Part 22 (2/2)

”About four thousand now.”

Art whistled his surprise.

That afternoon they were taken down the tunnel through several kilometers of transformed segments, many of them forested, and all containing a large stream that ran down the floor of the tunnel, widening in some segments to form big ponds. When Ariadne brought them back up to the first chamber, called Zakros, almost a thousand people showed up for an open-air meal in the largest park. Nirgal and Art wandered around talking to people, enjoying a plain meal of bread and salad and broiled fish. The people there appeared receptive to the idea of a congress of the underground. They had tried something like it years before, but had not gotten many takers at the time- had lists of the sanctuaries in their region- and one of the older women said, with authority, that they would be happy to host it, as they had a s.p.a.ce large enough to handle a great number of guests.

”Oh, that would be marvelous,” Art said, glancing at Ariadne.

Later Nadia agreed. ”It will help a lot,” she said. ”A lot of people will be resistant to the idea of a meeting, because they suspect the First Hundred of trying to take charge of the underground. But if it's held here, and the Bogdanovists are behind it...”

When Jackie came over and heard of the offer, she gave Art a hug. ”Oh, it's going to happen! And it's just what John Boone would have done. It's like the meeting he called on Olympus Mons.”

They left Dorsa Brevia and headed north again, on the east side of the h.e.l.las Basin. During the nights of this drive Jackie often brought out John Boone's AI, Pauline, which she had studied and cataloged. She played back selections from his thoughts about an independent state, thoughts disorganized and rambling, the reflections of a man with more enthusiasm (and omegendorph) than a.n.a.lytic ability; but sometimes he would get on a roll, and ad-lib in the manner of the famous speeches, and that could be fascinating. He had had a knack for free a.s.sociation which made his ideas sound like logical progression even when they weren't.

”See how often he talks about the Swiss,” Jackie said. She sounded like John, Nirgal noticed suddenly. She had been working with Pauline extensively for a long time, and her manner had been affected by it. John's voice, Maya's manner; in such ways they carried the past with them. ”We have to make sure some Swiss are at the congress.”

”We've got Jurgen and the group at Overhangs,” Nadia said.

”But they're not really so Swiss, are they?”

”You'll have to ask them,” Nadia said. ”But if you mean Swiss officials, there are a lot of them in Burroughs, and they've been helping us there, without ever even talking to us about it. About fifty of us have Swiss pa.s.sports now. They're a big part of the demimonde.”

”As is Praxis,” Art put in.

”Yes yes. Anyway, we'll talk to the group at Overhangs. They'll have contacts with the surface Swiss, I'm sure.”

Northeast of the volcano Hadriaca Patera, they visited a town that had been founded by Sufis. The original structure was built into the side of a canyon cliff, in a kind of high-tech Mesa Verde- a thin line of buildings, inserted into the break point where the cliff's imposing overhang began to slope back out and down to the canyon floor. Steep staircases in walktubes ran down the lower slope to a small concrete garage, and around the garage had sprung up a number of blister tents and greenhouses. These tents were occupied by people who wished to study with the Sufis. Some came from the sanctuaries, some from the cities of the north; many were natives, but quite a few were newcomers from Earth. Together they hoped to roof the entire canyon, using materials developed for the new cable to support an immense spread of tent fabric. Nadia was immediately drawn into discussions of the construction problems such a project would encounter, which she happily told them would be various and severe. Ironically, the thickening atmosphere made all dome projects more difficult, because the domes could not be floated by the air pressures underneath them to the extent they once had been; and though the tensile and load-bearing strengths of the new carbon configurations were more than they would need, anchoring points that would hold such weights as they had in mind would be almost impossible to find. But the local engineers were confident that lighter tent fabrics and new anchoring techniques might serve, and the walls of the canyon, they said, were solid. They were in the very upper reach of Reull Vallis, and ancient sapping had cut back into very hard material. Good anchoring points should be everywhere.

