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 mythologize. No- living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful. Something was going to have to be done.
Sax was still thinking about this, sitting in a corner absorbed in his wristpad, reading a collection of abstracts from recent experimental work on the memory, when there came a thump from the kitchen and a cry from Nadia. Sax rushed in to find Nadia and Art crouched over Michel, who lay white-faced on the floor. Sax called the concierge, and faster than he would have imagined possible an emergency crew had barged in with their equipment and shouldered Art aside, big young natives who brusquely encased Michel into their compact web of machinery, leaving the old ones as spectators only of their friend's- struggle.
Sax sat down among the medics, in their way, and put a hand to Michel's neck and shoulder. Michel's breathing had stopped, his pulse as well. White-faced. The resuscitation attempts were violent, the electrical shocks tried at a variety of strengths, the subsequent shift to heart-lung machine accomplished with a minimum of fuss; and the young medics worked in near silence, talking among themselves only when necessary, seemingly unaware of the old ones sitting against the wall. They did all they could; but Michel remained stubbornly, mysteriously dead.
Of course he had been upset by Maya's memory failure. But this did not seem an adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya's problem, none more so, and he had been worried; so any single display of her problem shouldn't have mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course eventually- quite late that evening, actually, after the doctors had finally given up, and taken Michel downstairs, and were clearing out their equipment- Maya returned, and they had to tell her what had happened.
She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much for one of the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won't work, Sax wanted to say, I've tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for his pains, which made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.
Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.
"I can't do this anymore," the man said after a while. He shook his head, seemingly apologetic. "It's pointless. We come and do all we can and it makes no difference. Nothing stops the quick decline."
"Which is?" Sax said.
The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. "That's the problem. No one knows."
"Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?"
"Heart arrhythmia," said one of the other medics curtly as he passed by with some equipment.
"That's just the symptom," the sitting man snarled, and sniffed again. "Why does it go arrhythmic? And why doesn't CPR restart it?"
No one answered.
Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya crying on the couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax realized that even if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.
Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of observation and initial hypothesis... flailing. In many ways it resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their unexplainables- Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn't even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn't be back. They had carried the last version of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax's age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax's chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn't make sense. But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn't so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya's as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.
Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.
Michel's ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.
The literature on longevity and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.
Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.
There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had been about- keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order (like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.
But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence- or, even more disturbingly, straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably (he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries....
Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks' absorbed reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field than he had ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the longevity treatment consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the subject's own DNA, the artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones already in the cells, so that the breaks and errors that crept in over time were repaired, and the strands generally strengthened. This much was true; but the longevity treatment was more than this, just as senescence itself was more than cell-division error. It was, as one might have predicted, much more complicated than just breaking chromosomes; it was an entire complex of processes. And while some were well understood, others were not. Senescencial action (aging) took place on every level: molecule, cell, organ, organism. Some senescence resulted from hormonal effects that were positive for the young organism in its reproductive phase, and only later negative for the post-reproductive animal, when in evolutionary terms it no longer mattered. Some cell lines were virtually immortal; bone-marrow cells and the mucus in the gut went on replicating for as long as their surroundings were alive, with no sign at all of time-related changes. Other cells, such as the nonreplaced proteins in the lens of the eye, underwent change that was driven by exposure to heat or light, regular enough to function as a kind of biological chronometer. Each kind of cell line aged at a different speed, or did not age at all; thus it was not just "a matter of time" in the sense of a kind of Newtonian absolute time, working entropically on an organism; there was no such time. Rather it was a great many trains of specific physical and chemical events, moving at different speeds, and with varying effects. There was a fantastically large number of cell-repair mechanisms inherent in any large organism, and an immune system of great and various power; the longevity treatments often supplemented these processes, or worked on them directly, or replaced them. The treatment now included supplements of the enzyme photolyase, to correct DNA damage, and supplements of the pineal hormone melatonin, and dehydroepiandrosterone, a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands.... There were about two hundred components like these in the longevity treatment now.
