Blue Mars Part 15

She came the next week.

Michel drove to the new train station and met her, feeling nervous. He had lived with Maya, in Odessa and Burroughs, for almost thirty years; but now, driving her to Avignon, she seemed like a stranger sitting there beside him, an ancient beauty with hooded eyes and an expression hard to read, speaking English in harsh rapid sentences, telling him everything that had happened in Bern. They had a treaty with the UN, which had agreed to their independence. In return they were to allow some emigration, but no more than ten percent of the Martian population per year; some transfer of mineral resources; some consultation on diplomatic issues. "That's good, really good." Michel tried to concentrate on her news, but it was hard. Occasionally as she spoke she glanced at the buildings shooting past their car, but in the dusty windy sunlight they looked tawdry enough in all truth. She did not seem impressed.

With a sinking feeling Michel drove as close as he could to the pope's palace in Avignon, parked, and took her for a walk along the swollen river, past the bridge that did not reach to the other side, then to the wide promenade leading south from the palace, where sidewalk cafes nestled in the shade of the ancient plane trees. There they ate lunch, and Michel tasted the olive oil and the ca.s.sis, running them luxuriously over his tongue as he watched his companion relax into her metal chair like a cat. "This is nice," she said, and he smiled. It was was nice: cool, relaxed, civilized, the food and drink very fine. But for him the taste of ca.s.sis was unleas.h.i.+ng its flood of memories, emotions from previous incarnations blended with the emotions he felt now, heightening everything, colors, textures, the feel of metal chairs and wind. While for Maya ca.s.sis was just a tart berry drink. nice: cool, relaxed, civilized, the food and drink very fine. But for him the taste of ca.s.sis was unleas.h.i.+ng its flood of memories, emotions from previous incarnations blended with the emotions he felt now, heightening everything, colors, textures, the feel of metal chairs and wind. While for Maya ca.s.sis was just a tart berry drink.

It occurred to him as he watched her that fate had led him to a companion even more attractive than the beautiful Frenchwomen he had consorted with in that earlier life. A woman somehow greater greater. In that too he had done well on Mars. He had taken on a bigger life. This feeling and his nostalgia clashed in his heart, and all the while Maya swallowed mouthfuls of ca.s.soulet, wine, cheeses, ca.s.sis, coffee, oblivious to the interference pattern of his lives, moving in and out of phase inside him.

They talked desultorily. Maya was relaxed, enjoying herself. Happy at her accomplishment in Bern. In no hurry to go anywhere. Michel felt a glow like omegandorph all through him. Watching her he was slowly becoming happy himself; simply happy. Past, future- neither was ever real. Just lunch under plane trees, in Avignon. No need to think of anything but that. "So civilized," Maya said. "I haven't felt so calm in years. I can see why you like it." And then she was laughing at him, and he could feel an idiot grin plastering his face.

"Would you not like to see Moscow again?" he asked curiously.

"Ah no. I would not."

She dismissed the idea as an intrusion on the moment. He wondered what she felt about this return to Earth. Surely one could not be completely without feelings about such a thing?

But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved s.p.a.ce of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute s.p.a.ce of the free self. And while he was one of the former type, Maya was one of the latter. And there was no use struggling against that fact. Nevertheless he wanted her to like Provence. Or at least to see why he loved it.

And so, when they were done eating, he drove her south through Saint-Remy, to Les Baux.

She slept during the drive, and he was not displeased; between Avignon and Les Baux the landscape consisted mostly of ugly industrial buildings, scattered on a dusty plain. She woke up at just the right time, when he was negotiating the narrow twisting road that wandered up a crease in the Alpilles to the old hilltop village. One parked in a parking lot, then walked up into the town; it was clearly a tourist arrangement, but the single curving street of the little settlement was now very quiet indeed, as if abandoned; and very picturesque. The village was shuttered for the afternoon, asleep. On the last turn to the hill's top, one crossed open ground like a rough tilted plaza, and beyond that were the limestone k.n.o.bs of the hilltop, every k.n.o.b hollowed out by some eremite of the ancient hermitage, tucked above Saracens and all the other dangers of the medieval world. To the south the Mediterranean gleamed like gold plate. The rock itself was yellowish, and as a thin veil of bronzed cloud lay in the western sky, the light everywhere took on a metallic amber cast, as if they walked in a gel of years.

