Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [118]
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In the days that followed, he introduced her to his nephew and to the rest of his relatives, rounded up by Francis. That whole gang took her in, and through the use of translation AIs asked her scores of questions. They also tried to tell her everything about themselves. It happened so often, Michel thought; people wanted to seize the famous stranger whose story they knew (or thought they knew), and give them their story in return, to redress the balance of the relationship. Some kind of witnessing, or confessional. The reciprocal sharing of stories. And people were naturally drawn to Maya anyway. She listened to their stories, and laughed, and asked questions— utterly there. Time after time they told her how the flood had come, drowning their homes, their livings, throwing them out into the world, to friends and family they hadn’t seen in years, forcing them into new patterns and reliances, breaking the mold of their lives and thrusting them out into the mistral. They had been exalted by this process, Michel saw, they were proud of their response, of how people had pulled together— also very indignant at any counterexamples of gouging or callousness, blots on an otherwise heroic affair: “Can you believe it? And it did no good, he was jumped one night in the street and all that money gone.”
“It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep forever.”
They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around Hellas Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics— because of the way they focused on others, the way they exalted people’s stories. Perhaps that was what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.
Some of Michel’s relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water— the sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste of his old beach swims.
Back on land they went out on drives. Once they went out to see the Pont du Gard, and there it was, same as ever, the Romans’ greatest work of art— an aqueduct: three tiers of stone, the thick lower arches foursquare in the river, proud of their two thousand years’ resistance to running water; lighter taller arches above, then the smallest on top of them. Form following function right into the heart of the beautiful— using stone to take water over water. The stone now pitted and honey blond, very Martian in every respect— it looked like Nadia’s Underhill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge of the Gard, in Provence; but now, to Michel, almost more Mars than France.
Maya loved its elegance. “See how human it is, Michel. This is what our Martian structures lack, they are too big. But this— this was built by human hands, with tools anyone could construct and use. Block and tackle and human math, and perhaps some horses. And not our teleoperated machines and their weird materials, doing things no one can understand or even see.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder