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Later that afternoon sunlight pierced the dust more strongly than usual, lighting the streaming clouds so that the caravanserai seemed to rest in the ventricle of a giant heart, with the gusts of the wind saying beat, beat, beat, beat. The Sufis called out to each other when they looked through the lechatelierite windows, and quickly they suited up to go out into this crimson world, into the wind, calling to Boone to accompany them. He grinned and suited up, surreptitiously swallowing a tab of omeg as he did so.
Once outside they walked the circumference of the ragged edge of the mesa, looking out into the clouds and down onto the shadowed plain below, pointing out to John whatever features happened to be visible. After that they gathered near the caravanserai, and John listened to their voices as they chanted, various voices providing English translations for the Arabic and Farsi. “Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold.”
Another voice: “Love thrilled the chord in my soul’s lute, and changed me to love from head to foot.”
And they began to dance. Watching John suddenly got it, that they were whirling dervishes: they leaped into the air to the beat of drums pattering lightly over the common band, they leaped and whirled in slow unearthly spins, arms outstretched; and when they touched down they pushed off and did it again, for turn after turn after turn. Whirling dervishes in the great storm, on a high round mesa that had been a crater floor in the Noachian. It looked so marvelous in the bloody pulsing glow of light that John stood up and started to spin with them. He wrecked their symmetries, he sometimes actually collided with other dancers; but no one seemed to mind. He found that it helped to jump slightly into the wind, to keep from being blown off balance. A hard gust would knock you flat. He laughed. Some of the dancers were chanting over the common band, the usual quarter-tone ululations, punctuated by shouts and harsh rhythmic breathing, and the phrase “Ana el-Haqq, ana el-Haqq” – I am God, one translated, I am God. A Sufi heresy. The dancing was meant to hypnotize you – there were other Moslem cults that did it with self-flagellation, John knew. Spinning was better; he danced, he joined the chant on the common band by punctuating it with his own rapid breath, and with grunts and babble; then without thinking about it he began to add to the flow of sound the names for Mars, muttering them in the rhythm of the chant as he understood it. “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.” He had memorized the list years ago, as a kind of party trick; now he was quite surprised to find what an excellent chant it made, how it spilled out of his mouth and helped stabilize his spinning. The other dancers were laughing at him, but in a good way, they sounded pleased. He felt drunk, his whole body was humming. He repeated the litany many times, then shifted to repeating the Arabic name, over and over: “Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira.” And then, remembering what one of the translating voices had told him, “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira. Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira.” I am God, I am Mars, I am God … The others quickly joined him in this chant, lifted it into a wild song, and in the flash of rotating faceplates he caught sight of their grinning faces. They were really good spinners; as they whirled their outstretched fingers cut the rush of red dust into arabesques, and now as they spun they tapped him with their fingertips, guiding him or even actively pushing his clumsy turns into the weave of their pattern. He shouted the planet’s names and they repeated them after him, in call and response style; they chanted the names, Arabic, Sanskrit, Inca, all the names for Mars, mixed together in a soup of syllables, creating a polyphonic music that was beautiful and shivery-strange, for the names for Mars came from times when words sounded odd, and names had power: he could hear that when he sang them.
When he finally stopped dancing and sat to watch, he began to feel sick. The world swam, his middle ear thingie was no doubt still spinning like a roulette ball. The scene pulsed before him; it was impossible to say whether this was the swirling dust or something internal, but either way he goggled at what he saw: whirling dervishes, on Mars? Well, in the Moslem world they were deviants of a kind, and with an ecumenical bent rare in Islam. And scientists too. So they were his way into Islam, perhaps, his tariqat; and their dervish ceremonies could perhaps be shifted into the areophany, as during his chant. He stood, reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before. “Love thrilled the chord of love in my lute …” He was too dizzy. The others were laughing at him, supporting him. He talked to them in his usual way, hoping they would understand. “I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up. But you must tell me why we can’t leave all the sad Terran baggage behind. Why we can’t invent together a new religion. The worship of Al-Qahira, Mangala, Kasei!”
They laughed, and carried him on their shoulders back toward the shelter. “I’m serious,” he said as the world spun. “I want you people to do it, I want your dancing to be in it, it’s obvious you should be the ones to design this religion, you’re doing it already.” But vomiting in a helmet was dangerous, and they only laughed at him and hustled him into the crushed-stone habitat as quickly as they could. There as he threw up a woman held his head, saying in musical subcontinental English, “The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message ‘This Too Will Pass.’”
