I don’t care about my mind. I only care about Maya.
Yes. I know.
They stood looking over the starry water. Over them arched the dome of stars, and in the silence the air breathed over them, the sea mumbled below. The world seemed a big place, wild and free, dark and mysterious.
After a time they turned, and began walking back along the trail.
One time I was taking the train from Da Vinci to Sheffield, and there was some problem with the piste, and we stopped for a while in Underbill. I got off and took a walk through the old trailer park. And I started remembering things, fust looking around. I wasn’t really trying. But things came to me.
A common phenomenon.
Yes, so I understand. But I wonder if it might not help Maya to do something like that. Not Underhill in particular, but all the places where she was happy. Where the two of you were happy. You’re living in Sabishii now, but why not move back to some place like Odessa?
She didn’t want to.
She might have been wrong. Why don’t you try living in Odessa, and visiting Underhill from time to time, or Sheffield. Cairo. Maybe even Nicosia. The south-pole cities, Dorsa Brevia. A dive into Burroughs. A train tour of the Hellas Basin. All that kind of return might help her to stitch her selves together, to see again where our story began. Where we were formed for good or ill, in the morning of the world. She might need that whether she knows it or not.
Hmm.
Arm in arm they walked back to the crater, following a dim track through dark bracken.
Bless you, Sax. Bless you.
The water of Isidis Baywas the color of a bruise or a clematis petal, sparkling with sunlight that glanced off waves just on the verge of whitecapping. The swell was from the north, and the cabin cruiser pitched and yawed as they motored northwest from DuMartheray Harbor. A bright day in spring, Ls 51, m-year 79, A.D. 2181.
Maya sat on the upper deck of the boat, drinking in the sea air and the flood of blue sunlight. It was a joy to be out on the water like this, away from all the haze and junk on shore. Wonderful the way the sea could not be tamed or changed in any way, wonderful how when one got out of the sight of land one rocked on blue wilderness again, always the same no matter what happened back there. She could have sailed on, all day every day, and each slide down the waves a little roller-coaster ride of the soul.
But that wasn’t what they were about. There ahead white-caps broke over a broad patch, and beside her the boat’s pilot brought the wheel over a spoke or two, and knocked the throttle down a few rpm. That white water was the top of Double Decker Butte, now a reef marked by a black buoy, clanging a deep bongBong, bongBong, bongBong.
Mooring buoys were scattered around this big nautical church bell. Their pilot steered to the nearest one. There were no other boats anchored here, or visible anywhere; it was as if they were alone in the world. Michel came up from below and stood by her, hand on her shoulder as the pilot cut the throttle, and a sailor in the bow below them reached out with a boat hook and snagged the buoy, clipped their mooring rope onto it. The pilot killed the engine and they drifted back on the swells till the mooring line tugged them short into one swell, with a loud slap and a fan of white spray. They were at anchor over Burroughs.
Down in the cabin Maya got out of her clothes and pulled on a flexible orange dry suit: suit and hood, booties, tank and helmet, lastly gloves. She had only learned to dive for this descent, and every part of it was still new, except for the sensation of being underwater, which was like the weightlessness of space. So once she got over the side of the boat and into the water, it was a familiar feeling: sinking down, pulled by the weight belt, aware that the water around her was cold, but not feeling it in any real way. Breathing underwater; that was odd, but it worked. Down into the dark. She let go and swam down, away from the little pin of sunlight.
Down and down. Past the upper edge of Double Decker Butte, past its silvered or coppery windows, standing in rows like mineral extrusions or the one-way mirrors of observers from another dimension. Quickly gone in the murk, however, and she dream-parachuted down again, down and down. Michel and a couple others were following her, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see them. Then a robot trawl shaped like a thick bed frame sank past them all, its powerful headlights shooting forward long cones of crystalline fluidity, cones so long that they became one blurry diffuse cylinder, flowing this way and that as the trawl dipped and bobbed, striking now a distant mesa’s metallic windows, now the black muck down on the rooftops of the old Nied-erdorf. Somewhere down there, the Niederdorf Canal had run — there, a gleam of white teeth — the Bareiss columns, impervious white under their diamond coating, about half-buried in black sand and muck. She pulled up and kicked her fins back and forth a few times to stop descending, then pushed a button that shot some compressed air into one part of her weight belt, to stabilize herself. She floated then over the canal like a ghost. Yes; it was like Scrooge’s dream, the trawl a kind of robot Christmas Past, illuminating the drowned world of lost time, the city she had loved so much. Sudden darts of pain lanced through her ribs; mostly she was numb to any” feeling. It was too strange, too hard to understand or believe that this was Burroughs, her Burroughs, now Atlantis at the bottom of a Martian sea.
Bothered by her lack of feeling, she kicked hard and swam down the canal park, over the salt columns and farther west.
There on the left loomed Hunt Mesa, where she and Michel had lived in hiding over a dance studio; then the broad black upslope of Great Escarpment Boulevard. Ahead lay Princess Park, where in the second revolution she had stood on a stage and given a speech to a huge throng; the crowd had stood just below where she was floating now. Over there — that was where she and Nirgal had spoken. Now the black bottom of a bay. All of that, so long ago — her life — They had cut open the tent and walked away from the city, they had flooded it and never looked back. Yes, no doubt Michel was right, this dive was a perfect image of the murky processes of memory; and maybe it would help to see it; and yet… Maya felt her numbness, and doubted it. The city was drowned, sure. But it was still here. Anytime they wanted to someone could rebuild the dike and pump out this arm of the bay, and there the city would be again, drenched and steaming in the sunlight, safely enclosed in a polder as if it were some town in the Netherlands; wash down the muddy streets, plant streetgrass and trees, clean out the mesa interiors, and the houses and the shops down in the Niederdorf, and up the broad boulevards — polish the windows — and there you would have it all again — Burroughs, Mars, on the surface and gleaming. It could be done; it even made sense, almost, given how much excavation there had been in the nine mesas, given that Isidis Bay had no other good harbor. Well, no one would ever do it. But it could be done. And so it was not really like the past at all.
Numb, and feeling more and more chill, Maya shot more air into the weight belt, turned and swam back up the length of Canal Park, back toward the light trawl. Again she spotted the row of salt columns, and something about them drew her. She kicked down to them, then swam just over the black sand, disturbing the rippled surface with the downdraft from her fins. The rows of Bareiss columns had bracketed the old canal. They looked more tumbledown than ever now that their symmetricality was ruined by half burial. She remembered taking afternoon walks in the park, west into the sun, then back, with the light pouring past them. It had been a beautiful place. Down among the great mesas it had been like being in a giant city of many cathedrals.