Equilateral (11 page)

Thayer expects the criminals to be languishing in cells. In fact they’re unbound and unmonitored, out-of-doors behind the building in an open lot that attenuates into scrub. The policeman blows a whistle and they assemble in a single sullen row, about a dozen of them with their arms at their sides, as prescribed.

The men are distinctly Arab—more Arab-looking, it seems to Thayer, than his more reliable excavators: blacker faces, beakier noses, more profoundly mournful eyes. Yes: he finds a profound mournfulness in their eyes, reflecting the tragic fatalism intrinsic to their faith and culture. He walks along the line. The fellahin avert their eyes, or focus them at a point in the impossible distance. He inspects their filthy shirts and long, loose trousers.

He stops at one of the prisoners, among the most disheveled of them. A mean scar runs above his right eyebrow. The fellah looks past the astronomer, ignoring him. Thayer addresses the policeman.

“Why is this man being held?”

“He’s a very low sort, Effendi.”

“I can see that, but what’s his offense? Why isn’t he at the excavations? We’re feeding him and giving him water, yet the man lies about the yard day and night.”

“The Guards brought him. I don’t know the particulars. He was refusing to work, I believe.”

Thayer stares directly into the man’s face. “Do you speak English?”

The policeman says, “Effendi, he’s from a small village. He hasn’t been taught a thing in his life.”

“Translate, then. Ask him why he doesn’t work. Why isn’t he being cooperative?”

The policeman speaks a few words. The fellah answers by flicking his head, a gesture that Thayer understands to be equivalent to a shrug.

“I’m sorry, he doesn’t care to respond. He’s sick in the brain, I think.”

“Doesn’t he care whether the Equilateral is completed?”

The policeman smiles with visible effort. “He doesn’t understand the Equilateral, Effendi. I’m an officer of the police, but even for myself the Equilateral is a strange endeavor. We hear rumors about its real purpose. Some say you wish to speak to the stars.”

“I do!” Thayer declares. “That’s exactly it! Ask him if he would like to join me.”

The policeman blinks as he considers the astronomer’s admission. It takes several moments before he can put this in words the fellah can understand. This time there’s no response at all.

“We may have chosen for our interview the worst of a bad lot,” the policeman observes, anxious about the intensity with which Thayer is gazing at the prisoner. The other fellahin fidget and glare. They don’t like standing in the sun, and they don’t like being questioned. Thayer evidently doesn’t realize that he and the policeman are the only figures of authority here, and that they’re both unarmed.

Only inches from the prisoner’s face, Thayer demands, “Do you have no manly ambition at all? Do you want to remain immured in squalor forever? Why do you waste this opportunity to bring a measure of grandeur into your life?”

The policeman struggles to understand the questions and compose their judicious translation.

Perhaps he doesn’t fully or correctly accomplish this task, but the prisoner’s attention is seized. His eyes catch fire. His reply to the policeman begins calmly and then runs off the rails. He becomes passionate. He vigorously jabs his finger in Thayer’s direction. Even after he makes his point, he goes on. Several fellahin murmur in agreement.

“He’s answered with an impertinence,” the policeman explains.

“What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter, Effendi.”

“What is it?”

The policeman frowns, troubled. He has never before addressed as high a personage as Thayer. He’s aware that the astronomer’s unexpected arrival may cost him his position. The prisoners may mutiny, and that may cost him his neck. He offers Thayer an apologetic shake of his head while he ponders the fellah’s invective. The fellah has replied that his life is already filled with grandeur. He says the word of God lives within him and that God’s word is sufficient magnificence for a mortal man. He quotes the Prophet: “Those are the ones upon whom are blessings from their Lord and mercy. And it is those who are the rightly guided.” It’s Thayer with his machines and his foolish works who lives in squalor, by which the fellah means squalor of the spirit.

Clearly the man is a Mahdist, but the policeman knows he speaks the truth. He again chooses his words carefully.

“He says that his corn wilts. His father’s ill. His wife has borne a son, who has yet to receive his blessing.”

