The Complete Mars Trilogy. Kim Stanley Robinson

unsure how to say it. Subtlety was dangerous when you were both using a second language, coming at it from different native tongues: possibilities for misunderstanding were all too real. “You must accept the idea that you perhaps do not want to choose between John and Frank. That in fact you want them both. In the context of the first hundred that can only be scandalous. But in a larger world, over time …”

      “Hiroko keeps ten men!” she exclaimed angrily.

      “Yes, and so do you. So do you. And in a larger world, no one will know or care.”

      He went on reassuring her, telling her that she was powerful, that (using Frank’s terms) she was the alpha female of the troop. She disagreed and forced more praise from him until finally she was satiated, and he could suggest they return home.

      “Don’t you think it will be a shock to have new people around? Different people?” She was driving, and as she turned to ask him this she almost drove off the road.

      “I suppose.” Parties had already landed in Borealis and Acidalia and the videotapes of them had been a shock, you could see it in people’s faces. As if aliens had arrived from space. But so far only Ann and Simon had met with any of them in person, running into a rover expedition north of Noctis Labyrinthus. “Ann said it felt as if someone had stepped out of the TV.”

      “My life feels like that all the time,” Maya said sadly.

      Michel lifted his eyebrows. The Maya program would not have said that. “What do you mean?”

      “Oh, you know. Half the time it seems like one big simulation, don’t you think?”

      “No.” He considered it. “I don’t.” It was all too real, in fact – the cold of it seeping up through the rover seat deep into his flesh – inescapably real, inescapably cold. Perhaps as a Russian she didn’t appreciate that. But it was always, always cold. Even at noon on midsummer’s day, with the sun overhead like an open furnace door blazing in the sand-colored sky, the temperature would be at best 260° K, meaning –15°C, cold enough to push through the mesh of a walker and make each move a little diamond pattern of hurt. As they approached Underhill Michel felt the cold pushing through the fabric into his skin, and he felt the too-cool oxygenated air expand out of the mouthpiece deep into his lungs, and he glanced up at the sand horizon and the sand sky and said to himself, I am a diamondback snake, slithering through a red desert of cold stone and dry dust. Someday I will shed my skin like a phoenix in a fire, to become some new creature of the sun, to walk the beach naked and splash in warm salt water …

      Back at Underhill he turned on the shrink program in his head and asked Maya if she were feeling better, and she touched her faceplate to his, giving him a brief glimpse of a gaze that was a kiss. “You know I do,” her voice said in his ear. He nodded. “I think I’ll go for another walk, then,” he said, and did not say, But what about me? What will make me feel better? He willed the movement of his legs and walked off. The bleak plain surrounding the base was a vision out of some post-holocaust desolation, a nightmare world; nevertheless he didn’t want to go back into their little warren of artificial light and heated air and carefully deployed colors, colors that he himself had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here: the colors were all wrong, or worse, irrelevant. Wallpaper in hell.

      The phrase formed in his mind and pushed at his lips. Wallpaper in hell. Wallpaper in hell. Since they’re going to go crazy anyway … Certainly it had been a mistake to have only one psychiatrist along. Every therapist on Earth was also in therapy, it was part of the job, it came with the territory. But his therapist was back in Nice, fifteen timeslipped minutes away at best, and Michel talked to him but he couldn’t help. He didn’t understand, not really; he lived where it was warm and blue, he could go outside, he was (Michel presumed) in reasonably good mental health. While Michel was a doctor in a hospice in a prison in hell; and the doctor was sick.

      He hadn’t been able to adapt. People were different in that regard, it was a matter of temperament. Maya, walking toward the lock door, had a temperament quite different from his, which somehow enabled her to be completely at home here. To tell the truth he didn’t think she really noticed her surroundings much in any case. And yet in other ways he and she were similar. It had to do with the lability-stability index, and its particular emotionality; they were both labile. And yet fundamentally they were very different characters; the labile-stabile index had to be considered in combination with the very different set of characteristics grouped under the labels extroversion and introversion. This had been his great discovery of the recent year, and now it structured all his thinking about himself and his charges.

      Walking toward the Alchemists’ Quarter, he fit the morning’s events into the gridwork of this new characterological system. Extra version-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence from many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that exceeded chance by a huge amount. So the concept was real, quite real! In fact physiological investigations had revealed that extraversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backwards to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extravert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead to more excited and uninhibited behavior.

      So the whole collection of extravert-introvert traits, with all that they said about one’s character, could be traced back to a group of cells in the brain stem called the ascending reticular activating system, the area that ultimately determined levels of cortical arousal. Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six year-old son died. But biology was fate.

      And there was more to Michel’s system; fate, after all, was no simple either-or. He had recently begun to consider Wenger’s index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic branch responds to outside stimuli and alerts the organism to action, so that individuals dominated by this branch were excitable; the parasympathetic branch, on the other hand, habituates the alerted organism to the stimulus, and restores it to homeostatic balance, so that individuals dominated by this branch were placid. Duffy had suggested calling these two classes of individuals labiles and stabiles, and this classification, while not as famous as extraversion and introversion, was just as solidly backed by empirical evidence, and just as useful in understanding varieties of temperament.

      Now, neither system of classification told the investigator all that much about the total nature of the personality being studied. The terms were so general, they were collections of so many traits, that they said very little in any useful diagnostic sense, especially since both were Gaussian curves in the actual population.

      But combine the two systems, and it began to get very interesting indeed.

      It was not a simple matter, and Michel had spent a fair amount of time at his computer screen sketching one kind of combinatoire after another, using the two different systems as the x and y axes of several different grids, none of which told him much. But then he began moving the four terms around the initial points of a Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something’s opposite and its contrary; the concept “not-X” being not quite the same thing as “anti-X,” as one saw