“Straight into the recyclers,” Boone said. He lay back spinning. It was kind of an awful feeling, when you were trying to lie still. “But what do you want here? Why are you on Mars? You have to tell me what you want here.” They took him to the common room and set out cups, and a pot of aromatic tea. He still felt like he was spinning, and the dust rushing by the crystalline windows didn’t help.
One of the old women around him picked up the pot and poured John’s cup full. She put down the pot, gestured: “Now you fill mine.” John did so, unsteadily, and then the pot went around the room. Each pourer filled someone else’s cup.
“We start every meal this way,” the old woman said. “It is a little sign of how we are together. We have studied the old cultures, before your global market netted everything, and in those ages there existed many different forms of exchange. Some of them were based on the giving of gifts. Each of us has a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back.”
“Like the equation for ecologic efficiency,” John said.
“Maybe so. In any case, whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift, in Malaysia, in the American northwest, in many primitive cultures. In Arabia we gave water, or coffee. Food and shelter. And whatever you were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your turn, hopefully with interest. You worked to be able to give more than you received. Now we think that this can be the basis for a reverent economics.”
“It’s just what Vlad and Ursula said!”
“Maybe so.”
The tea helped. After a while his equilibrium returned. They talked about other things, the great storm, the great hard plinth they lived on. Late that night he asked if they had heard of the Coyote, but they hadn’t. They did know stories about a creature they called the “hidden one”, the last survivor of an ancient race of Martians, a wizened thing who wandered the planet helping endangered wanderers, rovers, settlements. It had been spotted at the water station in Chasma Borealis last year, during an ice fall and subsequent power outage.
“It’s not Big Man?” John asked.
“No, no. Big Man is big. The hidden one is like us. Its people were Big Man’s subjects.”
“I see.”
But he didn’t, not really. If Big Man stood for Mars itself, then maybe the story of the hidden one had been inspired by Hiroko. Impossible to say. He needed a folklorist, or a scholar of myths, someone who could tell him how stories were born; but he had only these Sufis, grinning and weird, story creatures themselves. His fellow citizens in this new land. He had to laugh. They laughed with him and took him off to bed. “We say a bedtime prayer from the Persian poet Rumi Jalaluddin,” the old woman told him, and recited it:
“‘I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal.
I died as animal and I was human.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above.
And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.’
“Sleep well,” she said into his drowsing mind. “This is all our path.”
The next morning he climbed stiffly into his rover, wincing with soreness and determined to eat some omeg as soon as he got on his way. The same woman was there to see him off, and he bumped his faceplate against hers affectionately.
“Whether it be of this world or of that,” she said, “your love will lead you yonder in the end.”
The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus. John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts of light. Near Bakhuysen Crater he stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbines. The water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemisphere. Mary Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice reservoirs. “The exploratory drilling was actually scary as hell. When the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not.”
“What would have happened if you hadn’t?”
“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of water down there. If it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse.”
“That big?”
“Who knows? It’s possible.”
“Wow.”
“That’s what I said! Now Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic tests. But there are people who would like to release an aquifer or two, see? They leave messages on the bulletin boards in the net. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sax is among them. Big floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn’t he cheer?”
“But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it.”
“Oh, more destructive! Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreaks. The best Terran analogy is the scablands in eastern Washington, have you heard of them? About eighteen thousand years ago there was a lake covering most of Montana, Lake Missoula they call it, composed of Ice Age meltwater and held in place by an ice dam. At some point this ice dam broke and the lake emptied catastrophically, about two trillion cubic meters of water, draining down the Columbia plateau and out to the Pacific in a matter of days.”
“Wow.”
“While it lasted it ran about a hundred times the discharge of the Amazon, and carved channels in the basalt bedrock that are as much as two hundred meters deep.”
“Two hundred meters!”
“Right. And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut the Chryse channels! The anastomosing up there covers areas— ”
“Two hundred meters of bedrock?”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t just normal erosion. In floods that big the pressures fluctuate so much that you get exsolution of dissolved gases, you know, and when those bubbles collapse they produce incredible pressures. Hammering like that can break anything.”
“So it would be worse than an asteroid strike.”
“Sure. Unless you dropped a really big asteroid. But there are people who think we should be doing that too, right?”
“Are there?”
“You know there are. But the floods are better yet, if you want to do that kind of thing. If you could direct one of them into Hellas, for instance, you’d have a sea. And you might be able to refill it faster than the surface ice sublimed.”
