East three days from the Japanese, he ran across a Sufi caravanserai, located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed, and now it stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high. John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.
Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of Pavonis. Visibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.
It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far. They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of their own. One of them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to him, “It’s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great talib, has followed his tariqat here to visit us.”
“Talib?” John said. “Tariqat?”
“A talib is a seeker. And the seeker’s tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.”
“I see!” John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.
Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, looking dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough clear crystals. Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor’s impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the impact.
Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and women alike. The women were bare-headed and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs generally. He sat down and drank coffee with them, and started asking questions again. They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru’ yat al-qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a haqq. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”
“I guess I haven’t begun the first journey yet,” John said. “I don’t know anything.”
They were pleased by this response, he could see. You can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always start. They were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable. “No fancy in the world is all untrue,” Dhu said. And when John mentioned his last meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”
One of the women laughed and said, “Chalmers is your nafs.”
“What’s that?” John asked.
They were all laughing. Dhu, shaking his head, said “He is not your nafs. One’s nafs is one’s evil self, which some used to believe lived in one’s chest.”
“Like an organ or something?”
“Like an actual creature. Mohammed ibn ‘Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped out of his throat, and when he kicked it it only got bigger. That was his nafs.”
“It is another name for your Shadow,” the woman who had brought it up explained.
“Well,” John said. “Maybe he is, then. Or maybe it’s just that Frank’s nafs gets kicked a lot.” And they laughed with him at the thought.
Later that afternoon sunlight pierced the dust more strongly than usual, lighting the streaming clouds so that the caravanserai seemed to rest in the ventricle of a giant heart, with the gusts of the wind saying beat, beat, beat, beat. The Sufis called out to each other when they looked through the lechatelierite windows, and quickly they suited up to go out into this crimson world, into the wind, calling to Boone to accompany them. He grinned and suited up, surreptitiously swallowing a tab of omeg as he did so.
Once outside they walked the circumference of the ragged edge of the mesa, looking out into the clouds and down onto the shadowed plain below, pointing out to John whatever features happened to be visible. After that they gathered near the caravanserai, and John listened to their voices as they chanted, various voices providing English translations for the Arabic and Farsi. “Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold. “
Another voice: “Love thrilled the chord in my soul’s lute, and changed me to love from head to foot.”
And they began to dance. Watching John suddenly got it, that they were whirling dervishes: they leaped into the air to the beat of drums pattering lightly over the common band, they leaped and whirled in slow unearthly spins, arms outstretched; and when they touched down they pushed off and did it again, for turn after turn after turn. Whirling dervishes in the great storm, on a high round mesa that had been a crater floor in the Noachian. It looked so marvelous in the bloody pulsing glow of light that John stood up and started to spin with them. He wrecked their symmetries, he sometimes actually collided with other dancers; but no one seemed to mind. He found that it helped to jump slightly into the wind, to keep from being blown off balance. A hard gust would knock you flat. He laughed. Some of the dancers were chanting over the common band, the usual quarter-tone ululations, punctuated by shouts and harsh rhythmic breathing, and the phrase “Ana el-Haqq, ana el-Haqq”-I am God, one translated, I am God. A Sufi heresy. The dancing was meant to hypnotize you-there were other Moslem cults that did it with self-flagellation, John knew. Spinning was better; he danced, he joined the chant on the common band by punctuating it with his own rapid breath, and with grunts and babble; then without thinking about it he began to add to the flow of sound the names for Mars, muttering them in the rhythm of the chant as he understood it. “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.” He had memorized the list years ago, as a kind of party trick; now he was quite surprised to find what an excellent chant it made, how it spilled out of his mouth and helped stabilize his spinning. The other dancers were laughing at him, but in a good way, they sounded pleased. He felt drunk, his whole body was humming. He repeated the litany many times, then shifted to repeating the Arabic name, over and over: “Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira.” And then, remembering what one of the translating voices had told him, “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira. Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira.” I am God, I am Mars, I am God… The others quickly joined him in this chant, lifted it into a wild song, and in the flash of rotating faceplates he caught sight of their grinning faces. They were really good spinners; as they whirled their outstretched fingers cut the rush of red dust into arabesques, and now as they spun they tapped him with their fingertips, guiding him or even actively pushing his clumsy turns into the weave of their pattern. He shouted the planet’s names and they repeated them after him, in call and response style; they chanted the names, Arabic, Sanskrit, Inca, all the names for Mars, mixed together in a soup of syllables, creating a polyphonic music that was beautiful and shivery-strange, for the names for Mars came from times when words sounded odd, and names had power: he could hear that when he sang them.