Читать книгу The Martians - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 5

AT FIRST IT WAS fine. The people were nice. Wright Valley was awesome. Each day Michel woke in his cubicle and looked out of his little window (everyone had one) at the frozen surface of Lake Vanda, a flat oval of cracked blue ice, flooding the bottom of the valley. The valley itself was brown and big and deep, its great rock side-walls banded horizontally. Seeing it all he felt a little thrill and the day began well.

There was always a lot to do. They had been dropped there in the largest of the Antarctic dry valleys with a load of disassembled huts and, for immediate occupancy, Scott tents. Their task through the perpetual day of the Antarctic summer was to build their winter home, which on assembly had turned out to be a fairly substantial and luxurious modular array of interconnected red boxes. In many ways it seemed analogous to what the voyagers would be doing when they arrived on Mars, and so of course to Michel it was all very interesting.

There were one hundred and fifty-eight people there, and only a hundred were going to be sent on the first trip out, to establish a permanent colony. This was the plan as designed by the Americans and Russians, who had then convened an international team to enact it. So this stay in Antarctica was a kind of test, or winnowing. But it seemed to Michel that everyone there assumed he or she would be among the chosen, so there was little of the tension one saw in people doing job interviews. As they said, when it was discussed at all – in other words when Michel asked about it – some candidates were going to drop out, others would be invalided out, and others placed on later trips to Mars, at worst. So there was no reason to worry. Most of the people there were not worriers anyway – they were capable, brilliant, assured, used to success. Michel worried about this.

They finished building their winter home by the autumn equinox, March 21st. After that the alternation of day and night was dramatic, the brilliant slanted light of the days ending with the sun sliding off to the north and over the Olympus Range, the long twilights leading to a black starry darkness that eventually would be complete, and last for months. At their latitude, perpetual night would begin a little after mid-April.

The constellations as they revealed themselves were the stars of another sky, foreign and strange to a northerner like Michel, reminding him that the universe was a big place. Each day was shorter than the one before by a palpable degree, and the sun burned lower through the sky, its beams pouring down between the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges like vibrant stagelights. People got to know each other.

When they were first introduced, Maya had said ‘So you are to evaluate us!’ with a look that seemed to suggest this could be a process that went both ways. Michel had been impressed. Frank Chalmers, looking over her shoulder at him, had seen this.

They were a mix of personality types, as one might expect. But they all had the basic social skilfulness that had allowed them to make it this far, so that whether outgoing or withdrawn in their basic nature, they could still all talk easily. They were interested in each other, naturally. Michel saw a lot of relationships beginning to bloom around him. Romances too. Of course.

To Michel all the women in camp were beautiful. He fell a little in love with a lot of them, as was his practice always. Men he loved as elder brothers, women as goddesses he could never quite court (fortunately). Yes: every woman was beautiful, and all men were heroes. Unless of course they weren’t. But most were; this was humanity’s default state. So Michel felt, he always had. It was an emotional setting that called out for psychoanalysis, and in fact he had undergone analysis, without changing this feeling a bit (fortunately). It was his take on people, as he had said to his therapists. Naive, credulous, obtusely optimistic – and yet it made him a good clinical psychiatrist. It was his gift.

Tatiana Durova, for instance, he thought as gorgeous as any movie star, with also that intelligence and individuality that derived from life lived in the real world of work and community. Michel loved Tatiana.

And he loved Hiroko Ai, a remote and charismatic human being, withdrawn into her own affairs, but kind. He loved Ann Clayborne, a Martian already. He loved Phyllis Boyle, sister to Machiavelli. He loved Ursula Kohl like the sister he could always talk to. He loved Rya Jimenez for her black hair and bright smile, he loved Marina Tokareva for her tough logic, he loved Sasha Yefremova for her irony.

But most of all he loved Maya Toitovna, who was as exotic to him as Hiroko, but more extroverted. She was not as beautiful as Tatiana, but drew the eye. The natural leader of the Russian contingent, and a bit forbidding – dangerous somehow – watching everyone there in much the same way Michel was, though he was pretty sure she was a tougher judge of people. Most of the Russian men seemed to fear her, like mice under a hawk, or maybe it was that they feared falling hopelessly in love with her. If Michel were going to Mars (he was not) she was the one he would be most interested in.

Of course Michel, as one of the four psychologists there to help evaluate the candidates, could not act on any of these affections. That did not bother him; on the contrary he liked the constraint, which was the same he had with any of his clients. It allowed him to indulge his thoughts without having to consider acting on them. ‘If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling’ – maybe the old saying was right, but if you were forbidden to act for good reasons, then your feelings might not be false after all. So he could be both true and safe. Besides the saying was wrong, love for one’s fellow humans could be a matter of contemplation only. There was nothing wrong with it.

Maya was quite certain she was going to Mars. Michel therefore represented no threat to her, and she treated him like a perfect equal. Several others were like her in this respect – Vlad, Ursula, Arkady, Sax, Spencer, a few others. But Maya took matters beyond that; she was intimate from the very start. She would sit and talk to him about anything, including the selection process itself. They spoke English when they talked, their partial competence and strong accents making for a picturesque music.

‘You must be using the objective criteria for selecting people, the psychological profiles and the like.’

‘Yes, of course. Tests of various kinds, as you know. Various indexes.’

‘But your own personal judgments must count too, right?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘But it must be hard to separate out your personal feelings about people from your professional judgments, yes?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘How do you do it?’

‘Well … I suppose you would say it is a habit of mind. I like people, or whatever, for different reasons to the reasons that might make someone good on a project like this.’

‘For what reasons do you like people?’

