“To Pitcairn,” Bly corrected.
The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”
“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More sail than they needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless ‘em for that. Such a sight.”
Nirgal felt dizzy and bleak. The whole big room had gone a glossy dark, except in the exact spots where there were streaks of bright glare. Everything a chiaroscuro of jumbled objects, Brueghel in black-and-white, and so loud. “I remember the spring flood of thirteen, the North Sea in me living room—” “Ah no, not the flood of thirteen again, will you not go on about that again!”
He went to a partitioned room at one corner of the chamber, the men’s room, thinking he would feel better if he relieved himself. Inside the rescued sailor was on the floor of one of the stalls, retching violently. Nirgal retreated, sat down on the nearest bench to wait. A young woman passed him by, and reached out to touch him on the top of the head. “You’re hot!”
Nirgal held a palm to his forehead, tried to think about it. “Three hundred ten K,” he ventured. “Shit.”
“You’ve caught a fever,” she said.
One of his bodyguards sat beside him. Nirgal told him about his temperature, and the man said, “Will you ask your wristpad?”
Nirgal nodded, asked for a readout. 309 K. “Shit.”
“How do you feel?”
“Hot. Heavy.”
“We’d better get you to see someone.”
Nirgal shook his head, but a wave of dizziness came over him as he did. He watched the bodyguards calling to make arrangements. Bly came over, and they asked him questions.
“At night?” Bly said. More quiet talk. Bly shrugged; not a good idea, the shrug said, but possible. The bodyguards went on, and Bly tossed down the last of his pint and stood. His head was still at the same level as Nirgal’s, although Nirgal had slid down to rest his back against the table. A different species, a squat powerful amphibian. Had they known that, before the flood? Did they know it now?
People said good-bye, crushed or coddled his hand. Climbing the conning-tower ladder was painful work. Then they were out in the cool wet night, fog shrouding everything. Without a word Bly led them onto his boat, and he remained silent as he started the engines and unmoored the boat. Off they puttered over a low swell. For the first time the rocking over the waves made Nirgal really queasy. Nausea was worse than pain. He sat down beside Bly on a stool, and watched the gray cone of illuminated water and fog before their bow. When dark objects loomed out of the fog Bly would slow, even shove the engines into reverse. Once he hissed. This went on for a long time. By the time they docked in the streets of Faversham, Nirgal was too sick to say good-bye properly; he could only grasp Bly’s hand and look down briefly into the man’s blue eyes. Such faces. You could see people’s souls right there in their faces. Had they known that before? Then Bly was gone and they were in a car, humming through the night. Nirgal’s weight was increasing as it had during the descent in the elevator. Onto a plane, ascending in darkness, descending in darkness, ears popping painfully, nausea; they were in Berne and Sax was there by his side, a great comfort.
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
Home at Last
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. Jackie 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 Daedalia. 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 sais 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 f
umble 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 Provençal 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. Arles, 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 Arles, 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 Arles, 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 Arles.”
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 Côte 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 Sicié. Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own little Villefranche-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. Bro
wn 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 Arles, to a small hotel in the heart of the town. Michel had never lived in Arles, 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 Uzès.”
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.