Blue Mars (21 page)

The car stopped. He stood again, with an effort, and got out, and
had trouble walking; he almost fell, everything was swinging around. Maya held
his arm hard. He gripped his temples, breathed through his mouth. “Are you
okay?” she asked sharply.

“Yes,” Nirgal said, and tried to nod. They were in a complex of
raw new buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed
flower petals. People everywhere, almost all in Carnival costume. The singe of
the sun in his eyes wouldn’t go away. He was led to a wooden dais, above a
throng of people cheering madly.

A beautiful black-haired woman in a green sari, with a white sash
belting it, introduced the four Martians to the crowd. The hills behind bent
like green flames in a strong western wind; it was cooler than before, and less
smelly. Maya stood before the microphones and cameras, and the years fell away
from her; she spoke crisp isolated sentences that were cheered antiphonally,
call and response, call and response. A media star with the whole world
watching, comfortably charismatic, laying out what sounded to Nirgal like her
speech in Burroughs at the crux point of the revolution, when she had rallied
and focused the crowd in Princess Park. Something like that.

Michel and Sax declined to speak, they waved Nirgal up there to
face the crowd and the green hills holding them up to the sun. For a time as he
stood there he could not hear himself think. White noise of cheers, thick sound
in the thicker air.

“Mars is a mirror,” he said in the microphone, “in which Terra
sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away
all but the most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through
and through. And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran
thought and Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals
or new genetic strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way
for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus
in our small way we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles
on the brink of becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”

Loud cheers.

“That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway—a long evolution
through the centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they
understand better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we
have seen that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for
giving, in a culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of
all, working together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most
free. No hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the
greater we become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great
flood, we see the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the
two worlds at once.”

He sat in a blaze of noise. Then the speeches were over and they
had shifted into some kind of public press conference, responding to questions
asked by the beautiful woman in the green sari. Nirgal responded with questions
of his own, asking her about the new compound of buildings surrounding them,
and about the situation on the island; and she answered over a chatter of
commentary and laughter from the appreciative crowd, still looking on from
behind the wall of reporters and cameras. The woman turned out to be the prime
minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The little two-island nation had been
unwillingly dominated by the metanat Armscor for most of the previous century,
the woman explained, and only since the flood had they severed that
association, “and every colonial bond at last.” How the crowd cheered! And her
smile, so full of a whole society’s pleasure. She was dugla, he saw, and
amazingly beautiful.

The compound they were in, she explained, was one of scores of
relief hospitals that had been built on the two islands since the flood. Their
construction had been the major project of the islanders in response to their
new freedom; they had created relief centers that aided flood victims, giving
them all at once housing, work, and medical care, including the longevity
treatment.

“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing
on Earth.

“You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it
will create all kinds of problems.”

“Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give
everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.”

It was a minute or two before anything more could be heard over
the cheering of the crowd. The prime minister was trying to quiet them, but a
short man dressed in a fashionable brown suit came out of the group behind the
prime minister and proclaimed into the mike, to an uproar of cheers at every
sentence, “This Marsman Nirgal is a son of Trinidad! His papa, Desmond Hawkins
the Stowaway, the Coyote of Mars, is from Port of Spain, and he still has a lot
of people there! That Armscor bought the oil company and they tried to buy the
island too, but they picked the wrong island to try! Your Coyote didn’t get his
spirit from out of the air, Maestro Nirgal, he got it from T and T! He’s been
wandering around up there teaching everyone the T and T way, and they’re all up
there dugla anyway, they understand the dugla way, and they have taken over all
Mars with it! Mars is one great big Trinidad Tobago!”

