Red Mars (45 page)

“But the treaty is up for revision in nine years,” Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.

John laughed. “So it is! But you wouldn’t believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on Terran investment and profit. You just haven’t been paying attention. The thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific terms. There’s only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable society we’ve got to pay attention to that. You can’t just lift raw materials from here to Earth— the colonial era is over, you have to remember that.” He laughed again at the glinty stares being leveled on him; it was like gun sights had been implanted in their corneas.

And it only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation so hard. The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: This John Boone was bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John to see him. Well, another suspect then. But it took John a while to get to sleep that night.

He left Pavonis the next day, and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full 7,000 kilometers to Hellas, to visit Maya. The journey was made strangely solitary by the great storm. He glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompaniment. Maya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeting him. They had discovered a sizable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from below. Sustained in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shore. Maya was very excited at the plans.

John’s long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dust. One evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word of English, and lived in boxes like the trailer park; he and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the evening. Two days later, he stopped for a day at a huge Japanese air-mining facility in a high pass between craters. Here everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm. The technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working— and all for naught.

East three days from the Japanese, he ran across a Sufi caravanserai, located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed, and now it stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high. John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.

Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of Pavonis. Visibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.
“Talib?”
John said.
“Tariqat?”

It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far. They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of their own. One of them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to him, “It’s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great
talib
, have followed his
tariqat
here to visit us.”

“A
talib
is a seeker. And the seeker’s
tariqat
is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.”

“I see!” John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.

Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, looking dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough clear crystals. Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor’s impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the impact.

Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and women alike. The women were bare-headed and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs generally. He sat down and drank coffee with them, and started asking questions again. They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the
ru’ yat al-qalb
, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with
fana
, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when
fana
is succeeded by
baqa
, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a
haqq
. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”

“I guess I haven’t begun the first journey yet,” John said. “I don’t know anything.”

They were pleased by this response, he could see. You can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always start. They were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable. “No fancy in the world is all untrue,” Dhu said. And when John mentioned his last meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”

One of the women laughed and said, “Chalmers is your
nafs
.”

“What’s that?” John asked.

They were all laughing. Dhu, shaking his head, said “He is not your
nafs
. One’s
nafs
is one’s evil self, which some used to believe lived in one’s chest.”

“Like an organ or something?”

“Like an actual creature. Mohammed ibn ‘Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped out of his throat, and when he kicked it it only got bigger. That was his
nafs
.”

“It is another name for your Shadow,” the woman who had brought it up explained.

“Well,” John said. “Maybe he is, then. Or maybe it’s just that Frank’s
nafs
gets kicked a lot.” And they laughed with him at the thought.

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 before 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. I’m going to live for a thousand years, he thought.

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.