Perhaps we could go out here, Sax suggested. It doesnt 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?
Its 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 CO2 filter 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 Anns vision, achieved by a centurys 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 Michels mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hirokos, really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rocks sake. For Marss sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matters 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 Anns 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.
On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the ice ocean just a few kilometres to the north and west. And various Johnny Appleseed flights had passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new sea-part of Biotiques efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in Burroughs. So there was some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small patches of fellfield. And a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these plants were in trouble in this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the lichen of course. There was a fair bit of miniaturized fall colour already, there in the tiny leaves of the ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup, and icegrass, and, yes, arctic saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind of camouflage in the ambient redrock; often Sax didnt see plants until he was about to step on them. And of course he wasnt drawing attention to them anyway, so when he did stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative glance and walked on.
They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the refuge, and there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late light. It filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth horizon, from southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck out of the ice like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of Tempe was going to be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the lower ends of some fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one coastal crater was right at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making it a perfect round bay some fifteen kilometres wide, with an entry channel about two kilometres across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of the Great Escarpment would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many of the islands visible from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic coastline. As one could see already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset ice.
But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the ice, the jagged bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed by some process Sax wasnt aware of, though he was curious but it could not be discussed. One could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a cemetery.
Embarrassed, Sax kneeled to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he had almost stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.
Ann was looking over his shoulder. Is it dead?
No. He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the floret, showed her the brighter ones beneath. Its hardening for the winter already. Fooled by the drop in light. Then Sax went on, as if to himself: A lot of the plants will die, though. The thermal overturn, which was when air temperatures turned colder than the ground temperatures, came more or less overnight. There wont be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill. Plants are better at handling it than animals would have been. And insects are surprisingly good, considering theyre little containers of liquid. They have supercooling cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.
Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. Its alive, he wanted to say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each other for existence, it is part of your body. How can you hate it?
But then again, she wasnt taking the treatment.
The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was setting, they would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black silhouette, silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred metres away, then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the world. He did not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her thoughts. But how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say Ann, Ann, what are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.
The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.
* * *
But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer. Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants were scarcely visible any more. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping in, low over the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface; mostly it was rock alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.
Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a faint. On the way down she hit her head on the door-jamb. Sax caught her body as she was landing on a bench against the inner wall. She was unconscious, and Sax half-carried her, half-dragged her all the way into the lock. Then he pulled the outer door shut, and when the lock was pumped, pulled her through the inner door into the changing room. He must have been shouting over the common band, because by the time he got her helmet off, five or six Reds were there in the room, more than he had seen in the refuge so far. One of the young women who had so impeded him, the short one, turned out to be the medical person of the station, and when they got Ann up onto a rolling table that could be used as a gurney, this woman led the way to the refuges medical clinic, and there took over. Sax helped where he could, getting Anns walker boots off her long feet with shaking hands. His pulse rate he checked his wristpad was a hundred and forty-five beats a minute and he felt hot, even light-headed.
Has she had a stroke? he said. Has she had a stroke?
The short woman looked surprised. I dont think so. She fainted. Then struck her head.
But why did she faint?
I dont know.
She looked at the tall young woman, who sat next to the door. Sax understood that they were the senior authorities in the refuge. Ann left instructions for us not to put her on any kind of life support mechanism, if she were ever incapacitated like this.
No, Sax said.
Very explicit instructions. She forbade it. She wrote it down.
You put her on whatever it takes to keep her alive, Sax said, his voice harsh with strain. Everything he had said since Anns collapse had been a surprise to him; he was a witness to his actions just as much as they were. He heard himself say, It doesnt mean you have to keep her on it, if she doesnt come around. Its just a reasonable minimum, to make sure she doesnt go for nothing.
The doctor rolled her eyes at this distinction, but the tall woman sitting in the doorway looked thoughtful.
Sax heard himself go on: I was on life support for some four days, as I understand it, and Im glad no one decided to turn it off. Its her decision, not yours. Anyone who wants to die can do it without having to make a doctor compromise her Hippocratic oath.
The doctor rolled her eyes even more disgustedly than before. But with a glance at her colleague, she began to pull Ann onto the life support bed; Sax helped her; and then she was turning on the medical AI, and getting Ann out of her walker. A rangy old woman, now breathing with an oxygen mask over her face. The tall woman stood and began to help the doctor, and Sax went and sat down. His own physiological symptoms were amazingly severe, marked chiefly by heat all through him, and a kind of incompetent hyperventilation; and an ache that made him want to cry.
After a time the doctor came over. Ann had fallen into a coma, she said. It looked like a small heart rhythm abnormality had caused her to faint in the first place. She was stable at the moment.
Sax sat in the room. Much later the doctor returned. Anns wristpad had recorded an episode of rapid irregular heartbeat, at the time she fainted. Now there was still a small arrhythmia. And apparently anoxia, or the blow to the head, or both, had initiated a coma.
Sax asked what a coma was, and felt a sinking feeling when the doctor shrugged. It was a catch-all term, apparently, for unconscious states of a certain kind. Pupils fixed, body insensitive, and sometimes locked into decorticate postures. Anns left arm and leg were twisted. And unconsciousness of course. Sometimes odd vestiges of responsiveness, clenching hands and the like. Duration of coma varied widely. Some people never came out of them.
Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in the room until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Anns side, looking down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did not clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he was unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.
He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He called up Anns medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the incident in the lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed the data into the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his own. There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram. He called up Anns genome, and instructed the AI to run a search in the relevant regions of chromosomes three, seven and eleven. In the gene called HERG, in her chromosome seven, the AI identified a small mutation: one reversal of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions for the assembly of a protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the surface of heart cells, and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off contracting heart cells. Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and beat too fast to pump blood effectively.