The Arabs who live out of Arabia are called Mahjaris, and the Arabs who came to Mars, the Qahiran Mahjaris. When they arrived on Mars a good number of them began to wander Vastitas Borealis (“The Northern Badia”) and the Great Escarpment. These wanderers were mostly Bedouin Arabs, and they traveled in caravans, in a deliberate recreation of a life that had disappeared on Earth. People who had lived in cities all their lives went to Mars and moved around in rovers and tents. The excuses for their ceaseless travel included the hunt for metals, areology, and trade; but it seemed clear that the important thing was the travel, the life itself.

Frank Chalmers joined old Zeyk Tuqan’s caravan a month after the treaty was signed, in the northern autumn of m-year 16 (July 2057). For a long time he wandered with this caravan over the broken slopes of the Great Escarpment. He worked on his Arabic, and helped with their mining, and took meteorological observations. The caravan was composed of actual Bedouins from Awlad ‘Ali, the western coast of Egypt. They had lived north of the area that the Egyptian government had named the New Valley Project, after a search for oil discovered a water aquifer holding an amount equal to a thousand years of the Nile’s flow. Even before the discovery of the gerontological treatment, the Egyptian population problem had been severe; with 96% of the country desert, and 99% of the population in the Nile Valley, it was inevitable that the hordes relocated in the New Valley Project would overwhelm the Bedouins and their entirely distinct culture. The Bedouins wouldn’t even call themselves Egyptians, and despised the Nile Egyptians as spineless and immoral; but that did not keep the Egyptians from crowding north from the New Valley Project into Awlad ‘Ali. Bedouins in the other Arab countries had taken the side of these overwhelmed outposts of their culture, and when the Arab commonwealth started a Mars program, and bought space on the continuous Earth-to-Mars shuttle fleet, they asked Egypt to give preference to their western Bedouins. The Egyptian government had been only too happy to oblige, and clear the region of its troublesome minority. So here they were, Bedouins on Mars, wandering the world-wrapping northern desert.

The weather observations piqued Frank’s interest in climatology like none of the scientists’ talk ever had. The weather on the Escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of gritty hail. Currently the atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80% carbon dioxide and 10% oxygen, the remainder mostly argon. It wasn’t clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO2 with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of a scab. And in the hardest gales the gusts could knock you down quite easily. Frank timed one katabatic gust at six hundred kilometers an hour; luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.

The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the great escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.

While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the Escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose; so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.

All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside; when they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.

The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to the north. In his days of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by: silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itself. Days would pass, and the shadows wheel. The winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afternoons. Clouds stacked the sky, from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud twenty thousand meters high.

Occasionally he would turn on the TV and watch the Arabic news channel. Sometimes in the silence of the mornings he would talk back to the TV. There was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of the media, and of the events they packaged. The stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle. Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mob. Back there the Terran past still lived on in enormous regions, where village life was plodding on as it always had. Maybe that was wisdom, held to by old wives and shamans. Maybe. But it was hard to believe, because look what happened when they gathered in cities. Idiots on video, history in the making. “One can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great boon.” These things made him laugh. “Haven’t you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!”

One night he watched a report on the fertilization of the Antarctic Ocean with iron dust, which was to act as a dietary supplement to phytoplankton, a population that was shrinking at an alarming rate for no obvious reason. The iron dust was dumped out of planes, it looked like they were fighting some kind of submarine fire; the project would cost ten billion dollars a year, and would have to be continued in perpetuity, but it had been calculated that a century’s worth of fertilization would reduce the global concentration of carbon dioxide by fifteen percent plus or minus ten percent, and given the ongoing warming and subsequent threat to the coastal cities, not to mention the death of most of the world’s coral reefs, the project had been judged worth it. “Ann’s going to love this,” Frank muttered. “Now they’re terraforming Earth.”