The crowd went into transports at this, and impulsively Nirgal
walked over to the man and hugged him, such a smile, then found the stairs and
got down and walked out into the crowd, which clumped around him. A miasma of
fragrances. Too loud to think. He touched people, shook hands. People touched
him. The look in their eyes! Everyone was shorter than he was, they laughed at
that; and every face was an entire world. Black dots swam in his vision, things
went darker very abruptly—he looked around, startled—a bank of clouds had
massed over a dark strip of sea to the west, and the lead edge had cut off the
sun. Now as he continued to mingle the cloud bank came rolling over the island.
The crowd broke up as people moved under the shelter of trees, or verandas, or
a big tin-roofed bus stop. Maya and Sax and Michel were lost in their own
crowds. The clouds were dark gray at their bases, rearing up in white roils as
solid as rock but mutable, flowing continuously. A cool wind struck hard, and
then big raindrops starred the dirt, and the four Martians were hustled under
an open pavilion roof, where room was made for them.

Then the rain poured down like nothing Nirgal had ever seen—rain
sheeting down, roaring, slamming into sudden broad rivering puddles, all
starred with a million white droplet explosions, the whole world outside the
pavilion blurred by falling water into patches of color, green and brown all
mixed in a wash. Maya was grinning: “It’s like the ocean is falling on us!”

“So much water!” Nirgal said.

The prime minister shrugged. “It happens every day during monsoon.
It’s more rain than before, and we already got a lot.”

Nirgal shook his head and felt a stabbing at his temples. The pain
of breathing in wet air. Half drowning.

The prime minister was explaining something to them, but Nirgal
could barely follow, his head hurt so. Anyone in the independence movement
could join a Praxis affiliate, and during their first year’s work they were
building relief centers like this one. The longevity treatment was an automatic
part of every person’s joining, administered in the newly built centers.
Birth-control implants could be had at the same time, reversible but permanent
if left in; many took them as their contribution to the cause. “Babies later,
we say. There will be time.” People wanted to join anyway, almost everyone had.
Armscor had been forced to match the Praxis arrangement to keep some of their
people, and so it made little difference now what organization one was part of,
on Trinidad they were all much the same. The newly treated went on to build
more housing, or work in agriculture, or make more hospital equipment. Trinidad
had been fairly prosperous before the flood, the combined result of vast oil
reserves and metanat investment in the cable socket. There had been a
progressive tradition which had formed the basis of the resistance, in the
years after the unwelcome metanat arrival. Now there was a growing
infrastructure dedicated to the longevity project. It was a promising
situation. Every camp was a waiting list for the treatment, working on its own
construction. Of course people were absolutely firm in the defense of such
places. Even if Armscor had wanted to, it would be very difficult for its
security forces to take over the camps. And if they did they would find nothing
of value to them anyway; they already had the treatment. So they could try
genocide if they wanted to, but other than that, they had few options for
taking back control of the situation.

“The island just walked away from them,” the prime minister
concluded. “No army can stop that. It is an end to economic caste, caste of all
kind. This is something new, a new dugla thing in history, like you said in
your speech. Like a little Mars. So to have you here to see us, you a
grandchild of the island, you who have taught us so much in your beautiful new
world—oh, it is a special thing. A festival for real.” That radiant smile.

“Who was the man who spoke?”

“Oh that was James.”

Abruptly the rain let up. The sun broke through, and the world
steamed. Sweat poured down Nirgal in the white air. He could not catch his
breath. White air, black spots swimming.

“I think I need to lie down.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course. You must be exhausted, overwhelmed. Come
with us.”

They took him to a small outbuilding of the compound, into a
bright room walled with bamboo strips, empty except for a mattress on the
floor.

“I’m afraid the mattress is not long enough for you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He was left alone. Something about the room reminded him of the
interior of Hiroko’s cottage, in the grove on the far side of the lake in
Zygote. Not just the bamboo, but the room’s size and shape—and something
elusive, the green light streaming in perhaps. The sensation of Hiroko’s
presence was so strong and so unexpected that when the others had left the
room, Nirgal threw himself down the mattress, his feet hanging far off the
bottom edge, and cried. A complete confusion of feeling. His whole body hurt,
but especially his head. He stopped crying and fell into a deep sleep.

