Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [83]
The compound they were in, she explained, was one of scores of relief hospitals that had been built on the two islands since the flood. Their construction had been the major project of the islanders in response to their new freedom; they had created relief centers that aided flood victims, giving them all at once housing, work, and medical care, including the longevity treatment.
“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth.
“You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all kinds of problems.”
“Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.”
It was a minute or two before anything more could be heard over the cheering of the crowd. The prime minister was trying to quiet them, but a short man dressed in a fashionable brown suit came out of the group behind the prime minister and proclaimed into the mike, to an uproar of cheers at every sentence, “This Marsman Nirgal is a son of Trinidad! His papa, Desmond Hawkins the Stowaway, the Coyote of Mars, is from Port of Spain, and he still has a lot of people there! That Armscor bought the oil company and they tried to buy the island too, but they picked the wrong island to try! Your Coyote didn’t get his spirit from out of the air, Maestro Nirgal, he got it from T and T! He’s been wandering around up there teaching everyone the T and T way, and they’re all up there dugla anyway, they understand the dugla way, and they have taken over all Mars with it! Mars is one great big Trinidad Tobago!”
The crowd went into transports at this, and impulsively Nirgal walked over to the man and hugged him, such a smile, then found the stairs and got down and walked out into the crowd, which clumped around him. A miasma of fragrances. Too loud to think. He touched people, shook hands. People touched him. The look in their eyes! Everyone was shorter than he was, they laughed at that; and every face was an entire world. Black dots swam in his vision, things went darker very abruptly— he looked around, startled— a bank of clouds had massed over a dark strip of sea to the west, and the lead edge had cut off the sun. Now as he continued to mingle the cloud bank came rolling over the island. The crowd broke up as people moved under the shelter of trees, or verandas, or a big tin-roofed bus stop. Maya and Sax and Michel were lost in their own crowds. The clouds were dark gray at their bases, rearing up in white roils as solid as rock but mutable, flowing continuously. A cool wind struck hard, and then big raindrops starred the dirt, and the four Martians were hustled under an open pavilion roof, where room was made for them.
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