Blue Mars (28 page)

He left the ruins, and walked back among the old olive trees.

It looked like the grove was still being worked by someone. The
branches overhead were all cut to a certain level, and the ground underfoot was
smooth and covered by short dry pale grass, growing between thousands of old
gray olive pits. The trees were in ranks and files but looked natural anyway,
as if they had simply grown at that distance from each other. The wind blew its
lightly percussive shoosh in the leaves. Standing midgrove, where he could see
little but olive trees and sky, he noticed again how the leaves’ two colors
flashed back and forth in the wind, green then gray, gray then green....

He reached up to pull down a twig and inspect the leaves close up.
He remembered; up close the two sides of an olive leaf weren’t all that
different in color; a flat medium green, a pale khaki. But a hillside full of
them, flailing in the wind, had those two distinct colors, in moonlight
shifting to black and silver. If one were looking toward the sun at them it
became more a matter of texture, flat or shiny.

He walked up to a tree, put his hands on its trunk. It felt like
an olive tree’s bark: rough broken rectangles. A gray-green color, somewhat
like the undersides of the leaves, but darker, and often covered by yet another
green, the yellow green of lichen, yellow green or battleship gray. There were
hardly any olive trees on Mars; no Mediterraneans yet. No, it felt like he was
on Earth. About ten years old. Carrying that heavy child inside himself. Some
of the rectangles of bark were peeling down. The fissures between the
rectangles were shallow. The true color of the bark, clean of all lichen,
appeared to be a pale woody beige. There was so little of it that it was hard
to tell. Trees coated in lichen; Michel had not realized that before. The
branches above his head were smoother, the fissures flesh-colored lines only,
the lichen smoother as well, like green dust on the branches and twigs.

The roots were big and strong. The trunks spread outward as they
approached the ground, spreading in fingerlike protrusions with holes and gaps
between, like knobby fists thrust into the ground. No mistral would ever uproot
these trees. Not even a Martian wind could knock one down.

The ground was covered with old olive pits, and shriveled black
olives on the way to becoming pits. He picked up one with its black skin still
smooth, ripped away the skin with his thumb and fingernails. The purple juice
stained his skin, and when he licked it, the taste was not like cured olives at
all. Sour. He bit into the flesh, which resembled plum flesh, and the taste of
it, sour and bitter, unolivelike except for a hint of the oily aftertaste,
bolted through his mind—like Maya’s deja vu—he had done this before! As a child
they had tried it often, always hoping the taste would come round to the table
taste, and so give them food in their play field, manna in their own little
wilderness. But the olive flesh (paler the further one cut in toward the pit)
stubbornly remained as unpalatable as ever—the taste as embedded in his mind as
any person, bitter and sour. Now pleasant, because of the memory evoked.
Perhaps he had been cured.

The leaves flailed in the gusty north wind. Smell of dust. A haze
of brown light, the western sky brassy. The branches rose to twice or three
times his height; the underbranches drooped down where they could brush his
face. Human scale. The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks, who had seen
so many things so clearly, seen things in their proper proportion, everything
in a gauge symmetry to the human scale—the trees, the towns, their whole
physical world, the rocky islands in the Aegean, the rocky hills of the
Peloponnese—a universe you could walk across in a few days. Perhaps home was
the place of human scale, wherever it was. Usually childhood.

Each tree was like an animal holding its plumage up into the wind,
its knobby legs thrust into the ground. A hillside of plumage flashing under
the wind’s onslaught, under its fluctuating gusts and knocks and unexpected
stillnesses, all perfectly revealed by the feathering leaves. This was
Provence, the heart of Provence; his whole underbrain seemed to be humming at
the edge of every moment of his childhood, a vastpresque vu filling him up and
brimming over, a life in a landscape, humming with its own weight and balance.
He no longer felt heavy. The sky’s blue itself was a voice from that previous
incarnation, saying Provence, Provence.

