They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centred over the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth. Down and down; in the five days of their descent the world approached until it eventually filled everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the previous month and a half once again slowly took them in its grasp and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What little tolerance Nirgal had developed for the weight seemed to have disappeared during the brief return to microgravity, and now he gasped. Every breath an effort. Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colours push and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.
In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred kilometres over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.
A long last day. Then they were in the atmosphere, and then the cable led their car down onto the green square of Trinidad, into a huge socket complex next to an abandoned airport, its runways like grey runes. The elevator car slid down into the concrete mass. It decelerated; it came to a stop.
Nirgal detached his hands from the rail, and walked carefully after all the others, plod, plod, the weight all through him, plod, plod. They plodded down a jetway. He stepped onto the floor of a building on Earth. The interior of the socket resembled the one on Pavonis Mons, an incongruous familiarity, for the air was salty, thick, hot, clangorous, heavy. Nirgal hurried as much as he could through the halls, wanting to get outside and see things at last. A whole crowd trailed him, surrounded him, but the Praxis aides understood, they made a way for him through a growing crowd. The building was huge, apparently he had missed a chance to take a subway out of it. But there was a doorway glowing with light. Slightly dizzy with the effort, he walked out into a blinding glare. Pure whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar, shit, spices: like a greenhouse gone mad.
Now his eyes were adjusting. The sky was blue, a turquoise blue like the middle band of the limb as seen from space, but lighter; whiter over the hills, magnesium around the sun. Black spots swam this way and that. The cable threaded up into the sky. It was too bright to look up. Green hills in the distance.
He stumbled as they led him to an open car – an antique, small and rounded, with rubber tyres. A convertible. He stood up in the back seat between Sax and Maya, just to see better. In the glare of light there were hundreds of people, thousands, dressed in astonishing costumes, neon silks, pink purple teal gold aquamarine, jewels, feathers, headdresses—
‘Carnival,’ someone in the front seat of the car said up to him, ‘we dress in costumes for Carnival, also for Discovery Day, when Columbus arrive on the island. That was just a week ago, so we’ve continued the festival for your arrival too.’
‘What’s the date?’ Sax asked.
‘Nirgal Day! August the eleventh.’
They drove slowly, down streets lined with cheering people. One group was dressed like the natives before the Europeans arrived, shouting wildly. Mouths pink and white in brown faces. Voices like music, everyone singing. The people in the car sounded like Coyote. There were people in the crowd wearing Coyote masks, Desmond Hawkins’s cracked face twisted into rubbery expressions beyond what even he could achieve. And words – Nirgal had thought that on Mars he had encountered every possible distortion of English, but it was hard to follow what the Trinidadians said: accent, diction, intonation, he couldn’t tell why. He was sweating freely but still felt hot.
The car, bumpy and slow, ran between the walls of people to a short bluff. Beyond it lay a harbour district, now immersed in shallow water. Buildings swamped in the water stood in patches of dirty foam, rocking on unseen waves. A whole neighbourhood now a tidepool, the houses giant exposed mussels, some broken open, water sloshing in and out of their windows, rowing boats bobbing between them. Bigger boats were tied to streetlights and power-line poles out where the buildings stopped. Farther out sailboats tilted on the sunbeaten blue, each boat with two or three taut fore-and-aft sails. Green hills rising to the right, forming a big, open bay. ‘Fishing boats still coming in through the streets, but the big ships use the bauxite docks down at Point T, see out there?’
Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Fish scales and flowers scattered over the road, silver and red. Palm trees in the shallows were dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone; above it green burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a vegetable world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two primal colours were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were just above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of the size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The whitewater sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krrrrr sound, as loud as the cheers of the crowd.
The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind. ‘Pitch Lake down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a black hole in the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you smell, new road here by the water.’ Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People jammed the black roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the car to put a necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise, pinging and panging, they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the drowned district to their left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered from the flooded rooftops, from boats, the water coated with flowers floating up and down on the foam. Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating wood dock piled with several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish scales and flower petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots swimming. Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure colour, yellow, pink and red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring the road, ‘Hear the duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin’ contest, the best five bands in Port a Spain.’
They passed through an old neighbourhood, visibly ancient, the buildings made of small, crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or even thatch – all ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, ‘The countryside Hindu, the cities black. T‘n’T mix them, that’s dugla.’ Grass covered the ground, burst out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of potholes, out of everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt – an explosive surge of green, pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air reeked!
Then they emerged from the ancient district onto a broad asphalt boulevard, flanked by big trees and large marble buildings. ‘Metanat grabhighs, looked big when they first built, but nothing grab as high as the cable.’ Sour sweat, sweet smoke, everything blazing green, he had to shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t be sick. ‘You okay?’ Insects whirred, the air was so hot he couldn’t guess its temperature, it had gone off his personal scale. He sat down heavily between Maya and Sax.
The car stopped. He stood again, with an effort, and got out, and had trouble walking; he almost fell, everything was swinging around. Maya held his arm hard. He gripped his temples, breathed through his mouth. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked sharply.
‘Yes,’ Nirgal said, and tried to nod.
They were in a complex of raw, new buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed flower petals. People everywhere, almost all in carnival costume.