Ah, that star was occluded. Half an hour had jumped past all at once. As if time were a matter of instantaneous jumps, from one eternal moment to the next—which in fact it often seemed to him to be, as during those sunny warm afternoons when he would lie in a Sierra meadow by a chuckling stream and watch the clouds, dreaming of nothing, until with a jerk he would return to the meadow and the shadows would be stretching twice as long as before, over perfectly sculpted patches of meadow grass, the larks singing "wé-ero, spé-ero, wé-eo, wé-erlo, wé-it."
Drifting in and out. A call to Bixby got a feeble response. Still alive if nothing else. A bubble burst, splashed hot mud over his face, and he spluttered and wiped his nose clear. He couldn't feel his left arm, or make it move; he wasn't sure when that had happened. That was his windward side, so presumably it was benumbed in the onslaught of air. He tried to dip the arm further under the mud, to bury it. Not a process one would want to carry too far, descending limb by limb into black muck. Now the arm seemed to be burning; was that a fumarole bubbling up? No. In fact he had accidentally plunged the arm into the snowbank; his right hand confirmed it. But how the skin burned!
Then a gas bubble lifted his knee, and the back of his leg felt like glacier melt had been poured over it; it ached with cold, the knee joint creaked with it! He groaned. Cold now scalded and heat froze, and he didn't know which was which!
Perhaps it didn't matter. Caught between cold reason and hot passion, ignorant flesh always paid the price. One could never tell which was which. Outrageous pain! Better to leave all that behind.
A solution occurred to him. He stood up. He looked back down and saw his body lying there, stretched out in the mud, mostly submerged. A sponge, soaked in immortality. A mass of eternal atoms, bound together in just that particular way, to witness the beauty of the universe.
Yes: he stood there gazing down at his boiled and frozen body. Somewhat bemused, he tried a few steps; circled the mud patch; then took off across the windswept snow, toward an exposed rock outcropping. There was a building there, a small square cabin, white in the starlight. As he approached he saw that its walls were made of pure white quartz. Its door and windows were edged with quartz crystals. The door and the roof were made of slate, all dotted with lichen. The windows were thin smooth sheets of water.
He opened the door and walked in. The table was a slab of glacier-polished granite. The benches around it were fallen logs. The bed was made of spruce boughs. The carpet was green moss.
It was his home. He sat on one of the logs, and put his hand on the table. His hand sank into the granite. His body sank into the log, and then into the moss, and then into the quartz.
He felt himself dissolving out into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. He had melted into Shasta. The mountain mumbled in his ear "I am." With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass, then fell and steeped into the fabric of the land, one atom in every rock, in every grain of sand and soil, like gas in mud, or water in sponge, until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate, his precious sight, the landscape's consciousness soaring like a hawk over the long sand beaches, the great valley, the primeval sequoias, the range of light—but the mountains were different—blinding glaciers covered all but the highest peaks, fingered down through the hills, and cut Yosemite's walls. Then they retreated, dried up and ran away.
He tumbled, soared west. It was night, now, and below lay the bay like a sparkling black map, the black water crisscrossed with bridges of light, the surrounding hills dotted with millions of white points like stars, defining towers, roadways, docks, arenas, monuments; a bay-circling city, impossibly beautiful. But so many people! It had to be thousands of years in the future, as glaciers were thousands of years in the past. He was soaring through time, out of the knife-edge present, back to glaciers and forward to supercities, perhaps ten thousand years each way. An eyeblink in the life of stones, and the Sierra would stand throughout; but chewed at by the future city as much as by the ancient glaciers, perhaps. Sheep cropped meadows to dust in a single summer; and the shepherds were worse. And if so many came to live by the bay….
Curious, fearful, he tilted in his flight, soared east over the great valley, through the gold-choked foothills, up among the peaks. He rose in a gyre and stared down at starlit granite. There a valley had been drowned, a shocking sight. Wheel, turn, soar, take heart: for all was dark. Not a light to be seen, the whole length of the range. The backbone of California, gleaming in moonlight.
This much beauty would always be in danger, there was no avoiding that. Its animals must defend it. All its animals. He soared over the highest peaks, and then looked back; a full moon bathed the great eastern escarpment with white light. Death Valley burned, Whitney froze—
His ankle was in a fumarole, his head in the muddy snowbank. He shifted, saw that the wheel of stars had turned nearly a quarter turn. He took several long deep breaths. His vision cleared with the cold air, he returned to the moment and his bed in the mud. He could feel his lungs and his mind; beyond that, he and the mountain still seemed one undifferentiated mass, which he felt only in a distant, seismic way. But now he knew where he was. For a while he had soared on a great wind through time, but now he was just John again, flat on his back, and numb with cold.
Still, he remembered the vision perfectly. That was quite a voyage great Shasta had sent him on! Perhaps visions like that were why the Indians worshipped it.
