2

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 to 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.

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: 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 ProvenÃsect;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, Châteauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Château d’Yquem, and his speciality, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two each from Châteaux Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Château 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 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,” 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. . . .

Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and so he stood with a glass 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 Marseilles’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, Marseilles 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.”