Blue Mars (29 page)

“Back on the Med,” Francis said, deeply satisfied. “The flood may
have been a disaster for most places, but for Aries it has been a veritable
coup. The rice farmers are all coming into town ready to fish, or take any work
they can get. And many of the boats that survived have been docked right here
in town. They’ve been bringing fruit in from Corsica and Mallorca, trade with
Barcelona and Sicily. We’ve taken a good bit of Marseilles’s business, although
they’re recovering quickly, it has to be said. But what life has come back!
Before, you know, Aix had the university, Marseilles had the sea, and we had
only these ruins, and the tourists who came for a day to see them. And tourism
is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting
parasites. But now we’re living again!” He was a little bit drunk. “Here, you
must come out on the boat with me and see the lagoon.”

“I’d like that.”

That night Michel called Maya again. “You must come. I’ve found my
nephew, my family.”

Maya wasn’t impressed. “Nirgal went to England looking for
Hiroko,” she said sharply. “Someone told him she was there, and he left just
like that.”

“What’s this?” Michel exclaimed, shocked by the sudden intrusion
of the idea of Hiroko.

“Oh Michel. You know it can’t be true. Someone said it to Nirgal,
that’s all it was. It can’t be true, but he ran right off.”

“As would I!”

“Please, Michel, don’t be stupid. One fool is enough. If Hiroko is
alive at all, then she’s on Mars. Someone just said this to Nirgal to get him
away from the negotiations. I only hope it was for nothing worse. He was having
too much of an effect on people. And he wasn’t watching his tongue. You should
call him and tell him to come back. Maybe he would listen to you.”

“I wouldn’t if I were him.”

Michel was lost in thought, trying to crush the sudden hope that
Hiroko was alive. And in England of all places. Alive anywhere. Hiroko and
therefore Iwao, Gene, Rya—the whole group—his family. His real family. He
shuddered, hard; and when he tried to tell the impatient Maya about his family
in Aries, the words stuck in his throat. His real family had all disappeared
four years before, and that was the truth. Finally, sick at heart, he could
only say, “Please, Maya. Please come.”

“Soon. I’ve told Sax I’ll go as soon as we’re finished here. That
will leave all the rest of it to him, and he can barely talk. It’s ridiculous.”
She was exaggerating, they had a full diplomatic team there, and Sax was
perfectly competent, in his way. “But okay, okay, I’m going to do it. So stop
pestering me.”

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 cassis, 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 nice: cool, relaxed, civilized, the food and
drink very fine. But for him the taste of cassis was unleashing 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 cassis 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. 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 cassoulet,
wine, cheeses, cassis, 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 space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute
space 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 knobs of the hilltop, every knob 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 Underbill.”

Back on the tilted plaza, littered with limestone blocks, they
stopped to watch the Mediterranean shine. 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-spacious world,
above time itself. Maya put an arm around his waist and hugged him, shivering.
“It’s beautiful. But I couldn’t live up here like they did, it’s too exposed
somehow.”

They went back to Aries. As it was a Saturday 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 reverberating somewhere
outside time, drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the
slowly diminishing 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 relationship. 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 Hellas 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 Card, 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 Underbill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge
of the Card, 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 Card. Nosed around the street docks of Marseilles. 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, and into the middle of the old olive
grove.

And every night of these few precious days they returned to Aries,
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 ship 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 space. 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 God! 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 waHs,
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.”