Blue Mars (52 page)

He stumbled across a shallow depression, over a knob, between two
house-sized boulders. Then in a flash of white a naked woman was standing
before him, waving a green sash; he stopped abruptly, he reeled, stunned at the
sight of her, then concerned that the hallucinations had gotten so out of hand.
But there she stood, as vivid as a flame, blood streaks spattering her breasts
and legs, waving the green scarf silently. Then other human figures ran past
her and over the next little knob, going where she pointed, or so it seemed.
She looked at Nirgal, gestured to the south as if directing him as well, then
took off running, her lean white body flowing like something visible in more
than three dimensions, strong back, long legs, round bottom, already distant,
the green scarf flying this way and that as she used it to point.

Suddenly he saw three antelope ahead, moving over a hillock to the
west, silhouetted by the low sun. Ah; hunters. The antelope were being herded
west by the humans, who were scattered in an arc behind them, waving scarves at
them from behind rocks. All in silence, as if sound had disappeared from the
world: no wind, no cries. For a moment, as the antelope stopped on the hillock,
everyone stopped moving, everyone alert but still; hunters and hunted all
frozen together, in a tableau that transfixed Nirgal. He was afraid to blink
for fear the whole scene would wink away to nothing.

The antelope buck moved, breaking the tableau. He rocked forward
cautiously, step-by-step. The woman with the green sash walked after him,
upright and in the open. The other hunters popped in and out of view, moving
like finches from one frozen position to the next. They were barefoot, and wore
loincloths or singlets. Some of their faces and backs were painted red or black
or ochre.

Nirgal followed them. They swerved, and he found himself on their
left wing as they moved west. This turned out to be lucky, as the antelope buck
tried to make a break around his side, and Nirgal was in position to jump in
its path, waving his hands wildly. The three antelope then turned as one,
dashed west again. The troop of hunters followed, running faster than Nirgal at
his fastest, maintaining their arc. Nirgal had to work hard just to keep them
in sight; they were very fast, barefoot or not. It was hard to see them in the
long shadows, and they stayed silent; oa the other wing of the arc someone
yipped once, and that was their only sound, except for the squeak and clatter
of sand and gravel, the harsh breath in their throats. In and out of sight they
ran, the antelope keeping their distance in short bursts of flowing speed. No
human would ever catch them. Still Nirgal ran, panting hard, following the
hunt. Ahead he spotted their prey again. Ah—the antelope had stopped. They had
come to the edge of a cliff. A canyon rim—he saw the gap and the opposite rim.
A shallow fossa, pine tops sticking out of it. Had the antelope known it was
there? Were they familiar with this region? The canyon had not been visible
even a few hundred meters back. . . .

But perhaps they did know the place, for in the pure flow of
animal grace they half trotted, half pronged south along the cliff edge to a
little embayment. This turned out to be the top of a steep ravine, down which
rubble siphoned onto the canyon floor. As the antelope disappeared down this
slot all the hunters rushed to the rim, where they looked on as the three
animals descended the ravine, in an astonishing display of power and balance,
clacking from rock to rock in tremendous leaps down. One of the hunters howled,
“Owwwwwwwww,” and with that cry all the hunters hurried over to the head of the
ravine, yelping and grunting. Nirgal joined the others and dropped over the rim
and then they were all in a mad descent, clacking and jumping, and though
Nirgal’s legs were rubbery his endless days of lung-gom now served him well,
for he dropped past most of the others as he hopped down boulders and glissaded
down little rockslides, jumping, holding balance, using his hands, making great
desperate leaps, like everyone else utterly locked into the moment, into the
striving for a quick descent without a bad fall.

Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look
up again, to see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen
from above. Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir
and pine, and then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of
giant sequoias, big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed
shallow, though the descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were
the treetops that had stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias
two hundred meters tall, towering like great silent saints, each one extending
its arms in a broad circle over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin
patchy snow and the brown needle beds.

The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest,
headed south, and with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting
past one huge trunk after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark
dwarfed everything else—they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing
over a snowy forest floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his
back and flanks, he was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine,
panting and light-headed. It was obvious that they could not catch the
antelope, he didn’t understand what they were doing. Nevertheless he raced
between the stupendous trees, following the lead hunters. The chase itself was
all he wanted.

Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a
skyscraper district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the
trunks of the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other
side of a narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A
sheer wall of water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended
over them in a smooth transparent mass.

Reservoir dam. Recently they had begun building them out of
transparent sheets of diamond lattice, sunk in a concrete foundation; Nirgal
could see this one running down both canyon walls and across the canyon floor,
a thick white line.

The mass of water stood over them like the side of a great
aquarium, turbid near the bottom, weeds floating in dark mud. Above them silver
fish as big as the antelope flitted next to the clear wall, then receded into
dark crystalline deptns.

The three antelope pronged nervously back and forth before this
barrier, the doe and fawn following the quick turns of the buck. As the hunters
closed on them, the buck suddenly leaped away and crashed its head against the
dam with a powerful thrust of its whole body—antlers like bone knives,
thwack—Nirgal froze in fear, everyone froze at this violent gesture, so
ferocious as to be human; but the buck bounced away, staggered. He turned and
charged at them. Bola balls spun through the air and the line wrapped around
his legs just above the hocks, and he crashed forward and down. Some of the hunters
swarmed on him, others brought down doe and fawn in a hail of rocks and spears.
A squeal cut off abruptly. Nirgal saw the doe’s throat cut with an
obsidian-bladed dagger, the blood pouring onto the sand next to the foundation
of the dam. The big fish flashed by overhead, looking down at them.

