and took on her role as their keeper for the day. Everything in there was ready, and she called them in one by one, and took up little ultrasound injectors and put them to their necks, and with a little click-hiss administered one part of the drug package, and gave them the pills that contained the rest of it, and then helped them insert the earplugs that were custom-designed for each of them, to broadcast the silent electromagnetic waves. In the kitchen they waited for everyone to finish their preparations, in a nervous silence. When they were all done Maya ushered them to the door and guided them outside. And they were off.
• • •
Sax saw and felt an image: bright lights, a feeling of his skull being crushed, choking, gasping, spitting. Chill air and his mother’s voice, like an animal’s yelp, “Oh? Oh?