As for what he had seen… well, the habitable zone was never thick. Caught between the past and future, we squirm in a dangerous eighth of an inch. Perhaps it was like that always. The atmosphere, for instance, was frighteningly thin; hike for a day and you could ascend the larger part of it, as when climbing Shasta itself. The landscape was tightly wrapped in a thin skin of gas. And the earth itself rolled in a thin temperate sphere around the sun, a zone of heat that neither boiled the seas nor allowed them to freeze solid; that shell might only be a few feet thick, or an eighth of an inch, who knew? It was a miracle the earth rolled within that sphere! Delicate, precious dewdrop of a world, hung in the light with the nicest precision, like every dewdrop in every morning's spider-web….
The wheel of stars had turned again. Bixby was shifting, muttering as in a dream. The sky in the east was the black nearest blue. And then the blue nearest black. Light seeped into the world as if vision were a new faculty, a sense born instant by instant, to creatures formerly blind. The stars began to slip away; he watched a dim one grow fainter and then wink out of visibility, a strange moment. The eyes are flowers that see the stars.
Bixby croaked something about leaving. But they were on the western side of the peak, and it would be hours before the sun appeared. Meanwhile it was cold beyond movement. When they shifted, their coats crackled as if made of thin glass.
The sky, though cloudless, was a dull and frosty blue. He could see nothing of the earth but their mud patch, and the snow and lava bordering it. He still felt part of the mountain, with no discernable break between his skin and the mud. As the morning light blossomed it seemed to fill him, pouring through his eyes and down into the rock; he felt himself a conduit in a vast interconnected totality, an organism pulsing with its own universal breath. The heat at his core caught and burned, so that he was warm enough to melt his coat's sheath of ice; that was heat displaced from the volcano, which was heat displaced from the sun; which was heat displaced from the heart of the Milky Way; which was heat displaced from the heart of the universe, from that original heart's diastolic expansion. No dualism was significant in the face of this essential unity: he was an atom of God's great body, and he knew it. The landscape and his mind were two expressions of the same miracle.
On the lonely peak of a nearly extinct volcano, two black specks of consciousness observed the morning light.
The time came at last to try a de
scent. Imagination over reason, action over contemplation; thus he had always believed, and never more than now! It was time to think two thoughts down the mountain.
Spindrift sparked overhead like chips of mica, and then the sun cracked the mountaintop. They stood like golems new-made of clay, ice shattering from their chests, mud sluicing off their backs. They slapped their arms together and the world burned in their fingertips. Nature was the greatest teacher, for those who listened; and Muir had learned long ago that there was a reserve of energy at the end of any long period of suffering. It was something mountaineers often had the chance to discover.
They staggered crazy-legged over the long ridge. They reached the snow slopes and descended more rapidly, swimming through drifts, glissading at the top of little avalanches, falling on their faces; but all downward, and so of use, their weakness only speeding the descent.
Then the clean smell of pinesap cut through the sulphur stench in their hair, and they were at treeline. Bixby sat against a tree and rested, while Muir went on, in search of their host Sisson. Godlike he strode through a meadow, its wildflowers exploding in his sight, dot after dot of pure drenched color. And then he saw Sisson's horses through the trees, and smelled his coffee on the fire. Smoke rose through slanting sunbeams. He was home; and now he was home.
Sexual Dimorphism
The potential for hallucination in paleogenomics was high. There was not only the omnipresent role of instrumentation in the envisioning of the ultramicroscopic fossil material, but also the metamorphosis over time of the material itself, both the DNA and its matrices, so that the data were invariably incomplete, and often shattered. Thus the possibility of psychological projection of patterns onto the rorschacherie of what in the end might be purely mineral processes had to be admitted.
Dr. Andrew Smith was as aware of these possibilities as anyone. Indeed it constituted one of the central problems of his field—convincingly to sort the traces of DNA in the fossil record, distinguishing them from an array of possible pseudofossils. Pseudofossils littered the history of the discipline, from the earliest false nautiloids to the famous Martian pseudonanobacteria. Nothing progressed in paleogenomics unless you could show that you really were talking about what you said you were talking about. So Dr. Smith did not get too excited, at first, about what he was finding in the junk DNA of an early dolphin fossil.
In any case there were quite a few distractions to his work at that time. He was living on the south shore of the Amazonian Sea, that deep southerly bay of the world-ringing ocean, east of Elysium, near the equator. In the summers, even the cool summers they had been having lately, the extensive inshore shallows of the sea grew as warm as blood, and dolphins—adapted from Terran river dolphins like the baiji from China, or the boto from the Amazon, or the susu from the Ganges, or the bhulan from the Indus—sported just off the beach. Morning sunlight lanced through the waves and picked out their flashing silhouettes, sometimes groups of eight or ten of them, all playing in the same wave.
