Red Mars (59 page)

The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the Great Escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.

While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose, so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.

All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside. When they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.

The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to the north. In his days of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by: silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itself. Days would pass, and the shadows wheel. The winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afternoons. Clouds stacked the sky, from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud 20,000 meters high.

Occasionally he would turn on the TV and watch the Arabic news channel. Sometimes in the silence of the mornings he would talk back to the TV. There was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of the media, and of the events they packaged. The stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle. Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mob. Back there the Terran past still lived on in enormous regions, where village life was plodding on as it always had. Maybe that was wisdom, held to by old wives and shamans. Maybe. But it was hard to believe, because look what happened when they gathered in cities. Idiots on video, history in the making. “One can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great boon.” These things made him laugh. “Haven’t you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!”

One night he watched a report on the fertilization of the Antarctic Ocean with iron dust, which was to act as a dietary supplement to phytoplankton, a population that was shrinking at an alarming rate for no obvious reason. The iron dust was dumped out of planes, it looked like they were fighting some kind of submarine fire. The project would cost ten billion dollars a year, and would have to be continued in perpetuity, but it had been calculated that a century’s worth of fertilization would reduce the global concentration of carbon dioxide by 15 percent plus or minus 10 percent, and given the ongoing warming and subsequent threat to the coastal cities, not to mention the death of most of the world’s coral reefs, the project had been judged worth it. “Ann’s going to love this,” Frank muttered. “Now they’re terraforming Earth.”

Each vocal outburst he made untied a knot in his chest. He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies. No friend or enemy would ever know what he did here, he could do whatever he liked and normalcy be damned. Apparently this was what he had been craving, what he had instinctively sought. He could go out and kick stones down the side of a karst for a whole afternoon; or cry; or write aphorisms in the sand; or scream abuse at the moons, careening across the southern sky. He could talk back to himself over meals, he could talk back to the TV, he could have conversations with his parents or his lost friends, with the President, or John, or Maya. He could dictate long rambling entries into his lectern: bits of a sociobiological history of the world, a journal, a philosophical treatise, a pornographic novel (he could masturbate), an analysis of the Arab culture and their history. He did all these things, and when he and his prospector rolled back to the caravans, he would feel better: emptier, calmer. More truly hollow. “Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”

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.