So vast, so complex- sometimes Sax finished his day's reading and walked down to Odessa's seafront, to sit on the corniche with Maya, and he would pause in eating a burrito and stare at it- contemplate everything that went into its digestion, everything that kept them alive- feel his breath which he had never noted at all, before- and suddenly he would feel breathless- lose his appetite- lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more than a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of astrophysics. Like a house of cards a hundred stories tall, in a wind. Tap it anywhere.... It was lucky Maya did not require much in the way of active companionship, because often he was rendered speechless for many minutes at a time, rapt in the contemplation of his own evident impossibility.
But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma. And there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on the frontiers, and beside him in related fields, from the small- virology, where the inquiries into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even smaller forms, almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis, vs, all of which might have relevance to the larger problem.... All the way up to the large organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their relationship to the heart and other organs, or the pineal gland's ever-decreasing secretions of melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many aspects of aging. Sax followed them all, trying to glean a new view by his later and hopefully larger perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what seemed important, and study that.
Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the subject blanked out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to get these thought flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk aloud to himself, frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would help to forestall the blanks; but again, it didn't work. It simply was not a verbal process.
In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every evening, if he noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the staircase streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four different benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the harbor to the sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy a burrito or a gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next to her. She would nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they sat and watched the sea. "How was your day?" "Okay. And yours?" He did not attempt to talk much about his reading, and she didn't say much about her hydrology, or the theater productions that she would go off to after dusk had fallen. Really they didn't have much to say to each other. But it was companionable anyway. And one evening the sunset flared to an unusual lavender brilliance, and Maya said, "I wonder what color that is?" and Sax had ventured, "Lavender?"
"But lavender is usually more pastel, isn't it?"
Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help him see the colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up anyway, and compared various sample squares to the sky. "We need a bigger screen." And then they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or somewhere between light violet and pale violet.
And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 2 October the 11th Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady's Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine- and then they were into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.
One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike grip, "That's Martian orange, look, that's the color of the planet from space, what we saw from the Ares Ares! Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?"
They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. "Paprika red." "Tomato red." "Oxide red, now that should be right; it's oxygen's affinity for iron makes that color after all."
"But it's way too dark, look."
"True."
"Brownish red."
"Reddish brown."
Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange... they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. "We'll call it Martian orange," Maya decided.
"Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are for the purples, why is that?"
Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the chart, to see if they said anything about it. "Ah. It appears that the cones in the retina contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around those three have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites." Then in the empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he read it aloud: "Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived simultaneously as components of the same color."
"That's not true," Maya said immediately. "That's just because they're using a color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides."
"What do you mean? That there's more colors than these?"
"Of course. Artists' colors, theater colors; you put a green spot and a red spot on someone and you get a color all right, and it's not red or green."
"But what is it? Does it have a name?"
"I don't know. Look in an artist's color wheel."
And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: "Here. Burnt umber, Indian red, madder alizarin... those are all green-red mixes."
"Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don't you find that suggestive?"
She gave him a look. "We're talking about colors here, Sax, not politics."
"I know, I know. But still...."
"No. Don't be silly."
"But don't you think we need a red-green mix?"
"Politically? There's a red-green mix already, Sax. That's the trouble. Free Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that's why they're having such success. They're teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth, and soon after that we'll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it coming. We're spiraling down into it again."
"Hmm," Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar systemic politics these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye for these things, was getting more and more worried about it- with her usual mordant Mayan dash of satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps not as bad as she thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon, pay attention. But meanwhile- "Look, it's gone indigo, right over the mountains." Intense saw edge of black below, purple blue above....
"That's not indigo, it's royal blue."
"But they shouldn't call it blue if it's got some red in it."
"Shouldn't. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king's blue, they all have red in them."
"But that color on the horizon isn't any of those."
"No, you're right. Nondescript."
They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206; a new color. And so another evening passed.
Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade nisect;oise and clutched Sax by the arm, "Oh my God, look," and she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, "Ah," he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the home they had left forever.
Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and more complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus to the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on the papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of the problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical activity, protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests they had managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain during mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain included calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of melatonin it produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the longevity treatment, but of course it would be better to stop the calcification from occurring in the first place, for it probably had other effects. Then there was a clear growth in the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were protein filament aggregates that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure on them, perhaps the analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her presque vus presque vus, who could say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the cerebral blood vessels and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals, again impeding function. And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and hippocampus accumulated calpain, which meant they were vulnerable to calcium influxes, which damaged them. And these were nondividing cells, the same age as the organism itself; damage to them was permanent, as during Sax's stroke. He had lost a lot of his brain in that incident, he didn't like to think of it. And the ability of the molecules in these nondividing cells to replace themselves could also be damaged, a smaller but over time equally significant loss. Autopsies of people over two hundred who had died of the quick decline regularly showed serious calcification of the pineal gland, coupled with increases in calpain levels in the hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain levels generally were both implicated in some of the leading current models of how the memory worked. It was an interesting connection.
But all inconclusive. And no one was going to solve the mystery by literature review alone. But the experiments that might clear things up were not practical, given the inaccessibility of the living brain. You could kill chicks and mice and rats and dogs and pigs and lemurs and chimps, you could kill individuals of every species in creation, dissect the brains of their fetuses and embryos as well, and still never find what you were looking for; for it was autopsy itself that was insufficient to the task. And the various live scans were likewise insufficient to the task, as the processes involved were either more fine-grained than the scans could perceive, or more holistic, or more combinatorial, or, probably, all three at once.
Still, some of the experiments and the resultant modeling were suggestive; calpain buildup seemed to alter brain-wave function, for instance; and this fact and others gave him ideas for further investigation. He began to read intensively in the literature on the effects of calcium-binding protein levels, on corticosteroids, on the calcium currents in the hippocampal pyramidal neurons, and on the calcification of the pineal gland. It appeared there were synergistic effects that might impact both memory and general brain-wave function, indeed all bodily rhythms, including heart rhythms. "Was Michel experiencing any memory troubles?" Sax asked Maya. "Perhaps feeling that he had lost entire trains of thought- even very useful trains of thought?"
Maya shrugged. By now Michel was almost a year gone. "I can't remember."
It made Sax nervous. Maya seemed in retreat, her memory worse every day. Even Nadia could do nothing for her. Sax met her down on the corniche more and more frequently, it was a habit they both clearly must have enjoyed, though they never spoke of that; they simply sat, ate a kiosk meal, watched the sunset and pulled up their color charts to see if they would catch another new one. But if it weren't for the notations they made on the charts, neither of them would have been sure whether the colors they saw were new or not. Sax himself felt that he was experiencing his blankouts more frequently, perhaps some four to eight a day, although he couldn't be sure. He took to keeping his AI running a sound recorder permanently, activated by voice; and rather than try to describe his complete train of thought, he just spoke a few words that he hoped would later key a fuller recollection of what he had been thinking. Thus at the end of the day he would sit down apprehensively or hopefully, and listen to what the AI had captured during the day: and mostly it was thought that he remembered thinking, but occasionally he would hear himself say, "Synthetic melatonins may be a better antioxidant than natural ones, so that there aren't enough enough free radicals," or "Viriditas is a fundamental mystery, there will never be a grand unified theory," without having any memory of saying such things, or, often, what they might mean. But sometimes the statements were suggestive, their meanings excavatable. free radicals," or "Viriditas is a fundamental mystery, there will never be a grand unified theory," without having any memory of saying such things, or, often, what they might mean. But sometimes the statements were suggestive, their meanings excavatable.
