“Yes,” Nirgal said, and tried to nod.
They were in a complex of raw new buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed flower petals. People everywhere, almost all in Carnival costume. The singe of the sun in his eyes wouldn’t go away. He was led to a wooden dais, above a throng of people cheering madly.
A beautiful black-haired woman in a green sari, with a white sash belting it, introduced the four Martians to the crowd. The hills behind bent like green flames in a strong western wind; it was cooler than before, and less smelly. Maya stood before the microphones and cameras, and the years fell away from her; she spoke crisp isolated sentences that were cheered antiphonally, call and response, call and response. A media star with the whole world watching, comfortably charismatic, laying out what sounded to Nirgal like her speech in Burroughs at the crux point of the revolution, when she had rallied and focused the crowd in Princess Park. Something like that.
Michel and Sax declined to speak, they waved Nirgal up there to face the crowd and the green hills holding them up to the sun. For a time as he stood there he could not hear himself think. White noise of cheers, thick sound in the thicker air.
“Mars is a mirror,” he said in the microphone, “in which Terra sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through and through. And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran thought and Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals or new genetic strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus in our small way we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles on the brink of becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”
Loud cheers.
“That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway— a long evolution through the centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they understand better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we have seen that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for giving, in a culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of all, working together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most free. No hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the greater we become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great flood, we see the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the two worlds at once.”
• • •
He sat in a blaze of noise. Then the speeches were over and they had shifted into some kind of public press conference, responding to questions asked by the beautiful woman in the green sari. Nirgal responded with questions of his own, asking her about the new compound of buildings surrounding them, and about the situation on the island; and she answered over a chatter of commentary and laughter from the appreciative crowd, still looking on from behind the wall of reporters and cameras. The woman turned out to be the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The little two-island nation had been unwillingly dominated by the metanat Armscor for most of the previous century, the woman explained, and only since the flood had they severed that association, “and every colonial bond at last.” How the crowd cheered! And her smile, so full of a whole society’s pleasure. She was dugla, he saw, and amazingly beautiful.
The compound they were in, she explained, was one of scores of relief hospitals that had been built on the two islands since the flood. Their construction had been the major project of the islanders in response to their new freedom; they had created relief centers that aided flood victims, giving them all at once housing, work, and medical care, including the longevity treatment.
“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth.
“You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all kinds of problems.”
“Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.”
It was a minute or two before anything more could be heard over the cheering of the crowd. The prime minister was trying to quiet them, but a short man dressed in a fashionable brown suit came out of the group behind the prime minister and proclaimed into the mike, to an uproar of cheers at every sentence, “This Marsman Nirgal is a son of Trinidad! His papa, Desmond Hawkins the Stowaway, the Coyote of Mars, is from Port of Spain, and he still has a lot of people there! That Armscor bought the oil company and they tried to buy the island too, but they picked the wrong island to try! Your Coyote didn’t get his spirit from out of the air, Maestro Nirgal, he got it from T and T! He’s been wandering around up there teaching everyone the T and T way, and they’re all up there dugla anyway, they understand the dugla way, and they have taken over all Mars with it! Mars is one great big Trinidad Tobago!”