No attempt was being made to hide any of this activity from satellite observation. The Sufis' circular mesa dwelling in Margaritifer, and their main settlement in the south, Rumi, were similarly unconcealed. Yet they had never been hara.s.sed in any way by anybody, or even contacted by the Transitional Authority. This made one of their leaders, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, think the fears of the underground were exaggerated. Nadia politely disagreed, and when Nirgal pressed her on the point, curious about it, she looked at him steadily. ”They hunt the First Hundred.”

He thought it over, watching the Sufis lead the way up the walktube staircases to their cliff dwelling. They had arrived well before dawn, and Dhu had invited everyone up to the cliff for a brunch to welcome the visitors. So they followed the Sufis up to the dwelling, and sat at a great long table, in a long room with its outer wall a continuous great window, overlooking the canyon. The Sufis dressed in white, while the people from the tents in the canyon wore ordinary jumpers, most of them rust-colored. People poured each other's water, and talked as they ate. ”You are on your tariqat tariqat,” Dhu el-Nun said to Nirgal. This was one's spiritual path, he explained, one's road to reality. Nirgal nodded, struck by the aptness of the description- it was just how his life had always felt to him. ”You must feel lucky,” Dhu said. ”You must pay attention.”

After a meal of bread and strawberries and yogurt, and then mud-thick coffee, the tables and chairs were cleared, and the Sufis danced a sema sema or whirling dance, spinning and chanting to the music of a harpist and several drummers, and the chanting of the canyon dwellers. As the dancers pa.s.sed their guests, they placed their palms very briefly to the guests' cheeks, their touches as light as the brush of a wing. Nirgal glanced at Art, expecting him to be as goggle-eyed as he usually was at the various phenomena of Martian life, but in fact he was smiling in a knowing way, and tapping his forefinger and thumb together in time to the beat, and chanting with the rest. And at the end of the dance he stepped out and recited something in a foreign language, which caused the Sufis to smile and, when he was done, to applaud loudly. or whirling dance, spinning and chanting to the music of a harpist and several drummers, and the chanting of the canyon dwellers. As the dancers pa.s.sed their guests, they placed their palms very briefly to the guests' cheeks, their touches as light as the brush of a wing. Nirgal glanced at Art, expecting him to be as goggle-eyed as he usually was at the various phenomena of Martian life, but in fact he was smiling in a knowing way, and tapping his forefinger and thumb together in time to the beat, and chanting with the rest. And at the end of the dance he stepped out and recited something in a foreign language, which caused the Sufis to smile and, when he was done, to applaud loudly.

”Some of my professors in Tehran were Sufis,” he explained to Nirgal and Nadia and Jackie. ”They were a big part of what people call the Persian Renaissance.”

”And what did you recite?” Nirgal asked.

”It's a Farsi poem by Jalaluddin Rumi, the master of the whirling dervishes. I never learned the English version very well- '

I died from a mineral and plant became, D.

ied from the plant, took a sentient frame; D.

ied from the beast, donned a human dress- W.

hen by my dying did I ever grow less...'

”Ah, I can't remember the rest. But some of those Sufis were very good engineers.”

”They'd better be here too,” Nadia said, glancing at the people she had been talking to about doming the canyon.

In any case the Sufis here proved to be very enthusiastic about the idea of an underground congress. As they pointed out, theirs was a syncretic religion, which had taken some of its elements not only from the various types and nationalities of Islam, but also from the older religions of Asia that Islam had encountered, and also newer ones such as Baha'i. Something similarly flexible was going to be needed here, they said. Meanwhile, their concept of the gift had already been influential throughout the underground, and some of their theoreticians were working with Vlad and Marina on the specifics of eco-economics. So as the morning pa.s.sed and they waited for the late winter sunrise, standing at the great window and looking across the dark canyon to the east, they were quick to make very practical suggestions about the meeting. ”You should go talk to the Bedouin and the other Arabs as quickly as possible,” Dhu told them. ”They won't like being late in the list of those consulted.”

