Blue Mars

  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, 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 was 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 Uzès. 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 grass, 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 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 knobby 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 déjà 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 brassy. 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 knobby 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 filling him up and brimming 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. 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 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.

  No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafés 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 among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than 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 café he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in that very same café, at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal 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 for one’s past— not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had 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 café from his past to his car, and drove home, through Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the ruined 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 passed 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 passed.

  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 t
o his room to wait. He went out to walk again.

  • • •

  The Romans had used Arles for a port as much as they had Marseilles— in fact Caesar had razed Marseilles 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 grasses 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.