If the mistral hadn"t been blowing he might have cried, for nothing looked the same, nothing. He came into a Ma.r.s.eilles train station that hadn"t existed when he left, next to a little new town that hadn"t existed when he left, and all of it built according to a dripping bulbous Gaudi architecture which also had a kind of Bogdanovist circularity to it, so that Michel was reminded of Christianopolis or Hiranyagarba, if they had melted. No, nothing looked familiar in the slightest. The land was strangely flattened, green, deprived of its rock, deprived of that je ne sais quoi je ne sais quoi that had made it Provence. He had been gone 102 years. that had made it Provence. He had been gone 102 years.
But blowing over all this unfamiliar landscape was the mistral, pouring down off the Ma.s.sif Centrale- cold, dry, musty and electric, flushed with negative ions or whatever it was that gave it its characteristic katabatic exhilaration. The mistral! No matter what it looked like, it had to be Provence.
Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation franglaisation and and frarabisation frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to. A young woman leading the Praxis aides seemed to be saying that they could take a drive around and see the region, go down to the new coast and so on. he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to. A young woman leading the Praxis aides seemed to be saying that they could take a drive around and see the region, go down to the new coast and so on.
"Fine," Michel said.
Already he was understanding them better. It was possibly just a matter of Provencal accents. He followed them around through the concentric circles of the buildings, then out into a parking lot like all other parking lots. The young woman aide helped him into the pa.s.senger seat of a little car, then she got in on the other side, behind the steering wheel. Her name was Sylvie; she was small, attractive, stylish, and smelled nice, so that her strange French continuously surprised Michel. She started the car and drove them out of the airport. And then they were running noisily over a black road across a flat landscape, green with gra.s.s and trees. No, there were some hills in the distance; so small! And the horizon so far away!
Sylvie drove to the nearest coast. From a hilltop turnout they could see far over the Mediterranean, on this day mottled brown and gray, gleaming in the sun.
After a few minutes" silent observation, Sylvie drove on, cutting inland over flat land again. Then they were stopped on a levee, and looking over the Camargue, she said. Michel would not have recognized it. The delta of the Rhone River had been a broad triangular fan of many thousands of hectares, filled by salt marshes and gra.s.s; now it was part of the Mediterranean again. The water was brown, and dotted with buildings, but it was water nevertheless, the flow of the Rhone a bluish line out there crossing the middle of it. Arles, Sylvie said, up at the tip of the fan, was a functioning seaport again. Although they were still securing the channel. Everything in the delta south of Arles, Sylvie said proudly, from Martiques in the east to Aigue-Mortes in the west, was covered by water. Aigues-Mortes was dead indeed, its industrial buildings drowned. Its port facilities, Sylvie said, were being floated and moved to Arles, or Ma.r.s.eilles. They were working hard to make safe navigational routes for ships; both the Carmargue and the Plaine de la Crau, farther east, had been littered with structures of all kinds, many still sticking out of the water, but not all; and the water was too opaque with silt to see into. "See, there"s the rail station- you can see the graineries, but not the out-buildings. And there"s one of the levee-banked ca.n.a.ls. The levees are like reefs now. See the line of gray water? The levees are still breaking, when the current from the Rhone runs over them."
"Lucky the tides aren"t big," Michel said.
"True. If they were it would be too treacherous for ships to reach Arles."
In the Mediterranean tides were negligible, and fishermen and coastal freighters were discovering day by day what could be safely negotiated; attempts were being made to resecure the Rhone"s main channel through the new lagoon, and to reestablish the flanking ca.n.a.ls as well, so that boats wouldn"t have to challenge the flow of the Rhone when returning upstream. Sylvie pointed out at features Michel couldn"t see, and told him of sudden shifts of the Rhone"s channel, of ships" groundings, loose buoys, ripped hulls, rescues by night, oil spills, confusing new lighthouses- false lighthouses, set by moonlighters for the unwary- even ordinary piracy on the high seas. Life sounded exciting at the new mouth of the Rhone.