‘Well, I try not to be too analytical about that! You know – it’s a danger in my job, becoming too analytical. I try to let my own feelings alone, as long as they aren’t bothering me somehow.’

She nodded. ‘Very sensible, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could manage that. I should try. It’s all the same to me. That’s not always good. Not appropriate.’ With a quick sidelong smile at him.

She would say anything to him. He thought about this, and decided that it was a matter of their respective situations: since he was staying behind, and she was going (she seemed so sure), it didn’t much matter what she said to him. It was as if he were dying to her, and she therefore giving herself to him, openly, as a farewell gift.

But he wanted her to care about what she said to him.

On April 18th the sun went away. In the morning it sparked in the east, shining directly up the valley for a minute or two, and then with a faint green flash it slipped behind Mount Newell. After that the dark days had midday twilights, shorter every day; then just night. Starry starry night. It was beyond Martian, this constant darkness – living by starlight with the aching cold outside, experiencing sensory deprivation in everything but one’s sense of cold. Michel, a Provençal, found that he hated both the cold and the dark. So did many of the others. They had been living in an Antarctic summer, thinking life was good and that Mars would not be such a challenge after all, and then with winter they were suddenly getting a better idea of what Mars would be like – not exactly, but in the sense of experiencing a massive array of deprivations. It was sobering how hard it hit.

Of course some did better than others. Some seemed not even to notice. The Russians had experienced cold and dark almost like this before. Tolerance of confinement was also good among the senior scientists – Sax Russell, Vlad Taneev, Marina Tokareva, Ursula Kohl, Ann Clayborne – these and other dedicated scientists seemed to have the capacity to spend great amounts of their time reading, working at their computers, and talking. Presumably lives spent largely in labs had prepared them.

They also understood that this was the life Mars was waiting to give them. Something not that different from the lives they had always led. So that the best analogy to Mars, perhaps, was not Antarctica, but any intense scientific laboratory.

This led him to thoughts of the optimum life history when considering inclusion in the group: middle-aged lab scientist, dedicated, accomplished; childless; unmarried or divorced. Lots of applicants fitted the criteria. In some ways you had to wonder. Though it wouldn’t be fair; it was a life pattern with its own integrity, its own rewards. Michel himself fitted the bill in every respect.

Naturally he had to divide his attention equally among all of the candidates, and he did. But one day he got to accompany Tatiana Durova alone, on a hike up the South Fork of Wright Valley. They hiked to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called the Dais that divided the valley lengthways, and continued up the southern arm of Wright Valley to Don Juan Pond.

Don Juan Pond: what a name for this extraterrestrial desolation! The pond was so salty that it would not freeze until the air chilled to –54 C; then the ice coating the shallow saline pond, having been distilled by the freezing, would be fresh-water ice, and so would not thaw again until the temperature rose above zero, usually in the following summer when trapped sunlight would greenhouse in the water under the ice, and melt it from below. As Tatiana explained the process it hovered in Michel’s mind as some kind of analogy to their own situation, hanging right on the edge of his understanding but never coming clear.

‘Anyway,’ she was saying, ‘scientists can use the pond as a single-setting minimum-temperature thermometer. Come here in the spring and you know immediately if the previous winter has got below minus 54.’

As it had already, some cold night this autumn; a layer of white ice sheeted the pond. Michel stood with Tatiana on the whitish, humped, salt-crusted shore. Over the Dais the noon sky was blue-black. Around them the steep valley walls fell to the floor of the canyon. Large dark boulders stuck out of the pond’s ice sheet.

Tatiana walked out onto the white surface, plunging through it with every step, boots crackling, water splashing – liquid salt water, spilling over the fresh ice, dissolving it and sending up a thin frost smoke. A vision: the Lady of the Lake, become corporeal and thus too heavy to walk on water.

But the pond was only a few centimetres deep, it barely covered the tops of her thick boots. Tatiana reached down and touched the tip of one gloved finger into the water, pulled up her mask to taste the water with her impossibly beautiful mouth – which puckered to a tight square. Then she threw back her head and laughed. ‘My God! Come taste, Michel, but just a touch, I warn you. It’s terrible!’

And so he clomped through the ice and over the wet sand floor of the pond, stepping awkwardly, a bull in a china shop.

‘It’s fifty times saltier than the sea, taste it.’

Michel reached down, put his forefinger in the water; the cold was intense, it was amazing that it was liquid still, so cold it was. He raised it to his tongue, touched gingerly: cold fire. It burned like acid. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed, spitting out involuntarily. ‘Is it poison?’ Some toxic alkali, or a lake of arsenic –

‘No no.’ She laughed. ‘Salts only. A hundred and twenty-six grams of salt per litre of water. As opposed to three point seven grams per litre, in seawater. Incredible.’ Tatiana was a geochemist, and so now shaking her head with amazement. This kind of thing was her work. Michel saw her beauty in a new way, masked but perfectly clear.

‘Salt raised to a higher power,’ he said absently. A concentrated quality. So it might be in the Mars colony; and suddenly the idea he had felt hovering over him descended: The ordinary sea-salt of humanity would be concentrated by their isolation into a poisonous pond.

He shuddered and spat again, as if he could reject such a bad thought. But the taste remained.

As the perpetual darkness stretches on it becomes hard not to think it permanent, as if we are lingering on after the local star has burnt out. People (some of them) are finally beginning to act as if they are being tested. As if the world has indeed ended, and we existing in some antechamber of the final judgment. Imagine a time of real religion, when everyone felt like this all the time.

Some of them avoided Michel, and Charles and Georgia and Pauline, the other psychologists. Others were too friendly. Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Frank Chalmers; Michel had to watch himself to avoid ending up alone with these people, or he would fall into a depression witnessing the spectacle of their great charm.