But out over the ravine a flock of black crows swirled, crying Ka,
ka, ka!

Ka. Who had made up that story, of the little red people and their
name for Mars? No way of telling. No beginnings to such stories. In
Mediterranean antiquity the Ka had been a weird or double of a pharaoh,
pictured as descending on the pharaoh in the form of a hawk or a dove, or a
crow.

Now the Ka of Mars was descending on him, here in Provence. Black
crows—on Mars under the clear tents these same birds flew, just as carelessly
powerful in the aerators’ blasts as in the mistral. They didn’t care that they
were on Mars, it was home to them, their world as much as any other, and the
people below what they always had been, dangerous ground animals who would kill
you or take you on strange voyages. But no bird on Mars remembered the voyage
there, or Earth either. Nothing bridged the two worlds but the human mind. The
birds only flew and searched for food, and cawed, on Earth or Mars, as they
always had and always would. They were at home anywhere, wheeling in the hard
gusts of the wind, coping with the mistral and calling to each other Mars,
Mars, Mars! But Michel Duval, ah, Michel—a mind residing in two worlds at once,
or lost in the nowhere between them. The noos-phere was so huge. Where was he,
who was he? How was he to live?

Olive grove. Wind. Bright sun in a brass sky. The weight of his
body, the sour taste in his mouth: he felt himself root right into the ground.
This was his home, this and no other. It had changed and yet it would never
change—not this grove, not he himself. Home at last. Home at last. He could
live on Mars for ten thousand years and still this place would be his home.

Back in the hotel room in Arles
, he called up Maya. “Please come down, Maya. I want you to see
this.”

“I’m working on the agreement, Michel. The UN-Mars agreement.”

“I know.”

“It’s important!” ,
  
“I
know.”

“Well. It’s why I came here, and I’m part of it, in the middle of
it. I can’t just go off on vacation.”

“Okay, okay. But look, that work will never end. Politics will
never end. You can take a vacation, and then come back to it, and it will still
be going. But this—this is my home, Maya. I want you to see it. Don’t you want to
show me Moscow, don’t you want to go there?”

“Not if it was the last place above the flood.”

Michel sighed. “Well, it’s different for me. Please, come see what
I mean.”

“Maybe in a while, when we’ve finished this stage of the
negotiations. This is a critical time, Michel! Really it’s you who ought to be
here, not me who ought to be there.”

“I can watch on the wrist. There’s no reason to be there in
person. Please, Maya.”

She paused, caught finally by something in his tone of voice.
“Okay, I’ll try. It won’t be for a while though, no matter what.” “As long as
you come.”

After that he spent his days waiting for Maya, though he tried not
to think of it like that. He occupied every waking moment traveling about in a
rented car, sometimes with Sylvie, sometimes on his own. Despite the evocative
moment in the olive grove, perhaps because of it too, he felt deeply
dislocated. He was drawn to the new coastline for some reason, fascinated by
the adjustment to the new sea level that the local people were making. He drove
down to it often, following back roads that led to abrupt cliffs, to sudden
valley marshes. Many of the coastal fishing people had Algerian ancestry. The
fishing wasn’t going well, they said. The Camargue was polluted by drowned
industrial sites, and in the Med the fish were for the most part staying
outside the brown water, out in the blue which was a good morning’s voyage
away, with many dangers en route.

Hearing and speaking French, even this strange new French, was
like touching an electrode to parts of his brain that hadn’t been visited in
over a century. Coelacanths exploded regularly: memories of women’s kindnesses
to him, his cruelties to them. Perhaps that was why he had gone to Mars—to
escape himself, an unpleasant fellow it seemed.

Well, if escaping himself had been his desire, he had succeeded.
Now he was someone else. And a helpful man, a sympathetic man; he could look in
a mirror. He could return home and face it, face what he had been, because of
what he had become. Mars had done that, anyway.

