Then the rain poured down like nothing Nirgal had ever seen — rain sheeting down, roaring, slamming into sudden broad rivering puddles, all starred with a million white droplet explosions, the whole world outside the pavilion blurred by falling water into patches of color, green and brown all mixed in a wash. Maya was grinning: “It’s like the ocean is falling on us!”
“So much water!” Nirgal said.
The prime minister shrugged. “It happens every day during monsoon. It’s more rain than before, and we already got a lot.”
Nirgal shook his head and felt a stabbing at his temples. The pain of breathing in wet air. Half drowning.
The prime minister was explaining something to them, but Nirgal could barely follow, his head hurt so. Anyone in the independence movement could join a Praxis affiliate, and during their first year’s work they were building relief centers like this one. The longevity treatment was an automatic part of every person’s joining, administered in the newly built centers. Birth-control implants could be had at the same time, reversible but permanent if left in; many took them as their contribution to the cause. “Babies later, we say. There will be time.” People wanted to join anyway, almost everyone had. Armscor had been forced to match the Praxis arrangement to keep some of their people, and so it made little difference now what organization one was part of, on Trinidad they were all much the same. The newly treated went on to build more housing, or work in agriculture, or make more hospital equipment. Trinidad had been fairly prosperous before the flood, the combined result of vast oil reserves and metanat investment in the cable socket. There had been a progressive tradition which had formed the basis of the resistance, in the years after the unwelcome metanat arrival. Now there was a growing infrastructure dedicated to the longevity project. It was a promising situation. Every camp was a waiting list for the treatment, working on its own construction. Of course people were absolutely firm in the defense of such places. Even if Armscor had wanted to, it would be very difficult for its security forces to take over the camps. And if they did they would find nothing of value to them anyway; they already had the treatment. So they could try genocide if they wanted to, but other than that, they had few options for taking back control of the situation.
“The island just walked away from them,” the prime minister concluded. “No army can stop that. It is an end to economic caste, caste of all kind. This is something new, a new dugla thing in history, like you said in your speech. Like a little Mars. So to have you here to see us, you a grandchild of the island, you who have taught us so much in your beautiful new world — oh, it is a special thing. A festival for real.” That radiant smile.
“Who was the man who spoke?”
“Oh that was James.”
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 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 Hiranyagarba. 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-colored 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.”