The woman with the green scarf was nowhere to be seen. Another
hunter, a man wearing only necklaces, tilted his head back and howled,
shattering the strange silence of the work; he danced in a circle, then ran at
the clear wall of the dam and threw his spear straight at it. The spear bounced
away. The exultant hunter ran up and slammed his fist against the clear hard
membrane.

A woman hunter with blood on her hands turned her head to give the
man a contemptuous look. “Quit fooling around,” she said.

The spear thrower laughed. “You don’t have to worry. These dams
are a hundred times stronger than they need to be.”

The woman shook her head, disgusted. “It’s stupid to tempt fate.”

“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”

“You’re a fool,” the woman said. “Luck is as real as anything
else.”

“Luck! Fate! Ka.” The spear thrower picked up his spear and ran
and threw it at the dam again; it rebounded and almost hit him, and he laughed
wildly. “How lucky,” he said. “Fortune favors the bold, eh?”

“Asshole. Show some respect.”

“All honor to that buck, indeed, crashing the wall like he did.”
The man laughed raucously.

The others were ignoring these two, busy butchering the animals.
“Many thanks, brother. Many thanks, sister.” Nir-gal’s hands shook as he
watched; he could smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines
steamed in the chill air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waist bags and
telescoped out, and the decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the
legs. Hunters at the ends of the poles hefted the headless carcasses into the
air.

The bloody-handed woman shouted at the spear thrower, “You’d
better help carry if you want to eat any of these.”

“Fuck you.” But he helped carry the front end of the buck.

“Come on,” the woman said to Nirgal, and then they were hurrying
west across the canyon floor, between the great wall of water and the last of
the massive sequoias. Nirgal followed, stomach growling.

The west wall of the canyon was marked with petro-glyphs: animals,
lingams, yonis, handprints, comets and spaceships, geometric designs, the
humpbacked flute player Kokopelli, all scarcely visible in the dusk. There was
a staircase trail inlaid in the cliff, following a nearly perfect Z of ledges.
The hunters hiked up it and Nirgal followed. Shift into the uphill rhythm one
more time, his stomach eating him from within, his head swimming. A black
antelope splayed across the rock beside him.

Above, a few giant sequoias stood isolated on the canyon rim. When
they reached the rim, returning to the sunset’s last light, he saw that these
trees formed a circle, nine trees in a rough woodhenge, with a big firepit at
their center.

The band entered the circle and got to work starting a fire,
skinning the antelope, cutting big venison steaks out of the haunches. Nirgal
stood watching, legs in a sewing-machine tremble, mouth salivating like a
fountain; he swallowed again and again as he sniffed the steak juices lofting
in the smoke through the early stars. Firelight pushed like a bubble at the
dusk’s gloom, turning the circle of trees into a flickering roofless room. The
light flickering against the needles was like seeing your own capillaries. Some
of the trees had wooden staircases spiraling around their trunks, up into their
branches. High above them lamps were being lit, voices like skylarks among the
stars.

Three or four of the hunters bunched around him, offering him
flatcakes of what tasted like barley, then a fiery liquor out of clay jars.
They told him they had found the sequoia henge a few years before.

“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked,
looking around. “Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.” “Besides she
fucked up, she don’t want to.” “Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a
reason.” They laughed and moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred
steak, waved it on its stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little
sister.” And bit into the steak. Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot
taste of the meat, chewing hard but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz
with trembling light-headed hunger. Food, food!

He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His
stomach was filling quickly. He recalled the scramble down the ravine: it was
amazing what the body could do in such a situation, it had been an out-of-body
experience— or rather an experience so far into the body that it was like
unconsciousness—diving deep into the cerebellum, presumably, into that ancient
undermind that knew how to do things. A state of grace.

A resiny branch spit flames out of the blaze. His sight had not
yet settled down, things jumped and blurred with afterimages. The spear thrower
and another man came up to him, “Here, drink this,” and tilted a skin’s spigot
against his lips and laughed, some bitter milky drink in his mouth. “Have some
of the white brother, brother.” A group of them picked up some stones and began
to hit them together in rhythm, all their different patterns meshing bass to
treble. The rest of them began to dance around the bonfire, hooting or singing
or chanting. “Auqakuh, Qahira, Harmakhis, Kasei. Auqakuh, Mangala, Ma’adim,
Bahram.” Nirgal danced with them, exhaustion banished. It was a cold night and
one could move in or away from the heat of the fire, feel its radiance against
cold bare skin, move back out into the chill. When everyone was hot and sweaty
they took off into the night, stumbling back toward the canyon, south along the
rim. A hand clutched at Nirgal’s arm and it looked like the diana was there
beside him again, light in the dark, but it was too dark to see, and then they
were crashing into the water of the reservoir, shockingly frigid, dive under,
waist-deep silt and sand, heart-stopping cold, stand up, wade back out all the
senses pulsating wildly, gasps, laughter, a hand at his ankle and down he went
again, into the shallows face first, laughing. Through the dark wet, freezing,
toes banging “ow! ow!” and back into the henge, into the heat. Soaking they
danced again, pressed to the heat of the fire, arms extended, hugging its
radiance. All the bodies ruddy in the firelight, the sequoia needles flashing
against pinwheel stars, bouncing in rhythm to the rock percussion. When they
warmed back up and the fire died down, they led him up one of the sequoia
staircases. On the massive upper limbs of the tree were perched small flat
sleeping platforms, low-walled and open to the sky. The floors swayed very
slightly underfoot, on a cold breeze that had roused the trees’ deep airy
choral voices. Nirgal was left alone on what appeared to be the highest
platform. He unpacked his bedding and lay down. To the chorus of wind in
sequoia needles he fell fast asleep.