They clambered from one tiny chamber to the next, marveling at how small they were. "It's like a prairie-dog nest," Maya said, peering down into one squared-out little cave. "It's like our trailer park in Underhill."

Back on the tilted plaza, littered with limestone blocks, they stopped to watch the Mediterranean s.h.i.+ne. Michel pointed out the lighter sheen of the Camargue. "You used to see only a bit of water." The light deepened to a dark apricot, and the hill seemed a fortress above the oh-so-s.p.a.cious world, above time itself. Maya put an arm around his waist and hugged him, s.h.i.+vering. "It's beautiful. But I couldn't live up here like they did, it's too exposed somehow."

They went back to Arles. As it was a Sat.u.r.day night, the town center had become a kind of gypsy or North African festival, the alleys crowded with food and drink stands, many of them tucked into the arches of the Roman arena, which was open to all, with a band playing inside it. Maya and Michel walked around arm in arm, bathed in the smells of frying food and Arabic spices. Voices around them spoke in two or three different languages. "It reminds me of Odessa," Maya said as they made their promenade around the Roman arena, "only the people are so little. It's nice not to feel dwarfed for once."

They danced in the arena center, drank at a table under the blurry stars. One star was red, and Michel had his suspicions, but did not voice them. They went back to his hotel room and made love on the narrow bed, and at some point it seemed to Michel that there were several people in him, all coming at once; he cried out at the strange rapture of that sensation.... Maya fell asleep and he lay beside her awake, in a tristesse tristesse reverberating somewhere outside time, drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the slowly diminis.h.i.+ng cacophony of the town. Home at last. reverberating somewhere outside time, drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the slowly diminis.h.i.+ng cacophony of the town. Home at last.

In the days that followed, he introduced her to his nephew and to the rest of his relatives, rounded up by Francis. That whole gang took her in, and through the use of translation AIs asked her scores of questions. They also tried to tell her everything about themselves. It happened so often, Michel thought; people wanted to seize the famous stranger whose story they knew (or thought they knew), and give them their story in return, to redress the balance of the relations.h.i.+p. Some kind of witnessing, or confessional. The reciprocal sharing of stories. And people were naturally drawn to Maya anyway. She listened to their stories, and laughed, and asked questions- utterly there. Time after time they told her how the flood had come, drowning their homes, their livings, throwing them out into the world, to friends and family they hadn't seen in years, forcing them into new patterns and reliances, breaking the mold of their lives and thrusting them out into the mistral. They had been exalted by this process, Michel saw, they were proud of their response, of how people had pulled together- also very indignant at any counterexamples of gouging or callousness, blots on an otherwise heroic affair: "Can you believe it? And it did no good, he was jumped one night in the street and all that money gone."

"It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep forever."

They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around h.e.l.las Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics- because of the way they focused on others, the way they exalted people's stories. Perhaps that was what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.

Some of Michel's relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water- the sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste of his old beach swims.

Back on land they went out on drives. Once they went out to see the Pont du Gard, and there it was, same as ever, the Romans' greatest work of art- an aqueduct: three tiers of stone, the thick lower arches foursquare in the river, proud of their two thousand years' resistance to running water; lighter taller arches above, then the smallest on top of them. Form following function right into the heart of the beautiful- using stone to take water over water. The stone now pitted and honey blond, very Martian in every respect- it looked like Nadia's Underhill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge of the Gard, in Provence; but now, to Michel, almost more Mars than France.

Maya loved its elegance. "See how human it is, Michel. This is what our Martian structures lack, they are too big. But this- this was built by human hands, with tools anyone could construct and use. Block and tackle and human math, and perhaps some horses. And not our teleoperated machines and their weird materials, doing things no one can understand or even see."