Thayer doesn’t reply at once. There’s no shade in the yard. The heat of the day can’t be distinguished from his recent fever. He recognizes that he hasn’t received an accurate rendering of the fellah’s speech. He doesn’t blame the policeman. A regular translator, like one of the better dragomen, would enjoy a greater command of both languages and know which cultural concepts are held in common and which need to be bridged. Thayer believes everything may be understood in the end: an equal-sided triangle, the elaborations of trigonometry, the motions of celestial objects, the fundamental principles and aspirations of intelligence.

“Send him home, then,” he murmurs. He adds fervently, “With my best wishes for the boy.”

Thayer doesn’t recall fainting, nor does he recall the prisoners carrying him to the chair in the policeman’s office, nor the cup of tea being brought to him, nor Bint’s arrival. She looms above him now, biting her lip as if he’s a damaged item for sale at the bazaar. The policeman and the fellahin stand behind her.

She leads him from the lockup to his carriage, a springless, wide-wheeled
araba
, and takes the seat next to him.

“Thank you for coming,” he says.

She doesn’t respond.

They travel in silence for a while. He gazes from the carriage into the unfamiliar neighborhoods through which they must pass. Washing hangs to dry above the streets. Women bring back
produce from the local markets. Children play in the ditches. It seems that every quarter is centered around a new mosque whose spacious courtyard is misted by the spray of a voluptuously flowing fountain.

Bint is looking away and it occurs to Thayer that she is somehow cross with him. This may have been expected. Any kind of dependence on an Arab engenders insolence, even if she’s a simple, illiterate, probably much-handled serving girl.

He turns away too and sees a half-naked child gazing at the carriage in delighted surprise. Thayer throws him a coin.

Bint says, “This is no place for a casual stroll. You’ve been ill. If you die here, the project fails. We will never speak with Mars. We will never learn from them.”

“Pardon?”

Her eyes flash.

“And when you put men to death, you place the Equilateral in moral jeopardy! It no longer serves the people. It serves …” She pauses before she decides on the next words. “The Devil!”

Still pleased by his encounter with the boy, who caught the copper in midair, Thayer almost grins at Bint’s attempt at speech, none of which he can follow.

“I believed once that the Equilateral was the gift of God, directly from the mind of God,” she says hesitantly. Her eyes are moist. She moans softly before she continues: “I believe that no longer. It is the work of man, with all the compromises and imperfections of man. But I have confidence that the Equilateral can still be completed. It may yet find favor in God’s eyes, if we complete it according to His law.”

Thayer is puzzled by the Arab girl’s attempt at complex expression, which comes out as a series of freakish grunts and cries. He says, “I don’t understand you at all.”

Attentive to the muffled impact of the horse’s hooves on the sand-blanketed pavement, Thayer wonders when they’ll reach his quarters. They’ve been traveling through the settlement for what now seems like hours. He’s lost sight of the pitch factory and other distinctive tall structures. The carriage rattles down crooked alleyways that spill out onto broad, dusty thoroughfares before the vehicle returns to another warren of small lanes and cul-de-sacs that is perhaps the same neighborhood as the one they just left. Bint has assumed a poutish scowl as she stares directly ahead, past the driver. Thayer reflects how tiresome these girls can be. He’ll have her replaced this very afternoon.

The scent of jasmine reaches him. He can’t imagine that an ordinary Arab serving girl would perfume herself, so either this is a natural scent, a compound analogous to the floral fragrance and exuded by her pores, or in fact an ordinary Arab serving girl does perfume herself, proffering another mystery of the East, one of the many arrayed about her: Bint’s provenance, her desires and ambitions, what she’s seen, and the arts in which she’s been instructed, especially the carnal ones. He can’t be surprised by the feminine affectation now, he’s always sensed in the girl the heat, the light, and the natural passions that have necessarily been made recessive in European women. Even as he feels himself relapsing into illness, Thayer speculates about what may lie beneath her robe, the distinct tawny-dusky colorations
of her naked self. He begins to regard her pout as nearly coquettish.

