• • •
But the Japanese were aliens. And living with the Arabs sharpened his sense of how alien they were too. Oh, they were part of twenty-first-century humanity, no doubt about it; they were sophisticated scientists and technicians, cocooned like everyone else in a protective shell of technology at every moment of their lives, and busy making and watching their own life movies. And yet they prayed three to six times a day, bowing toward Earth when it was the morning or evening star. And the reason their techno-caravans gave them such great and obvious pleasure was because the caravans were an outward manifestation of this bending of the modern world to their ancient goals. “Man’s work is to actualize God’s will in history,” Zeyk would say. “We can change the world in ways that help to actualize the divine pattern. It’s always been our way: Islam says the desert does not remain desert, the mountain does not remain mountain. The world must be transformed into a semblance of the divine pattern, and that is what constitutes history in Islam. Al-Qahira gives us the same challenge as the old world, except in a purer form.”
He would say these things to Frank as they sat around in his rover, in its tiny courtyard. These family rovers were transformed into private preserves, spaces that Frank was seldom invited into, and then only by Zeyk. Each time he visited he was surprised anew: the rover was nondescript from the exterior, big, with darkened windows, one of several parked in a bunch with walktubes between them. But then one ducked through a doorway and inside, and stepped into space filled with sunlight pouring down through skylights, illuminating couches and elaborate rugs, tiled floors, green-leafed plants, bowls of fruit, a window with the Martian view tinted and framed like a photo, low couches, silver coffee urns, computer consoles of inlaid teak and mahogany, running water in pools and fountains. A cool wet world, green and white, intimate and small. Looking around Frank had the powerful sensation that rooms like this had existed for centuries, that the chamber would be instantly recognized for what it was by people living in the Empty Quarter in the tenth century, or across Asia in the twelfth.
Often Zeyk’s invitations would come in the afternoon, when a group of men would convene in his rover for coffee and talk. Frank would sit in his spot near Zeyk, and sip his muddy coffee and listen to the Arabic with all the attention he could muster. It was a beautiful language, musical and intensely metaphoric, so that all their modern technical terminology resonated with desert imagery because of the root meanings of all the new words, which like most of their abstract terms had concrete physical origins. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, and this showed in many unexpected cognates with English, and in the organic and compact nature of the vocabulary.
The conversations ran all over, but they were guided by Zeyk and the other elders, who were deferred to by the younger men in a way Frank found incredible. Many times the conversation became an overt lesson for Frank on Bedouin ways, which allowed him to nod and ask questions, and occasionally to offer comments or criticism. “When you have a strong conservative streak in your society,” Zeyk would say, “which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.”
“Or like Beirut,” said Frank innocently.
“No, no.” Zeyk smiled. “Beirut was much more complex than that. It was not only civil war, but also a number of exterior wars impinging on it. It was not a matter of social or religious conservatives detaching from the normal progress of culture, as in Colombia or the Spanish Civil War.”
“Spoken like a true progressive.”
“All Qahiran Mahjaris are progressive by definition, or we would not be here. But Islam has avoided civil war by remaining a whole; we have a coherent culture, so that the Arabs here are still devout. This is understood even by the most conservative elements back home. We will never have civil war, because we are united by our faith.”
Frank let his expression alone speak the fact of the Shiite heresy, among many other Islamic “civil wars.” Zeyk understood the expression, but ignored it and forged on: “We all move together through history, one loose caravan. You could say that we here on Al-Qahira are like one of our prospecting rovers. And you know what a pleasure it is to be in one of those.”
“So . . .” Frank thought hard about how to word his question; his inexperience with Arabic would only give him a certain amount of leeway before they got offended. “Is there really the idea of social progress in Islam?”
“Oh, certainly!” Several of them had replied in the affirmative, and were nodding still. Zeyk said, “Don’t you think so?”
“Well . . .” Frank let it pass. There still was not a single Arab democracy. It was a hierarchical culture with a premium put on honor and freedom, and for the many who were low down in the hierarchy, honor and freedom were only achievable by deference. Which reinforced the system and held it static. But what could he say?
“The destruction of Beirut was a disaster for progressive Arab culture,” another man said. “It was the city where intellectuals and artists and radicals went when they were attacked by their local governments. The national governments all hated the pan-Arab ideal, but the fact is we speak one language across these several countries, and language is a powerful unifier of culture. Along with Islam it makes us one, really, despite the political borders. Beirut was always the place to affirm that position, and when the Israelis destroyed it, that affirmation became more difficult. The destruction was calculated to splinter us, and it did. So here we begin the work again.”
And that was their social progress.
• • •
The stratiform copper deposit that they had been raking up ran dry, and it was time for another ráhla, the movement of the hejra to the next site. They traveled two days, and arrived at another stratiform deposit that Frank had found. Frank went out again on another prospecting trip.
For days he sat in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash, watching the land roll by. They were in a region of thulleya or little ribs, parallel ridges running downslope. He never turned on the TV anymore; there was a lot to think about. “The Arabs don’t believe in original sin,” he wrote in his lectern. “They believe that man is innocent, and death natural. That we do not need a saviour. There is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it is lived. It is a humanist correction of Judaism and Christianity, in that sense. Although in another sense they have always refused to take responsibility for their destiny. It’s always Allah’s will. I don’t understand that contradiction. But now they are here. And the Mahjaris have always been an intimate part of Arab culture, often its leading edge; Arabic poetry was revived in the twentieth century by poets who actually lived in New York or Latin America. Perhaps it will be the same here. It is surprising to find how much their vision of history corresponds to what Boone believed; I don’t think either understood that at all. Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”
He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcome. Copper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on Earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy sources of it. And here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the Arabs would not care. Harvest it, and then they would get to move again.
