Fear thrust him into a new world. Suddenly he could see much better, as if the touch of his visitor had sprung his pupils open like camera apertures. A thin dark-skinned man. A stranger. Astonishment launched through his fear, and he got up and moved through the dark light with dreamlike precision, stepping into slippers, and then at the stranger’s urging following him out into the hallway, feeling the lightness of Martian g for the first time in years. The hallway seemed bursting with gray light, though he could tell that only the night strips in the floor were on. It was enough to see well by if you were scared. His companion had short black dreadlocks, which made his head appear spiked. He was short, thin, narrow-faced. A stranger, no doubt about it. An intruder from one of the new colonies in the southern hemisphere, Michel thought. But the man was leading him through Underhill with an expert touch, moving in utter silence. Indeed the whole of Underhill was soundless, as if it were a silent black-and-white film. He glanced at his wristpad: it was blank. The timeslip. He wanted to say, “Who are you?” but the silence was so blanketing that he couldn’t bring himself to speak. He mouthed the words and the man turned and looked over his shoulder at him, the whites of his eyes visible and luminous all the way around the irises, the nostrils wide black holes. “I’m the stowaway,” he mouthed, and grinned. His eyeteeth were discolored; they were made of stone, Michel suddenly saw that. Martian stone teeth in his head. He took Michel by the arm. They were heading to the farm lock. “We need helmets out there,” Michel whispered, balking.
“Not tonight.” The man opened the lock door, and no air rushed into it even though it was open on the other side. They went in and walked between the black rows of packed foliage, and the air was sweet. Hiroko will be angry, Michel thought.
His guide was gone. Ahead Michel saw movement, and heard a tinkly little laugh. It sounded like a child. Suddenly it occurred to Michel that the absence of children accounted for the colony’s pervasive feeling of sterility, that they could build buildings and grow plants and yet without children this sterile feeling would still permeate every part of their lives. Extremely frightened, he continued to walk toward the center of the farm. It was warm and humid, and the air stank of wet dirt and fertilizer and foliage. Light glinted from thousands of leaf surfaces, as if the stars had fallen through the clear roof and clustered around him. Rows of corn rustled, and the air was going to his head like brandy. Little feet were scurrying behind the narrow rice paddies: even in the darkness the rice was an intense blackish green, and there among the paddies were small faces, grinning knee-high and disappearing when he turned to face them. Hot blood flooded his face and hands, his blood turned to fire and he retreated three steps, then stopped and spun. Two naked little girls were walking down the lane toward him, black-haired, dark-skinned, about three years old. Their oriental eyes were bright in the gloom, their expressions solemn. They took him by the hands and turned him around; he allowed them to lead him down the lane, looking down at first one head and then the other. Someone had decided to take action against their sterility. As they walked along, other naked toddlers appeared out of the shrubbery and crowded around them, boys and girls both, some a bit darker or lighter than the first two, most the same color, all the same age. Nine or ten of them escorted Michel to the center of the farm, weaving around him in a quick trot; and there at the center of the maze was a small clearing, currently occupied by about a dozen adults, all naked, seated in a rough circle. The children ran to the adults, gave them hugs and sat at their knees. Michel’s pupils opened further in the nimbus of starlight and leaf gleam, and he recognized members of the farm team, Iwao, Raul, Ellen, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all of the farm team except for Hiroko herself.