The best solution was to stay active. Remembering the pleasure of his hike with Tatiana, he went out as often as he could, accompanying the others as they performed various maintenance and scientific tasks. The days passed in their artificial rounds, everything measured out and lived just as if the sun were rising in the morning and setting in the evening. Wake, eat, work, eat, work, eat, relax, sleep. Just like home.

One day he went out with Frank on a hike up to an anemometer near the Labyrinth, an interlacing complex of canyons cutting the floor of upper Wright Valley. He wanted to try to see if he could penetrate the man’s pleasant surface. In the end it did not work; Frank was too cool, too professional, too friendly. Years of work in Washington DC had made him very smooth indeed. He had been involved in getting the first human expedition to Mars, a few years before; an old friend of John Boone, the first man to set foot on Mars. He was also said to be heavily involved in the planning for this expedition as well. He was certainly one of those who felt they were going to be among the hundred; extremely confident, in fact. He had a very American voice somehow, booming out to Michel’s left as they hiked. ‘Check those glaciers, falling out of the passes and being blown away before they reach the valley floor. What an awesome place, really.’

‘Yes.’

‘These katabatic winds – falling off the polar cap – nothing can stop them. Cold as hell. I wonder if that little windvane we set up here will even be there any more.’

It was. They pulled out its data cartridge, put in another one. Around them the huge expanse of brown rock formed a bowl under the starry sky. They started back down.

‘Why do you want to go to Mars, Frank?’

‘What’s this, we’re still at work out here are we?’

‘No, no. I’m just curious.’

‘Sure. Well, I want to try it. I want to try living somewhere where you can actually try to do something new. Set up new systems, you know. I grew up in the South, like you did. Only the American South is a lot different from the French South. We were stuck in our history for a long, long time. Then things opened up, partly because it got so bad. Partly just a lot of hurricanes hitting the coast! And we had a chance to rebuild. And we did, but not much changed. Not enough, Michel. So I have this desire to try it again. That’s the truth.’ And he glanced over at Michel, as if to emphasize not only that it was the truth, but that it was a truth he seldom talked about. Michel liked him a bit better after that.

Another day (or, in another hour of their endless night) Michel went out with a group, to check on the climatology stations located around the lake shore. They hauled banana sleds loaded with replacement batteries and tanks of compressed nitrogen and the like. Michel, Maya, Charles, Arkady, Iwao, Ben, and Elena.

They walked across Lake Vanda, Ben and Maya pulling the sleds. The valley seemed huge. The frozen surface of the lake gleamed and sparked blackly underfoot. To a northerner the sky already seemed overstuffed with stars, and in the ice underfoot each star was shattered into many pricks of light. Next to him Maya shone her flashlight down, lighting a field of cracks and bubbles under her; it was like shining light into a glass floor that had no bottom. She turned the flashlight off and it suddenly looked to Michel like the stars of the other hemisphere were shining up through a clear world, an alien planet much closer to the centre of its galaxy. Looking down into the black hole at the centre of things, through burred starlight. Like the shattered bottomless pool of the self. Every step broke the sight into a different refraction, a kaleidoscope of white points in black. He could gaze down into Vanda for a long time.

They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: their complex sparked like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon. Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading, resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.

A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto rust-coloured rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air. Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in spacesuits. Would that matter? The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a spacesuit as the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing downvalley breeze was like breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.

Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake’s summertime moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the others crouched around him –

‘Excuse me,’ Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben’s side.

‘Is it your hip?’

‘Ah – yeah –’

‘Hold on. Hold steady.’ Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his other side. ‘Here, let’s get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we’ll get you back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down? Okay, let’s go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to get ready for us.’ She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed beside Ben.

Across the Ross Sea, McMurdo Station had an extra complement of winter staff precisely to help support them out at Vanda, and so the winter helicopter came yammering down in a huge noise only an hour or so after their return to the station. By that time Ben was furious at himself for falling, more angry than hurt, though they found out later that his hip had been fractured.

‘He went down in a flash,’ Michel said to Maya afterwards. ‘So fast he had no time to get a hand out. I’m not surprised it broke something.’

‘Too bad,’ Maya said.

‘You were good out there,’ Michel said, surprising himself. ‘Very quick.’

She blew this away with a sound and a wave of her hand. ‘How many times I’ve seen it. I spent my whole childhood on ice.’

‘Ah, of course.’ Expertise. A fund of experience was the basis of all natural decision making. This was true of Maya in many different realms, he felt. Ergonomics, her speciality, was a matter of people getting along well with things. She was going to Mars. He was not. He loved her. Well, but he loved many women. That was just the way it was. But with her …

From Michel’s personal notes, heavily encrypted:

Maya: very beautiful. A tiger slouches into the room, reeking of sex and murder. The alpha female before whom all submit. Quick in everything, including moods. I can talk to her. We have real conversations because she doesn’t care what I’m here for. Can that be true?

Spencer Jackson: a power. A secret soul. Depths beyond all calculation, even for him. The Vanda inside us. His the mind into which the whole community falls, transmuted to art. Can sketch any face in a dozen strokes, and there they are bare as a pebble. But I don’t think he’s happy.

Tatiana Durova: very beautiful. A goddess trapped in a motel. She’s looking for a way out. She knows everyone thinks she is beautiful, and therefore trusts none of us. She needs to get back to Olympus, where her appearance would be taken for granted, and she able to get through to someone. To her peers. Perhaps she takes Mars to be Olympus.

Arkady Bogdanov is a power. A very steady reliable fellow, earnest almost to the point of dullness. One sees everything he’s thinking, he doesn’t bother to conceal it. What I am is enough to get me to Mars, he says in his manner. Don’t you agree? And I do. An engineer, quick and ingenious, not interested in larger issues.

Marina Tokareva: a beauty. Very serious and intense, no small talk to her. One is forced to think about things. And she assumes you are as quick as she is. So it can be work to follow her. Narrow chiselled features, thick jet-black hair. Sometimes following her glances I think she is one of the homosexuals who must be among us; other times she seems fixated on Vlad Taneev, the oldest man here.

George Berkovic and Edvard Perrin are paired in their regard for Phyllis Boyle. Yet it is not a competition but a partnership. They both think they like Phyllis, but really what they like is the way the other one mirrors their affection. Phyllis likes this too.

Ivana is quite beautiful, despite a thin face and an overbite; a goofy smile lights up the face of the classic chemist nerd, and suddenly the goddess is revealed. Shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, but one has to quash the thought that the smile is what won the prize. It makes one happy to see it. One would give her the Nobel Prize just to see that smile.

Simon Frazier: a very quiet power. English; public school education from age nine. He listens very closely, speaks well, but he says about one tenth as much as everyone else, which naturally gains him the reputation of a complete mute. He plays with this image, quietly. I think he likes Ann, who is like him in some ways, though not so extreme; in other ways very unlike. Ann does not joke with her image among the others, she is completely unaware of it – American lack of self-consciousness, versus Simon’s Brit irony.

Janet Blyleven: beautiful. Speaks rapidly, confidently. Friendly. Looks healthy. Nice breasts. Doggy friendship is no friendship at all.

Ann is a real beauty, though austere. Tall, angular, bony, strong; both body and face. She draws the eye. She certainly does take Mars seriously. People see that in her and like her for it. Or not, as the case may be. Her shadow is very distinct.

Alexander Zhalin is a power. He likes women with his eyes. Some of them know it, some don’t. Mary Dunkel and Janet Blyleven are both with him a lot. He is an enthusiast. Whatever has taken his fancy becomes the horizon of all interest.

Nadia Cherneshevsky: at first you think she is plain, then you see she is one of the most beautiful of all. It has to do with solidity – physical, intellectual, and moral. The rock everyone rests on. Her physical beauty is in her athleticism – short, round, tough, skilful, graceful, strong – and in her eyes, as her irises are parti coloured, a dense stippled carpet of colour dots, bits of brown and green mostly, with some blue and yellow, all flecked together in concentric rings of pattern, shot by rays of a different pattern, merging in a casual glance to a colour like hazel. You could dive into those eyes and never come out. And she looks back at you without fear.

Frank Chalmers: a power. I think. It’s hard not to see him as an adjunct to John Boone. The sidekick, or enabler. On his own out here, not so impressive. Diminished; less an historical character. He’s elusive. Big, bulky, dark-complexioned. He keeps a low profile. He is quite friendly, but it doesn’t seem to one that it is real friendliness. A political animal, like Phyllis; only they don’t like each other. It’s Maya he likes. And Maya makes sure he feels part of her world. But what he really wants is not clear. There’s a person in there one does not know at all.

More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles. Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was one of the main ways they passed the time.

They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent, especially people’s faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw very clearly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention. Blind people hear actors’ voices as completely artificial and false, and in this world they were all blind to faces, but if he looked at them more closely, it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that person’s character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded, whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously, as he seemed to take everything: this was a scientific experiment to him, and he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.

They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast fund of experiences, and then made quick decisions based on analogies to past experience. Thus now, in this situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant, or to win over a committee judging a tenure application package. Something like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was problematic but not debilitating.

Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could not well predict hailstorms, even the best battlefield commanders could not predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to predict people’s future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard psychological tests. In each case there wasn’t enough data. And so Michel stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.

Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the models of personality itself – the many, many theories – came down to a matter of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality theory, where new propositions were supported by reference to earlier theorists, who often supported their assertions by reference to even earlier theorists, in strings all the way back to Freud and Jung, if not Galen. The fascinating Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy was a perfect example of this, as was Jones’s classic The New Psychology of Dreaming. It was a standard technique: citing a guess by a dead authority added weight to one’s assertions. So that often the large statistical tests administered by contemporary psychologists were designed mostly to confirm or disconfirm preliminary intuitive stabs by near-Victorians like Freud, Jung, Adler, Sullivan, Fromm, Maslow, etc. You picked the earlier expert whose guesses seemed right to you, then tested these intuitions using current scientific techniques. If going back to the original either/or, Michel chose Jung over Freud; after that he was partial to the whole Utopian self-definition crowd – Fromm, Erikson, Maslow – and the matching philosophers of freedom from the same era, people like Nietzsche and Sartre. And the latest in modern psychology, of course – tested, peer-reviewed, and published in the journals.

But all his ideas were elaborations of an original set of feelings about people. A matter of hunches. On that basis he was supposed to evaluate who would or would not do well if removed to Mars. Predicting hailstorms and surprise attacks. Interpreting personality tests designed according to the paradigms of alchemists. Even asking people about their dreams, as if these were anything more than the detritus of the sleeping brain! Dream interpretation: once Jung dreamed about killing a man named Siegfried, and he struggled mightily to figure out what the dream might have meant, never once wondering if it had anything to do with his immense anger at his old friend Freud. As Fromm noted later, ‘the slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was enough to enable a man whose greatest skill was the interpretation of dreams, to hide the real meaning of this dream from himself.’

It was a perfect image for the power of their methodology.