After a while they got back in the little car, and Sylvie drove them south and east, until they hit the coast, the true coast, between Ma.r.s.eilles and Ca.s.sis. This part of the Mediterranean littoral, like the Cote d"Azur farther east, consisted of a range of steep hills dropping abruptly into the sea. The hills still stood well above the water, of course, and at first glance it seemed to Michel that this section of the coast had changed much less than the drowned Camargue. But after a few minutes of silent observation, he changed his mind. The Camargue had always been a delta, and now it was a delta still, and so nothing essential had changed. Here, however: "The beaches are gone."
"Yes."
It was only to be expected. But the beaches had been the essence of this coast, the beaches with their long tawny summers all jammed with sun-worshiping naked human animals, with swimmers and sailboats and carnival colors, and long warm thrilling nights. All that had vanished. "They"ll never come back."
Sylvie nodded. "It"s the same everywhere," she said matter-of-factly.
Michel looked eastward; hills dropped into the brown sea all the way to a distant horizon; it looked like he might be seeing as far as Cap Sicie. Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own little Villefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach resorts in between, big and small, all drowned like the stretch under them: the sea mud brown, lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow trees, with the beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing up into the streets of deserted towns.
Green trees above the new sealine tossed over whitish rock. Michel had not remembered how white the rock was. The foliage was low and dusty, deforestation had been a problem in recent years, Sylvie said, as people had cut trees for firewood. But Michel barely heard her; he was staring down at the drowned beaches, trying to recall their sandy hot erotic beauty. Gone. And he found, as he stared at the dirty surf, that in his mind he couldn"t remember them very well- nor his days on them, the many lazy days now blurs, as of a dead friend"s face. He couldn"t remember.
Ma.r.s.eilles however had of course survived- the only part of the coast one could not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its docks were inundated, and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the land rose quickly here, and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their tough sordid existence, big ships still anch.o.r.ed in the harbor, long floating docks maneuvered out to them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded the town and went mad in time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Ma.r.s.eilles was where she had heard most of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth of the Rhone and elsewhere around the Med, where the charts meant nothing anymore: houses of the dead between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs... "Ma.r.s.eilles is more itself than it has been for centuries," she said, and grinned, and Michel got a sudden sense of her nightlife, wild and perhaps a bit dangerous. She liked Ma.r.s.eilles. The car lurched in one of the road"s many potholes and it felt like his pulse, he and the mistral rushing around ugly old Ma.r.s.eilles, stricken by the thought of a wild young woman.
More itself than it had been for centuries. Perhaps that was true of the entire coast. There were no tourists anymore; with the beaches gone, the whole concept of tourism had taken a knife to the heart. The big pastel hotels and apartment buildings now stood in the surf half-drowned, like children"s blocks left at low tide. As they drove out of Ma.r.s.eilles, Michel noted that many of these buildings appeared to have been reoccupied in their upper stories, by fishermen Sylvie said; no doubt they kept their boats in rooms downstairs, like the Lake People of prehistoric Europe. The old ways, returning.
So Michel kept looking out the window, trying to rethink the new Provence, doing his best to deal with the shock of so much change. Certainly it was all very interesting, even if it was not as he remembered it. New beaches would eventually form, he rea.s.sured himself, as the waves cut away at the foots of sea cliffs, and the charged rivers and streams carried soil downstream. It was possible they might even appear fairly quickly, although they would be dirt or stones, at first. That tawny sand- well, currents might bring some of the drowned sand up onto the new strand, who knew? But surely most of it was gone for good.
Sylvie brought the car to another windy turnout overlooking the sea. It was brown right to the horizon, the offsh.o.r.e wind causing them to be looking at the back sides of waves moving away from the strand, an odd effect. Michel tried to recall the old sun-beaten blue. There had been varieties of Mediterranean blue, the clear purity of the Adriatic, the Aegean with its Homeric touch of wine... now all brown. Brown sea, beachless sea cliffs, the pale hills rocky, desertlike, deserted. A wasteland. No, nothing was the same, nothing.
Eventually Sylvie noticed his silence. She drove him west to Arles, to a small hotel in the heart of the town. Michel had never lived in Arles, or had much to do there, but there were Praxis offices next to this hotel, and he had no other compelling idea concerning where to stay. They got out; the g felt heavy. Sylvie waited downstairs while he took his bag up; and there he was, standing uncertainly in a small hotel room, his bag thrown on the bed, his body tense with the desire to find his land, to return to his home. This wasn"t it.
