It only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation so hard. The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: This John Boone is bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John to see him. Well, another suspect then. It took John a while to get to sleep that night.
He left Pavonis the next day and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full seven thousand kilometers to Hellas, to visit Maya. The journey was made strangely solitary by the great storm. He glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompaniment. Maya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeting him. They had discovered a sizeable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from below. Sustained in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shore. Maya was very excited at the plans.
John’s long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dust. One evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word of English and lived in boxes like the trailer park. He and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the evening. Two days later, he stopped for a day at a huge Japanese air mining facility in a high pass between craters. Here everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm; the technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working; and all for naught.
East three days from the Japanese he ran across a Sufi caravanserai located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed and now stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high. John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.
Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of Pavonis. Visibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.
It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far. They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of their own. One of them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to him, “It’s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great talib, has followed his tariqat here to visit us.”
“Talib?” John said. “Tariqat?”
“A talib is a seeker. And the seeker’s tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.”
“I see!” John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.
Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, looking dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough clear crystals. Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor’s impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the impact.
Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and women alike. The women were bareheaded and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs generally. He sat down and drank coffee with them, and started asking questions again. They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru’ yat al-qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a haqq. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”
“I guess I haven’t begun the first journey yet,” John said. “I don’t know anything.”
They were pleased by this response, he could see. You can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always start. They were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable. “No fancy in the world is all untrue,” Dhu said. And when John mentioned his last meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”
One of the women laughed and said, “Chalmers is your nafs.”
“What’s that?” John asked.
They were all laughing. Dhu, shaking his head, said “He is not your nafs. One’s nafs is one’s evil self, which some used to believe lived in one’s chest.”
“Like an organ or something?”
“Like an actual creature. Mohammed ibn ’Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped out of his throat, and when he kicked it it only got bigger. That was his nafs.”
“It is another name for your Shadow,” the woman who had brought it up explained.
“Well,” John said. “Maybe he is, then. Or maybe it’s just that Frank’s nafs gets kicked a lot.” And they laughed with him at the thought.
Later that afternoon sunlight pierced the dust more strongly than usual, lighting the streaming clouds so that the caravanserai seemed to rest in the ventricle of a giant heart, with the gusts of the wind saying beat, beat, beat, beat. The Sufis called out to each other when they looked through the lechatelierite windows, and quickly they suited up to go out into this crimson world, into the wind, calling to Boone to accompany them. He grinned and suited up, surreptitiously swallowing a tab of omeg as he did so.
Once outside they walked the circumference of the ragged edge of the mesa, looking out into the clouds and down onto the shadowed plain below, pointing out to John whatever features happened to be visible. After that they gathered near the caravanserai, and John listened to their voices as they chanted, various voices providing English translations for the Arabic and Farsi. “Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold.”
Another voice: “Love thrilled the chord in my soul’s lute, and changed me to love from head to foot.”
And they began to dance. Watching John suddenly got it, that they were whirling dervishes: they leaped into the air to the beat of drums pattering lightly over the common band, they leaped and whirled in slow unearthly spins, arms outstretched; and when they touched down they pushed off and did it again, for turn after turn after turn. Whirling dervishes