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 especial
ly 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 were, 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 score
s 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 Montes; 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.”