Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Of course he had been upset by Maya’s memory failure. But this did not seem an adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya’s problem, none more so, and he had-been worried; so any single display of her problem shouldn’t have mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course eventually — quite late that evening, actually, after the doctors had finally given up, and taken Michel downstairs, and were clearing out their equipment — Maya returned, and they had to tell her what had happened.

  She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much for one of the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won’t work, Sax wanted to say, I’ve tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for his pains, which made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.

  Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” the man said after a while. He shook his head, seemingly apologetic. “It’s pointless. We come and do all we can and it makes no difference. Nothing stops the quick decline.”

  “Which is?” Sax said.

  The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. “That’s the problem. No one knows.”

  “Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?”

  “Heart arrhythmia,” said one of the other medics curtly as he passed by with some equipment.

  “That’s just the symptom,” the sitting man snarled, and sniffed again. “Why does it go arrhythmic? And why doesn’t CPR restart it?”

  No one answered.

  Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya crying on the couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax realized that even if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.

  Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of observation and initial hypothesis… flailing. In many ways it resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their unexplainables — Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version .of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense.

  But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.

  Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.

  Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.

  The literature on longevity, and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.

  Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.

  There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had been about — keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.

  But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence — or, even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries…

  Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks’ absorbed reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field than he had ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the longevity treatment consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the subject’s own DNA, the artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones already in the cells, so that the breaks and errors that crept in over time were repaired, and the strands generally strengthened. This much was true; but the longevity treatment was more than this, just as senescence itself was more than cell-division error. It was, as one might have predicted, much more complicated than just breaking chromosomes; it was an entire complex of processes. And while some were well understood, others were not. Senes-cencial action (aging) took place on every level: molecule, cell, organ, organism. Some senescence resulted from hormonal effects that were positive for the young organism in its reproductive phase, and only later negative for the post-reproductive animal, when in evolutionary terms it no longer mattered. Some cell lines were virtually immortal; bone-marrow cells and the mucus in the gut went on replicating for as long as their surroundings were alive, with no sign at all of time-related changes. Other cells, such as the nonreplaced proteins in the lens of the eye, underwent change that was driven by exposure to heat or light, regular enough to function as a kind of biological chronometer. Each kind of cell line aged at a different speed, or did not age at all; thus it was not just “a matter of time” in the sense of a kind of Newtonian absolute time, working entropically on an organism; there was no such time. Rather it was a great many trains of specific physical and chemical events, moving at different speeds, and with varying effects. There was a fantastically large number of cell-repair mechanisms inherent in any large organism, and an immune system of great and various power; the longevity treatments often supplemented these processes, or worked on them directly, or replaced them. The treatment now included supplements of the enzyme photolyase, to correct DNA damage, and supplements of the pineal hormone melatonin, and dehydroepiandrosterone, a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands… There were about two hundred components like these in the longevity treatment now.

  So vast, so complex —
sometimes Sax finished his day’s reading and walked down to Odessa’s seafront, to sit on the corniche with Maya, and he would pause in eating a burrito and stare at it — contemplate everything that went into its digestion, everything that kept them alive — feel his breath which he had never noted at all, before — and suddenly he would feel breathless — lose his appetite — lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more than a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of astrophysics. Like a house of cards a hundred stories tall, in a wind. Tap it anywhere… It was lucky Maya did not require much in the way of active companionship, because often he was rendered speechless for many minutes at a time, rapt in the contemplation of his own evident impossibility.

  But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma. And there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on the frontiers, and beside him in related fields, from the small — virology, where the inquiries into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even smaller forms, almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis, vs, all of which might have relevance to the larger problem… All the way up to the large organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their relationship to the heart and other organs, or the pineal gland’s ever-decreasing secretions of melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many aspects of aging. Sax followed them all, trying to glean a new view by his later and hopefully larger perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what seemed important, and study that.

  Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the subject blanked out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to get these thought flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk aloud to himself, frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would help to forestall the blanks; but again, it didn’t work. It simply was not a verbal process.

