Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [117]
They talked desultorily. Maya was relaxed, enjoying herself. Happy at her accomplishment in Bern. In no hurry to go anywhere. Michel felt a glow like omegandorph all through him. Watching her he was slowly becoming happy himself; simply happy. Past, future— neither was ever real. Just lunch under plane trees, in Avignon. No need to think of anything but that. “So civilized,” Maya said. “I haven’t felt so calm in years. I can see why you like it.” And then she was laughing at him, and he could feel an idiot grin plastering his face.
“Would you not like to see Moscow again?” he asked curiously.
“Ah no. I would not.”
She dismissed the idea as an intrusion on the moment. He wondered what she felt about this return to Earth. Surely one could not be completely without feelings about such a thing?
But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free self. And while he was one of the former type, Maya was one of the latter. And there was no use struggling against that fact. Nevertheless he wanted her to like Provence. Or at least to see why he loved it.
And so, when they were done eating, he drove her south through Saint-Rémy, to Les Baux.
She slept during the drive, and he was not displeased; between Avignon and Les Baux the landscape consisted mostly of ugly industrial buildings, scattered on a dusty plain. She woke up at just the right time, when he was negotiating the narrow twisting road that wandered up a crease in the Alpilles to the old hilltop village. One parked in a parking lot, then walked up into the town; it was clearly a tourist arrangement, but the single curving street of the little settlement was now very quiet indeed, as if abandoned; and very picturesque. The village was shuttered for the afternoon, asleep. On the last turn to the hill’s top, one crossed open ground like a rough tilted plaza, and beyond that were the limestone knobs of the hilltop, every knob hollowed out by some eremite of the ancient hermitage, tucked above Saracens and all the other dangers of the medieval world. To the south the Mediterranean gleamed like gold plate. The rock itself was yellowish, and as a thin veil of bronzed cloud lay in the western sky, the light everywhere took on a metallic amber cast, as if they walked in a gel of years.
They clambered from one tiny chamber to the next, marveling at how small they were. “It’s like a prairie-dog nest,” Maya said, peering down into one squared-out little cave. “It’s like our trailer park in Underhill.”
Back on the tilted plaza, littered with limestone blocks, they stopped to watch the Mediterranean shine. Michel pointed out the lighter sheen of the Camargue. “You used to see only a bit of water.” The light deepened to a dark apricot, and the hill seemed a fortress above the oh-so-spacious world, above time itself. Maya put an arm around his waist and hugged him, shivering. “It’s beautiful. But I couldn’t live up here like they did, it’s too exposed somehow.”
They went back to Arles. As it was a Saturday night, the town center had become a kind of gypsy or North African festival, the alleys crowded with food and drink stands, many of them tucked into the arches of the Roman arena, which was open to all, with a band playing inside it. Maya and Michel walked around arm in arm, bathed in the smells of frying food and Arabic spices. Voices around them spoke in two or three different languages. “It reminds me of Odessa,” Maya said as they made their promenade around the Roman arena, “only the people are so little. It’s nice not to feel dwarfed for once.”
They danced in the arena center, drank at a table under the blurry stars. One star was red, and Michel had his suspicions, but did not voice them. They went back