Mary Dunkel sat beside him at lunch one day. Her leg pressed against his. This was not an accident. Michel was surprised; it was a tremendous risk on her part, after all. His leg responded with a matching pressure, before he had a chance to think things over. Mary was beautiful. He loved Mary for her dark hair and brown eyes and the turn of her hips as she went through doorways ahead of him, and now for her boldness. Elena he loved for the kindness in her beautiful pale eyes, and for her rangy shoulders, wide as any man’s. Tatiana he loved for being so gorgeous and self-contained.

But it was Mary pressed against him. What did she mean by it? Did she mean to influence his recommendation for or against her? But surely she would know this kind of behaviour might very possibly be counted against her. She had to know that. So knowing that and doing this anyway meant that she must be doing it for other reasons, more important to her than going to Mars. Meant it personally, in other words.

How easy he was. A woman only had to look at him right and he was hers forever. She could knock him down with the brush of a fingertip.

Now his body began to fall over yet again, reflexively, like the jerk of the lower leg when the knee is properly tapped. But part of his mind’s slow train of thought, trailing behind reality by a matter of some minutes (sometimes it was hours, or days), began to worry. He could not be sure what she meant. She could be a woman willing to risk all on a single throw of the dice. Try sidling up to a man to get on his good side. It often worked like a charm.

He realized that to have power over another’s destiny was intolerable. It corrupted everything. He wanted to slip away to the nearest bed with Mary, hers or his, to fall onto it and make love. But making love could by definition only occur between two free human beings. And as he was warden, judge and jury to this group …

He moaned at the thought, a little ‘uhnn’ in his throat as the problem struck him in the solar plexus and forced air upward through his vocal cords. Mary gave him a glance, smiled. Across the table Maya picked this up and looked at them. Maya had perhaps heard him groan. Maya saw everything; and if she saw him wanting silly reckless Mary, when really he wanted Maya with all his heart, then it would be a double disaster. Michel loved Maya for her hawklike vision, her fierce sharp intelligence, now watching him casually but completely.

He got up and went to the counter for a piece of cheesecake, feeling his knees weakly buckling. He dared not look back at either of them.

Though it was possible the leg contact and all their looks had been in his mind only.

It was getting strange.

Two Russians, Sergei and Natasha, had started a relationship soon after their arrival at Lake Vanda. They did not try to hide it, like some other couples Michel knew about or suspected. If anything they were a bit too demonstrative, given the situation; it made some people uncomfortable how affectionate they were with each other. Ordinarily one could ignore strangers kissing in public, watch them or not as one chose. Here there were decisions to be made. Was it worse to be a voyeur or a prude? Did one apply to the programme as an individual or as a part of a couple? Which gave one a better chance? What did Michel think?

Then during the winter solstice party, June 21st, after everyone had drunk a glass of champagne and was feeling good about getting past that ebb tide in the psychological year, Arkady called them out to see the aurora australis, a filmy electric dance of coloured veils and draperies, soft greens and blues and a pale pink flowing across the grain of their reality, shimmering through the black plenum in quick sine waves. And suddenly, in the midst of this magic, shouting erupted from inside the compound – muffled shrieks, bellows. Michel looked around and all the hooded ski-masked figures were looking at him, as if he should have known this was coming and forestalled it somehow, as if it were his fault – and he ran inside and there were Sergei and Natasha, literally at each other’s throats.

He tried to detach them and got hit in the side of the face for his trouble.

After that operatic debacle Sergei and Natasha were expelled to McMurdo – which itself took some doing, both getting the helicopter over during a week of stormy weather, and getting Sergei and Natasha to agree to leave. And after that people’s trust in Michel was heavily damaged, if not shattered completely. Even the administrators of the programme, back in the north, were faintly over-inquisitive when they asked him about it; they noted that records showed he had had an interview with Natasha the day before the fight, and asked what they had talked about, and if he could please share his notes on the meeting, which he declined to do for reasons of professional confidentiality.

Natasha Romanova: very beautiful. Magnificent posture. The calmest Russian woman I have ever met. Biologist, working in hydroponic farming. Met Sergei Davydov and fell in love with him here in the camp. Very happy now.

But everyone knew he had been involved with the investigation of the incident, and naturally they must have discussed the fact that he was testing and judging them. And keeping records of course. Mary no longer pressed his leg with hers, if she ever had, nor even sat next to him. Maya watched him more closely than ever, without appearing to. Tatiana continued to seek her peers, speaking always to the person inside one, or behind one. Or inside her. And Michel wondered more and more, as the arbitrary divisions of time they called days passed in their cycles – sleep, hunger, work, Bright Room, tests, relaxation, sleep – whether they could hold it together, mentally or socially, when they got to Mars.

This of course had been his worry from the start, expressed to the others on the planning committee only partially, as a nervous joke: Since they’re all going to go crazy anyway, why not send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?

Now, trying to shake the feeling of anxiety growing in him, in the bright rooms and out in the dark world, the joke got less and less funny. People were furtive. Relationships were forming, and Michel saw these relationships now by the absences created by their concealment. Like tracing footprints in air. People no longer caressed who had before; glances were exchanged, then avoided; some people never looked at each other any more, and yet drew toward each other as they passed in the halls out of an internal magnetism too strong to tell the others about, but also too strong to conceal. There were trips out into the frigid starry night, often timed so that both parties were out there together, although they did not leave or return together, but with other parties. Lookout Point, a knob low on the Dais, could be observed through night IR goggles, and sometimes one saw two flowing green bodies delineated out there against the black phosphor background, the two figures overlapping in a slow dance, a beautiful mime. Michel hummed an old song in English as he watched, absorbed beyond shame: ‘I’m a spy, in the house of love – I know the things, that you’re thinking of …’

Some of these relationships might knit the community together, others might tear it apart. Maya was playing a very dangerous game with Frank Chalmers now, for instance; she went out on walks with him, they talked late into the evenings; unselfconsciously she would put a hand to his arm and laugh, head thrown back, in a way that she never had with Michel. A prelude to a later intensification, Michel judged, as the two were beginning to look like the natural leaders of the expedition. But at the same time she was always playing him off against the Russian men, with whom she would joke in Russian about the non-Russians, unaware perhaps that Frank spoke some Russian, as he did French (atrociously) and several other languages. Frank just watched her, a small inner smile playing over his lips, even when she joked about him and he could understand it. He would even glance at Michel, to see if he too caught what she was doing. As if they were complicit in their interest in Maya!