"Yes."

"I wonder if we could build things by hand. Nadia should see this, she would love it."

"That's what I thought."

Michel was happy. They ate a picnic there. They visited the fountains of Aix-en-Provence. Went out to an overlook above the Grand Canyon of the Gard. Nosed around the street docks of Ma.r.s.eilles. Visited the Roman sites in Orange, and Nimes. Drove past the drowned resorts of the Cote d'Azur. Walked out one evening to Michel's ruined mas mas, and into the middle of the old olive grove.

And every night of these few precious days they returned to Arles, and ate in the hotel restaurant, or if it was warm out, under the plane trees in the sidewalk cafes; and then went up to their room and made love; and at dawn woke and made love again, or went down directly for fresh croissants and coffee. "It's lovely," Maya said, standing one blue evening in the tower of the arena, looking over the tile roofs of the town; she meant all of it, all of Provence. And Michel was happy.

But a call came on the wrist. Nirgal was sick, very sick; Sax, sounding shaken, had already gotten him off Earth, back into Martian g and a sterile environment, inside a s.h.i.+p in Terran orbit. "I'm afraid his immune system isn't up to it, and the g doesn't help. He's got an infection, pulmonary edema, a very bad fever."

"Allergic to Earth," Maya said, her face grim. She made plans and ended the call with curt instructions to Sax to stay calm, then went to the room's little closet and began to throw her clothes out onto the bed.

"Come on!" she cried when she saw Michel standing there. "We have to go!"

"We do?"

She waved him off, burrowed into the closet. "I'm going." She threw handfuls of underwear into her suitcase, gave him a look. "It's time to go anyway."

"It is?"

She didn't reply. She was tapping at her wristpad, asking the local Praxis team to arrange transport into s.p.a.ce. There they would rendezvous with Sax and Nirgal. Her voice was cold, tense, businesslike. She had already forgotten Provence.

When she saw Michel still standing motionless, she exploded-"Oh come on, don't be so theatrical about it! Just because we have to leave now doesn't mean we won't ever come back! We're going to live a thousand years, you can come back all the time if you want, a hundred times, my G.o.d! Besides how is this place so much better than Mars? It looks just like Odessa to me, and you were happy there, weren't you?"

Michel ignored that. He stumbled by her suitcases to the window. Outside, an ordinary Arlesian street, blue in the twilight: pastel stucco walls, cobblestones. Cypress trees. Tiles on the roof across the street were broken. Mars-colored. Voices below shouted in French, angry about something.

"Well?" Maya exclaimed. "Are you coming?"

"Yes."

Part Six

Ann in the Outback

Look, not choosing to take the longevity treatment is suicide.

So?

Well. Suicide is usually considered to be a sign of psychological dysfunction.

Usually.

I think you'll find it's true more often than not. You're unhappy at least.

At least.

And yet why? What now is lacking?

The world.

Every day you still walk out to see the sunset.

Habit.

You claim the destruction of the primal Mars is the source of your depression. I think the philosophical reasons cited by people suffering depression are masks protecting them from harder, more personal hurts.

It can all be real.

You mean all the reasons?

Yes. What did you accuse Sax of? Monocausotaxophilia?

Touche. But there's usually a start to these things, among all the real reasons- the first one that started you down your road. Often you have to go back to that point in your journey in order to start off in a new way.

Time is not s.p.a.ce. The metaphor of s.p.a.ce lies about what is really possible in time. You can never go back.

No no. You can go back, metaphorically. In your mental traveling you can journey back into the past, retrace your steps, see where you turned and why, then proceed onward in a direction that is different because it includes these loops of understanding. Increased understanding increases meaning. When you continue to insist that it is the fate of Mars that concerns you most, I think it is a displacement so strong that it has confused you. It too is a metaphor. Perhaps a true one, yes. But both terms of the metaphor should be recognized.

I see what I see.

