Blue Mars (27 page)

He was in a bed, very hot, his breathing wet and painful. Out one
window, the Alps. The white breaking up out of the green, like death itself
rearing up out of life, crashing through to remind him that viriditas was a
green fuse that would someday explode back into nova whiteness, returning to
the same array of elements it had been before the pattern dust devil had picked
it up. The white and the green; it felt like the Jungfrau was shoving up his
throat. He wanted to sleep, to get away from that feeling.

Sax sat at his side, holding his hand. “I think he needs to be in
Martian gravity,” he was saying to someone who did not seem to be in the room.
“It could be a form of altitude sickness. Or a disease vector. Or allergies. A
systemic response. Edema, anyway. Let’s take him up immediately in a
ground-to-space plane, and get him into a g ring at Martian g. If I’m right it
will help, if not it won’t hurt.”

Nirgal tried to speak, but couldn’t catch his breath. This world
had infected him—crushed him—cooked him in steam and bacteria. A blow to the
ribs: he was allergic to Earth. He squeezed Sax’s hand, pulled in a breath like
a knife to the heart. “Yes,” he gasped, and saw Sax squint. “Home, yes.”

PART
FIVE

              
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---Home
At Last

              
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An old man sitting at sickbed. Hospital rooms are all the same.
Clean, white, cool, humming, fluorescent. On the sickbed lies a man, tall,
dark-skinned, thick black eyebrows. Sleeping fitfully. The old man is hunched
at his head. One finger touches the skull behind the ear. Under his breath the
old man is muttering. “If it’s an allergic response, then your own immune
system has to be convinced that the allergen isn’t really a problem. They
haven’t identified an allergen. Pulmonary edema is usually high-altitude
sickness, but maybe the mix of gases caused it, or maybe it was low-altitude
sickness. You need to get water out of your lungs. They’ve done pretty well
with that. The fever and chills might be amenable to biofeedback. A really high
fever is dangerous, you must remember that. I remember the time you came into
the baths after falling into the lake. You were blue, fackie jumped right
in—no, maybe she stopped to watch. You held Hiroko and me by the arms, and we
all saw you warm up. Nonshivering thermogenesis, everyone does it, but you did
it voluntarily, and very powerfully as well. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I still don’t know how you did it. You were a wonderful boy. People can shiver
at will if they want, so maybe it’s like that, only inside. It doesn’t really
matter, you don’t need to know how, you just need to do it. If you can do it in
the other direction. Bring your temperature down. Give it a try. Give it a try.
You were such a wonderful boy.”

The old man reaches out and grabs the young man by the wrist. He
holds it and squeezes.

“You used to ask questions. You were very curious, very
good-natured. You would say Why, Sax, why? Why, Sax, why? It was fun to try to
keep answering. The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to
the roots. I’m sure Hiroko felt that way, she probably was the one who first
told me that. Listen, it wasn’t a bad thing to go looking for Hiroko. I’ve done
the same thing myself. And I will again. Because I saw her once, on Dae-dalia.
She helped me when I got caught out in a storm. She held my wrist. Just like
this. She’s alive, Nirgal. Hiroko is alive. She’s out there. You’ll find her
someday. Put that internal thermostat to work, get that temperature down, and
someday you’ll find her....”

The old man lets go of the wrist. He slumps over, half-asleep,
muttering still. “You would say Why, Sax, why?”

If the mistral hadn’t been blowing
he might have cried, for nothing looked
the same, nothing. He came into a Marseilles train station that hadn’t existed
when he left, next to a little new town that hadn’t existed when he left, and
all of it built according to a dripping bulbous Gaudi architecture which also
had a kind of Bogdanovist circularity to it, so that Michel was reminded of
Christianopolis or Hiranyagarba, if they had melted. No, nothing looked
familiar in the slightest. The land was strangely flattened, green, deprived of
its rock, deprived of that je ne sals quoi that had made it Provence. He had
been gone 102 years.

But blowing over all this unfamiliar landscape was the mistral,
pouring down off the Massif Centrale—cold, dry, musty and electric, flushed
with negative ions or whatever it was that gave it its characteristic katabatic
exhilaration. The mistral! No matter what it looked like, it had to be
Provence.

Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand
them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him,
that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed
things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too
that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in
the seventeenth century like it was supposed to. A young woman leading the
Praxis aides seemed to be saying that they could take a drive around and see
the region, go down to the new coast and so on.

“Fine,” Michel said.

Already he was understanding them better. It was possibly just a
matter of Provenfal accents. He followed them around through the concentric
circles of the buildings, then out into a parking lot like all other parking
lots. The young woman aide helped him into the passenger seat of a little car,
then she got in on the other side, behind the steering wheel. Her name was
Sylvie; she was small, attractive, stylish, and smelled nice, so that her
strange French continuously surprised Michel. She started the car and drove
them out of the airport. And then they were running noisily over a black road
across a flat landscape, green with grass and trees. No, there were some hills
in the distance; so small! And the horizon so far away!