The marine laboratory he worked at, located on the seafront of the harbour town of Eumenides Point, was associated with the Acheron labs, farther up the coast to the west. The work at Eumenides had mostly to do with the shifting ecologies of a sea that was getting saltier. Dr. Smith's current project dealing with this issue involved investigating the various adaptations of extinct cetaceans that had lived when the Earth's sea had exhibited different levels of salt. He had in his lab some fossil material, sent to the lab from Earth for study, as well as the voluminous literature on the subject including the full genomes of all the living descendants of these creatures. The transfer of fossils from Earth introduced the matter of cosmic-ray contamination to all the other problems involved in the study of ancient DNA, but most people dismissed these effects as minor and inconsequential, which was why fossils were shipped across at all. And of course with the recent deployment of fusion-powered rapid vehicles, the amount of exposure to cosmic rays had been markedly reduced. Smith was therefore able to do research on mammal salt-tolerance both ancient and modern, thus helping to illuminate the current situation on Mars, also joining the debates ongoing concerning the paleohalocycles of the two planets, now one of the hot research areas in comparative planetology and bioengineering.
Nevertheless, it was a field of research so arcane that if you were not involved in it, you tended not to believe in it. It was an offshoot, a mix of two difficult fields, its ultimate usefulness a long shot, especially compared to most of the enquiries being conducted at the Eumenides Point Labs. Smith found himself fighting a feeling of marginalization in the various lab meetings and informal gatherings, in coffee lounges, cocktail parties, beach luncheons, boating excursions. At all of these he was the odd man out, with only his colleague Frank Drumm, who worked on reproduction in the dolphins currently living offshore, expressing any great interest in his work and its applications. Worse yet, his work appeared to be becoming less and less important to his advisor and employer, Vlad Taneev, who as one of the First Hundred, and the co-founder of the Acheron labs, was ostensibly the most powerful scientific mentor one could have on Mars; but who in practice turned out to be nearly impossible to access, and rumoured to be in failing health, so that it was like having no boss at all, and therefore no access to the lab's technical staff and so forth. A bitter disappointment.
And then of course there was Selena, his—his partner, roommate, girlfriend, significant other, lover—there were many words for this relationship, though none was quite right. The woman with whom he lived, with whom he had gone through graduate school and two post-docs, with whom he had moved to Eumenides Point, taking a small apartment near the beach, near the terminus of the coastal tram, where when one looked back east the point itself just heaved over the horizon, like a dorsal fin seen far out to sea. Selena was making great progress in her own field, genetically engineering salt grasses; a subject of great importance here, where they were trying to stabilize a thousand-kilometer coastline of low dunes and quicksand swamps. Scientific and bioengineering progress; important achievements, relevant to the situation; all things were coming to her professionally, including of course offers to team up in any number of exciting public/co-op collaborations.
And all things were coming to her privately as well. Smith had always thought her beautiful, and now he saw that with her success, other men were coming to the same realization. It took only a little attention to see it; an ability to look past shabby lab coats and a generally unkempt style to the sleekly curving body and the intense, almost ferocious intelligence. No—his Selena looked much like all the rest of the lab rats when in the lab, but in the summers when the group went down in the evening to the warm tawny beach to swim, she walked out the long expanse of the shallows like a goddess in a bathing suit, like Venus returning to the sea. Everyone in these parties pretended not to notice, but you couldn't help it.
All very well; except that she was losing interest in him. This was a process that Smith feared was irreversible; or, to be more precise, that if it had got to the point where he could notice it, it was too late to stop it. So now he watched her, furtive and helpless, as they went through their domestic routines; there was a goddess in his bathroom, showering, drying off, dressing, each moment like a dance.
But she didn't chat anymore. She was absorbed in her thoughts, and tended to keep her back to him. No—it was all going away.
They had met in an adult swimming club in Mangala, while they were both graduate students at the university there. Now, as if to re-invoke that time, Smith took up Frank's suggestion and joined him at an equivalent club in Eumenides Point, and began to swim regularly again. He went from the tram down to the big fifty-meter pool, set on a terrace overlooking the ocean, and swam so hard in the mornings that the whole rest of the day he buzzed along in a flow of beta endorphins, scarcely aware of his work problems or the situation at home. After work he took the tram home feeling his appetite kick in, and banged around the kitchen throwing together a
meal and eating much of it as he cooked it, irritated (if she was there at all) with Selena's poor cooking and her cheery talk about her work, irritated also probably just from hunger, and dread at the situation hanging over them; at this pretence that they were still in a normal life. But if he snapped at her during this fragile hour she would go silent for the rest of the evening; it happened fairly often; so he tried to contain his temper and make the meal and quickly eat his part of it, to get his blood sugar level back up.
Either way she fell asleep abruptly around nine, and he was left to read into the timeslip, or even slip out and take a walk on the night beach a few hundred yards away from their apartment. One night, walking west, he saw Pseudophobos pop up into the sky like a distress flare down the coast, and when he came back into the apartment she was awake and talking happily on the phone; she was startled to see him, and cut the call short, thinking about what to say, and then said, "That was Mark, we've got tamarisk three fifty-nine to take repetitions of the third salt flusher gene!"
"That's good," he said, moving into the dark kitchen so she wouldn't see his face.
This annoyed her. "You really don't care how my work goes, do you?"
"Of course I do. That's good, I said."
She dismissed that with a noise.
Then one day he got home and Mark was there with her, in the living room, and at a single glance he could see they had been laughing about something; had been sitting closer together than when he started opening the door. He ignored that and was as pleasant as he could be.
The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson Page 45
