The Complete Mars Trilogy. Kim Stanley Robinson

blue no-slip pads. Each step gave him a wider view of Underhill Plain, but it was still the same sere and barren rockpile, no matter how large it got. From the square white pavilion at the pyramid’s summit one could just see Chernobyl, and the spaceport. Other than that, nothing. Why had he come to this place? Why had he worked so hard to get here, sacrificing so many of the pleasures of life, family, home, leisure, play … He shook his head. So far as he could recall, it had simply been what he had wanted to do, the definition of his life. A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference? Moonlit nights in the fragrant olive grove, the ground dotted with small black circles and the electric warm brush of the mistral rustling the leaves in quick soft waves, flat on his back, arms spread wide, the leaves flickering silver and grey under the black bowl of stars; and one of those stars would be steady, faint, red, and he would seek it out and watch it, there among the windswept olive leaves; and he had been eight years old! My God, what were they? Nothing explained that, nothing explained them! As well explain why they had painted in Lascaux, why they had built stone cathedrals into the sky. Why coral polyps built reefs.

      He had had an ordinary youth, moved often, lost what friends he made, went to the University of Paris to study psychology, did his degree work on space station depression and went to work for Ariane, and then Glavkosmos. Along the way got married and divorced: Françoise had said he “was not there”. All those nights with her in Avignon, all those days in Villefranche-sur-Mer, living in the most beautiful place on Earth, and he had walked about in a fog of desire for Mars! It was absurd! Worse, it was stupid. A failure of the imagination, of memory, of, finally, intelligence itself: he had not been able to see what he had had, or to imagine what he would get. And now he was paying for it, trapped on an icefloe in the Arctic night with ninety-nine foreigners, not one of whom spoke French worth a damn. Only three who could even try, and Frank’s French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet.

      The absence of his mind’s own tongue had driven him to watching TV from home, which only exacerbated his pain. Still he taped video monologues, and sent them to his mother and sister, so that they would send replies in kind; he watched the replies many times, looking more at the backdrops than at his relatives. He even had occasional live conversations with journalists, waiting impatiently between exchanges. Those talks made it clear how famous he was in France, a household name, and he was careful to answer everything conventionally, playing the Michel Duval persona, running the Michel program. Sometimes he cancelled consultations with fellow colonists when he was in the mood to listen to French; let them eat English! But these incidents got him a sharp reprimand from Frank, and a conference with Maya. Was he overworked? Of course not; only ninety-nine people to keep sane, while at the same time wandering in a Provence of the mind, on tree-covered steep hillsides with their vineyards and farmhouses and ruined towers and monasteries, in a living landscape, a landscape infinitely more beautiful and humane than the stony waste of this reality—

      He was in the TV lounge. While lost in thought he had apparently gone back inside. But he could not remember that; he had thought he was still standing on top of the Great Pyramid; and then he had blinked and was in the TV lounge (all asylums have them), watching a video image of one of the lichen-covered canyon walls of Marineris.

      He shivered. It had happened again. He had lost touch, gone away and come to later in the day. It had happened already some dozen times before. And it was not just being lost in thought, but buried in it, dead to the world. He looked around the room, shivered convulsively. It was Ls = 5 now, the beginning of northern spring, and the northern walls of the great canyons were basking in the sun. Since they’re all going to go crazy anyway …

      Then it was Ls = 157, and 152° had passed in a blur of tele-existence. He was basking in the sun in the courtyard of Françoise’s seaside villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer, looking down on tile rooftops and terracotta pillars and a small pool, turquoise above the cobalt of the Mediterranean. A cypress stood like a green flame over the pool, swaying in a breeze and casting its perfume over his face. In the distance the green headland of a peninsula —

      Except really he was in Underhill Prime, usually called the trench, or Nadia’s arcade, sitting on the upper balcony looking out at a dwarf sequoia, behind it the glass wall and the mirrors with their gradient refractive index that guided the light down into the concourse from its origin on the Cote D’Or. Tatiana Durova had been killed by a crane tipped by a robot, and Nadia was inconsolable. But grief runs off us, Michel thought as he sat with her, like rain off a duck. In time Nadia would be well. Meanwhile there was nothing to be done. Did they think he was a sorcerer? A priest? If that were true he would have healed himself, healed all this world, or better, flown through space home. Wouldn’t that cause a sensation, to appear on the beach at Antibes and say, “Bonjour, I am Michel, I have come home”?

      Then it was Ls = 190, and he was a lizard on the top of the Pont du Gard, on the narrow rectangular rock plates that covered the actual aqueduct itself, which ran in its straight line high over the gorge. His diamondback skin had sloughed off around his tail, and the hot sun burned the new skin in crisscross lines. Except he was in Underhill in fact, in the atrium, and Frank had gone off to live with the Japanese that had landed in Argyre, and Maya and John were at loggerheads about their rooms, and where to house the UNOMA local headquarters; and Maya, more beautiful than ever, stalked him through the atrium, imploring his aid. He and Marina Tokareva had stopped rooming together nearly a full Martian year before – she had said he was not there – and looking at Maya Michel found himself imagining her as a lover but of course this was crazy, she was a russalka, she had slept with Glavkosmos bosses and cosmonauts to make her way up through the system and it had made her dissociated and bitter and unpredictable, she used sex to hurt now, sex was just diplomacy by other means to her, it would be insane to have anything to do with her in that mode, to be drawn down into the vortex of her limbs and her limbic system. Why not send crazy people in the first place …

      But now it was Ls = 241. He walked over the honeycombed limestone parapet of Les Baux, looking in the ruined chambers of the medieval hermitage. It was near sunset and the light was a curious Martian orange, the limestone glowing, the whole village and hazy plain below stretching out to the whitebronze line of the Mediterranean, looking as implausible as a dream … Except it was a dream, and he woke up, and found himself awake and back in Underhill. Phyllis and Edvard had just returned from an expedition and Phyllis was laughing and showing them a buttery lump of rock. “It was scattered all over the canyon,” she said laughing, “gold nuggets the size of your fist.”

      Then he was walking the tunnels out to the garage. The colony’s psychiatrist, experiencing visions, falling into gaps of consciousness, gaps of memory. Physician, heal thyself! But he couldn’t. He had gone insane of homesickness. Homesickness, there must be a better term for that, a scientific label that would legitimize it, make it real to others; but he already knew it was real. He missed Provence so much that at times he felt he could not breathe. He was like Nadia’s hand, a part of it torn away, the ghost nerves still throbbing with pain.

      … And save them the trouble?

      Time passed. The Michel program walked around, a hollow persona, empty inside, only some tiny homunculus of the cerebellum left to teleoperate the thing.

      The night of the second day of Ls = 266, he went to bed. He was dog-tired though he had done nothing, totally exhausted and drained, and yet he lay in the dark of his room and could not sleep. His mind spun miserably; he was very aware of how sick he was. He wished he could quit the pretense and admit that he had lost it, institutionalize himself. Go home. He could remember almost nothing of the previous few weeks; or maybe it was longer than that? He was not sure. He began to weep.

      His door clicked. It swung open, and a narrow wedge of hall light shone in, unblocked. No one there.

      “Hello?” he said, working to keep the tears out of his voice. “Who is it?”

      The reply was right in his ear, as if from a helmet intercom: “Come with me,” a man’s voice said.

      Michel jerked back and bumped into the wall. He stared up at a black silhouetted figure.

      “We need your help,” the figure whispered. A hand gripped his arm as he pressed