“In a few months. But—come on. Tell me about it.”
“Well . . . you were a student. Or just finishing school, I can’t remember.” She smiles. “Anyway, I was guiding groups in hikes through the little canyons north of here, and you were part of a group. We started up a—a little affair, as I recall. And saw each other for a while after we got back. But you were in Burroughs, and I kept guiding tours, and—well, you know. It didn’t last.”
Eileen smiles again. “So I went on to become a mountain guide—which I’ve been for as long as I can remember—while you moved to the city and got into politics!” She laughs and Roger smiles wryly. “Obviously we must have impressed each other!”
“Oh yes, yes.” Roger laughs shortly. “Searching for each other.” He grins lopsidedly, feeling bitter. “Actually I only got into government about forty years ago. Too late, as it turned out.”
Silence for a while. “So that’s what’s got you down,” Eileen says.
“What?”
“The Red Mars party—out of favor.”
“Out of existence, you mean.”
She considers it. “I never could understand the Red point of view—”
“Few could, apparently.”
“—until I read something in Heidegger, where he makes a distinction between earth and world. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“Earth is that blank materiality of nature that exists before us and more or less sets the parameters on what we can do. Sartre called it facticity. World then is the human realm, the social and historical dimension that gives earth its meaning.”
Roger nods his understanding.
“So—the Reds, as I understood it, were defending earth. Or planet, in this case. Trying to protect the primacy of planet over world—or at least to hold a balance between them.”
“Yes,” Roger says. “But the world inundated the planet.”
“True. But when you look at it that way, you can see what you were trying to do was hopeless. A political party is inevitably part of the world, and everything it does will be worldly. And we only know the materiality of nature through our human senses—so really it is only world that we know directly.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Roger protests. “I mean, it’s logical, and usually I’m sure it’s true—but sometimes—” He smacks the rock of their shelf with his mittened hand. “You know?”
Eileen touches the mitten. “World.”
Roger lifts his lip, irritated. He pulls the mitten off and hits the cold rock again. “Planet.”
Eileen frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe.”
And there was hope, Roger thought fiercely. We could have lived on this planet the way we found it, and confronted the materiality of earth every day of our lives. We could have.
Eileen is called away to help with the arrangement of the next day’s loads. “We’ll continue this later,” she says, touching Roger lightly on the shoulder.
He is left alone over the Gully. Moss discolors the stone under him, and grows in the cracks in the couloir. Swallows shoot down the Gully like falling stones, hunting for cliff mice or warm-blooded lizards. To the east, beyond the great shadow of the volcano, dark forests mark the sunlit Tharsis Bulge like blobs of lichen. Nowhere can one see Mars, just Mars, the primal Mars. They forgot what it was like to walk out onto the empty face of old Mars.
Once he walked out onto the great northern desert of Vastitas Borealis. All of Mars’s geographical features are immense by Terran scales, and just as the southern hemisphere is marked by huge canyons, basins, volcanoes, and craters, the northern hemisphere is strangely, hugely smooth; it had, in its highest latitudes, surrounding what at that time was the polar ice cap (it is now a small sea), a giant planet-ringing band of empty flat layered sand. Endless desert. And one morning before dawn Roger walked out of his campsite and hiked a few kilometers over the broad wavelike humps of the windswept sand, and sat down on the crest of one of the highest waves. There was no sound but his breath, his blood pounding in his ears, and the slight hiss of the oxygen regulator in his helmet. Light leaked over the horizon to the southeast and began to bring out the sand’s dull ocher, flecked with dark red. When the sun cracked the horizon the light bounced off the short steep faces of the dunes and filled everything. He breathed the gold air, and something in him bloomed, he became a flower in a garden of rock, the sole consciousness of the desert, its focus, its soul. Nothing he had ever felt before came close to matching this exaltation, the awareness of brilliant light, of illimitable expanse, of the glossy, intense presence of material things. He returned to his camp late in the day, feeling that a moment had passed—or an age. He was nineteen years old, and his life was changed.
Just being able to remember that incident, after two hundred and eighty-odd years have passed, makes Roger a freak. Less than one percent of the population share this gift (or curse) of powerful, long-term recollection. These days Roger feels the ability like a weight—as if each year were a stone, so that now he carries the crushing burden of three hundred red stones everywhere he goes. He feels angry that others forget. Perhaps it is envious anger.
Thinking of that walk when he was nineteen reminds Roger of a time years later, when he read Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. The little black cabin boy Pip (and Roger had always identified himself with Pip in Great Expectations), “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” fell overboard while his whaleboat was being pulled by a harpooned whale. The boat flew onward, leaving Pip alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Abandoned on the ocean alone, Pip grew more and more terrified, until “By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little Negro went about the deck an idiot.... The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”
Reading that made Roger feel strange. Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture had driven Pip insane.
It occurred to him, as he stared at the thick book, that perhaps he had gone mad as well. Terror, rapture—these extremities of emotion circumnavigate the spirit and approach each other again, though departing from the origin of perception in opposite directions. Mad with solitude, ecstatic with Being—the two parts of the recognition of self sit oddly together. But Pip’s insanity only shocked Roger into a sharper love for his own experience of the “heartless immensity.” He wanted it; and suddenly all the farthest, most desolate reaches of Mars became his special joy. He woke at night and sat up to watch dawns, a flower in a garden of rock. And wandered days like John in the desert, seeing God in stones and frost and skies that arched like sheets of fire.
Now he sits on a ledge on a cliff on a planet no longer his, looking down on plains and canyons peppered with life, life created by the human mind. It is as if the mind has extruded itself into the landscape: each flower an idea, each lizard a thought.... There is no heartless immensity left, no mirror of the void for the self to see itself in. Only the self, everywhere, in everything, suffocating the planet, cloying all sensation, imprisoning every being.
Perhaps this perception itself was a sort of madness.
The sky itself, after all (he thought) provides a heartless immensity beyond the imagination’s ability to comprehend, night after night.
Perhaps he needed an immensity he could imagine the extent of, to feel the perception of it as ecstasy rather than terror.