But all of his symptomatic categories suddenly seemed to Maya only to mask what was really happening to her.
Sometimes she got very confused; sometimes she thought she understood things that did not exist; sometimes she forgot things, forever; and sometimes she got very, very scared. And these were the things Michel was trying to contain with his names and his combinatoires.
Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of light and time. And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went. Enough days passed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how frightened she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing that it was easy to forget. Just live in la vie quotidienne, pay attention to daily life with its work, friends, visitors.
Among other visitors were Charlotte and Ariadne, who came down from Mangala to consult with Maya about the worsening situation with Earth. They went out to breakfast on the corniche, and talked about Dorsa Brevia’s concerns. Essentially, despite the fact that the Minoans had left the Free Mars coalition because they disliked its attempt to dominate the outer satellite settlements, among other things, the Dorsa Brevians had come to think Jackie had been right about immigration, at least to an extent.
“It’s not that Mars is approaching its human carrying capacity,” Charlotte said, “they’re wrong about that. We could tighten our belts, density the towns. And these new floating towns on the North Sea could accommodate a lot of people, they’re a sign of how many more could live here. They have practically no impact, except on harbor towns, in some senses. But there’s room for more harbor towns, on the North Sea anyway.”
“Many more,” Maya said. Despite the Terran incursions, she did not like to hear anti-immigrant talk in any form. But Charlotte was back on the executive council, and for years she had supported a close relation to Earth, so this was hard for her to say:
“It isn’t the numbers. It’s who they are, what they believe. The assimilation troubles are getting really severe.”
Maya nodded. “I’ve read about them on the screen.”
“Yes. We’ve tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but they clump, naturally, and you can’t just break them up.”
“No.”
“But so many problems are rising — cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives — usually men attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, harassing the new settlements and so on. It’s big trouble. And this with immigration already much reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us about that, they want to send up even more. And if they do we’ll become a kind of human disposal site, and all our work will have gone to waste.”
“Hmm.” Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But it was depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the other side, just because the problem was getting hard. “Still, whatever you do has to take the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate anyway, and back it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That’s what’s been happening with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to keep it at the lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with the immigrants as they come.”
The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out at the fresh blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, “The exmetas are a problem as well. They want to come here even more than the UN.”
“Of course.” It was no surprise to Maya that the old meta-nationals were still such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the Praxis model to survive, and so with that fundamental change in their nature, they were no longer like totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but they were still big and strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of capital accumulated; and they still wanted to do business, to make their members’ livings. Strategies for doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes not: one could make things that people really needed, in a new and better way; or one could play the angles, try to press advantages, try to inflate false needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of strategies, of course, trying to stabilize by diversification as in their old investment days. But that made fighting the bad strategies even harder in a way, because everyone was pursuing them to some extent. And now a lot of exmetas were pursuing very active Martian programs, working for the Terran governments and shipping people up from Earth, building cities and starting farms, mining, production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that emigration from Earth to Mars would not cease until there was an exact balance in their fullnesses; which given the hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would be a disaster for Mars.
“Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently. “Nevertheless, we have to try to help, and we have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis a vis Earth. Or else it will be war.”
So Charlotte and Ariadne went away, both looking as worried as Maya felt. And it suddenly occurred to Maya, very grimly, that if they were coming to her for help, then they were in deep trouble indeed.
So her direct political work picked up again, although she tried to keep a limit on it. She seldom traveled away from Odessa, except for AWT business. She did not stop working with her theater group, which in any case was now the true heart of her political work. But she started going to meetings again, and rallies, and sometimes she took the stage and spoke. Werteswandel took many forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for Odessa’s seat in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of Friends, if they couldn’t find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a chance to think it over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in the end they decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group, who worked in the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped that, and went on doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less actively — feeling more and more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following — that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth century existed to prove. So they had to be careful, and not let too many people up — it was a tightrope act — but coping with a limited period of overpopulation was better than dealing with an outright invasion, and this was a point she made in meeting after meeting.
And all this time Nirgal was out there in the outback, wandering in his nomadic life and talking to the ferals and the farmers, and, she hoped, having his usual effect on the Martian worldview, on what Michel called its collective unconscious. She pinned a lot of her hopes on Nirgal. And did her best to deal with this other strand in her life, to face up to history, in some ways the darkest strand of all, as it stitched its course through her life and bunched it up, in a big twisting loop, back into the foreboding that had prevailed during her previous life in Odessa.
So that was already a kind of malign deja vu. And then the real deja vus came back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a day of it was torture; and a week, hell itself. The stereo-temporal state, Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the “always-already sensation.” Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repetition of some earlier identical day — this was how it felt — as if Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, the endless repetition of all possible spa-cetime continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the non-stereotemporal state — like double vision coming back into focus, giving things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.