Green Mars(168)
“Whatever!” Art said, splashing them. “Velvet revolution. Silk revolution.”
“Aerogel,” Sax said. “Light, strong. Invisible.”
“It’s worth a try!” Art said.
Ann shook her head. “It will never work.”
“It’s better than another sixty-one,” Nadia said.
Sax said, “Better if we agree on a play. On a plan.”
“But we can’t,” Maya said.
“The front is broad,” Art insisted. “Let’s go out there and do what we’re comfortable with.”
Sax and Nadia and Maya all shook their heads at once; seeing it, Ann unexpectedly laughed out loud. And then they were all sitting in the pond together, giggling at they knew not what.
• • •
The final general meeting took place in the late afternoon, in the Zakros park where it had all begun. It had a strangely confused air, Nadia felt, with most people only grudgingly satisfied with the Dorsia Brevia Declaration, now several times longer than Art and Nirgal’s original draft. Each point was read aloud by Priska, and each was cheered in a consensual vote of approval; but different groups cheered more loudly for some points than for others, and when the reading was done, the general applause was brief and perfunctory. No one could be happy with that, and Art and Nirgal looked exhausted.
The applause ended, and for a moment everyone just sat there. No one knew what to do next; the lack of agreement on the matter of methods seem to extend right into that very moment. What next? What now? Did they just go home? Did they have a home? The moment stretched out, uncomfortable, even vaguely painful (how they needed John!), so that Nadia was relieved when someone shouted something— an exclamation that seemed to break a malign spell. She looked around as people pointed.
There on a staircase, high on the black tunnel wall, stood a green woman. She was unclothed, green-skinned, glowing in a shaft of afternoon sun that shot down from a skylight— gray-haired, barefoot, without jewelry— completely naked, except for a coat of green paint. And what was common at night in the pond was, in this vivid daylight, dangerous and provocative— a shock to the senses, a challenge to their notion of what a political congress was, or could be.
It was Hiroko. She began to step down the staircase, in a steady measured pace. Ariadne and Charlotte and several other Minoan women stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her, along with Hiroko’s closest followers from the hidden colony— Iwao, Rya, Evgenia, Michel, all the rest of that little band. As Hiroko descended they started to sing. When she reached them, they draped her with strings of bright red flowers. A fertility rite, Nadia thought, reaching directly into some paleolithic part of their minds, and intermingling there with Hiroko’s areophany.
When Hiroko left the foot of the stairs she had a little train of followers, singing the names of Mars, “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram,” and so on, a great mélange of archaic syllables, into which some of them were interjecting “Ka . . . ka . . . ka . . .”
She led them down the path, through trees, out again onto the grass, into the meeting in the park. She walked right through the middle of the crowd, with a solemn, distant expression on her green face. Many stood as she passed. Jackie Boone came out of the crowd and joined the group of followers, and her green grandmother took her by the hand. The two of them led the way through the crowd, the old matriarch tall, proud, thoroughly ancient, gnarled like a tree, and as green as a tree’s leaves; Jackie taller still, young and graceful as a dancer, her black hair flowing halfway down her back. A rustle went through the crowd, a sigh; and as the two and the group following them walked down to the central path by the canal, people stood and followed, the Sufis among them dancing a braid around their circumference. “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira . . .” And so a thousand people walked down the canal path after the two women and their train, the Sufis singing, others chanting pieces of Hiroko’s areophany, the rest content to follow.
Nadia walked along holding hands with Nirgal and Art, feeling happy. They were animals, after all, no matter where they chose to live. She felt something like worship, an emotion very rare in her experience— worship for the divinity of life, which took such beautiful forms.
At the pond Jackie took off her rust jumper, and she and Hiroko stood in ankle-deep water, facing each other and holding their clasped hands as far overhead as they could reach. The other Minoan women joined this bridge. Old and young, green and pink. . . .
The hidden colonists passed under the bridge first, among them Maya herself, hand in hand with Michel. And then all kinds of people were filing under the mother bridge, in what felt like the millionth repetition of a million-year-old ritual, something everyone had coded in their genes and had practiced all their life. The Sufis danced under the clasped hands still wearing their white billowing clothes, and this gave a model to others, who stayed clothed but surged right out into the water, ducking under the naked women, Zeyk and Nazik leading the way, chanting, “Ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq,” looking like Hindus in the Ganges, or Baptists in the Jordan. So that in the end many shed their clothes, but all walked into the water. And they stared around at this instinctive and yet highly conscious rebirth, many drumming on the water surface, making rhythmic slapping splashes to accompany the singing and chanting. . . . Nadia saw again and again how beautiful humans were. Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality. They stood before each other with all their imperfections and their sexual characteristics and their intimations of mortality— but most of all with their astonishing beauty, which in the ruddy light of the tunnel sunset could scarcely be believed, could scarcely be comprehended or answered. Skin at sunset had a lot of red in it— but not enough for some of the Reds, apparently, who were sponging one of their women down with a red dye they had located, to make a counter figure to Hiroko, apparently. Political bathing! Nadia groaned. Actually all the colors were coming off in the pond, turning the water brown.