Then the eastern sky lightened, very slowly, from dark plum to lavender. The opposite cliff was lower than the one they were on, and they could see over the dark plateau to the east for a few kilometers, to a low range of hills that formed the horizon. The Sufis pointed out the cleft in the hills where the sun would rise, and some began to chant again. ”There is a group of Sufis in Elysium,” Dhu told them, ”who are exploring backwards to our roots in Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Some say there are Mithraists on Mars now, wors.h.i.+pping the sun, Ahura Mazda. They consider the soletta to be religious art, like a stained gla.s.s window in a cathedral.”

When the sky was an intense clear pink the Sufis gathered around their four guests and gently pushed them into a pattern against the windows: Nirgal next to Jackie, Nadia and Art behind them. ”Today you are our stained gla.s.s,” Dhu said quietly. Hands lifted Nirgal's forearm until his hand was touching Jackie's, and he took it. They exchanged a quick glance and then stared forward to the hills on the horizon. Art and Nadia were likewise holding hands, and their outside hands were placed on Nirgal's and Jackie's shoulders. The chanting around them got louder, the chorus of voices intoning words in Farsi, the long and liquid vowels stretching out for minutes on end. And then the sun cracked the horizon and the fountain of light exploded over the land, pouring in the wide window and over them so that they had to squint, and their eyes watered. Between the soletta and the thickening atmosphere the sun was visibly larger than it had been in the past, bronze and oblate and s.h.i.+mmering up through the horizontal slicing of distant inversion layers. Jackie squeezed Nirgal's hand hard, and on an impulse he looked behind them; there on the white wall all their shadows made a kind of linked tapestry, black on white, and in the intensity of the light, the white nearest their shadows was the brightest white of all, tinged just barely by the colors of the rainbow glory, embracing them all.

They took the Sufis' advice when they left, and headed for the Lyell mohole, one of the four 70 south lat.i.tude moholes. In this region the Bedouin from western Egypt had located a number of caravanserai, and Nadia was acquainted with one of their leaders. So they decided to try and find him.

As they drove Nirgal thought hard about the Sufis, and what their influential presence said about the underground and the demimonde. People had left the surface world for many different reasons, and that was important to remember. All of them had thrown everything away, and risked their lives, but they had done so intent on very different goals. Some hoped to establish radically new cultures, as in Zygote, or Dorsa Brevia, or in the Bogdanovist sanctuaries. Others, like the Sufis, wanted to hold on to ancient cultures they felt were under a.s.sault in the Terran global order. Now all these parts of the resistance were scattered in the southern highlands, mixed but still separate. There was no obvious reason why they should all want to become one single thing. Many of them had been trying specifically to get away from dominant powers- transnationals, the West, America, capitalism- all the totalizing systems of power. A central system was just what they had gone to great lengths to get away from. That did not bode well for Art's plan, and when Nirgal expressed this worry, Nadia agreed. ”You are American, this is trouble for us.” Which made Art go cross-eyed. But then Nadia added, ”Well, America also stands for the melting pot. The idea of the melting pot. It was the place where people could come from anywhere and be a part of it. Such was the theory. There are lessons there for us.”

Jackie said, ”What Boone finally concluded was that it wasn't possible to invent a Martian culture from scratch. He said it should be a mix of the best of everyone that came here. That's the difference between Booneans and Bogdanovists.”

”Yes,” Nadia said, frowning, ”but I think they were both wrong. I don't think we can invent it from scratch, and I don't think there will be a mix. At least not for a very long time. In the meantime, it will be a matter of a lot of different cultures coexisting, I think. But whether such a thing is possible...” She shrugged.

The problems they were going to face in any congress were made flesh during their visit to the Bedouin caravanserai. These Bedouin were mining the region of the far south between Dana Crater, Lyell Crater, the Sisyphi Cavi, and Dorsa Argentea. They were traveling about in mobile mining rigs, in the style honed on the Great Escarpment, now traditional- harvesting surface deposits, and then moving on. The caravanserai was just a small tent, left in place like an oasis, for people to use in emergencies, or when they wanted to stretch out a little.

n.o.body could have made more of a contrast with the ethereal Sufis than the Bedouin; these reserved unsentimental Arabs dressed in modern jumpers, and seemed to be mostly male. When the travelers arrived there was a mining caravan about to leave, and when they heard what the travelers wanted to discuss, they frowned and left anyway. ”More Booneism. We don't want anything to do with it.”