It was so strange how the memory worked. The fragments were so
small and sharp, they were like those furry minute cactus needles that hurt far
out of proportion to their minuscule size. What he remembered best was his life
on Mars. Odessa, Burroughs, the underground shelters in the south, the hidden
outposts in the chaos. Even Underbill.

If he had returned to Earth during the Underbill years, he would
have been swamped with media crowds. But he had been out of contact since
disappearing with Hiroko, and though he had not attempted to conceal himself
since the revolution, few in France seemed to have noticed his reappearance.
The enormity of recent events on Earth had ineluded a partial fracturing of the
media culture—or perhaps it was simply the passage of time; most of the
population of France had been born after his disappearance, and the First
Hundred were ancient history to them—not ancient enough, however, to be truly
interesting. If Voltaire or Louis XIV or Charlemagne had appeared, there might be
a bit of attention—perhaps—but a psychologist of the previous century who had
emigrated to Mars, which was a sort of America when all was said and done? No,
that was of very little interest to anyone. He got some calls, some people came
by the Arlesian hotel to interview him down in the lobby or the courtyard, and
after that one or two of the Paris shows came down as well; but they all were
much more interested in what he could tell them about Nirgal than in anything
about he himself. Nirgal was the one people were fascinated by, he was their
charismatic.

No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafes
eating his meals, feeling as alone as if he were in a solo rover in the far
outback of the southern highlands, it was a bit disappointing to be entirely
ignored—just one vieux among all the rest, another one of those whose
unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than le fleuve
blanc, if the truth were told....

It was better this way. He could stop in little villages around Vallabrix,
like Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, or Saint-Victor-des-Quies, or
Saint-Hippolyte-de-Montaigu, and chat with the shopkeepers, who looked
identical to the ones who had been running the shops when he had left, and were
probably their descendants, or even possibly the same people; they spoke in an
older more stable French, careless of him, absorbed in their own conversations,
their own lives. He was nothing to them, and so he could see them clearly. It
was the same out in the narrow streets, where many people looked like
gypsies—North African blood no doubt, spreading into the populace as it had
after the Saracen invasion a thousand years before. Africans pouring in every
thousand years or so; this too was Provence. The young women were beautiful:
gracefully flowing through the streets in gangs, their black tresses still
glossy and bright in the dust of the mistral. These had been his villages.
Dusty plastic signs, everything tatttred and run-down....

Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation,
memory and forgetfulness. But ever more lonely.

In one cafe he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered
sitting in that very same cafe, at that very same table. Across from Eve.
Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of
involuntary memory, for one’s long-term memories settled or at least were
organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste
and smell—and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with
the emotional network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus
the neurological sequence, smell triggering memory triggering nostalgia.
Nostalgia, the intense ache for one’s past, desire for one’s past—not because
it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been, and now was gone. He
recalled Eve’s face, talking in this crowded room across from him. But not what
she had said, or why they were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment,
a cactus needle, an image seen as if by lightning bolt, then gone; and no
knowing the rest of it, no matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were
all like that, his memories; that was what memories were when they got old
enough, flashes in the dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes
filled with a vague ache.

He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove
home, through Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the
ruined mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as
if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty
ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.

That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live
into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp
painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here
the first time. Flashes, images—a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling
involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.

The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray.
Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they gave him no euphoric
connection with lost time; that moment too was past.

In a flickering gray green he drove back to Aries. The clerk in
the hotel’s lobby was telling someone that the mistral would never stop. “Yes
it will,” Michel said as he passed.

He went up to his room and called Maya again. Please, he said.
Please come soon. It was making him angry that he was reduced to such begging.
Soon, she kept saying. A few more days and they would have an agreement
hammered out, a bona fide written agreement between the UN and an independent
Martian government. History in the making. After that she would see about
coming.

Michel did not care about history in the making. He walked around
Aries, waiting for her. He went back to his room to wait. He went out to walk
again.