And of course she played Michel as well. He could see that. Perhaps just instinctively, as a matter of habit. Perhaps something more personal. He couldn’t tell. He wanted her to care about him …

Meanwhile, other small groups were withdrawing from the main one. Arkady had his admirers, Vlad his close group of intimates; they were harem keepers, perhaps. On the other hand, Hiroko Ai had her group, and Phyllis hers, each distinct; polyandry as well as polygamy, then, or at least it seemed possible to Michel. They all existed already – in potentiality or in his imagination, it was hard to tell. But it was impossible not to perceive at least part of what was going on among them as the group dynamics of a troop of primates, thrown together all unknown to each other, and therefore sorting things out, establishing consorts, dominance hierarchies, and so on. For they were primates; apes shut in cages; and even though they had chosen the cages themselves, still – there they were. In a situation. Like Sartre’s Huis Clos. No exit. Social life. Lost in a prison of their own devise.

Even the stablest people were affected. Michel watched fascinated as the two most introverted personalities among them, Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, became interested in each other. It was pure science for both of them, at first; they were very much alike in that, and also in that both were so straightforward and guileless that Michel was able to overhear many of their first conversations. They were all shop talk; Martian geology, with Sax grilling her for the most part, learning from her as from a professor, but always able to contribute from the standpoint of a theoretical physicist, one of the leading lights a decade or two before, in his postgraduate years. Not that Ann seemed to care about that. She was a geologist, a planetologist who had studied Mars ever since grad school, until now in her forties she was one of the acknowledged authorities. A Martian ahead of the fact. So if Sax was interested, she could talk Mars for hours; and Sax was interested. So they talked on and on.

‘It’s a pure situation, you have to remember that. There might even be indigenous life, left there underground from the early warm wet period. So that we have to make a sterile landing and a sterile colony. Put a cordon sanitaire between us and Mars proper. Then a comprehensive search. If Terran life were allowed to invade the ground before we determined the presence or absence of life, it would be a disaster for science. And the contamination might work the other way too. You can’t be too careful. No – if anyone tries to infect Mars, there will be opposition. Maybe even active resistance. Poison the poisoners. You can never tell what people will do.’

Sax said little or nothing in reply to this.

Then one day it was those two, appearing as deadpan and phlegmatic as ever, who went out for night walks at the (carefully offset) same time, and, Michel saw through his goggles, made their way to Lookout Point. They might have been among those Michel had already seen out there. They sat there beside each other for some time.

But when they came back Sax’s colour was high, and he saw nothing of the world inside the compound. Autistic to all. And Ann’s brow was furrowed, her eye distracted. And they did not talk to each other, or even look at each other, for many days after that. Something had happened out there!

But as Michel watched them, fascinated by this turn of events, he came to understand that he would never know what it had been. A wave of – what was it – grief? Or sorrow, at their distance from each other, their isolation – each in his or her own private world, sealed vessels jostling – cut off – the futility of his work – the deathly cold of the black night – the ache of living life so inescapably alone. He fled.

Because he was one of the evaluators, he could flee. He could leave Lake Vanda from time to time on the rare helicopter visits, and though he tried not to, in order to establish better solidarity with the group, still he had done it once before, in the darkest depth of winter before the solstice, after seeing Maya and Frank together. Now, though the midday twilights were returning, he took up an invitation from an acquaintance at McMurdo to visit the Scott and Shackleton huts, just north of McMurdo on Ross Island.

Maya met him in the lock as he left. ‘What – running away?’

‘No, no – no – I’m going to have a look at the Scott and Shackleton huts. A matter of research. I’ll be right back.’

Her look showed that she did not believe it. Also that she cared where he went.

But it was in the nature of research, after all. The little cabins left behind by the first explorers of Antarctica were the remains of some of the very few expeditions in human history that resembled in any way what they were proposing to do on Mars. Though of course all analogy was false and misleading, and dangerous – this was a new thing they were thinking, a new event in history, nothing like it before.

Still, the first decades of Antarctic exploration had been somewhat like their planned expedition, he had to admit as the helicopter landed on the black rock of Cape Evans, and he followed the other distinguished visitors to the small snow-slabbed wooden hut above the beach. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of their settlement at Lake Vanda, though their compound was ever so much more luxurious. Here at Cape Evans they had had only the necessities, all the necessities except for some vitamins, and the company of the opposite sex. How pale and odd they had become from those lacks, along with the lack of sunlight itself. Monastic malnourished troglodytes, suffering from seasonal affective disorder without knowing what a ferocious psychological problem this was (so that perhaps it hadn’t been). Writing newspapers, acting out sketches, pumping music rolls through player pianos, reading books, doing research, and producing some food, by fishing and killing seals. Yes – they had had their pleasures – deprived as they were, these men had still lived on Mother Earth, in contact with the cold fringe of her bounty. On Mars there would be none of those Inuit raptures to pass the time and ameliorate their confinement.