He went downstairs and then next door, where Sylvie was tending to other business.
"I have a place I want to see," he said to her.
"Anywhere you like."
"It"s near Vallabrix. North of Uzes."
She said she knew where that was.
It was late afternoon by the time they reached the place: a clearing by the side of a narrow old road, next to an olive grove on a slope, with the mistral raking over it. Michel asked Sylvie to stay at the car, and got out in the wind and walked up the slope between the trees, alone with the past.
His old mas mas had been set at the north end of the grove, on the edge of a tableland overlooking a ravine. The olive trees were gnarled with age. The had been set at the north end of the grove, on the edge of a tableland overlooking a ravine. The olive trees were gnarled with age. The mas mas itself was nothing but a sh.e.l.l of masonry, almost buried under long tangled th.o.r.n.y blackberry vines growing against the outer walls. itself was nothing but a sh.e.l.l of masonry, almost buried under long tangled th.o.r.n.y blackberry vines growing against the outer walls.
Looking down into the ruin, Michel found he could just remember its interior. Or parts of it. There had been a kitchen and dining table near the door, and then, after pa.s.sing under a ma.s.sive roof beam, a living room with couches and a low coffee table, and a door back to the bedroom. He had lived there for two or three years, with a woman named Eve. He hadn"t thought of the place in over a century. He would have said it was all gone from his mind. But with the ruins before him, fragments of that time leaped to the eye, ruins of another kind: a blue lamp had stood in that corner now filled with broken plaster. A Van Gogh print had been tacked to that wall, where now there was only blocks of masonry, roof tiles, drifts of leaves. The ma.s.sive roof beam was gone, its supports in the walls gone as well. Someone must have hauled it out; hard to believe anyone would make the effort, it had to have weighed hundreds of kilos. Strange what people would do. Then again, deforestation; there were few trees left big enough to provide a beam that large. The centuries people had lived on this land.
Eventually deforestation might cease to be a problem. During the drive Sylvie had spoken of the violent flood winter, rains, wind; this mistral had lasted a month. Some said it would never end. Looking into the ruined house, Michel was not sorry. He needed the wind to orient himself. It was strange how the memory worked, or didn"t. He stepped up onto the broken wall of the mas mas, tried to remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve. Deliberate recall, a hunt for the past.... Instead scenes came to him of the life he had shared with Maya in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two lives had shared enough aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been hot-tempered like Maya, and as for the rest, la vie quotidienne la vie quotidienne was was la vie quotidienne la vie quotidienne, in all times and all places, especially for a specific individual no doubt, settling into his habits as if into furniture, taken along from one place to the next. Perhaps.
The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster, tacked with prints. Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored, like the exterior walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a dancer in a routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her shoulder at him to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he remembered that repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love. Although he had made her angry. Eventually she had left him for someone else, ah yes, a teacher in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to him now, he felt not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make him feel it. They scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening- as if reincarnation were real, and had happened to him, so that he was experiencing minute flashbacks of a life separated from him by several subsequent deaths. How odd it would be if such reincarnation were real, speaking in languages one did not know, like Bridey Murphy; feeling the swirl of the past through the mind, feeling previous existences... well. It would feel just like this, in fact. But to reexperience nothing of those past feelings, to feel nothing except the sensation that one was not feeling....
He left the ruins, and walked back among the old olive trees.
It looked like the grove was still being worked by someone. The branches overhead were all cut to a certain level, and the ground underfoot was smooth and covered by short dry pale gra.s.s, growing between thousands of old gray olive pits. The trees were in ranks and files but looked natural anyway, as if they had simply grown at that distance from each other. The wind blew its lightly percussive shoosh shoosh in the leaves. Standing midgrove, where he could see little but olive trees and sky, he noticed again how the leaves" two colors flashed back and forth in the wind, green then gray, gray then green.... in the leaves. Standing midgrove, where he could see little but olive trees and sky, he noticed again how the leaves" two colors flashed back and forth in the wind, green then gray, gray then green....
He reached up to pull down a twig and inspect the leaves close up. He remembered; up close the two sides of an olive leaf weren"t all that different in color; a flat medium green, a pale khaki. But a hillside full of them, flailing in the wind, had those two distinct colors, in moonlight shifting to black and silver. If one were looking toward the sun at them it became more a matter of texture, flat or shiny.