Sylvie drove to the nearest coast. From a hilltop turnout they
could see far over the Mediterranean, on this day mottled brown and gray,
gleaming in the sun.

After a few minutes’ silent observation, Sylvie drove on, cutting
inland over flat land again. Then they were stopped on a levee, and looking
over the Camargue, she said. Michel would not have recognized it. The delta of
the Rhone River had been a broad triangular fan of many thousands of hectares,
filled by salt marshes and grass; now it was part of the Mediterranean again.
The water was brown, and dotted with buildings, but it was water nevertheless,
the flow of the Rhone a bluish line out there crossing the middle of it. Aries,
Sylvie said, up at the tip of the fan, was a functioning seaport again.
Although they were still securing the channel. Everything in the delta south of
Aries, Sylvie said proudly, from Martiques in the east to Aigue-Mortes in the
west, was covered by water. Aigues-Mortes was dead indeed, its industrial
buildings drowned. Its port facilities, Sylvie said, were being floated and
moved to Aries, or Marseilles. They were working hard to make safe navigational
routes for ships; both the Carmargue and the Plaine de la Crau, farther east,
had been littered with structures of all kinds, many still sticking out of the
water, but not all; and the water was too opaque with silt to see into. “See,
there’s the rail station—you can see the graineries, but not the out-buildings.
And there’s one of the levee-banked canals. The levees are like reefs now. See
the line of gray water? The levees are still breaking, when the current from
the Rhone runs over them.”

“Lucky the tides aren’t big,” Michel said.

“True. If they were it would be too treacherous for ships to reach
Aries.”

In the Mediterranean tides were negligible, and fishermen and
coastal freighters were discovering day by day what could be safely negotiated;
attempts were being made to resecure the Rhone’s main channel through the new
lagoon, and to reestablish the flanking canals as well, so that boats wouldn’t
have to challenge the flow of the Rhone when returning upstream. Sylvie pointed
out at features Michel couldn’t see, and told him of sudden shifts of the
Rhone’s channel, of ships’ groundings, loose buoys, ripped hulls, rescues by
night, oil spills, confusing new lighthouses—false lighthouses, set by
moonlighters for the unwary—even ordinary piracy on the high seas. Life sounded
exciting at the new mouth of the Rhone.

After a while they got back in the little car, and Sylvie drove
them south and east, until they hit the coast, the true coast, between
Marseilles and Cassis. This part of the Mediterranean littoral, like the Cote
d’Azur farther east, consisted of a range of steep hills dropping abruptly into
the sea. The hills still stood well above the water, of course, and at first
glance it seemed to Michel that this section of the coast had changed much less
than the drowned Camargue. But after a few minutes of silent observation, he
changed his mind. The Camargue had always been a delta, and now it was a delta
still, and so nothing essential had changed. Here, however: “The beaches are
gone.”

“Yes.”

It was only to be expected. But the beaches had been the essence
of this coast, the beaches with their long tawny summers all jammed with
sun-worshiping naked human animals, with swimmers and sailboats and carnival
colors, and long warm thrilling nights. All that had vanished. “They’ll never
come back.”

Sylvie nodded. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said
matter-of-factly.

Michel looked eastward; hills dropped into the brown sea all the
way to a distant horizon; it looked like he might be seeing as far as Cap
Sicie. Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes,
Nice, his own little Vil-lefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach
resorts in between, big and small,”all drowned like the stretch under them: the
sea mud brown, lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow
trees, with the beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing
up into the streets of deserted towns.

Green trees above the new sealine tossed over whitish rock. Michel
had not remembered how white the rock was. The foliage was low and dusty,
deforestation had been a problem in recent years, Sylvie said, as people had
cut trees for firewood. But Michel barely heard her; he was staring down at the
drowned beaches, trying to recall their sandy hot erotic beauty. Gone. And he
found, as he stared at the dirty surf, that in his mind he couldn’t remember
them very well—nor his days on them, the many lazy days now blurs, as of a dead
friend’s face. He couldn’t remember.

Marseilles however had of course survived—the only part of the
coast one could not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its
docks were inundated, and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the
land rose quickly here, and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their
tough sordid existence, big ships still anchored in the harbor, long floating
docks maneuvered out to them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded
the town and went mad in time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Marseilles was
where she had heard most of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth
of the Rhone and elsewhere around the Med, where the charts meant nothing
anymore: houses of the dead between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs...
“Marseilles is more itself than it has been for centuries,” she said, and
grinned, and Michel got a sudden sense of her nightlife, wild and perhaps a bit
dangerous. She liked Marseilles. The car lurched in one of the road’s many
potholes and it felt like his pulse, he and the mistral rushing around ugly old
Marseilles, stricken by the thought of a wild young woman.

