Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  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 harassed 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,” 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 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 passed 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,

  Died from the plant, took a sentient frame;

  Died from the beast, donned a human dress—

  When 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 passed 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, worshipping the sun, Ahura Mazda. They consider the soletta to be religious art, like a stained glass 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 glass,” 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 shimmering 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 latitude 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 assault 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 Argéntea. 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.

  Nobody 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 friendship, but after their years in Sabishii 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, Nazik, who came out to join them. Zeyk and Nazik 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 countnes 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 leadership, 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 assessment, 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 Nazik 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?”

  The three old ones thought it over.

  Slowly Zeyk said, “He was an angry man. He listened to Arabs, though, and respected us. He lived with us for a time and learned our language, and truthfully there are few Americans who have ever done that. And so we loved him. But he was no very easy man to know. And he was angry. I don’t know why. Something in his years on Earth, I suppose. He never spoke of them. In fact he never spoke about himself at all. But there was a gyroscope in him, spinning like a pulsar. And he had black moods. Very black. We sent him out in scouting rovers, to see if he could help himself. It didn’t always work. He would rip us from time to time, even though he was our guest.” Zeyk smiled, remembering. “Once he called us all slaveowners, right to our faces over coffee.”

  “Slaveowners?”

  Zeyk waved a hand. “He was angry.”

  “He saved us, there at the end,” Nadia told Zeyk, stirring from deep in her own thoughts. “In sixty-one.” She told them of a long drive down Valles Marineris, accomplished at the very same time that the Compton Aquifer outbreak was flooding the great canyon; and how when they were almost clear of it, the flood had caught Frank and swept him away. “He was out getting the car off a rock, and if he hadn’t acted so quickly, the whole car would have gone.”

  “Ah,” said Zeyk. “A happy death.”

  “I don’t think he thought so.”

  The issei all laughed, briefly, then reached together for their empty cups, and made a small toast to their late friend, “I miss him,” Nadia said as she put her cup down. “I never thought I would say that.”

  She went silent, and watching her Nirgal felt the night cosseting them, hiding them. He had never heard her speak of Frank Chalmers. A lot of her friends had died in the revolt. And her partner too, Bogdanov, whom so many people still followed.

  “Angry to the last,” Zeyk said. “For Frank, a happy death.”

  From Lyell they continued counterclockwise around the South Pole, stopping at sanctuaries or tent towns, and exchanging news and goods. Christianopolis was the largest tent town in the region, center of trade for all the smaller settlements south of Argyre. The sanctuaries in the area were mostly occupied by Reds. Nadia asked all the Reds they met to convey news of the congress to Ann Clay-borne. “We’re supposed to have a phone link, but she’s not answering me.” A lot of the Reds clearly thought a meeting was a bad idea, or at least a waste of time. South of Schmidt Crater they stopped at a settlement of Bologna communists who lived in a hollowed-out hill, lost in one of the wildest zones of the southern highlands, a region very hard to travel in because of the many wandering scarps and dikes, which rovers could not negotiate. The Bolognese gave them a map marking some tunnels and elevators they had installed in the area, to allow passage through dikes, and up or down scarps. “If we didn’t have them our trips would be nothing but detours.”

  Located next to one of their hidden dike tunnels was a small colony of Polynesians, living in a short lava tunnel, which they had floored with water and three islands. The dike was piled high with ice and snow on its southern flank, but the Polynesians, most of whom were from the island of Vanuatu, kept the interior of their refuge at homey temperatures, and Nirgal found the air so hot and humid that it was hard to breathe, even when just sitting on a sand beach, between a black lake and a line of tilting palm trees. Clearly, he thought as he looked around, the Polynesians could be counted among those trying to build a culture incorporati
ng some aspects of their archaic ancestors. They also proved to be scholars of primitive government everywhere in Earth’s history, and they were excited at the idea of sharing what they had learned in these studies at the congress, so it was no problem getting them to agree to come.

  To celebrate the idea of the congress they had gathered for a feast on the beach. Art, seated between Jackie and a Polynesian beauty named Tanna, beamed blissfully as he sipped from a half coconut shell filled with kava. Nirgal lay stretched out on the sand before them, listening as Jackie and Tanna talked animatedly about the indigenous movement, as Tanna called it. This was not any simple back-to-the-past nostalgia, she said, but rather an attempt to invent new cultures, which incorporated aspects of early civilizations into high-tech Martian forms. “The underground itself is a kind of Polynesia,” Tanna said. “Little islands in a great stone ocean, some on the maps, some not. And someday it will be a real ocean, and well be out on the islands, flourishing under the sky.”