But the way it is, you are not even seeing. There is so much of red Mars that remains. You should go out and look! Go out and empty your mind and just see what is out there. Go out at low alt.i.tude and walk free in the air, a simple dust mask only. It would be good for you, good at the physiological level. Also it would be reaping a benefit of the terraforming. To experience the freedom it gives us, the bond with this world- that we can walk on its surface naked and survive. It's amazing! It makes us part of an ecology. It deserves to be rethought, this process. You should go out to consider it, to study the process as areoformation.

That's just a word. We took this planet and plowed it under. It's melting under our feet.

Melting in native water. Not imported from Saturn or the like, it's been there from the beginning, part of the original accretion, right? Outga.s.sed from the first lump that was Mars. Now part of our bodies. Our very bodies are patterns in Martian water. Without the trace minerals we would be transparent. We are Martian water. And water that has been on the surface of Mars before, yes? Rupturing out in artesian apocalypse. Those channels are so big!

It was permafrost for two billion years.

Then we helped it back onto the surface. The majesty of the great outbreak floods. We were there, we saw one with our own eyes, we nearly died in it- Yes yes- You felt the car as that water swept it away, you were driving- Yes! But it swept Frank away instead.

Yes.

It swept the world away. And left us on the beach.

The world is still here. You could go out and see.

I don't want to see. I've seen it already!

Not you. Some previous you. Now you're the you living now. Yes yes.

I think you're afraid. Afraid of attempting a trans.m.u.tation- a metamorphosis into something new. The alembic stands out there, all around you. The fire is hot. You'll be melted, you'll be reborn, who knows if you'll still be there afterward?

I don't want to change.

You don't want to stop loving Mars.

Yes. No.

You will never stop loving Mars. After metamorphosis the rock still exists. It's usually harder than the parent rock, yes? You will always love Mars. Your task becomes seeing the Mars that always endures, under thick or thin, hot or cold, wet or dry. Those are ephemeral, but Mars endures. These floods happened before, isn't it true?

Yes.

Mars's own water. All these volatiles are Mars's own volatiles.

Except the nitrogen from t.i.tan.

Yes yes. You sound like Sax.

Come on.

You two are more alike than you think. And all we volatiles are Mars's own.

But the destruction of the surface. It's wrecked. Everything's changed.

That's areology. Or the areophany.

It's destruction. We should have tried living here as it was.

But we didn't. And so now being red means working to keep conditions as much like the primal conditions as possible, within the framework of the areophany- the project of biosphere creation that allows humans the freedom of the surface, below a certain alt.i.tude. That's all being a Red can mean now. And there are a lot of Reds like that. I think you worry that if you ever change in even the slightest degree, then that will be the end of redness everywhere. But redness is bigger than you. You helped start it and define it, but you were never the only one. If you had been no one would ever have listened to you.

They didn't!

Some did. Many did. Redness will go on no matter what you do. You could retire, you could become someone entirely different, you could become lime green, and redness would always go on. It might even become something more red than you ever imagined.

I've imagined it as red as it can get.

All those alternatives. We'll live one of them and then go on. The process of coadaptation with this planet will go on for thousands of years. But here we are now. At every moment you should ask, what now is lacking? and work at some acceptance of your current reality. This is sanity, this is life. You have to imagine your life from here on out.

I can't. I've tried and I can't.

You should go have a look around, really. A walkabout. Look very closely. Take a look even at the ice seas, a close look. But not just that. That is in the nature of a confrontation. Confrontation is not necessarily bad, but first just a look, eh? A recognition. Then you should think about going up into the hills. Tharsis, Elysium. A rise in alt.i.tude is a voyage into the past. Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. It's wonderful, really. So many people don't have such a wonderful task as that, you can't imagine. You're lucky to have it.

And you?

What?

What is your task?

My task?

Yes. Your task ... I 'm not sure. I told you, I envy you having that. My tasks are... confused. To help Maya, and me. And the rest of us. Reconciliation... I would like to find Hiroko...