More itself than it had been for centuries. Perhaps that was true
of the entire coast. There were no tourists anymore; with the beaches gone, the
whole concept of tourism had taken a knife to the heart. The big pastel hotels
and apartment buildings now stood in the surf half-drowned, like children’s
blocks left at low tide. As they drove out of Marseilles, Michel noted that
many of these buildings appeared to have been reoccupied in their upper
stories, by fishermen Sylvie said; no doubt they kept their boats in rooms
downstairs, like the Lake People of prehistoric Europe. The old ways,
returning.

So Michel kept looking out the window, trying to rethink the new
Provence, doing his best to deal with the shock of so much change. Certainly it
was all very interesting, even if it was not as he remembered it. New beaches
would eventually form, he reassured himself, as the waves cut away at the foots
of sea cliffs, and the charged rivers and streams carried soil downstream. It
was possible they might even appear fairly quickly, although they would be dirt
or stones, at first. That tawny sand—well, currents might bring some of the
drowned sand up onto the new strand, who knew? But surely most of it was gone
for good.

Sylvie brought the car to another windy turnout overlooking the
sea. It was brown right to the horizon, the offshore wind causing them to be
looking at the back sides of waves moving away from the strand, an odd effect.
Michel tried to recall the old sun-beaten blue. There had been varieties of
Mediterranean blue, the clear purity of the Adriatic, the Aegean with its
Homeric touch of wine . . . now all brown. Brown sea, beachless sea cliffs, the
pale hills rocky, desertlike, deserted. A wasteland. No, nothing was the same,
nothing.

Eventually Sylvie noticed his silence. She drove him west to
Aries, to a small hotel in the heart of the town. Michel had never lived in
Aries, or had much to do there, but there were Praxis offices next to this
hotel, and he had no other compelling idea concerning where to stay. They got
out; the g felt heavy. Sylvie waited downstairs while he took his bag up; and
there he was, standing uncertainly in a small hotel room, his bag thrown on the
bed, his body tense with the desire to find his land, to return to his home.
This wasn’t it.

He went downstairs and then next door, where Sylvie was tending to
other business.

“I have a place I want to see,” he said to her.

“Anywhere you like.”

“It’s near Vallabrix. North of Uzes.” She said she knew where that
was.

It was late afternoon by the time they reached the place: a
clearing by the side of a narrow old road, next to an olive grove on a slope,
with the mistral raking over it. Michel asked Sylvie to stay at the car, and
got out in the wind and walked up the slope between the trees, alone with the
past.

His old mas had been set at the north end of the grove, on the
edge of a tableland overlooking a ravine. The olive trees were gnarled with
age. The mas itself was nothing but a shell of masonry, almost buried under
long tangled thorny blackberry vines growing against the outer walls.

Looking down into the ruin, Michel found he could just remember
its interior. Or parts of it. There had been a kitchen and dining table near
the door, and then, after passing under a massive roof beam, a living room with
couches and a low coffee table, and a door back to the bedroom. He had lived
there for two or three years, with a woman named Eve. He hadn’t thought of the
place in over a century. He would have said it was all gone from his mind. But
with the ruins before him, fragments of that time leaped to the eye, ruins of
another kind: a blue lamp had stood in that corner now filled with broken
plaster. A Van Gogh print had been tacked to that wall, where now there was
only blocks of masonry, roof tiles, drifts of leaves. The massive roof beam was
gone, its supports in the walls gone as well. Someone must have hauled it out;
hard to believe anyone would make the effort, it had to have weighed hundreds
of kilos. Strange what people would do. Then again, deforestation; there were
few trees left big enough to provide a beam that large. The centuries people
had lived on this land.

Eventually deforestation might cease to be a problem. During the
drive Sylvie had spoken of the violent flood winter, rains, wind; this mistral
had lasted a month. Some said it would never end. Looking into the ruined
house, Michel was not sorry. He needed the wind to orient himself. It was
strange how the memory worked, or didn’t. He stepped up onto the broken wall of
the mas, tried to remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve.
Deliberate recall, a hunt for the past.... Instead scenes came to him of the life
he had shared with Maya in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two
lives had shared enough aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been
hot-tempered like Maya, and as for the rest, la vie quotidienne was la vie
quotidienne, in all times and all places, especially for a specific individual
no doubt, settling into his habits as if into furniture, taken along from one
place to the next. Perhaps.

The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster,
tacked with prints. Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored,
like the exterior walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a
dancer in a routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her
shoulder at him to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he
remembered that repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love.
Although he had made her angry. Eventually she had left him for someone else,
ah yes, a teacher in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to
him now, he felt not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make
him feel it. They scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening—as
if reincarnation were real, and had happened to him, so that he was
experiencing minute flashbacks of a life separated from him by several
subsequent deaths. How odd it would be if such reincarnation were real,
speaking in languages one did not know, like Bridey Murphy; feeling the swirl
of the past through the mind, feeling previous existences ... well. It would
feel just like this, in fact. But to reexperience nothing of those past
feelings, to feel nothing except the sensation that one was not feeling. . . .