“I think I do. But you know Onega, the guide for the Hellas group?”
I nodded.
“I love him, Hjalmar. I have for years. Please don’t be angry! I’ve enjoyed our trip,” etc. Then she left, claiming duties at the hotel.
I walked among the standing stones of Stenness, overlooking the lochs of Harray and Stenness to east and west. The narrow irregular gray stones spiked up at the swiftly moving, stippled clouds. Off across the loch the ring of Brodgar, tiny in the distance, stood in a patch of sun. A world of slates. Slate people: old tales said these stones were farmers caught dancing in a pagan rite. I leaned my forehead against the pitted, lichen- covered side of one, and felt myself shake. So often this had happened and I had resolved never to extend myself again — the aquifer was drained, the land above collapsing! — and here just the slightest show of friendship and I had done it again. Not the slightest bit of control over myself. There was something wrong with me, I knew it. I felt it.
What I wanted then was a marriage like the Greek ideal, two strong trees grown round each other in a double helix, each stronger for the help of the other, and intertwined for good. Some people found such marriages even in our age, and I wanted one. I was just beginning to understand that my life was a series of discrete lives, and that I could not count on any family or friend to stay with me through more than one life. So that I would never really come to know anybody. Unless I could find that partner, you see, that Greek marriage.
But I couldn’t. And leaning against that rough stone it seemed to me that there were two kinds of people: the attractive sociable people, who drew to each other and had their serious relations together; and the rest of us, the plain or ugly or maladroit, who had to make do with one another no matter how much we loved beauty and charm. And realizing this warped the maladroit even more, so that our relations among ourselves were filled with resentment and frustration and anger and pity, which doomed them to failure. As in my three marriages, and in all the other liaisons in which I had tried so hard and failed so miserably.
In the midst of this fit of bitter self-pity I caught sight of a dozen or so of our party, hiking in my direction and pointing across the loch at the stones of Brodgar. One great ring viewed from another, across a band of metallic water: it was an eerie, wonderful sight. The group was like a pantomime of excitement, and though I did not feel it, I understood. On all of Earth I had not seen a place more beautiful (that is, more like Mars). So the cheerful alien tourists approached, happy on familiar ground, and when they saw me some waved. They entered the ring. One of the women was telling them about the megalithic yard, and the astronomical significance of the stones’ placement. She was a withdrawn, shy woman who had scarcely said a word during the rest of the tour, but the stone rings appeared to be her subject. “They could calculate the midsummer and midwinter sunrises, and they could even predict eclipses.”
“Wrong,” I told them. “Your information is as dated as the idea of ley lines. These rings had some simple sun alignments, but they were by no means scientific observatories. To think so is to impose our way of thinking onto the prehistoric mind, and so to distort the past. And the megalithic yard, by the way, is no more than a freak of statistical interpretation.”
The woman looked down, turned away. The others glanced at her awkwardly; her reign as expert was done. But I saw they also thought me an ass, and I knew I had been rude at best. Immediately I wanted to apologize to the poor woman, to explain my ill humor, but I couldn’t see how without bringing up my own affairs. Besides, she had been spouting nonsense; what was I supposed to have said? A tall, brown-haired woman broke the uncomfortable pause with a hearty, “Well, shall we see Brodgar and the Comet Stone?” And they trooped off around the shore of the loch, surrounding the expert, pointedly not inviting me along. The tall woman stared back at me.
I was left walking about the frosted hummocks of dead gray-green grass, feeling worse than before. I didn’t want to stay there, but there seemed no reason to leave, and nowhere to go. I wrapped my arms around a lichen-chewed standing stone and watched the gray clouds blow over, leaving a white sky that turned pale blue at dusk. At my feet were little flowers, specks of color scattered over the rock and heather, violet, yellow, pink, red, white. I began to feel very odd indeed, and I banged my forehead against the stone rhythmically, thump thump thump.
My hands were as blue as the sky. A thin crescent moon hung over the distant loaf hill across the loch to the west. A cutting breeze wafted off the ruffled dark silver water, and I was cold. Four thousand years before, humans had put up these stones to mark the strangeness of the place, and of their lives in it; I knew four thousand times what they knew, but the world was no less strange and harsh for that. With the sun down the standing stones, the island, the loch, the little ring on the land beyond, the bone-bare hills in the distance, they all gleamed under the rich dark blue sky, and I was frightened by their starkness. A world stripped bare.
Near dark I roused myself and walked stiffly back to the stone hotel near the passage grave of Maes Howe. I sat before the fireplace and held my hands over the flames for a good part of the night; but I could not get the chill from them.
Jokulhlaups — these glacial bursts occur in Iceland, where underground reservoirs heated by volcanic action melt through glacial caps in catastrophic floods.
Now I begin to see that I have underestimated the memory. Events keep piling into it beyond its natural capacity, and it becomes packed tight. The chambers of the hippocampus and amygdala are overwhelmed. What remains of the distant past is jammed under the weight of subsequence, so that recollection is stressed, then disabled. But the memories remain. To be able to recall them takes a particular form of intelligence; so that when I curse my poor memory, I am really lamenting my stupidity.
The other form of remembrance, the epiphanic recollection, is not really recollection at all. Under the right pressure the past bursts into consciousness, as a string of images we have created — so we see not the past, but a part of ourselves, a sweet fragment to make us ache with the poignancy of time lost, and the beauty of connection with it.
In the interregnum, in the naked moment between lives, we are most vulnerable to experience.
On the Earth events have a sheer physical weight of significance.
When we leave our natural span, and venture into the centuries, we are like climbers on Olympus Mons, hiking up out of the atmosphere. We must carry our air with us.
I don’t know what I am.
Valles Marineris — just south of the equator are several enormous interconnected canyons, extending some four thousand kilometers from the Tharsis bulge east to low- lying areas of chaotic terrain.
The Subcommittee for Planetary Affairs and the University Faculty Board and the Planetary Survey all denied me permission to visit the libraries at Alexandria — I suspected Satarwal was behind the refusals, exerting influence in Burroughs — and so I went to Shrike for help again, and got it. I knew it was bad to pile up too many debts to Shrike, but there was no other way to get the work done.
On the long train ride west I sat in a window seat in a nearly empty car. From the car ahead came the sound of a child playing, and I went up to have a look; it was a ten-year- old, flying plastic airplanes to his parents; and at the other end of the car was a crowd of spectators, watching curiously. The child ignored them as he retrieved his planes from under their hungry stares. I felt bad for him and returned to my seat. Outside, the train slid along the southern rims of Eos and then Coprates Chasma. Coprates, so simple and huge, gave me the feeling we were flying; the canyon floor was kilometers below us, and off to the north the other wall of the canyon made an abrupt horizon, as if Mars itself was rolling toward us in a fantastic tidal wave. It was like traveling in an optical illusion, and I could only watch it for moments at a time before it made me dizzy. The weather cooperated in this assault on my senses. High clouds topped a dusty sky, and the sunset was one of those extravaganzas of color too garish for art; but Nature knows no aesthetic restraint, and purples, pinks, and pale clear greens stained the tall dome of the sky, which altered imperceptibly from raspberry to blackberry above it all. Finally the sun fell, and in the mirror dusk the train crawled up the gentle slope of the bulge, appearing a filament of algae in the big barren world. I switched on my little overhead light and read for a bit — stared through my faint reflection at the canyon — read some more — looked out again.