And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in his undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous parthenon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in the different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure. These standard models were somewhat like Kuhnian paradigms but in reality (paradigms being a model of modeling) more supple and various, a dialogic process in which thousands of minds had participated over the previous hundreds of years; so that figures like Newton or Einstein or Vlad were not the isolate giants of public perception, but the tallest peaks of a great mountain range, as Newton himself had tried to make clear with his comment about standing on the shoulders of giants. In truth the work of science was a communal thing; extending back even beyond the birth of modern science, back all the way into prehistory, as Michel had insisted; a constant struggle to understand. Now of course it was highly structured, articulated beyond the ability of any single individual to fully grasp. But this was only because of the sheer quantity of it; the spectacular efflorescence of structure was not in any particular incomprehensible, one could still walk around anywhere inside the parthenon, so to speak, and thus comprehend at least the shape of the whole, and make choices as to where to study, where to learn the current surface, where to contribute. One could first learn the dialect of the language relevant to the study; which in itself could be a formidable task, as in superstring theory or cascading recombinant chaos; then one could survey the background literature, and hopefully find some syncretic work by someone who had worked long on the cutting edge, and was able to give a coherent account of the status of the field for outsiders; this work, disparaged by most working scientists, called the "gray literature" and considered a vacation or a lowering of oneself on the part of the synthesist, was nevertheless often of great value for someone coming in from the outside. With a general overview (though it was better to think of it as an underview, with the actual workers up there lost in the dim rafters and entablatures of the edifice), one could then move up into the journals, the peer-reviewed "white literature," where the current work was being recorded; and one could read the abstracts, and get a sense of who was attacking what part of the problem. So public, so explicit.... And for any given problem in science, the people who were actually out there on the edge making progress constituted a special group, of a few hundred at most- often with a core group of synthesists and innovators that was no more than a dozen people in all the worlds- inventing a new jargon of their dialect to convey their new insights, arguing over results, suggesting new avenues of investigation, giving each other jobs in labs, meeting at conferences specially devoted to the topic- talking to each other, in all the media there were. And there in the labs and the conference bars the work went forward, as a dialogue of people who understood the issues, and did the sheer hard work of experimentation, and of thinking about experiments.
And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world. So Sax had always believed, and no analysis by social scientists, nor even the troubling experience of the Martian terraforming process, had ever caused him to waver in that belief. Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet had been right (they weren't always).
And so Sax moved about in the great structure, comfortable, capable, and on some levels content.
But he began to understand that as beautiful and powerful as science was, the problem of biological senescence was perhaps too difficult. Not too difficult to be solved ever, nothing was that, but simply too difficult to be solved in his lifetime. Actually it was still an open question how hard a problem it was. Their understanding of matter, space and time was incomplete, and it might be that it would always necessarily shade off into metaphysics, like the speculations about the cosmos before the Big Bang, or things smaller than strings. On the other hand the world might be amenable to progressive explanations, until it all (at least from string to cosmos) would be brought someday within the realm of the great parthenon. Either result was possible, the court was still out, the next thousand years or so should tell the tale.
But in the meantime, he was experiencing several blank-outs a day. And sometimes he was short of breath. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat so hard. Seldom did he sleep at night. And Michel was dead, so that Sax's sense of the meaning of things was becoming uncertain, and in great need of help. When he managed to think at all on the level of meaning, he found that he felt he was in a race. Him and everyone else, but especially the life scientists actually at work on the problem: they were in a race with death. To win it, they had to explain one of the greatest of the great unexplainables.
And one day, sitting down on a bench with Maya after a day in front of his screen, thinking of the vastness of that growing wing of the parthenon, he realized that it was a race he couldn't win. The human species might win it, someday, but it looked to be a long way off still. It was no great surprise, really; he knew this; that is to say, he had always known it. Labeling the current largest manifestation of the problem had not disguised to him its profundity, "the quick decline" was just a name, inaccurate, over-simple- not science, in fact, but rather an attempt (like "the Big Bang") to diminish and contain the reality, as yet not understood. In this case the problem was simply death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life and of time, this was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve. Postponements, yes; solutions, no. "Reality itself is mortal," he said.
"Of course," Maya said, absorbed in the sight of the sunset.
He needed a simpler problem. As a postponement, as a step toward the harder problems; or just as something he could solve. Memory, perhaps. Fighting the blank-outs; it was certainly a problem that stood at hand, ready for study. His memory was in need of help. Working on it might even cast light on the quick decline. And even if it didn't, he had to try it, no matter how hard it was. Because they were all going to die; but they could at least die with their memories intact.
So he switched his emphasis to the memory problem, abandoning the quick decline and all the rest of the senescence issues. He was only mortal after all.