Δ

By the time they reach his quarters, where Miss Keaton waits anxiously, the day’s heat has abated, but Thayer is running a fever. Bint and the driver remove him from the carriage. Coming from his tent, Miss Keaton observes the flush that mottles his face, his frailty, and also the tenderness with which he allows himself to be supported by the girl, and how it’s reciprocated. He mumbles a vague good-afternoon to his secretary. The girl firmly propels him inside. Miss Keaton stands by the tent flap for a moment before realizing that the driver stands with her, patiently anticipating his baksheesh.

Bint sponges off the astronomer and later, when he wakes in the evening dusk, the events of the afternoon have receded down a dimly lit passageway. His determination to dismiss her flickers in and out of visibility.

Nineteen

The Arab needs to be beaten. He demands to be flogged. He hungers for the cudgel and the whip, and a kick or a slap from his betters. He considers every blow a sign of respect, or even love, evidence that he has been judged worthy of discipline and instruction. Strike, strike, strike—and pray to wake him from his millennia-long torpor.

Yet except in difficult cases Ballard has forbidden the bastinado, the Spanish-imported flogging that breaks the small bones and tendons of a man’s feet and often leaves him crippled for life. A cripple incurs dishonor. He begs at the mosque and the market, sprawled in the dirt to be sniffed at by dogs. He can’t marry—but he can’t excavate more sand either. Depending on circumstance, exquisitely balancing Christian leniency against the demands of their undertaking, Ballard has formulated other means of compulsion. The Arabs appreciate this, he says.

Miss Keaton notes that most of the fellahin bear with perverse pride distinctive marks or raised calluses on their foreheads that have emerged over a lifetime of bowing and scraping against their prayer mats. The prayer bumps usually assume
irregular shapes, but she occasionally encounters a man with a knob so perfectly round and evenly raised from his head that she has to resist the urge to pull on its stalk. She has discovered bumps that are circular disks and bumps that form ovals for which the two foci can be computed. Some prayer bumps are small, some are grand dominating features that take up most of the region between eyebrows and scalp. Often these calluses bleed, scab, and fall off, leaving peculiar depressions on the foreheads, difficult to distinguish from the effects of cancer or venereal disease. She once met a man, employed in a ware house at Point B where the spades are kept, whose forehead accurately mapped Trivium Charontis, the intriguing oasis slightly north of the Martian equator.

These prayer bumps are acquired characteristics, to be sure, not in the blood, not heritable. Yet nearly every Egyptian boy is destined to bow and scrape and be so disfigured. Every race of man is defined by qualities incurred through experience as well as attributes transmitted at birth; its virtues and faults are mutable across the centuries. A productive race’s industry and respect for legitimate authority can be engendered no less than its good dentition.

Now she contemplates the canal builders of Mars, who have already dug broad waterways thousands of miles long and are extending them at great dispatch, under Earth’s straining, watchful, ever-astonished eye. They’ve invented ingenious, powerful machinery for the task. They’ve given their machines noble purpose. They’ve comprehended their world’s tenuous atmosphere, dwindling bodies of water, hardy flora, exotic fauna, and embattled intelligence as interrelated elements of a single imperiled
environment. Mars evidently commands much better laborers as well: more disciplined than their terrestrial analogues, more committed to their planet’s survival.

Yet the engineers of Mars and their laborers are no more than victors in a brutal rivalry to survive their environment, just as the men of Earth are. Competition is intrinsic to the character of every living thing, including the canal builders. To ensure their continued procreation, they may have developed through natural selection broad lungs with which to suck in their atmosphere’s thin gruel. They may have gained long flexible appendages to transport themselves in low gravity more conveniently. The inexorable drive for survival must have demanded beings endowed with godlike capabilities and judgment. And through natural selection and nonbiological processes, through brutality and education, through calculated humiliations and measures of grace, by pitting every individual against the other to determine who was more suited to their purposes, the engineers would have forged a separate, servile race that has put its servility to productive use, for the salvation of the planet they share with their masters. That’s what it’s taken to carve their lines into the fourth planet’s hard red rock.

Δ

Miss Keaton finds Thayer with Ballard in the central bureau, standing over the long drafting table on which maps of the Western Desert are laid out. When she comes in the men look up without seeing her. They’re entombed in grim thoughts.