But the postmodern structure of feeling might already have made them used to disconnection from Earth. Everyone inhabiting their own personal spaceship, carrying it mobile with them like a hermit crab’s shell, moving from one component of it to the next: home, office, car, plane, apartment, hotel room, mall. An indoor life, even a virtual life. How many hours a day did they spend in the wind? So that perhaps Mars would not feel very different.

As he considered these matters Michel wandered the big main room of Scott’s hut, looking at all the artifacts in the grey light. Scott had erected a wall of boxes to separate the officers and scientists from the common seamen. So many different facets; Michel felt his thoughts ricocheting this way and that.

They flew up the coast to Cape Royds, where Shackleton’s hut stood like a rebuke to Scott’s – smaller, neater, more wind-sheltered. Everyone together. Shackleton and Scott had fallen out during the first expedition to Antarctica, in 1902. Similar disagreements were likely to occur in the Martian colony; but there would be no chance to build a new home elsewhere. At least not at first. And no going home. At least that was the plan. But was that wise? Here again the analogy to the first Antarcticans fell apart, for no matter how uncomfortable they had been in these huts (and Shackleton’s looked quite homely, actually) they knew they were only going to be here for a year or three, and then out and back home to England. Almost anything could be endured if there was some release foreseeable at the end of it, coming closer every day. Without that it would be a life sentence – no exit indeed. Exile, to a sur-antarctic wasteland of frigid airless rock.

Surely it made better sense to cycle the scientists and technicians to Mars in a way similar to that of the early Antarcticans. Tours of duty at small scientific stations, the stations built and then manned continuously, but by rotating teams, with individuals out there for three years each. This would be more in keeping with recommended lifetime maximum radiation doses. Boone and the others on the first trip there and back, two years before, had taken about thirty-five rad. Subsequent visiting scientists could stick to something like that.

But the American and Russian space programmers had decided otherwise. They wanted a permanent base, and they had invited scientists to move there for good. They wanted a commitment from people, no doubt hoping for a similar commitment of public interest back home – interest in a permanent cast of characters that could be learned, their lives become a matter of drama for public consumption back on Earth, with its bottomless addiction to narrative – biography as spectacle. Part of the funding effort. It made sense in its way.

But who would want to do such a thing? This was a matter that troubled Michel greatly; it headed the long list of double-binds he felt applicants were put in by the process of selection. In short, they had to be sane to be selected, but crazy to want to go.

Many other double-binds accompanied that basic one. Applicants had to be extroverted enough to socialize, but introverted enough to have studied a discipline to the point of mastering it. They had to be old enough to have learned these primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary professions, and yet be young enough to withstand the rigors of the trip out and the work there. They had to do well in groups, but want to leave everyone they knew behind forever. They were being asked to tell the truth, but clearly had to lie to increase their changes of getting what they wanted. They had to be both ordinary and extraordinary.

Yes, the double-binds were endless. Nevertheless this nearly final group had come from an initial pool of many thousands of applicants. Double-binds? So what! Nothing new to fear there. Everyone on Earth was strung up in vast networks of double-binds. Going to Mars might actually reduce their number, decrease their strain! Perhaps that was part of the appeal of going!

Perhaps that was why these men of the first Antarctic explorations had volunteered to come south. Still, looking around at the bare wooden room, it was amazing to Michel that those who had wintered down here had managed to stay sane. On the wall of Shackleton’s hut there was a photo of them: three men, huddled before a black stove. Michel stared long at this evocative photo. The men were worn-looking, battered, dirty, frostbitten, tired. Also calm, even serene. They could sit and do nothing but watch fire burn in a stove, entirely satisfied. They looked cold but warm. The very structure of the brain had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that was culturally determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century later their brains depended on great dollops of mediated stimulation, quick-cut inputs which had not even existed for earlier generations. So that reliance on inner resources was harder. Patience was harder. They were different animals from the people in this photo. The epigenetic interplay of DNA and culture was now changing people so fast that even a century was enough to make a measurable difference. Accelerated evolution. Or one of the punctuations in the long tale of punctuated evolution. And Mars would be more of the same. There was no telling what they would become.

Back to Lake Vanda, and the old huts quickly became like a dream interrupting the only reality, a reality so cold that spacetime itself seemed to have frozen, leaving all of them living the same hour over and over again. Dante’s cold circle of hell, the worst of all, as he recalled.

The sensory deprivation was getting to them all. Every ‘morning’ he found himself waking up in low spirits. It took hours after waking to work the weight out of his stomach and focus on the day. After he reached level neutrality, as it was beginning to turn blue twilight at the windows, he was able to ask to join whoever was going outside that day. Out there in the numbing grey or blue or purple twilight he hiked along, trailing the other thickly-clad figures, who looked like pilgrims in a medieval winter, or prehistoric people struggling through the Ice Age. One slender bundle might be Tatiana, her beauty muffled but not entirely blanketed, for she moved like a dancer over the cracked mirror of the lake, under the high walls of the valley. Another might be Maya, focused on the others, though quite friendly and diplomatic to him too. It worried him. Beside her strode Frank, bulky and muffled.

Tatiana was easier to understand, and so attractive. Across the ice one day he followed her. On the far shore they stopped to inspect the dead body of a mummified seal. These disoriented Weddell seals were found far up all the Dry Valleys, dead for hundreds or thousands of years, frozen all that time, slowly frittered away by the winds, until the skeleton slowly emerged from the body like a soul taking off a fur coat, a soul white and wind-polished and articulated.

