Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [339]
as amazingly dissociated by the disaster, their first death. Would Nadia remember that now? Yes, she would if she thought about it. Nothing unique about Sax, or to be more accurate, if the treatment was working on him, it would work on all of them. There was Vasili, who had fought for UNOMA in both revolutions; what was he remembering? He looked stricken, but it could have been rapture— anything or everything— very likely it was the everything emotion, the fullness, apparently one of the first effects of the treatment. Perhaps he was remembering Tatiana’s death as well. Once Sax and Tatiana had gone out on a hike in Antarctica during their year there, and Tatiana had slipped on a loose boulder and sprained an ankle, and they had had to wait on Nussbaum Riegel for a helicopter from McMurdo to lift them back to camp. He had forgotten that for years, and then Phyllis had reminded him of it the night she had had him arrested, and he had promptly forgotten it again until this very moment. Two rehearsals in two hundred years; but now it was back, the low sun, the cold, the beauty of the Dry Valleys, Phyllis’s jealousy of Tatiana’s great dark beauty. That their beauty should die first— it was like a sign, a primal curse, Mars as Pluto, planet of fear and dread. And now that day in Antarctica, the two women long dead— he was the only carrier of that day so precious, without him it would be gone. Ah yes— what one could remember was precisely the part of the past that one had felt the most, the events spiked by emotion above a certain threshold— the great joys, the great crises, the great disasters. And the small ones as well. He had been cut from the seventh-grade basketball team, had cried alone after reading the list, at a drinking fountain at the far edge of the school, thinking You will remember this forever. And by God he had. Great beauty. The first times one did things had that special charge, first love— who had that been, though? A blank, back there in Boulder, a face— some friend of a friend— but that wasn’t love; and he couldn’t recall her name. No— now he was thinking of Ann Clayborne, standing before him, looking at him closely, sometime long ago. What had he been trying to recall? The rush of thought was so dense and rapid he would not be able to remember some of this remembering, he was pretty sure. A paradox, but only one of many caused by the single thread of consciousness in the huge field of the mind. Ten to the forty-third power, the matrix in which all big bangs flowered. Inside the skull was a universe as vast as the one outside. Ann— he had taken a walk with her in Antarctica as well. She was strong. Curious, during the walk across Olympus Mons caldera he had never once remembered this walk across Wright Valley in Antarctica, despite the similarities, a walk during which they had argued so earnestly over the fate of Mars, and he had wanted so much to take her hand, or for her to take his, why he had had a kind of crush on her! And him in his labrat mode, having never before risen to such feelings, now stifled for no better reason than shyness. She had looked at him curiously but had not understood his import, only wondered that he should stammer so. He had stammered a fair bit when a boy, it was a biochemical problem apparently solved by puberty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann— Ann— he saw her face as he argued with her on the Ares, in Underhill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the warehouse on Pavonis. Why always this assault on a woman he had been attracted to, why? She was so strong. And yet he had seen her so depressed that she lay helplessly on the floor, in that boulder car, for many days as her red Mars died. Just lay there. But then she had pried herself off the floor and gone on. She had stopped Maya from yelling at him. She had helped bury her partner Simon. She had done all these things, and never, never, never had Sax been anything but a burden to her. Part of her pain. That was what he was for her. Angry with her in Zygote or Gamete— Gamete— both, really— her face so drawn— and then