He woke in a small black chamber.
It smelled green. He couldn’t remember
where he was. He rolled onto his back and it came to him: Earth. Whispers—he
sat up, frightened. A muffled laugh. Hands caught at him and pressed him down,
but they were friendly hands, he could feel that immediately. “Shh,” someone
said, and then kissed him. Someone else was fumbling at his belt, his buttons.
Women, two, three, no two, scented overpoweringly with jasmine and something
else, two strands of perfume, both warm. Sweaty skin, so slick. The arteries in
his head pounded. This kind of thing had happened to him once or twice when he
was younger, when the newly tented canyons were like new worlds, with new young
women who wanted to get pregnant or just have fun. After the celibate months of
the voyage it felt like heaven to squeeze women’s bodies, to kiss and be
kissed, and his initial fright melted away in a rush of hands and mouths,
breasts and tangled legs. “Sister Earth,” he gasped. There was music coming
from somewhere far away, piano and steel drums and tablas, almost washed out by
the sound of the wind in the bamboo. One of the women was on top of him,
pressed down on him, and the feel of her ribs sliding under his hands would
stay with him forever. He came inside her, kept on kissing. But his head still
pounded painfully.

*
     
*
       
*

The next time he woke he was damp and naked on the mattress. It
was still dark. He dressed and went out of the room, down a dim hallway to an
enclosed porch. It was dusk; he had slept through a day. Maya and Michel and
Sax were sitting down to a meal with a large group. Nirgal assured them he was
fine, ravenous in fact.

He sat among them. Out in the clearing, in the middle of the raw
wet compound, a crowd was gathered around an outdoor kitchen. Beyond them a
bonfire blazed yellow in the dusk; its flames limned the dark faces and
reflected in the bright liquid whites of their eyes, their teeth. The people at
the inside table all looked at him. Several of the young women smiled, their
jet hair like caps of jewels, and for a second Nirgal was afraid he smelled of
sex and perfume; but the smoke from the bonfire, and the steamy scents of the
spiced dishes on the table, made such a thing irrelevant— in such an explosion
of smells, nothing could be traced to its origin—and anyway one’s olfactory
system was blasted by the food, hot with spices, curry and cayenne, chunks of
fish on rice, with a vegetable that seared his mouth and throat, so that he
spent the next half hour blinking and sniffing and drinking glasses of water,
his head burning. Someone gave him a slice of candied orange, which cooled his
mouth somewhat. He ate several slices of bittersweet candied orange.

When the meal was over they all cleared the tables together, as in
Zygote or Hiranyagarba. Outside dancers began to circle the bonfire, dressed in
their surreal carnival costumes, with masks of beasts and demons over their
heads, as during Fassnacht in Nicosia, although the masks were heavier and
stranger: demons with multiple eyes and big teeth, elephants, goddesses. The
trees were black against the blurry black of the sky, the stars all fat and
swinging around, the fronds and leaves up there green black black green, and
then fire-colored as the flames leaped higher, seeming to provide the rhythm of
the dance. A small young woman with six arms, all moving together to the dance,
stepped behind Nirgal and Maya. “This is the dance of Ramayana,” she told them.
“It is as old as civilization, and in it they speak of Mangala.”

She gave Nirgal a familiar squeeze on the shoulder, and suddenly he
recognized her jasmine scent. Without smiling she went back out to the bonfire.
The tabla drums were following the leaping flames to a crescendo, and the
dancers cried out. Nirgal’s head throbbed at every beat, and despite the
candied orange his eyes were still watering from the burning pepper. And his
lids were heavy. “I know it’s strange,” he said, “but I think I have to sleep
again.”

He woke before dawn, and went out on a veranda to watch the sky
lighten in a quite Martian sequence, black to purple to rose to pink, before
turning the startling cyanic blue of a tropical Terran morning. His head was
still sore, as if stuffed, but he felt rested at last, and ready to take on the
world again. After a breakfast of green-brown bananas, he and Sax joined some
of their hosts for a drive around the island.