“Direct a flood like that?” John exclaimed.
“Well, yeah, that would be impossible. But if you found one in the right spot, you wouldn’t have to direct it. You should check where Sax has sent the dowsing team lately, see what it looks like to you.”
“But it would be forbidden by UNOMA for sure.”
“Since when has that mattered to Sax?”
John laughed. “Oh, it matters now. They’ve given him too much for him to ignore them. They’ve tied him down with money and power.”
“Maybe.”
That night at 3:30 a.m. there was a small explosion in one of the well heads, and alarm bells ripped them from sleep and sent them stumbling through the tunnels half-naked, to be faced with a gusher that was shooting up into the night’s flying dust, in a column of white water torn to shreds in the unsteady glare of hastily directed spotlights. The water was falling out of the dust clouds as chunks of ice, hail the size of bowling balls; wells downwind were being pummelled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.
Given the discussion of the previous night John found himself quite alarmed by the sight, and he ran around until he found Mary. Through the noise of the eruption and the ever-present storm, Mary shouted in John’s ear: “Clear the area, I’m going to set off a charge beside the well and try to snuff it!” She ran off in her white nightshirt, and John rounded up the spectators and got them back down the tunnels to the station habitat. Mary joined them in the lock, huffing and puffing, and fiddled with her wristpad, and there was a low boom in the direction of the well. “Come on, let’s go see,” she said, and they got through the lock and ran back down the tunnels toward the window overlooking the well. There in a tumble of white ice balls lay the wreckage of the drill, on its side, and still. “Yeah! Capped!” Mary cried.
They cheered weakly. Some of them went down to the well area, to see if there was anything they could do to secure the situation. “Good work!” John said to Mary.
“I’ve read a lot about well capping since that first incident,” Mary said, still short of breath. “And we had it all set up to go. But we never actually had the chance. To try it. Of course. So you never know.”
John said, “Do your locks have recorders?”
“They do.”
“Great.”
John went to check them. He plugged Pauline into the station system, asked questions, scanning the answers as they appeared on his pad. No one had used the locks after the time-slip that night. He called the weather satellite overhead, and clicked into the radar and IR systems that Sax had given him the codes for, and scanned the area around Bakhuysen. No sign of any machines nearby, except some of the old windmill heaters. And the transponders showed that no one had been on the roads in the area since his arrival the previous day.
John sat heavily before Pauline, feeling sluggish and slow-witted. He couldn’t think of any other checks to make; and it seemed from those he had, that no one had been out that night to do the damage. The explosion could have been arranged days before, perhaps; although it would be hard to hide the device, the wells being worked on daily. He got up slowly and went to find Mary, and with her help talked to the people who had last worked on that well, the day before. No sign of tampering then, all the way until eight p.m. And after that everyone in the station had been at the John Boone party, the locks unused. So there really had been no chance.
He went back to his bed and thought about it. “Oh, by the way, Pauline; please check Sax’s records, and give me a list of all the dowsing expeditions in the last year.”
Continuing on his blind road to Hellas he ran into Nadia, who was overseeing the construction of a new kind of dome over Rabe Crater. It was the largest dome yet built, taking advantage of the thickening of the atmosphere and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weightless. The frame was to be made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential uses for it. Crater domes themselves were a thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect a big clear tent.
She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe’s interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with skylighted rooms, and the domed interior would hold a farm that would feed thirty thousand. Earth-moving robots the size of buildings hummed out of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters away. These behemoths were working on their own, or by teleoperation, and the teleoperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safe. John followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish the miners at Bradbury Point had been – and there they had been able to see what was happening! He had to laugh at Nadia’s obliviousness. When the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehicles. It was quite a tour. Nadia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machinery. The great storm was now four months old, the longest in years; and it still showed no sign of ending. Temperatures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificial light. And dust was in everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generally. Plus frequent cases of frostnip. And computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation. Middays inside Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal mine fires. She hated it.
John changed the subject. “What do you think of this space elevator?”
“Big.”
“But the effect, Nadia. The effect.”
“Who knows? You can never tell with a thing like that, can you?”
“It’ll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos station. She’ll have made her own bottleneck. That’s a lot of power.”
“That’s what Arkady says, but I don’t see why it can’t be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature.”
“You’re an optimist.”
“That’s what Arkady says.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to be sensible.”
“Me too.”
“I know. Sometimes I think we’re the only two.”
“And Arkady?”
She laughed.
