Kim Stanley Robinson - The Complete Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

Often Zeyk’s invitations would come in the afternoon, when a group of men would convene in his rover for coffee and talk. Frank would sit in his spot near Zeyk, and sip his muddy coffee and listen to the Arabic with all the attention he could muster. It was a beautiful language, musical and intensely metaphoric, so that all their modern technical terminology resonated with desert imagery because of the root meanings of all the new words, which like most of their abstract terms had concrete physical origins. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, and this showed in many unexpected cognates with English, and in the organic and compact nature of the vocabulary.

The conversations ran all over, but they were guided by Zeyk and the other elders, who were deferred to by the younger men in a way Frank found incredible. Many times the conversation became an overt lesson for Frank on Bedouin ways, which allowed him to nod and ask questions, and occasionally to offer comments or criticism. “When you have a strong conservative streak in your society,” Zeyk would say, “which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.”

“Or like Beirut,” said Frank innocently.

“No, no.” Zeyk smiled. “Beirut was much more complex than that. It was not only civil war, but also had a number of exterior wars impinging on it. It was not a matter of social or religious conservatives detaching from the normal progress of culture, as in Colombia or the Spanish Civil War.”

“Spoken like a true progressive.”

“All Qahiran Mahjaris are progressive by definition, or we would not be here. But Islam has avoided civil war by remaining a whole: we have a coherent culture, so that the Arabs here are still devout. This is understood even by the most conservative elements back home. We will never have civil war, because we are united by our faith.”

Frank let his expression alone speak the fact of the Shiite heresy, among many other Islamic “civil wars”. Zeyk understood the expression, but ignored it and forged on: “We all move together through history, one loose caravan. You could say that we here on Al-Qahira are like one of our prospecting rovers. And you know what a pleasure it is to be in one of those.”

“So…” Frank thought hard about how to word his question; his inexperience with Arabic would only give him a certain amount of leeway before they got offended. “Is there really the idea of social progress in Islam?”

“Oh, certainly!” Several of them had replied in the affirmative, and were nodding still. Zeyk said, “Don’t you think so?”

“Well…” Frank let it pass. There still was not a single Arab democracy. It was a hierarchical culture with a premium put on honor and freedom; and for the many who were low down in the hierarchy, honor and freedom were only achievable by deference. Which reinforced the system and held it static. But what could he say?

“The destruction of Beirut was a disaster for progressive Arab culture,” another man said. “It was the city where intellectuals and artists and radicals went when they were attacked by their local governments. The national governments all hated the pan-Arab ideal, but the fact is we speak one language across these several countries, and language is a powerful unifier of culture. Along with Islam it makes us one, really, despite the political borders. Beirut was always the place to affirm that position, and when the Israelis destroyed it, that affirmation became more difficult. The destruction was calculated to splinter us, and it did. So here we begin the work again.”

And that was their social progress.

The stratiform copper deposit that they had been raking up ran dry and it was time for another ráhla, the movement of the hejra to the next site. They traveled for two days, and arrived at another stratiform deposit that Frank had found. Frank went out again on another prospecting trip.

For days he sat in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash, watching the land roll by. They were in a region of thulleya or little ribs, parallel ridges running downslope. He never turned on the TV anymore; there was a lot to think about. “The Arabs don’t believe in original sin,” he wrote in his lectern. “They believe that man is innocent, and death natural. That we do not need a saviour. There is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it is lived. It is a humanist correction of Judaism and Christianity, in that sense. Although in another sense they have always refused to take responsibility for their destiny; it’s always Allah’s will. I don’t understand that contradiction. But now they are here. And the Mahjaris have always been an intimate part of Arab culture, often its leading edge; Arabic poetry was revived in the twentieth century by poets who actually lived in New York or Latin America. Perhaps it will be the same here. It is surprising to find how much their vision of history corresponds to what Boone believed; I don’t think either understood that at all. Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcome. Copper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy sources of it. And here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the

Arabs would not care. Harvest it, and then they would get to move again.

He moved on himself. Days passed, the shadows wheeled. The wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope. Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink sunlight. Sometimes he would see one of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya: the view bent a thousand kilometers over the horizon by an inversion layer in the atmosphere. He stopped turning on the lectern as he had the TV. Nothing but the world and him. Winds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the rover. Khála, the empty land.

But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he slept. One night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian colony. He had driven from Washington out to the Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odd. He walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest. He came on the limestone caves at Luray, now a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour. Every stalactite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lights. Some had had mallets attached to them, and an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered cavern! He had to walk out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn’t hear him laugh.

Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walked off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree. No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry with trees. Cicadas cycling through their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kill them. He felt so odd.. . could he really leave this world behind? Sitting there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and re-emerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived – something like a tree. But nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.