Everywhere they went there were always several hundred people in
his field of vision. The people were all small: brown-skinned like him in the
countryside, darker in the towns. There were big vans that moved around
together, providing mobile shops to villages too small to have them. Nirgal was
surprised to see how lean people werq, their limbs wiry with labor or else as
thin as reeds. In this context the curves of the young women were like the
blooms of flowers, not long for this world.

When people saw who he was they rushed up to greet him and shake
his hand. Sax shook his head at the sight of Nirgal among them. “Bimodal
distribution,” he said. “Not speciation exactly—but perhaps if enough time
passed. Island divergence, it’s very Darwinian.”

“I’m a Martian,” Nirgal agreed.

Their buildings were placed in holes hacked into the green jungle,
which then tried to take the space back. The older buildings were all made of
mud bricks black with age, melting back into the earth. Rice fields were
terraced so finely that the hills looked farther away than they really were.
The light green of rice shoots was a color never seen on Mars. In general the
greens were brilliant and glowing beyond anything Nirgal could recall seeing;
they pressed on him, so various and intense, the sun plating his back: “It’s
because of the sky’s color,” Sax said when Nirgal mentioned it. “The reds in
the Martian sky mute the greens just a bit.”

The air was thick, wet, rancid. The shimmering sea settled on a
distant horizon. Nirgal coughed, breathed through his mouth, struggled to
ignore his throbbing temples and forehead.

“You have low-altitude sickness,” Sax speculated. “I’ve read
claims that it happens to Himalayans and Andeans who come down to sea level.
Acidity levels in the blood. We ought to have landed you someplace higher.”

“Why didn’t we?”

“They wanted you here because Desmond came from here. This is your
homeland. Actually there seems to be a bit of conflict over who should host us
next.”

“Even here?”

“More here than on Mars, I should think.”

Nirgal groaned. The weight of the world, the stifling air— “I’m
going running,” he said, and took off.

At first it was its usual release; the habitual motions and
responses poured through him, reminding him that he was still himself. But as
he thumped along he did not ascend into that lung-gom-pa zone where running was
like breathing, something he could do indefinitely; instead he began to feel
the press of the thick air in his lungs, and the pressure of eyes from the
little people he passed, and most of all the pressure of his own weight,
hurting his joints. He weighed more than twice what he was used to, and it was
like carrying an invisible person on his back, except no— the weight was inside
him. As if his bones had turned to lead inside him. His lungs burned and
drowned at the same time, and no cough would get them clear. There were taller
people in Western clothes behind him now, on little three-wheeled bicycles that
splashed through every puddle. But locals were stepping into the road behind
him, crowds of them blocking off the tricyclers, their eyes and teeth gleaming
in their dark faces as they talked and laughed. The men on the tricycles had
blank faces, and they were looking at Nirgal. But they did not challenge the
crowd. Nirgal headed back toward the camp, turning down a new road. Now the
green hills were blazing to his right. The road jarred up through his legs with
every step, until his legs were like tree trunks aflame. That running should hurt!
And his head was like a giant balloon. All the wet green plants seemed to be
reaching out for him, a hundred shades of green flame melding to one dominant
color band, pouring into the world. Black dots swimming. “Hiroko,” he gasped,
and ran on with the tears streaming down his face; no one would be able to tell
them from sweat. Hiroko, it isn’t like you said it would be!

He stumbled into the ochre dirt of the compound, and scores of
people followed him to Maya. Soaking as he was, he still threw his arms around
her and put his head down on her shoulder, sobbing.

“We should get to Europe,” Maya said angrily to someone over his
back. “This is stupid, to bring him right to the tropics like this.”

Nirgal shifted to look back. It was the prime minister. “This is
how we always live,” she said, and pierced Nirgal with a resentful proud look.