“But you two are a couple!”
“Yes, yes. Like you and Maya.”
“Touché.”
Nadia smiled briefly. “I try to make Arkady think about things. That’s the best I can do. We’re meeting at Acheron in a month to take the treatment. Maya tells me it’s a good thing to do together.”
“I recommend it,” John said with a grin.
“And the treatment?”
“Beats the alternative, right?”
She chuckled. Then the ground growled through their boots, and they stiffened and jerked their heads around, looking for shadows in the murk. A black bulk like a moving hill appeared to their right. They ran to the side, stumbling and hopping over cobbles and debris, John wondering if this were another attack, Nadia rapping out commands over the common band, cursing the teleoperators for not keeping track of them on the IR. “Watch your screens, you lazy bastards!”
The ground stopped trembling. The black leviathan no longer moved. They approached it warily. A Brobdingnagian dump truck, on tracks. Built locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines: a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.
John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his forehead. They were safe. His pulse slowed. “Monsters like this are all over the planet,” he said to Nadia wonderingly. “Cutting, scraping, digging, filling, building. Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The size of it, Nadia! The size!”
“It’s big all right.”
“It’s unimaginable, really. Something completely beyond human abilities as we were brought up to understand them. Teleoperation on a massive scale. A kind of spiritual waldo. Anything that can be imagined can be executed!” Slowly they walked around the giant black object before them: no more than a kind of dump truck, nothing compared to what the space elevator would be; and yet even this truck, he thought, was an amazing thing. “Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. Maybe impossible. That’s probably part of your talent, and Sax’s too – to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we have yet. I mean holes drilled right through the lithosphere, the terminator lit with mirrored sunlight, all these cities filling mesas and stuck in the sides of cliffs – and now a cable strung out way past Phobos and Deimos, so long that it’s both in orbit and touching down at the same time! It’s impossible to imagine it!”
“Not impossible,” Nadia noted.
“No. And now of course we see the evidence of our power all around us, we almost get run down by it as it goes about its work! And seeing is believing. Even without an imagination you can see what kind of power we have. Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about ownership or sovereignty, fighting, making claims. People squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we’re just as powerful as they were.”
“Or more,” Nadia said.
He drove on into the Hellespontus Montes, the curved mountain range surrounding Hellas Basin. Somehow, one night when he was sleeping his rover got off the transponder road. He woke up, and in breaks in the dust saw that he was in a narrow valley, walled with small cliffs that were cut by the typical fluting of ravines. It seemed likely that by staying on the valley floor he would cross the road again, so he headed on cross country. Then the valley floor was disrupted by shallow transverse grabens like empty canals, and Pauline kept having to stop and turn and try another branch in her route-finding algorithm, defeated by one gulch after another as they appeared out of the murk. When John got impatient and tried to take over, it only got worse. In the land of the blind, the autopilot is king.
But slowly he closed on the valley mouth, where the map showed the transponder road descending to a wider valley below. So that night he stopped, unworried, and sat in front of the TV and ate a meal. Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending on the angle and strength of the wind hitting them. For the premiere the daily downslope wind in Noctis was augmented by some fierce katabatic gusts from the storm, and the music fluctuated like a composition, mournful, angry, dissonant or in sudden snatches harmonic: it seemed the work of a mind, an alien mind perhaps, but certainly something more than random chance. The almost aleatory aeolia, as a commentator said.
After that came news from Earth. The existence of the gerontological treatments had been leaked by a official in Geneva, and had flashed around the world in a day; and now there was a violent debate going on in the General Assembly concerning the matter. Many delegates were demanding that the treatments be made a basic human right, guaranteed by the UN for all, with funding from the developed nations placed immediately in a pool to make sure that financing for the treatments would be equally available to all. Meanwhile other reports were coming in: some religious leaders were coming out against the treatments, including the Pope; there were widespread riots, and some damage at certain medical centers. Governments were in a turmoil. All the faces on the TV were tense or angry, demanding change; and all the inequality, hatred and misery that the faces revealed made John flinch, he couldn’t watch. He fell asleep, and then slept poorly.
He was dreaming of Frank when a sound woke him. A knock on his windshield. It was the middle of the night. Groggily he hit the lock lock; sitting up he wondered that he had such a reflex action in him. When had he learned that one? He rubbed his jaw, turned on the common band. “Hello? Anyone out there?”
“The Martians.”
It was a man’s voice. His English was accented, but John couldn’t identify how.
“We want to talk,” the voice said.
