Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [175]
“Some of my professors in Tehran were Sufis,” he explained to Nirgal and Nadia and Jackie. “They were a big part of what people call the Persian Renaissance.”
“And what did you recite?” Nirgal asked.
“It’s a Farsi poem by Jalaluddin Rumi, the master of the whirling dervishes. I never learned the English version very well—
‘
I died from a mineral and plant became,
D
ied from the plant, took a sentient frame;
D
ied from the beast, donned a human dress—
W
hen by my dying did I ever grow less . . .’
“Ah, I can’t remember the rest. But some of those Sufis were very good engineers.”
“They’d better be here too,” Nadia said, glancing at the people she had been talking to about doming the canyon.
In any case the Sufis here proved to be very enthusiastic about the idea of an underground congress. As they pointed out, theirs was a syncretic religion, which had taken some of its elements not only from the various types and nationalities of Islam, but also from the older religions of Asia that Islam had encountered, and also newer ones such as Baha’i. Something similarly flexible was going to be needed here, they said. Meanwhile, their concept of the gift had already been influential throughout the underground, and some of their theoreticians were working with Vlad and Marina on the specifics of eco-economics. So as the morning passed and they waited for the late winter sunrise, standing at the great window and looking across the dark canyon to the east, they were quick to make very practical suggestions about the meeting. “You should go talk to the Bedouin and the other Arabs as quickly as possible,” Dhu told them. “They won’t like being late in the list of those consulted.”
Then the eastern sky lightened, very slowly, from dark plum to lavender. The opposite cliff was lower than the one they were on, and they could see over the dark plateau to the east for a few kilometers, to a low range of hills that formed the horizon. The Sufis pointed out the cleft in the hills where the sun would rise, and some began to chant again. “There is a group of Sufis in Elysium,” Dhu told them, “who are exploring backwards to our roots in Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Some say there are Mithraists on Mars now, worshipping the sun, Ahura Mazda. They consider the soletta to be religious art, like a stained glass window in a cathedral.”
When the sky was an intense clear pink the Sufis gathered around their four guests and gently pushed them into a pattern against the windows: Nirgal next to Jackie, Nadia and Art behind them. “Today you are our stained glass,” Dhu said quietly. Hands lifted Nirgal’s forearm until his hand was touching Jackie’s, and he took it. They exchanged a quick glance and then stared forward to the hills on the horizon. Art and Nadia were likewise holding hands, and their outside hands were placed on Nirgal’s and Jackie’s shoulders. The chanting around them got louder, the chorus of voices intoning words in Farsi, the long and liquid vowels stretching out for minutes on end. And then the sun cracked the horizon and the fountain of light exploded over the land, pouring in the wide window and over them so that they had to squint, and their eyes watered. Between the soletta and the thickening atmosphere the sun was visibly larger than it had been in the past, bronze and oblate and shimmering up through the horizontal slicing of distant inversion layers. Jackie squeezed Nirgal’s hand hard, and on an impulse he looked behind them; there on the white wall all their shadows made a kind of linked tapestry, black on white, and in the intensity of the light, the white nearest their shadows was the brightest white of all, tinged just barely by the colors of the rainbow glory, embracing them all.
• • •
They took the Sufis’ advice when they left, and