Recent memory work was fairly suggestive of avenues of approach. This particular scientific front was related in some of its aspects to the work on learning that had enabled Sax to (partially) recover from his stroke. This was not surprising, as memory was the retention of learning. All brain science tended to move together in its understanding of consciousness. But in that progression, retention and recall remained recalcitrant crux issues, still imperfectly understood.
But there were indications, and more all the time. Clinical clues; a lot of the ancient ones were experiencing memory problems of varying kinds, and behind the ancient ones came a giant generation of nisei, who could see the problems manifesting in their elders, and hoped to avoid them. So memory was a hot topic. Hundreds, indeed thousands of labs were working on it in one way or another, and as a result many aspects of it were coming clear. Sax immersed himself in the literature in his usual style, reading intensively for several months on end; and at the end of that time he thought he could say, in general terms, how memory worked; although in the end he, like all the rest of the scientists working on the problem, ran into their insufficient understanding of the underlying basics- of consciousness, matter, time. And at this point, as detailed as their understanding was, Sax could not see how memory might be improved or reinforced. They needed something more.
The original Hebb hypothesis, first proposed by Donald Hebb in 1949, was still held to be true, because it was such a general principle; learning changed some physical feature in the brain, and after that the changed feature somehow encoded the event learned. In Hebb's time the physical feature (the engram) was conceived of as occurring somewhere on the synaptic level, and as there could be hundreds of thousands of synapses for each of the ten billion neurons in the brain, this gave researchers the impression that the brain might be capable of holding some 1014 data bits; at the time this seemed more than adequate to explain human consciousness. And as it was also within the realm of the possible for computers, it led to a brief vogue in the notion of strong artificial intelligence, as well as that era's version of the "machine fallacy," a variant of the pathetic fallacy, in which the brain was thought of as being something like the most powerful machine of the time. The work of the twenty-first and twenty-second century, however, had made it clear that there were no specific "engram" sites as such. Any number of experiments failed to locate these sites, including one in which various parts of rat's brains were removed after they learned a task, with no part of the brain proving essential; the frustrated experimenters concluded that memory was "everywhere and nowhere," leading to the analogy of brain to hologram, even sillier than all the other machine analogies; but they were stumped, they were flailing. Later experiments clarified things; it became obvious that all the actions of consciousness were taking place on a level far smaller even than that of neurons; this was associated in Sax's mind with the general miniaturization of scientific attention through the twenty-second century. In that finer-grained appraisal they had begun investigating the cytoskeletons of neuron cells, which were internal arrays of microtubules, with protein bridges between the microtubules. The microtubules' structure consisted of hollow tubes made of thirteen columns of tubulin dimers, peanut-shaped globular protein pairs, each about eight-by-four-by-four nanometers, existing in two different configurations, depending on their electrical polarization. So the dimers represented a possible on-off switch of the hoped-for engram; but they were so small that the electrical state of each dimer was influenced by the dimers around it, because of van der Waals interactions between them. So messages of all kinds could be propagated along each microtubule column, and along the protein bridges connecting them. Then most recently had come yet another step in miniaturization: each dimer contained about 450 amino acids, which could retain information by changes in the sequences of amino acids. And contained inside the dimer columns were tiny threads of water in an ordered state, a state called vicinal water, and this vicinal water was capable of conveying quantum-coherent oscillations for the length of the tubule. A great number of experiments on living monkey brains, with miniaturized instrumentation of many different kinds, had established that while consciousness was thinking, amino-acid sequences were shifting, tubulin dimers in many different places in the brain were changing configuration, in pulsed phases; microtubules were moving, sometimes growing; and on a much larger scale, dendrite spines then grew and made new connections, sometimes changing synapses permanently, sometimes not.
So now the best current model had it that memories were encoded (somehow) as standing patterns of quantumcoherent oscillations, set up by changes in the microtubules and their constituent parts, all working in patterns inside the neurons. Although there were now researchers who speculated that there could be significant action at even finer ultramicroscopic levels, permanently beyond their ability to investigate (familiar refrain); some saw traces of signs that the oscillations were structured in the kind of spin-network patterns that Bao's work described, in knotted nodes and networks that Sax found eerily reminiscent of the palace-of-memory plan, utilizing rooms and hallways, as if the ancient Greeks by introspection alone had intuited the very geometry of timespace.