  In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every evening, if he noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the staircase streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four different benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the harbor to the sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy a burrito or a gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next to her. She would nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they sat and watched the sea. “How was your day?” “Okay. And yours?” He did not attempt to talk much about his reading, and she didn’t say much about her hydrology, or the theater productions that she would go off to after dusk had fallen. Really they didn’t have much to say to each other. But it was companionable anyway. And one evening the sunset flared to an unusual lavender brilliance, and Maya said, “I wonder what color that is?” and Sax had ventured, “Lavender?”

  “But lavender is usually more pastel, isn’t it?”

  Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help him see the colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up anyway, and compared various sample squares to the sky. “We need a bigger screen.” And then they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or somewhere between light violet and pale violet.

  And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 2 October the llth Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine — and then they were into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.

  One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet from space, what we saw from the Aresl Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?”

  They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika red.” “Tomato red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s affinity for iron makes that color after all.”

  “But it’s way too dark, look.”

  “True.”

  “Brownish red.”

  “Reddish brown.”

  Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange… they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll call it Martian orange,” Maya decided.

  “Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are for the purples, why is that?”

  Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the chart, to see if they said anything about it. “Ah. It appears that the cones in the retina contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around those three have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites.” Then in the empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he read it aloud:

  “Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived simultaneously as components of the same color.”

  “That’s not true,” Maya said immediately. “That’s just because they’re using a color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides.”

  “What do you mean? That there’s more colors than these?”

  “Of course. Artists’ colors, theater colors; you put a green spot and a red spot on someone and you get a color all right, and it’s not red or green.”

  “But what is it? Does it have a name?”

  “I don’t know. Look in an artist’s color wheel.”

  And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: “Here. Burnt umber, Indian red, madder alizarin… those are all green-red mixes.”

  “Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don’t you find that suggestive?”

  She gave him a look. “We’re talking about colors here, Sax, not politics.”

  “I know, I know. But still…”

  “No. Don’t be silly.”

  “But don’t you think we need a red-green mix?”

  “Politically? There’s a red-green mix already, Sax. That’s the trouble. Free Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that’s why they’re having such success. They’re teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth, and soon after that we’ll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it coming. We’re spiraling down into it again.”

  “Hmm,” Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar systemic politics these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye for these things, was getting more and more worried about it — with her usual mordant Mayan dash of satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps not as bad as she thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon, pay attention. But meanwhile —

  “Look, it’s gone indigo, right over the mountains.” Intense saw edge of black below, purple blue above…

  “That’s not i
ndigo, it’s royal blue.”

  “But they shouldn’t call it blue if it’s got some red in it.”

  “Shouldn’t. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king’s blue, they all have red in them.”

  “But that color on the horizon isn’t any of those.”

  “No, you’re right. Nondescript.”

  They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206; a new color. And so another evening passed.

  Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade nicoise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, “Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the home they had left forever.

  Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and more complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus to the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on the papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of the problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical activity, protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests they had managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain during mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain included calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of melatonin it produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the longevity treatment, but of course it would be better to stop the calcification from occurring in the first place, for it probably had other effects. Then there was a clear growth in the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were protein filament aggregates that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure on them, perhaps the analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her presque vus, who could say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the cerebral blood vessels and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals, again impeding function. And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and hippocampus accumulated calpain, which meant they were vulnerable to calcium influxes, which damaged them. And these were nondividing cells, the same age as the organism itself; damage to them was permanent, as during Sax’s stroke. He had lost a lot of his brain in that incident, he didn’t like to think of it. And the ability of the molecules in these nondividing cells to replace themselves could also be damaged, a smaller but over time equally significant loss. Autopsies of people over two hundred who had died of the quick decline regularly showed serious calcification of the pineal gland, coupled with increases in calpain levels in the hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain levels generally were both implicated in some of the leading current models of how the memory worked. It was an interesting connection.