He walked up to a tree, put his hands on its trunk. It felt like an olive tree"s bark: rough broken rectangles. A gray-green color, somewhat like the undersides of the leaves, but darker, and often covered by yet another green, the yellow green of lichen, yellow green or battleship gray. There were hardly any olive trees on Mars; no Mediterraneans yet. No, it felt like he was on Earth. About ten years old. Carrying that heavy child inside himself. Some of the rectangles of bark were peeling down. The fissures between the rectangles were shallow. The true color of the bark, clean of all lichen, appeared to be a pale woody beige. There was so little of it that it was hard to tell. Trees coated in lichen; Michel had not realized that before. The branches above his head were smoother, the fissures flesh-colored lines only, the lichen smoother as well, like green dust on the branches and twigs.
The roots were big and strong. The trunks spread outward as they approached the ground, spreading in fingerlike protrusions with holes and gaps between, like k.n.o.bby fists thrust into the ground. No mistral would ever uproot these trees. Not even a Martian wind could knock one down.
The ground was covered with old olive pits, and shriveled black olives on the way to becoming pits. He picked up one with its black skin still smooth, ripped away the skin with his thumb and fingernails. The purple juice stained his skin, and when he licked it, the taste was not like cured olives at all. Sour. He bit into the flesh, which resembled plum flesh, and the taste of it, sour and bitter, unolivelike except for a hint of the oily aftertaste, bolted through his mind- like Maya"s deja vu- he had done this before! As a child they had tried it often, always hoping the taste would come round to the table taste, and so give them food in their play field, manna in their own little wilderness. But the olive flesh (paler the further one cut in toward the pit) stubbornly remained as unpalatable as ever- the taste as embedded in his mind as any person, bitter and sour. Now pleasant, because of the memory evoked. Perhaps he had been cured.
The leaves flailed in the gusty north wind. Smell of dust. A haze of brown light, the western sky bra.s.sy. The branches rose to twice or three times his height; the underbranches drooped down where they could brush his face. Human scale. The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks, who had seen so many things so clearly, seen things in their proper proportion, everything in a gauge symmetry to the human scale- the trees, the towns, their whole physical world, the rocky islands in the Aegean, the rocky hills of the Peloponnese- a universe you could walk across in a few days. Perhaps home was the place of human scale, wherever it was. Usually childhood.
Each tree was like an animal holding its plumage up into the wind, its k.n.o.bby legs thrust into the ground. A hillside of plumage flashing under the wind"s onslaught, under its fluctuating gusts and knocks and unexpected stillnesses, all perfectly revealed by the feathering leaves. This was Provence, the heart of Provence; his whole underbrain seemed to be humming at the edge of every moment of his childhood, a vast presque vu presque vu filling him up and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over, a life in a landscape, humming with its own weight and balance. He no longer felt heavy. The sky"s blue itself was a voice from that previous incarnation, saying Provence, Provence. filling him up and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over, a life in a landscape, humming with its own weight and balance. He no longer felt heavy. The sky"s blue itself was a voice from that previous incarnation, saying Provence, Provence.
But out over the ravine a flock of black crows swirled, crying Ka, ka, ka! Ka, ka, ka!
Ka. Who had made up that story, of the little red people and their name for Mars? No way of telling. No beginnings to such stories. In Mediterranean antiquity the Ka had been a weird or double of a pharaoh, pictured as descending on the pharaoh in the form of a hawk or a dove, or a crow.
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 bra.s.s 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 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?" 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 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 pa.s.sage 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.
No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafes eating his meals, feeling as alone as if he were in a solo rover in the far outback of the southern highlands, it was a bit disappointing to be entirely ignored- just one vieux vieux among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than le fleuve blanc le fleuve blanc, if the truth were told....