In any case, it was sure that these ultramicroscopic actions were implicated in the brain's plasticity; they were part of how the brain learned and then remembered. So memory was happening at a far smaller level than had been previously imagined, which gave the brain a much higher computational possibility than before, up to perhaps 1024 operations per second- or even 1043 in some calculations, leading one researcher to note that every human mind was in a certain sense more complicated that all the rest of the universe (minus its other consciousnesses, of course). Sax found this suspiciously like the strong anthropic phantoms seen elsewhere in cosmological theory, but it was an interesting idea to contemplate.
So, not only was there simply more going on, it was also happening at such fine levels that quantum effects were certainly involved. Experimentation had made it clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum reality were an integral part of consciousness. Indeed it was only very recently, by including the quantum effects in the cytoskeletons, that a team of French researchers had finally managed to put forth a plausible theory as to why general anesthetics worked, after all the centuries of blithely using them.
So they were confronted with yet another bizarre quantum world, in which there was action at a distance, in which decisions not made could affect events that really happened, in which certain events seemed to be triggered teleologically, that is to say by events that appeared to come after them in time.... Sax was not greatly surprised by this development. It supported a feeling he had had all his life, that the human mind was deeply mysterious, a black box that science could scarcely investigate. And now that science was investigating it, it was coming up hard against the great unexplainables of reality itself.
Still, one could hold to what science had learned; and admit that reality at the quantum level behaved in ways that were simply outrageous at the level of human senses and ordinary experience. They had had three hundred years to get used to that, and eventually they had somehow to incorporate this knowledge into their worldviews, and forge on. Sax would have indeed said that he was comfortable with the familiar quantum paradoxes; things at the microscale were bizarre but explicable, quantifiable or at least describable, using complex numbers, Riemannian geometry, and all the rest of the armatures of the appropriate branches of mathematics. Finding such stuff in the very workings of the brain should have been no surprise at all. Indeed, compared to things like human history or psychology or culture, it was even somehow comforting. It was only quantum mechanics after all. Something that could be modeled by mathematics. And that was saying something.
So. At an extremely fine level of structure in the brain, much of one's past was contained, encoded in a unique complex network of synapses, microtubules, dimers and vicinal water and amino-acid chains, all small enough and near enough together to have quantum effects on each other. Patterns of quantum fluctuation, diverging and collapsing; this was consciousness. And the patterns were clearly held or generated in specific parts of the brain; they were the result of a physical structure articulated on many levels. The hippocampus, for instance, was critically important, especially the dentate gyrus region and the perforant pathway nerves that led to it. And the hippocampus was extremely sensitive to action in the limbic system, directly underneath it in the brain; and the limbic system was in many ways the seat of the emotions, what the ancients would have called the heart. Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experienced changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best- or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.
After that initial change in the brain, however, the slow process of degradation began. For one thing, the power of recollection was different in different people, but always less powerful than memory storage, it appeared, and very hard to direct. So much was patterned into the brain but never retrieved. And then if one never remembered a pattern, never recollected and rehearsed it, then they never got the reinforcement of another run-through; and after about 150 years of storage, experiments suggested, the pattern began to degrade more and more rapidly, due apparently to the accumulated quantum effects of free radicals collecting randomly in the brain. This was apparently what was happening to the ancient ones; a breakdown process which began immediately after an event was patterned into the brain, eventually hit a cumulative level where the effects were catastrophic for the oscillatory patterns involved, and thus for the memories. It was probably about as clocklike, Sax thought glumly, as the thermodynamic clouding of the lens of the eye.
