This flying group was led by a young woman Zo hadn’t met before, a girl of only nine m-years, named Melka. She was the best flier Zo had ever seen. When she was in the air leading them it was as if an angel had come into their midst, darting through them like a raptor through doves, at other times leading them through the tight maneuvers that made flocking such fun. And so Zo worked through the days at her co-op’s local partner, and flew every day after her work stint was over. And her heart was always soaring, pleased by one thing after another. Once she even called Ann Clayborne, to try to tell her about flying, about what it really meant; but the old one had nearly forgotten who she was, and did not appear interested even when Zo managed to make it clear when and how they had met.
That afternoon she flew with an ache inside. The past was a dead letter, sure; but that people could become such ghosts…’
Nothing for such a feeling but sun and salt air, the everchanging spill of sea foam, rising and falling against the cliffs. There was Melka, diving; Zo chased her, feeling a sudden rush of affection for such a beautiful spirit. But then Melka saw her and tipped away, and clipped the highest rock of a seastack with the end of one wing, and tumbled down like a shot bird. Shocked at the sight of the accident, Zo pulled her wings in and began dolphin-kicking downward next to the seastack, until she was plummeting in a powerful stoop; she caught up the tumbling girl in her arms, she flapped one wing just over the blue waves, while Melka struggled under her; then she saw that they were going to have to swim.
PART TWELVE
It Goes So Fast
They walked down to the the low bluffs overlooking the Florentine. It was night, the air still and cool, the stars bunched overhead in their thousands. They strode side by side on the bluff trail, looking down at the beaches below. The black water was smooth, pricked everywhere by reflected starlight, and the long smeared line reflecting Pseudophobos setting in the east, leading the eye to the dim black mass of land across the bay.
I’m worried, yes, very worried. In fact I’m scared.
Why?
It’s Maya. Her mind. Her mental problems. Her emotional problems. They’re getting worse.
What are the symptoms?
The same, only worse. She can’t sleep at night. She hates the way she looks, sometimes. She’s still in her manic-depressive cycle, but it’s changing somehow, I don’t know how to characterize it. As if she can’t always remember where in the cycle she is. Bouncing around in it. She forgets things, a lot of things.
We all do.
I know. But Maya is forgetting things that I would have said were essentially May an. She doesn’t seem to care. That’s the worst part; she doesn’t seem to care.
I find that hard to imagine.
Me too. Maybe it’s just the depressive part of her mood cycle, now predominating. But there are days when she loses all affect.
What you call jamais vu?
No, not exactly. She has those incidents too, mind you. Like a certain kind ofprestroke symptom. I know, I know — I told you, I’m scared. But I don’t know what this is, not really. She has jamais vus that are like a prestroke symptom. She has presque vus, where she feels almost on the edge of a revelation that never comes. That often happens to people in pre-epileptic auras.
I have feelings like that myself.
Yes, I suppose we all do. Sometimes it seems like things will come clear, and then the feeling goes away. Yes. But for Maya these are very intense, as in everything.
Better than the loss of affect.
Oh yes. I agree. Presque vu is not so bad. It’s deja vu that is the worst, and she has periods of continuous deja vu that can last up to a week. Those are devastating to her. They rob the world of something she can’t live without.
Contingency. Free will.
Perhaps. But the net effect of all these symptoms is to drive her into a state of apathy. Almost catatonia. Tried to avoid any of the abnormal states by not feeling too much. Not feeling at all.
They say one of the common issei ailments is falling into a funk.
Yes, I’ve been reading about that. Loss ofaffectual function, anomie, apathy. They’ve been treating it as they would catatonia, or schizophrenia — giving them a serotonin dopamine complex, limbic stimulants… a big cocktail, as you can imagine. Brain chemistry… I’ve been dosing her with everything I can think of, I must admit, keeping journals, running tests, sometimes with her cooperation, sometimes without her knowing much about it. I’ve been doing what I can, I swear I have.
I’m sure you have.
But it isn’t working. She’s losing it. Oh Sax —
He stopped, held on to his friend’s shoulder.
I can’t bear it if she goes. She was always such an airy spirit. We are earth and water, fire and air. And Maya was always in flight. Such an airy spirit, flying on her own gales up above us. I can’t stand to see her falling like this!
Ah well.
They walked on.
It’s nice to have Phobos back again.
Yes. That was a good idea of yours.
It was your idea, actually. You suggested it to me.
Did I? I don’t remember that.
You did.
Below them the sea crunched faintly on rocks.
These four elements. Earth, water, fire, and air. One of your semantic rectangles?
It’s from the Greeks.
Like the four temperaments?
Yes. Thales made the hypothesis. The first scientist.
But there were always scientists, you told me. All the way back to the savanna.
Yes, that’s true.
And the Greeks — all honor to them, they were obviously great minds — but they were only part of a continuum of scientists, you know. There has been some work done since.
Yes I know.
Yes. And some of that subsequent work might be of use to you, in these conceptual schemata of yours. In mapping the world for us. So that you might be given new ways of seeing things that might help you, even with problems like Maya’s. Because there are more than four elements. A hundred and twenty, more or less. Maybe there are more than four temperaments as well. Maybe a hundred and twenty of them, eh? And the nature of these elements — well — things have gotten strange since the Greeks. You know subatomic particles have an attribute called spin, that comes only in multiples of one half? And you know how an object in our visible world, it spins three hundred and sixty degrees, and is back to its original position? Well, a particle with a spin designated one half, like a proton or a neutron — it has to rotate through seven hundred and twenty degrees to get back to its original configuration.
What’s that?
It has to go through a double rotation relative to ordinary objects, to come back to its starting state.
You’re kidding.
No no. This has been known for centuries. The geometry of space is simply different for spin one half particles. They live in a different world.
And so…
Well, I don’t know. But it seems suggestive to me. I mean, if you are going to use physical models as analogues for our mental states, and throw them together in the patterns that you do, then perhaps you ought to be considering these somewhat newer physical models. To think of Maya as a proton, perhaps, a spin one half pariicle, living in a world twice as big as ours.
Ah.
And it gets stranger than that. There are ten dimensions to this world, Michel. Ten. The three of macrospace that we can perceive, the one of time, and then six more microdimensions, compactifted around the fundamental particles in ways we can describe mathematically but cannot visualize. Convolutions and topologies. Differential geometries, invisible but real, down at the ultimate level ofspacetime. Think about it. It could lead to whole new systems of thought for you. A vast new enlargement of your mind.