He moved on himself. Days passed, the shadows wheeled. The wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope. Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink sunlight. Sometimes he would see one
of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes, bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya; the view had been bent a thousand kilometers over the horizon by an inversion layer in the atmosphere. He stopped turning on the lectern as he had the TV. Nothing but the world and him. Winds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the rover. Khála, the empty land.
• • •
But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he slept. One night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian colony. He had driven from Washington out to the Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odd. He walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest. He came on the limestone caves at Luray, a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour. Every stalactite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lights. Some had had mallets attached to them, and an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered cavern! He had to walk out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn’t hear him laugh.
Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walked off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree. No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry with trees. Cicadas cycling through their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kill them. He felt so odd… could he really leave this world behind? Sitting there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and reemerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived— something like a tree. But nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.
And he woke, and was disturbed all the rest of that day.
And then, even worse, he dreamed of John. He dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the other three. Frank left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot D.C. night, summer of 2020. It had been part of his plan for John to make the first landing, he had given it to him as one sacrifices a queen in chess, because that first crew would be fried by the voyage’s radiation, and according to the regs grounded for good on their return. And then the field would be cleared for the next trip out, for the colonists who would stay for good. That was the real game, and that was the one Frank planned to lead.
Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with Martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated.
“Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.”
“Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty-foot dunks easy.”
“Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.”
Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy D.C. summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning—”Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man. Then on to his apartment building, with its bored security team behind the foyer desk, people wasting their whole lives sitting there doing nothing. Upstairs his hands shook so hard that he couldn’t at first get his door open and once inside he stood frozen, horrified at the sight of all the bland executive’s furniture, all of it a theater set, built to impress infrequent visitors, really just NASA and the FBI. None of it his. Nothing his. Nothing but a plan.
And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.
• • •
Eventually he returned from this awful expedition of dreams. Back in the caravan he found it hard to talk. He was invited to Zeyk’s for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself in the company of men. In Zeyk’s rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups of clove-dosed coffee. Unsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history, and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam period. Al-Khal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted that the honor was Frank’s, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to usurp it. Typical insult by over-politeness, the hierarchy again— one could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only went downward. Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah (or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.
Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, “What about your women?”
They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugged. “In Islam men and women have different roles. Just as in the West. It is biological in origin.”
Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight of the past. The pressure on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thinking increased, and something gave, and suddenly he didn’t care about anything and was sick of pretending he did. Sick of all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrid way.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s slavery, isn’t it?”
The men around him stiffened, shocked by the word.
“Isn’t it?” he said, helplessly feeling the words bubble up out of his throat. “Your wives and daughters are powerless, and that is slavery. You may keep them well, and they may be slaves with peculiar and intimate powers over their masters, but the master-slave relationship twists everything to it. So that all these relations are twisted, pressured to the bursting point.”
Zeyk’s nose was wrinkled. “This is not the lived experience of it, I can assure you. You should listen to our poetry.”
“But would your women assure me?”
“Yes,” Zeyk said with perfect confidence.
“Maybe. But look, the most successful women among you are modest and deferent at all times, they are scrupulous in honoring the system. Those are the ones that aid their husbands and sons to rise in the system. So to succeed, they must work to enforce the same system that subjugates them. This is poisonous in its effects. And the cycle repeats itself, generation after generation. Supported by both masters and slaves.”
“The use of the word slaves,” Al-Khal said slowly, and paused. “Is offensive, because it presumes judgment. Judgment of a culture you do not really know.”
“True. I only tell you what it looks like from the outside. This can only be of interest to a progressive Moslem. Is this the divine pattern you are struggling to actualize in history? The laws are there to read, and to watch
in action, and to me it looks like a form of slavery. And, you know, we fought wars to end slavery. And we excluded South Africa from the community of nations for arranging its laws so that the blacks could never live as well as the whites. But you do this all the time. If any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the U.N. would ostracize that nation. But because it is a matter of women, the men in power look away. They say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be interfered with. Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere.”
“Or not even an exaggeration,” Zeyk suggested. “A variation.”
“No, it is an exaggeration. Western women choose much of what they do, they have their lives to live. Not so among you. But no human submits to being property, they hate it, and subvert it, and have what revenge they can against it. That’s how humans are. And in this case it is your mother, your wife, your sisters, your daughters.”
Now the men were glaring at him, still more shocked than offended; but Frank stared at his coffee cup, and went on regardless. “You must free your women.”
“How do you suggest we do this?” Zeyk said, looking at him curiously.
“Change your laws! Educate them in the same schools your sons go to. Make them the equal in rights to any Moslem of any kind anywhere. Remember, there is much in your laws that is not in the Koran, but was added in the time since Mohammed.”
“Added by holy men,” Al-Khal said angrily.
“Certainly. But we choose the ways we enforce our religious beliefs in the behavior of daily life. This is true of all cultures. And we can choose new ways. You must free your women.”
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