Now the Ka of Mars was descending on him, here in Provence. Black crows— on Mars under the clear tents these same birds flew, just as carelessly powerful in the aerators’ blasts as in the mistral. They didn’t care that they were on Mars, it was home to them, their world as much as any other, and the people below what they always had been, dangerous ground animals who would kill you or take you on strange voyages. But no bird on Mars remembered the voyage there, or Earth either. Nothing bridged the two worlds but the human mind. The birds only flew and searched for food, and cawed, on Earth or Mars, as they always had and always would. They were at home anywhere, wheeling in the hard gusts of the wind, coping with the mistral and calling to each other Mars, Mars, Mars! But Michel Duval, ah, Michel— a mind residing in two worlds at once, or lost in the nowhere between them. The noosphere was so huge. Where was he, who was he? How was he to live?
Olive grove. Wind. Bright sun in a brass sky. The weight of his body, the sour taste in his mouth: he felt himself root right into the ground. This was his home, this and no other. It had changed and yet it would never change— not this grove, not he himself. Home at last. Home at last. He could live on Mars for ten thousand years and still this place would be his home.
Back in the hotel room in Arles, he called up Maya. “Please come down, Maya. I want you to see this.”“I’m working on the agreement, Michel. The UN-Mars agreement.”
“I know.”
“It’s important!”
“I know.”
“Well. It’s why I came here, and I’m part of it, in the middle of it. I can’t just go off on vacation.”
“Okay, okay. But look, that work will never end. Politics will never end. You can take a vacation, and then come back to it, and it will still be going. But this— this is my home, Maya. I want you to see it. Don’t you want to show me Moscow, don’t you want to go there?”
“Not if it was the last place above the flood.”
Michel sighed. “Well, it’s different for me. Please, come see what I mean.”
“Maybe in a while, when we’ve finished this stage of the negotiations. This is a critical time, Michel! Really it’s you who ought to be here, not me who ought to be there.”
“I can watch on the wrist. There’s no reason to be there in person. Please, Maya.”
She paused, caught finally by something in his tone of voice. “Okay, I’ll try. It won’t be for a while though, no matter what.”
“As long as you come.”
• • •
After that he spent his days waiting for Maya, though he tried not to think of it like that. He occupied every waking moment traveling about in a rented car, sometimes with Sylvie, sometimes on his own. Despite the evocative moment in the olive grove, perhaps because of it too, he felt deeply dislocated. He was drawn to the new coastline for some reason, fascinated by the adjustment to the new sea level that the local people were making. He drove down to it often, following back roads that led to abrupt cliffs, to sudden valley marshes. Many of the coastal fishing people had Algerian ancestry. The fishing wasn’t going well, they said. The Camargue was polluted by drowned industrial sites, and in the Med the fish were for the most part staying outside the brown water, out in the blue which was a good morning’s voyage away, with many dangers en route.
Hearing and speaking French, even this strange new French, was like touching an electrode to parts of his brain that hadn’t been visited in over a century. Coelacanths exploded regularly: memories of women’s kindnesses to him, his cruelties to them. Perhaps that was why he had gone to Mars— to escape himself, an unpleasant fellow it seemed.
Well, if escaping himself had been his desire, he had succeeded. Now he was someone else. And a helpful man, a sympathetic man; he could look in a mirror. He could return home and face it, face what he had been, because of what he had become. Mars had done that, anyway.
It was so strange how the memory worked. The fragments were so small and sharp, they were like those furry minute cactus needles that hurt far out of proportion to their minuscule size. What he remembered best was his life on Mars. Odessa, Burroughs, the underground shelters in the south, the hidden outposts in the chaos. Even Underhill.
If he had returned to Earth during the Underhill years, he would have been swamped with media crowds. But he had been out of contact since disappearing with Hiroko, and though he had not attempted to conceal himself since the revolution, few in France seemed to have noticed his reappearance. The enormity of recent events on Earth had included a partial fracturing of the media culture— or perhaps it was simply the passage of time; most of the population of France had been born after his disappearance, and the First Hundred were ancient history to them— not ancient enough, however, to be truly interesting. If Voltaire or Louis XIV or Charlemagne had appeared, there might be a bit of attention— perhaps— but a psychologist of the previous century who had emigrated to Mars, which was a sort of America when all was said and done? No, that was of very little interest to anyone. He got some calls, some people came by the Arlesian hotel to interview him down in the lobby or the courtyard, and after that one or two of the Paris shows came down as well; but they all were much more interested in what he could tell them about Nirgal than in anything about he himself. Nirgal was the one people were fascinated by, he was their charismatic.