Abruptly the rain let up. The sun broke through, and the world steamed. Sweat poured down Nirgal in the white air. He could not catch his breath. White air, black spots swimming.
‘I think I need to lie down.’
‘Oh yes, yes, of course. You must be exhausted, overwhelmed. Come with us.’
They took him to a small outbuilding of the compound, into a bright room walled with bamboo strips, empty except for a mattress on the floor.
‘I’m afraid the mattress is not long enough for you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
He was left alone. Something about the room reminded him of the interior of Hiroko’s cottage, in the grove on the far side of the lake in Zygote. Not just the bamboo, but the room’s size and shape – and something elusive, the green light streaming in perhaps. The sensation of Hiroko’s presence was so strong and so unexpected that when the others had left the room, Nirgal threw himself down on the mattress, his feet hanging far off the bottom edge, and cried. A complete confusion of feeling. His whole body hurt, but especially his head. He stopped crying and fell into a deep sleep.
He woke in a small black chamber. It smelled green. He couldn’t remember where he was. He rolled onto his back and it came to him: Earth. Whispers – he sat up, frightened. A muffled laugh. Hands caught at him and pressed him down, but they were friendly hands, he could feel that immediately. ‘Shh,’ someone said, and then kissed him. Someone else was fumbling at his belt, his buttons. Women, two, three, no two, scented overpoweringly with jasmine and something else, two strands of perfume, both warm. Sweaty skin, so slick. The arteries in his head pounded. This kind of thing had happened to him once or twice when he was younger, when the newly-tented canyons were like new worlds, with new young women who wanted to get pregnant or just have fun. After the celibate months of the voyage it felt like heaven to squeeze women’s bodies, to kiss and be kissed, and his initial fright melted away in a rush of hands and mouths, breasts and tangled legs. ‘Sister Earth,’ he gasped. There was music coming from somewhere far away, piano and steel drums and tablas, almost washed out by the sound of the wind in the bamboo. One of the women was on top of him, pressed down on him, and the feel of her ribs sliding under his hands would stay with him forever. He came inside her, kept on kissing. But his head still pounded painfully.
The next time he woke he was damp and naked on the mattress. It was still dark. He dressed and went out of the room, down a dim hallway to an enclosed porch. It was dusk; he had slept through a day. Maya and Michel and Sax were sitting down to a meal with a large group. Nirgal assured them he was fine, ravenous in fact.
He sat among them. Out in the clearing, in the middle of the raw, wet compound, a crowd was gathered around an outdoor kitchen. Beyond them a bonfire blazed yellow in the dusk; its flames limned the dark faces and reflected in the bright liquid whites of their eyes, their teeth. The people at the inside table all looked at him. Several of the young women smiled, their jet hair like caps of jewels, and for a second Nirgal was afraid he smelled of sex and perfume; but the smoke from the bonfire, and the steamy scents of the spiced dishes on the table, made such a thing irrelevant – in such an explosion of smells, nothing could be traced to its origin – and anyway one’s olfactory system was blasted by the food, hot with spices, curry and cayenne, chunks of fish on rice, with a vegetable that seared his mouth and throat, so that he spent the next half hour blinking and sniffing and drinking glasses of water, his head burning. Someone gave him a slice of candied orange, which cooled his mouth somewhat. He ate several slices of bittersweet candied orange.
When the meal was over they all cleared the tables together, as in Zygote or Hiranyagarbha. Outside, dancers began to circle the bonfire, dressed in their surreal carnival costumes, with masks of beasts and demons over their heads, as during Fassnacht in Nicosia, although the masks were heavier and stranger: demons with multiple eyes and big teeth, elephants, goddesses. The trees were black against the blurry black of the sky, the stars all fat and swinging around, the fronds and leaves up there green black black green, and then fire-coloured as the flames leaped higher, seeming to provide the rhythm of the dance. A small young woman with six arms, all moving together to the dance, stepped behind Nirgal and Maya. ‘This is the dance of Ramayana,’ she told them. ‘It is as old as civilization, and in it they speak of Mangala.’
She gave Nirgal a familiar squeeze on the shoulder, and suddenly he recognized her jasmine scent. Without smiling she went back out to the bonfire. The tabla drums were following the leaping flames to a crescendo, and the dancers cried out. Nirgal’s head throbbed at every beat, and despite the candied orange his eyes were still watering from the burning pepper. And his lids were heavy. ‘I know it’s strange,’ he said, ‘but I think I have to sleep again.’
He woke before dawn, and went out on a veranda to watch the sky lighten in a quite Martian sequence, black to purple to rose to pink, before turning the startling cyanic blue of a tropical Terran morning. His head was still sore, as if stuffed, but he felt rested at last, and ready to take on the world again. After a breakfast of green-brown bananas, he and Sax joined some of their hosts for a drive around the island.
Everywhere they went there were always several hundred people in his field of vision. The people were all small: brown-skinned like him in the countryside, darker in the towns. There were big vans that moved around together, providing mobile shops to villages too small to have them. Nirgal was surprised to see how lean people were, their limbs wiry with labour or else as thin as reeds. In this context the curves of the young women were like the blooms of flowers, not long for this world.
When people saw who he was they rushed up to greet him and shake his hand. Sax shook his head at the sight of Nirgal among them. ‘Bimodal distribution,’ he said. ‘Not speciation exactly – but perhaps if enough time passed. Island divergence, it’s very Darwinian.’
‘I’m a Martian,’ Nirgal agreed.
Their buildings were placed in holes hacked into the green jungle, which then tried to take the space back. The older buildings were all made of mud bricks black with age, melting back into the earth. Rice fields were terraced so finely that the hills looked further away than they really were. The light green of rice shoots was a colour never seen on Mars. In general the greens were brilliant and glowing beyond anything Nirgal could recall seeing; they pressed on him, so various and intense, the sun plating his back: ‘It’s because of the sky’s colour,’ Sax said when Nirgal mentioned it. ‘The reds in the Martian sky mute the greens just a bit.’
The air was thick, wet, rancid. The shimmering sea settled on a distant horizon. Nirgal coughed, breathed through his mouth, struggled to ignore his throbbing temples and forehead.
‘You have low altitude sickness,’ Sax speculated. ‘I’ve read claims that it happens to Himalayans and Andeans who come down to sea level. Acidity levels in the blood. We ought to have landed you somewhere higher.’
‘Why didn’t we?’
‘They wanted you here because Desmond came from here. This is your homeland. Actually there seems to be a bit of conflict over who should host us next.’
‘Even here?’
‘More here than on Mars, I should think.’
Nirgal groaned. The weight of the world, the stifling air—‘I’m going running,’ he said, and took off.
At first it was its usual release; the habitual motions and responses poured through him, reminding him that he was still himself. But as he thumped along he did not ascend into that lung-gom-pa zone where running was like breathing, something he could do indefinitely; instead he began to feel the press of the thick air in his lungs, and the pressure of eyes from the little people he passed, and most of all the pressure of his own weight, hurting his joints. He weighed more than twice what he was used to, and it was like carrying an invisible person on his back, except no – the weight was inside him. As if his bones had turned to lead inside him. His lungs burned and drowned at the same time, and no cough