Tatiana grabbed his arm, exclaiming at the sight. She spoke French well, and had spent summers as a girl on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur; just the thought of that made him melt. Now they spoke, gloved hand in gloved hand, looking down through ski-masks at the memento mori in the grey light. His heart beat hard at the thought of the beauty encased in the chrysalis parka beside him, saying ‘It’s such a shock to come on one of these poor creatures’ vertebra, out on its own in all the rock, like someone’s lost bracelet.’

From across the lake Frank watched them.

And after that day Maya dropped Michel completely, with never a word nor any outward sign that things had changed, but only a single swift glance at Tatiana, in his presence, after which a purely formal politeness, no content whatsoever. And now Michel knew, very acutely, whose company in this group he craved the most; but would never have again.

Frank had done that.

And all around him it was happening: the pointless wars of the heart. It was all so small, petty, tawdry. Yet it mattered; it was their life. Sax and Ann had gone dead to each other, likewise Marina and Vlad, and Hiroko and Iwao. New cliques were forming around Hiroko and Vlad and Arkady and Phyllis, as they all spun out into their own separate orbits. No – this group would go dysfunctional. Was going dysfunctional, he could see it right before his eyes. It was too hard to live isolated in this sub-biological sensory deprivation; and this was paradise compared to Mars. There was no such thing as a good test. There was no such thing as a good analogy. There was only reality, unique and different in every moment, to be lived without rehearsal and without revision. Mars would not be like this cold continuous night on the bottom of their world; it would be worse. Worse than this! They would go mad. A hundred people confined in tanks and sent to a poisonous cold dead planet, a place to which winter in Antarctica was like paradise; a prison universe, like the inside of a head when your eyes are closed. They would all go mad.

In the first week of September the noonday twilight grew almost as bright as day, and they could see sunlight on the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, flanking the deep valley. Because the valley was such a narrow slot between such high ranges, it would be perhaps another ten days before the sun fell directly on the base, and Arkady organized a hike up the side of Mount Odin to catch an earlier glimpse of it. This turned into a general expedition, as almost everyone proved interested in seeing the sun again as soon as possible. So early on the morning of September 10th, they stood nearly a thousand metres above Lake Vanda, on a shelf occupied by a small ice pond and tarn. It was windy, so the climb had not warmed them. The sky was a pale starless blue; the east sides of the peaks of both ranges were glazed gold with sunlight. Finally to the east, at the end of the valley, over the burnished plate of the frozen Ross Sea, the sun emerged over the horizon and burned like a flare. They cheered; their eyes ran with emotion, also an excess of new light and cold wind. People hugged each other, bundle after bundle. But Maya kept on the other side of the group from Michel, with Frank always between them. And it seemed to Michel that everyone’s joy had a desperate edge to it, as of people who had barely survived an extinction event.

Thus when the time came to make his report to the selection committees, Michel advised against the project as designed. ‘No group can stay functional under such conditions indefinitely,’ he wrote. In the meetings he made his case point by point. The long list of double-binds was especially impressive.

This was in Houston. The heat and humidity were saunalike; Antarctica was already a nightmare memory, slipping quickly away.

‘But this is just social life,’ Charles York pointed out, bemused. ‘All social existence is a set of double-binds.’

‘No no,’ Michel said. ‘Social life is a set of contradictory demands. That’s normal, agreed. But what we’re talking about here are requirements to be two opposite things at once. Classic double-binds. And they are already causing a lot of the classic responses. Hidden lives. Multiple personalities. Bad faith. Repression, then the return of the repressed. A close look at the results of the tests given down there will show it is not a viable project. I would advise starting with small scientific stations, with rotating crews. As Antarctica itself is operated now.’

This caused a lot of discussion, even controversy. Charles remained committed to sending up a permanent colony, as proposed; but he had grown close to Mary. Georgia and Pauline tended to agree with Michel; though they too had had personal difficulties at Vanda.

Charles dropped by to see Michel in his borrowed office, shaking his head. He looked at Michel, serious but somehow still uninvolved, distanced. Professional. ‘Look, Michel,’ he said. ‘They want to go. They’re capable of adapting. A lot of them did very well with that, so well that you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd in any kind of blind test. And they want to go, it’s clear. That’s how we should choose who to send. We should give them their chance to do what they want. It’s not really our business to decide for them.’

‘But it won’t work. We saw that.’

‘I didn’t see that. They didn’t see that. What you saw is your concern, but they have the right to make their try at it. Anything could happen there, Michel. Anything. And this world is not so well-arranged that we should deny people who want to take their chance to try something different. It could be good for us all.’ He stood abruptly to leave the office. ‘Think about it.’

Michel thought about it. Charles was a sensible man, a wise man. What he had said had the ring of truth to it. And a sudden gust of fear blew through Michel, as cold as any katabatic downdraught in Wright Valley: he might, out of his own fear, be stopping something with greatness in it.

He changed his recommendation, describing all the reasons why. He explained his vote for the project to continue; he gave the committees his list of the best hundred candidates. But Georgia and Pauline continued to advise against the project as designed. And so an outside panel was convened to make an evaluation, a recommendation, a judgment. Near the end of the process Michel even found himself in his office with the American president, who sat down with him and told him he had probably been right the first time around, first impressions were usually that way, second-guessing was of little use. Michel could only nod. Later he sat in a meeting attended by both the American and Russian presidents; the stakes were that high. They both wanted a Martian base, for their own political purposes, Michel saw that clearly. But they also wanted a success, a project that worked. In that sense, the hundred permanent colonists as originally conceived was clearly the riskier of the options they had before them now. And neither president was a risk-taker. Rotating crews were intrinsically less interesting, but if the crews were large enough, and the base large enough, then the political impact (the publicity) would be almost the same; the science would be the same; and everything would be that much safer, radiologically as well as psychologically.

So they cancelled the project.