The travelers ate a meal with a group of men in the largest rover left in the caravanserai, with women appearing from a tube from the car next door to serve the dishes. Jackie glowered at this, with a dark expression that was straight off Maya's face. When one of the younger Arab men sitting beside her tried to strike up a conversation, he found it hard going indeed. Nirgal suppressed a smile at this, and attended to Nadia and an old Bedu named Zeyk, the leader of this group, and the one Nadia had known from before. ”Ah, the Sufis,” he said genially. ”No one bothers them because they are clearly harmless. Like birds.”

Later in the meal Jackie warmed to the young Arab, of course, as he was a strikingly handsome man, with long dark eyelashes framing liquid brown eyes, an aquiline nose, full red lips, a sharp jaw, and an easy confident manner that appeared unintimidated by Jackie's own beauty, which was similar in some ways to his own. His name was Antar, and he came from an important Bedu family. Art, sitting across the low table from them, looked shocked at this developing friends.h.i.+p, but after their years in Sabis.h.i.+ Nirgal had seen it coming even before Jackie had, and in a strange way it was almost a pleasure to watch her at work. Quite a sight, in fact- she the proud daughter of the greatest matriarchy since Atlantis, Antar the proud heir of the most extreme patriarchy on Mars, a young man with a grace and ease of manner so pure it was as if he were king of the world.

After the meal the two of them disappeared. Nirgal settled back with scarcely a twinge, and talked with Nadia and Art and Zeyk, and Zeyk's wife, n.a.z.ik, who came out to join them. Zeyk and n.a.z.ik were Mars old-timers, who had met John Boone, and been friends of Frank Chalmers. Contrary to the Sufis' prediction, they were very friendly to the idea of a congress, and they agreed that Dorsa Brevia would be a good place to hold it.

”What we need is equality without conformity,” Zeyk said at one point, squinting seriously as he chose his words. This was close enough to what Nadia had been saying on the drive there that it caught Nirgal's attention even more than it otherwise would have. ”This is not an easy thing to establish, but clearly we have to try, to avoid fighting. I'll spread the word through the Arab community. Or at least the Bedu. I must say, there are Arabs in the north who are very much involved with the transnationals, with Amexx especially. All the African Arab countries are falling into Amexx, one after the next. A very odd pairing. But money...” He rubbed his fingers together. ”You know. Anyway, we will contact our friends. And the Sufis will help us. They are becoming the mullahs down here, and the mullahs don't like it, but I do.”

Other developments worried him. ”Armscor has taken on the Black Sea Group, and that's a very bad combination- old Afrikaaner leaders.h.i.+p, and security from all the member states, most of them police states- Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.” He ticked them off on his fingers, wrinkling his nose. ”Think about those histories for a while! And they have been building bases on the Great Escarpment, a band around Mars, in effect. And they're in tight with the Transitional Authority.” He shook his head. ”They will crush us if they can.”

Nadia nodded her agreement, and Art, looking surprised at this a.s.sessment, pumped Zeyk with a hundred questions. ”But you don't hide,” he noted at one point.

”We have sanctuaries if we need them,” Zeyk said. ”And we are ready to fight.”

”Do you think it will come to that?” Art asked.

”I am sure of it.”

Much later, after several more tiny cups of mudlike coffee, Zeyk and n.a.z.ik and Nadia talked to each other about Frank Chalmers, all three of them smiling peculiar fond smiles. Nirgal and Art listened, but it was hard to get a sense of that man, dead long before Nirgal had been born. In fact it was a shocking reminder of just how old the issei were, that they had known such a figure from the videotapes. Finally Art blurted out, ”But what was he like like?”

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