The Romans had used Aries for a port as much as they had
Marseilles—in fact Caesar had razed Marseilles for backing Pompey, and had
given Aries his favor as the local capital. Three strategic Roman roads had
been constructed to meet at the town, all used for hundreds of years after the
Romans had gone, and so for those centuries it had been lively, prosperous,
important. But the Rhone had silted its lagoons, and the Camargue had become a
pestilential swamp, and the roads had fallen into disuse. The town dwindled.
The Camargue’s windswept salt grasses and their famous herds of wild white
horses were eventually joined by oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical
works.

Now with the flood the lagoons were back, and flushing clean.
Aries was again a seaport. Michel continued to wait for Maya there precisely
because he had never lived there before. It did not remind him of anything but
the moment; and he spent his days watching the people of the moment live their
lives. In this new foreign country.

He received a call at the hotel, from a Francis Duval. Sylvie had
contacted the man. He was Michel’s nephew, Michel’s dead brother’s son, still
alive and living on Rue du 4 Sep-tembre, just north of the Roman arena, a few
blocks from the swollen Rhone, a few blocks from Michel’s hotel. He invited
Michel to come over.

After a moment’s hesitation, Michel agreed. By the time he had
walked across town, stopping briefly to peer into the Roman theater and arena,
his nephew appeared to have convened the entire quartier: an instant
celebration, champagne corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was
pulled in the door and embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks,
in the Proven9al manner. It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him
long and hard, talking all the while as people’s camera fibers pointed at them.
“You look just like my father!” Francis said.

“So do you!” said Michel, trying to remember if it were true or
not, trying to remember his brother’s face. Francis was elderly, Michel had
never seen his brother that old. It was hard to say.

But all the faces were familiar, somehow, and the language
comprehensible, mostly, the phrases sparking image after image in him; the
smells of cheese and wine sparking more; the taste of the wine yet more again.
Francis it turned out was a connoisseur, and happily he uncorked a number of
dusty bottles, Chateauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Chateau
d’Yquem, and his specialty, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two
each from Chateaux Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild
with a label by Pougnadoresse. These aged wonders had metamorphosed over the
years into something more than mere wine, tastes thick with overtones and
harmonics. They spilled down Michel’s throat like his own youth.

It could have been a party for some popular town politi-can, say;
and though Michel concluded that Francis did not much resemble Michel’s
brother, he sounded exactly like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would
have said, but it was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way
Francis drawled “normalement,” in this case meaning the way things had been
before the flood, whereas for Michel’s brother it had meant that hypothetical
state of smooth operation that never occurred in the real Provence—but exactly
the same lilt and drawl, nor-male-ment....

Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and
so he stood with a glass in his hand and gave a quick speech in the style of a
town politician, complimenting the women on their beauty, managing to make it
clear how pleased he was to be in their company without getting sentimental, or
revealing just how disoriented he was feeling: a slick competent performance,
which was just what the sophisticates of Provence liked, their rhetoric quick
and humorous like the local bullfighting. “And how is Mars?

What is it like? What will you do now? Are there Jacobins yet?”

“Mars is Mars,” Michel said, dismissing it. “The ground is the
color of Arlesian roof tiles. You know.”

They partied right through the afternoon, and then called in a
feast. Innumerable women kissed his cheeks, he was drunk on their perfume and
skin and hair, their smiling liquid dark eyes, looking at him with friendly
curiosity. Native Martian girls one always had to look up to, inspecting their
chins and necks and the insides of their nostrils. Such a pleasure to look down
on a straight part in glossy black hair.

In the late evening people dispersed. Francis walked with Michel
over to the Roman arena, and they climbed the bowed stone steps of the medieval
towers that had fortified the arena. From the little stone chamber at the top
of the stairs they looked out small windows at the tile -oofs, and the treeless
streets, and the Rhone. Out the south windows they could see a portion of the
speckled sheet of water which was the Camargue.