It was better this way. He could stop in little villages around Vallabrix, like Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, or Saint-Victor-des-Quies, or Saint-Hippolyte-de-Montaigu, and chat with the shopkeepers, who looked identical to the ones who had been running the shops when he had left, and were probably their descendants, or even possibly the same people; they spoke in an older more stable French, careless of him, absorbed in their own conversations, their own lives. He was nothing to them, and so he could see them clearly. It was the same out in the narrow streets, where many people looked like gypsies- North African blood no doubt, spreading into the populace as it had after the Saracen invasion a thousand years before. Africans pouring in every thousand years or so; this too was Provence. The young women were beautiful: gracefully flowing through the streets in gangs, their black tresses still glossy and bright in the dust of the mistral. These had been his villages. Dusty plastic signs, everything tattered and run-down....
Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation, memory and forgetfulness. But ever more lonely. In one cafe he ordered ca.s.sis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in that very same cafe, at that very same table at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the princ.i.p.al agent of involuntary memory, for one"s long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell- and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus the neurological sequence, smell triggering memory triggering nostalgia. Nostalgia, the intense ache for one"s past, desire desire for one"s past- not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had for one"s past- not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been been, and now was gone. He recalled Eve"s face, talking in this crowded room across from him. But not what she had said, or why they were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment, a cactus needle, an image seen as if by lightning bolt, then gone; and no knowing the rest of it, no matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were all like that, his memories; that was what memories were when they got old enough, flashes in the dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes filled with a vague ache.
He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove home, through Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the ruined mas mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.
That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had pa.s.sed here the first time. Flashes, images- a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.
The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they gave him no euphoric connection with lost time; that moment too was past.
In a flickering gray green he drove back to Arles. The clerk in the hotel"s lobby was telling someone that the mistral would never stop. "Yes it will," Michel said as he pa.s.sed.
He went up to his room and called Maya again. Please, he said. Please come soon. It was making him angry that he was reduced to such begging. Soon, she kept saying. A few more days and they would have an agreement hammered out, a bona fide written agreement between the UN and an independent Martian government. History in the making. After that she would see about coming.
Michel did not care about history in the making. He walked around Arles, waiting for her. He went back to his room to wait. He went out to walk again.
The Romans had used Arles for a port as much as they had Ma.r.s.eilles- in fact Caesar had razed Ma.r.s.eilles for backing Pompey, and had given Arles his favor as the local capital. Three strategic Roman roads had been constructed to meet at the town, all used for hundreds of years after the Romans had gone, and so for those centuries it had been lively, prosperous, important. But the Rhone had silted its lagoons, and the Camargue had become a pestilential swamp, and the roads had fallen into disuse. The town dwindled. The Camargue"s windswept salt gra.s.ses and their famous herds of wild white horses were eventually joined by oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical works.
Now with the flood the lagoons were back, and flushing clean. Arles was again a seaport. Michel continued to wait for Maya there precisely because he had never lived there before. It did not remind him of anything but the moment; and he spent his days watching the people of the moment live their lives. In this new foreign country.
He received a call at the hotel, from a Francis Duval. Sylvie had contacted the man. He was Michel"s nephew, Michel"s dead brother"s son, still alive and living on Rue du 4 Septembre, just north of the Roman arena, a few blocks from the swollen Rhone, a few blocks from Michel"s hotel. He invited Michel to come over.
After a moment"s hesitation, Michel agreed. By the time he had walked across town, stopping briefly to peer into the Roman theater and arena, his nephew appeared to have convened the entire quartier: quartier: an instant celebration, champagne corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was pulled in the door and embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks, in the Provensect;al manner. It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him long and hard, talking all the while as people"s camera fibers pointed at them. "You look just like my father!" Francis said. an instant celebration, champagne corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was pulled in the door and embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks, in the Provensect;al manner. It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him long and hard, talking all the while as people"s camera fibers pointed at them. "You look just like my father!" Francis said.
"So do you!" said Michel, trying to remember if it were true or not, trying to remember his brother"s face. Francis was elderly, Michel had never seen his brother that old. It was hard to say.
But all the faces were familiar, somehow, and the language comprehensible, mostly, the phrases sparking image after image in him; the smells of cheese and wine sparking more, the taste of the wine yet more again. Francis it turned out was a connoisseur, and happily he uncorked a number of dusty bottles, Chateauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Chateau d"Yquem, and his speciality, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two each from Chateaux Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild with a label by Pougnadoresse. These aged wonders had metamorphosed over the years into something more than mere wine, tastes thick with overtones and harmonics. They spilled down Michel"s throat like his own youth.