However- if one could rehearse all one's memories, ecphorize ecphorize them as some called it in the literature on the subject- from the Greek, meaning something like "echo transmission"- then it would reinforce the patterns, giving them a fresh start and setting the clock of degradation back to zero. A sort of longevity treatment for dimer patterns, in effect, sometimes referred to in the literature as them as some called it in the literature on the subject- from the Greek, meaning something like "echo transmission"- then it would reinforce the patterns, giving them a fresh start and setting the clock of degradation back to zero. A sort of longevity treatment for dimer patterns, in effect, sometimes referred to in the literature as anamnesis anamnesis, or loss of forgetting. And after such treatment it would be easier to recall any given event, or at least as easy as it had been soon after the event happened. This was the general direction that work in memory reinforcement was taking. Some called the drugs and electrical devices involved in this process nootropics nootropics, a word which Sax read as "acting upon mind." There were a lot of terms for the process being bandied about in the current literature, people scrambling through their Greek and Latin lexicons in the hope of becoming the namer of the phenomenon: Sax had seen mnemonics mnemonics and and mnemonistics mnemonistics, and mnemosynics mnemosynics, after the goddess of memory; also mimenskesthains mimenskesthains, from the Greek verb "to remember." Sax preferred memory reinforcer memory reinforcer, although he also liked anamnesis anamnesis, which seemed the most accurate term for what they were trying to do. He wanted to concoct an anamnestic.
But the practical difficulties of ecphorization- of remembering all one's past, or even some particular part of it- were great. Not just finding the anamnestics that might stimulate such a process, but finding as well the time it would take! When one had lived two centuries, it seemed possible that it might take years to ecphorize all the significant events of one's life.
Clearly a sequential chronological run-through was impractical, in more ways than one. What would be preferable was some kind of simultaneous flushing of the system, strengthening the entire network without consciously remembering every component of it. Whether such a flushing was electrochemically possible was unclear; and what such a flushing might feel like was impossible to imagine. But if one were to electrically stimulate the perforant pathway to the hippocampus, and get a great deal of adenosine triphosphate past the blood-brain barrier, for instance, thus stimulating the long-term potentiation that aided learning in the first place; and then impose a brain-wave pattern stimulating and supporting the quantum oscillations of the microtubules; and then direct one's consciousness to review the memories that felt most important to one, while the rest were being reinforced as well, unconsciously....
He ran through another accelerando of thought on this issue, then crashed blank on it. There he was, sitting in his apartment living room, blanked, cursing himself for not at least trying to mutter something into his AI. It seemed that he had been onto something- something about ATP, or was it LTP? Well. If it was a genuinely useful thought, it would come back. He had to believe that. It seemed probable.
As it did, more and more as he studied the issues, that the shock of Maya's amnesiac moment had somehow propelled Michel into the quick decline. Not that such an explanation could ever be proved, or that it even really mattered. But Michel would not have wanted to survive either his memory or hers; he had loved her as his life project, his definition of himself. The shock of Maya blanking on something so basic, so important (like the key to memory restoration).... And the mind-body connection was so strong- so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one's body's life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone. So Michel must have felt, in that final traumatic half hour, as his self tumbled into a fatal arrhythmia, under the anguish of grieving for his love's death-of-mind.
They had to remember to be truly alive. And so ecphorization, if he could figure out the appropriate anamnestic methodology, was going to have to be tried.
Of course it might be dangerous. If he did manage to work up a memory reinforcer, it would flush the system all at once, perhaps, and no one could predict what that would feel like subjectively. One would just have to try it. It would be an experiment. Self-experimentation. Well, it wouldn't be the first time. Vlad had given himself the first gerontological treatment, though it could have killed him; Jennings had inoculated himself with live smallpox vaccine; Arkady's ancestor Alexander Bogdanov had exchanged his blood for that of a young man suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and had died while the young man had lived for thirty more years. And of course there was the story of the young physicists at Los Alamos, who had set off the first nuclear explosion wondering among themselves whether it might not burn up the entire atmosphere of the Earth, a somewhat disturbing case of self-experimentation, one had to admit. Compared to that ingesting a few amino acids seemed no very great thing, something more like Dr. Hoffman trying LSD on himself. Presumably ecphorizing would be less disorienting than an LSD experience, for if all one's memories were being reinforced at once, consciousness would surely not be capable of being aware of it. The so-called stream of consciousness was fairly unilinear, it seemed to Sax on introspection. So that at most one might experience a quick associative train of recollections, or a random jumble- not unlike Sax's everyday mentation, to tell the truth. He could handle that. And he was willing to risk something more traumatic, if that was what it happened to take.
He flew to Acheron.