But Maya was unimpressed. “We have to go to Bern,” she said.

They flew to Switzerland in a small space plane provided by
Praxis. As they traveled, they looked down on the Earth from thirty thousand
meters: the blue Atlantic, the rugged mountains of Spain, somewhat like the
Hellespontus Mon-tes; then France; then the white wall of the Alps, unlike any
mountains he had ever seen. The cool ventilation of the space plane felt like
home to Nirgal, and he was chagrined to think that he could not tolerate the
open air of Earth.

“You’ll do better in Europe,” Maya told him.

Nirgal thought about the reception they had gotten. “They love you
here,” he said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the
welcome of the duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors
as for him; and Maya had been particularly cherished.

“They’re happy we survived,” Maya said, dismissing it. “We came
back from the dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we
were dead, do you see? From sixty-one until just last year, they thought all
the First Hundred were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them
was dead too. To have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with
everything changing—yes. It’s like a myth. The return from underground.”

“But not all of you.”

“No.” She almost smiled. “They still have to sort that out. They
think Frank is alive, and Arkady—and John too, even though John was killed years
before sixty-one, and everyone knew it! For a while, anyway. But people are
forgetting things. That was a long time ago. And so much has happened since.
And people want John Boone to be alive. And so they forget Nicosia, and say
that he is part of the underground still.” She laughed shortly, unsettled by
this.

“Like with Hiroko,” Nirgal said, feeling his throat constrict. A
wave of sadness like the one in Trinidad washed through him, leaving him
bleached and aching. He believed, he had always believed, that Hiroko was
alive, and hiding with her people somewhere in the southern highlands. This was
how he had coped with the shock of the news of her disappearance—by being quite
certain that she had slipped out of Sabishii, and would show up again when she felt
the time was right. He had been sure of it. Now, for some reason he could not
tell, he was no longer sure.

In the seat on the other side of Maya, Michel sat with a pinched
expression on his face. Suddenly Nirgal felt like he was looking in a mirror; he
knew his face held the same expression, he could feel it in his muscles. He and
Michel both had doubts—perhaps about Hiroko, perhaps about other things. No way
of telling. Michel did not seem inclined to speak.

And from across the plane Sax watched them both, with his usual
birdlike gaze.

They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of
the Alps, and landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through
a cool Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically
up and out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were
in Bern.

In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters,
everyone with an ID badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to
them. The city was small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered
power was palpable. Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly
arcaded stone buildings, everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift
river Aare S-ing through it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow.
The people crowding that quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking
white people, not as short as most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their
talk, and always a good number of them clustering around the Martians and their
escorts, who now were blue-uniformed Swiss military police.

Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis
headquarters, in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed
Nirgal how close to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river
of even two meters would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they
had the river under control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest
mountain range Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the
Swiss were good on Mars.

The Praxis building was just a few streets from the old center of
the city. The World Court occupied a scattering of offices next to the Swiss
federal buildings, near the middle of the peninsula. So every morning they walked
down the cobbled main street, the Kramgasse, which was incredibly clean, bare
and underpopulated compared with any street in Port of Spain. They passed under
the medieval clock tower, with its ornate face and mechanical figures, like one
of Michel’s alchemical diagrams made into a three-dimensional object; then into
the World Court offices, where they talked to group after group about the
situations on Mars and Earth: UN officials, national government
representatives, metanational executives, relief organizations, media groups.
Everyone wanted to know what was happening on Mars, what Mars planned to do
next, what they thought of the situation on Earth, what Mars could offer Earth
in the way of help. Nirgal found most of the people he was introduced to fairly
easy to talk with; they seemed to understand the respective situations on the
two worlds, they were not unrealistic about Mars’s ability to somehow “save
Earth”; they did not seem to expect to control Mars ever again, nor did they
expect the metanational world order of the antediluvian years to return.