Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [177]
After the meal the two of them disappeared. Nirgal settled back with scarcely a twinge, and talked with Nadia and Art and Zeyk, and Zeyk’s wife, Nazik, who came out to join them. Zeyk and Nazik were Mars old-timers, who had met John Boone, and been friends of Frank Chalmers. Contrary to the Sufis’ prediction, they were very friendly to the idea of a congress, and they agreed that Dorsa Brevia would be a good place to hold it.
“What we need is equality without conformity,” Zeyk said at one point, squinting seriously as he chose his words. This was close enough to what Nadia had been saying on the drive there that it caught Nirgal’s attention even more than it otherwise would have. “This is not an easy thing to establish, but clearly we have to try, to avoid fighting. I’ll spread the word through the Arab community. Or at least the Bedu. I must say, there are Arabs in the north who are very much involved with the transnationals, with Amexx especially. All the African Arab countries are falling into Amexx, one after the next. A very odd pairing. But money . . .” He rubbed his fingers together. “You know. Anyway, we will contact our friends. And the Sufis will help us. They are becoming the mullahs down here, and the mullahs don’t like it, but I do.”
Other developments worried him. “Armscor has taken on the Black Sea Group, and that’s a very bad combination— old Afrikaaner leadership, and security from all the member states, most of them police states— Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.” He ticked them off on his fingers, wrinkling his nose. “Think about those histories for a while! And they have been building bases on the Great Escarpment, a band around Mars, in effect. And they’re in tight with the Transitional Authority.” He shook his head. “They will crush us if they can.”
Nadia nodded her agreement, and Art, looking surprised at this assessment, pumped Zeyk with a hundred questions. “But you don’t hide,” he noted at one point.
“We have sanctuaries if we need them,” Zeyk said. “And we are ready to fight.”
“Do you think it will come to that?” Art asked.
“I am sure of it.”
• • •
Much later, after several more tiny cups of mudlike coffee, Zeyk and Nazik and Nadia talked to each other about Frank Chalmers, all three of them smiling peculiar fond smiles. Nirgal and Art listened, but it was hard to get a sense of that man, dead long before Nirgal had been born. In fact it was a shocking reminder of just how old the issei were, that they had known such a figure from the videotapes. Finally Art blurted out, “But what was he like?”
The three old ones thought it over.
Slowly Zeyk said, “He was an angry man. He listened to Arabs, though, and respected us. He lived with us for a time and learned our language, and truthfully there are few Americans who have ever done that. And so we loved him. But he was no very easy man to know. And he was angry. I don’t know why. Something in his years on Earth, I suppose. He never spoke of them. In fact he never spoke about himself at all. But there was a gyroscope in him, spinning like a pulsar. And he had black moods. Very black. We sent him out in scouting rovers, to see if he could help himself. It didn’t always work. He would rip us from time to time, even though he was our guest.” Zeyk smiled, remembering. “Once he called us all slaveowners, right to our faces over coffee.”
“Slaveowners?”
Zeyk waved a hand. “He was angry.”
“He saved us, there at the end,” Nadia told Zeyk, stirring from