After a moment’s hesitation Michel stepped out of his slippers and took off his clothes, and put them on top of the slippers and sat down in an empty spot in the circle. He didn’t know what he was taking part in, but it didn’t matter. Several of the figures nodded at him in welcome, and Ellen and Evgenia, seated on each side of him, touched him on the arms. All of a sudden the children got up and ran together down one of the aisles, squealing and giggling. They came back in a tight knot around Hiroko, who walked into the middle of the circle, her naked form dark in the darkness. Trailed by the kids she walked slowly around the circle, pouring from her two outstretched fists a little bit of dirt into each person’s offered hands. Michel held up his palms with Ellen and Evgenia as she approached, he stared at her lustrous skin. Once on the night beach at Villefranche he had walked by a gang of African women splashing in the phosphorescent waves, white water on black gleaming skin —
The dirt in his hand was warm and smelled rusty. “This is our body,” Hiroko said. She walked to the other side of the circle, gave the children each a fistful of dirt and sent them back to sit among the adults. She sat across from Michel and began to chant in Japanese. Evgenia leaned over and whispered a translation or rather an explanation in his ear. They were celebrating the areophany, a ceremony they had created together under Hiroko’s guidance and inspiration. It was a kind of landscape religion, a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself. Kami was manifested most obviously in certain extraordinary objects in the landscape, stone pillars, isolated ejecta, sheer cliffs, oddly smoothed crater interiors, the broad circular peaks of the great volcanoes. These intensified expressions of Mars’s kami had a Terran analogue within the colonists themselves, the power that Hiroko called viriditas, that greening fructiparous power within, which knows that the wild world itself is holy. Kami, viriditas; it was the combination of these sacred powers that would allow humans to exist here in a meaningful way.
When Michel heard Evgenia whisper the word combination, all the terms immediately fell into a semantic rectangle: kami and viriditas, Mars and Earth, hatred and love, absence and yearning. And then the kaleidoscope clicked home and all the rectangles folded into place in his mind, all antimonies collapsed to a single, beautiful rose, the heart of the areophany, kami suffused with viriditas, both fully red and fully green at one and the same time. His jaw was slack, his skin was burning, he could not explain it and did not want to. His blood was fire in his veins.
Hiroko stopped chanting, brought her hand to her mouth, began to eat the dirt in her palm. All the others did the same. Michel lifted his hand to his face: a lot of dirt to eat, but he stuck his tongue out and licked up half of it and felt a brief electric shiver as he rubbed it against the roof of his mouth, sliding the gritty stuff back and forth until it was mud. It tasted salty and rusty, with an unpleasant whiff of rotten eggs and chemicals. He choked it down, gagging slightly. He swallowed the other mouthful in his hand. There was an irregular hum coming from the circle of celebrants as they ate, vowel sounds shifting from one to the next, aaaay, ooooo, ahhhh, iiiiiii, eeee, uuuuuu, lingering over each vowel for a minute it seemed, the sound spreading into two and sometimes three parts, with head tones creating odd harmonies. Hiroko began to chant over this song. Everyone stood and Michel scrambled up with them. They all moved into the center of the circle together, Evgenia and Ellen taking Michel by the arms and pulling him along. Then they were all pressed together around Hiroko, in a mass of close-packed bodies, surrounding Michel so that warm skin squashed up against every side of him. This is our body. A lot of them were kissing, their eyes closed. Slowly they moved, twisting to keep maximum contact as they shifted to new kinetic configurations. Wiry pubic hair tickled his bottom, and he felt what had to have been an erect penis against his hip. The dirt was heavy in his stomach, and he felt light-headed; his blood was fire, his skin felt like a taut balloon, containing a blaze. The stars were packed overhead in astonishing numbers, and each one had its own color, green or red or blue or yellow; they looked like sparks.
He was a phoenix. Hiroko herself pressed against him, and he rose in the center of the fire, ready for rebirth. She held his new body in a full embrace, squeezed him; she was tall, and seemed all muscle. She looked him eye-to-eye. He felt her breasts against his ribs, her pubic bone hard on his thigh. She kissed him, her tongue touching his teeth; he tasted the dirt, then suddenly felt all of her at once; all the rest of his life the involuntary memory of that feeling would be enough to start the pulse of an erection, but at that moment he was too overwhelmed, completely aflame.
Hiroko pulled her head back and looked at him again. His breath was whooshing in his lungs, in and out. In English, in a voice formal but kind, she said,