It could have been a party for some popular town politician, say; and though Michel concluded that Francis did not much resemble Michel"s brother, he sounded exactly exactly like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would have said, but it was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way Francis drawled like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would have said, but it was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way Francis drawled "normalement," "normalement," in this case meaning the way things had been before the flood, whereas for Michel"s brother it had meant that hypothetical state of smooth operation that never occurred in the real Provence- but exactly the same lilt and drawl, in this case meaning the way things had been before the flood, whereas for Michel"s brother it had meant that hypothetical state of smooth operation that never occurred in the real Provence- but exactly the same lilt and drawl, nor-malement nor-malement....
Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and so he stood with a gla.s.s in his hand and gave a quick speech in the style of a town politician, complimenting the women on their beauty, managing to make it clear how pleased he was to be in their company without getting sentimental, or revealing just how disoriented he was feeling: a slick competent performance, which was just what the sophisticates of Provence liked, their rhetoric quick and humorous like the local bullfighting. "And how is Mars? What is it like? What will you do now? Are there Jacobins yet?"
"Mars is Mars," Michel said, dismissing it. "The ground is the color of Arlesian roof tiles. You know."
They partied right through the afternoon, and then called in a feast. Innumerable women kissed his cheeks, he was drunk on their perfume and skin and hair, their smiling liquid dark eyes, looking at him with friendly curiosity. Native Martian girls one always had to look up to, inspecting their chins and necks and the insides of their nostrils. Such a pleasure to look down on a straight part in glossy black hair.
In the late evening people dispersed. Francis walked with Michel over to the Roman arena, and they climbed the bowed stone steps of the medieval towers that had fortified the arena. From the little stone chamber at the top of the stairs they looked out small windows at the tile roofs, and the treeless streets, and the Rhone. Out the south windows they could see a portion of the speckled sheet of water which was the Camargue.
"Back on the Med," Francis said, deeply satisfied. "The flood may have been a disaster for most places, but for Arles it has been a veritable coup. The rice farmers are all coming into town ready to fish, or take any work they can get. And many of the boats that survived have been docked right here in town. They"ve been bringing fruit in from Corsica and Mallorca, trade with Barcelona and Sicily. We"ve taken a good bit of Ma.r.s.eilles"s business, although they"re recovering quickly, it has to be said. But what life has come back! Before, you know, Aix had the university, Ma.r.s.eilles had the sea, and we had only these ruins, and the tourists who came for a day to see them. And tourism is an ugly business, it"s not fit work for human beings. It"s hosting parasites. But now we"re living again!" He was a little bit drunk. "Here, you must come out on the boat with me and see the lagoon."
"I"d like that."
That night Michel called Maya again. "You must come. I"ve found my nephew, my family."
Maya wasn"t impressed. "Nirgal went to England looking for Hiroko," she said sharply. "Someone told him she was there, and he left just like that."
"What"s this?" Michel exclaimed, shocked by the sudden intrusion of the idea of Hiroko.
"Oh Michel. You know it can"t be true. Someone said it to Nirgal, that"s all it was. It can"t be true, but he ran right off."
"As would I!"
"Please, Michel, don"t be stupid. One fool is enough. If Hiroko is alive at all, then she"s on Mars. Someone just said this to Nirgal to get him away from the negotiations. I only hope it was for nothing worse. He was having too much of an effect on people. And he wasn"t watching his tongue. You should call him and tell him to come back. Maybe he would listen to you."
"I wouldn"t if I were him."
Michel was lost in thought, trying to crush the sudden hope that Hiroko was alive. And in England of all places. Alive anywhere. Hiroko and therefore Iwao, Gene, Rya- the whole group- his family. His real family. He shuddered, hard; and when he tried to tell the impatient Maya about his family in Arles, the words stuck in his throat. His real family had all disappeared four years before, and that was the truth. Finally, sick at heart, he could only say, "Please, Maya. Please come."
"Soon. I"ve told Sax I"ll go as soon as we"re finished here. That will leave all the rest of it to him, and he can barely talk. It"s ridiculous." She was exaggerating, they had a full diplomatic team there, and Sax was perfectly competent, in his way. "But okay, okay, I"m going to do it. So stop pestering me."