So viriditas existed in the universe like this saxifrage on the great sand curves of the polar island: small, isolate, magnificent. Sax saw a curving universe before him; but Deleuze maintained that they lived in a flat universe, on the cusp between permanent expansion and the expand-contract model, in a delicate balance. And he also maintained that the turning point, when the universe would either start to shrink or else expand past all possibility of shrinking, appeared to be very close to the present time! This made Sax very suspicious, as did the implication in Deleuze that they could influence the matter one way or the other: stomp on the ground and send the universe flying outward to dissolution and heat death, or catch one’s breath, and pull it all inward to the unimaginable omega point of the eschaton: no. The first law of thermodynamics, among many other considerations, made this a kind of cosmological hallucination, a small god’s existentialism. Psychological result of humanity’s suddenly vastly increased physical powers, perhaps. Or Deleuze’s own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything.

In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth’s surface, but they did. Coincidences happened. Most of these anthropocentric features, however, seemed to Sax likely to be the mark of the limits of their understanding; very possibly there were things larger than the universe, and others smaller than strings — some even larger plenum, made of even smaller components — all beyond human perception, even mathematically. If that were true it might explain some of the inconsistencies in Bao’s equations — if one allowed that the four macrodimensions of timespace were in relation to some larger dimensions, like the six microdimensions were to their ordinary four, then the equations might work quite beautifully — he had a vision of one possible formulation, right there —

He stumbled, caught his balance. Another small bench of sand, about three times the size of the normal one. Okay — on and up to the car. Now what had he been thinking about?

He couldn’t remember. He had been thinking something interesting, he knew that. Figuring something out, it seemed like. But try as he might, he couldn’t recall what it was. It bulked at the back of his mind like a rock in his shoe, a tip-of-the-tongueism that never came through. Most uncomfortable; even maddening. It had happened to him before, he seemed to recall — and more frequently recently, wasn’t that true? He wasn’t sure, but that felt right. He had been losing his train of thought, and then been unable to retrieve it, no matter how hard he tried.

He reached his car without seeing his walk there. Love of place, yes — but one had to be able to remember things to love them! One had to be able to remember one’s thoughts! Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner together, then ate it without noticing.

This memory trouble would not do.

Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wristpad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several different strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the languages of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterize. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow — they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse — fast, coherent, effortless — the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others — the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.

So, well; these incidents were just one of the many conditions they had to adapt to in their unnaturally prolonged old age. It was very inconvenient, even irritating. No doubt the matter ought to be investigated, although memory was a notorious quagmire for brain science. And it was somewhat like the leaky-roof problem; immediately after such a lost train of thought, with the absent shape of it still in his mind, and the emotional excitation, it almost drove him mad; but as the content of the thought was forgotten, half an hour later it did not seem much more significant than the slipping away of dreams in the minutes after waking. He had other things to worry about.

Such as the death of his friends. Yeli Zudov this time, a member of the First Hundred he had never known well; nevertheless he went down to Odessa, and after a memorial service, a lugubrious affair during which Sax was frequently distracted by thoughts of Vlad, of Spencer, of Phyllis, and then of Ann — they returned to the Praxis building, and sat in Michel and Maya’s apartment. It was not the same apartment they had lived in before the second revolution, but Michel had taken pains to make it look much the same, as far as Sax could recall — something about Maya’s therapy, as she was having more and more mental trouble — Sax wasn’t sure what the latest was. He had never been able to deal with the more melodramatic aspects of Maya, and he hadn’t paid overmuch attention to Michel’s talk about her when the two of them last got together — it was always different, always the same.

Now, however, he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go back into the kitchen, past the table on which Michel’s scrapbooks were spre’ad. Face up was a photo of Frank that Maya had treasured long ago; she had had it taped to the kitchen cabinet by the sink, in the apartment down the hall — Sax remembered that most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature of those tense years: all of them struggling while the young Frank laughed at them.

Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely. Remembering their earlier dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very long ago.

But she said, “What an interesting face.”

Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the physiological manifestations of distress. To lose the substance of a speculative train of thought, a venture into the metaphysical — that was one thing. But this — her own past, their past — it was insupportable. Not to be abided. He would not abide it.

Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.

The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.

“More and more like that,” Michel muttered, looking haunted. “More and more. I feel it myself. But for Maya…” He shook his head, looking deeply discouraged. Even Michel could make nothing good of this, Michel who had worked his alchemy of optimism on all their previous reversals, making them part of his great story, the myth of Mars that he had somehow wrenched out of the daily morass. But this was the death of story. Thus hard to mythol-ogize. No — living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful. Something was going to have to be done.