The Romans had used Aries for a port as much as they had Marseilles — in fact Caesar had razed Marseilles for backing Pompey, and had given Aries his favor as the local capital. Three strategic Roman roads had been constructed to meet at the town, all used for hundreds of years after the Romans had gone, and so for those centuries it had been lively, prosperous, important. But the Rhone had silted its lagoons, and the Camargue had become a pestilential swamp, and the roads had fallen into disuse. The town dwindled. The Camargue’s windswept salt grasses and their famous herds of wild white horses were eventually joined by oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical works.
Now with the flood the lagoons were back, and flushing clean. Aries was again a seaport. Michel continued to wait for Maya there precisely because he had never lived there before. It did not remind him of anything but the moment; and he spent his days watching the people of the moment live their lives. In this new foreign country.
He received a call at the hotel, from a Francis Duval. Sylvie had contacted the man. He was Michel’s nephew, Michel’s dead brother’s son, still alive and living on Rue du 4 Sep-tembre, just north of the Roman arena, a few blocks from the swollen Rhone, a few blocks from Michel’s hotel. He invited Michel to come over.
After a moment’s hesitation, Michel agreed. By the time he had walked across town, stopping briefly to peer into the Roman theater and arena, his nephew appeared to have convened the entire quartier: an instant celebration, champagne corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was pulled in the door and embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks, in the Proven9al manner. It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him long and hard, talking all the while as people’s camera fibers pointed at them. “You look just like my father!” Francis said.
“So do you!” said Michel, trying to remember if it were true or not, trying to remember his brother’s face. Francis was elderly, Michel had never seen his brother that old. It was hard to say.
But all the faces were familiar, somehow, and the language comprehensible, mostly, the phrases sparking image after image in him; the smells of cheese and wine sparking more; the taste of the wine yet more again. Francis it turned out was a connoisseur, and happily he uncorked a number of dusty bottles, Chateauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Chateau d’Yquem, and his specialty, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two each from Chateaux Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild with a label by Pougnadoresse. These aged wonders had metamorphosed over the years into something more than mere wine, tastes thick with overtones and harmonics. They spilled down Michel’s throat like his own youth.
It could have been a party for some popular town politi-can, say; and though Michel concluded that Francis did not much resemble Michel’s brother, he sounded exactly like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would have said, but it was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way Francis drawled “normalement,” in this case meaning the way things had been before the flood, whereas for Michel’s brother it had meant that hypothetical state of smooth operation that never occurred in the real Provence — but exactly the same lilt and drawl, nor-male-ment…
Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and so he stood with a glass in his hand and gave a quick speech in the style of a town politician, complimenting the women on their beauty, managing to make it clear how pleased he was to be in their company without getting sentimental, or revealing just how disoriented he was feeling: a slick competent performance, which was just what the sophisticates of Provence liked, their rhetoric quick and humorous like the local bullfighting. “And how is Mars?
What is it like? What will you do now? Are there Jacobins yet?”
“Mars is Mars,” Michel said, dismissing it. “The ground is the color of Arlesian roof tiles. You know.”
They partied right through the afternoon, and then called in a feast. Innumerable women kissed his cheeks, he was drunk on their perfume and skin and hair, their smiling liquid dark eyes, looking at him with friendly curiosity. Native Martian girls one always had to look up to, inspecting their chins and necks and the insides of their nostrils. Such a pleasure to look down on a straight part in glossy black hair.
In the late evening people dispersed. Francis walked with Michel over to the Roman arena, and they climbed the bowed stone steps of the medieval towers that had fortified the arena. From the little stone chamber at the top of the stairs they looked out small windows at the tile –oofs, and the treeless streets, and the Rhone. Out the south windows they could see a portion of the speckled sheet of water which was the Camargue.
“Back on the Med,” Francis said, deeply satisfied. “The flood may have been a disaster for most places, but for Aries it has been a veritable coup. The rice farmers are all coming into town ready to fish, or take any work they can get. And many of the boats that survived have been docked right here in town. They’ve been bringing fruit in from Corsica and Mallorca, trade with Barcelona and Sicily. We’ve taken a good bit of Marseilles’s business, although they’re recovering quickly, it has to be said. But what life has come back! Before, you know, Aix had the university, Marseilles had the sea, and we had only these ruins, and the tourists who came for a day to see them. And tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites. But now we’re living again!” He was a little bit drunk. “Here, you must come out on the boat with me and see the lagoon.”
“I’d like that.”
That night Michel called Maya again. “You must come. I’ve found my nephew, my family.”
Maya wasn’t impressed. “Nirgal went to England looking for Hiroko,” she said sharply. “Someone told him she was there, and he left just like that.”
“What’s this?” Michel exclaimed, shocked by the sudden intrusion of the idea of Hiroko.
“Oh Michel. You know it can’t be true. Someone said it to Nirgal, that’s all it was. It can’t be true, but he ran right off.”
“As would I!”
“Please, Michel, don’t be stupid. One fool is enough. If Hiroko is alive at all, then she’s on Mars. Someone just said this to Nirgal to get him away from the negotiations. I only hope it was for nothing worse. He was having too much of an effect on people. And he wasn’t watching his tongue. You should call him and tell him to come back. Maybe he would listen to you.”
“I wouldn’t if I were him.”
Michel was lost in thought, trying to crush the sudden hope that Hiroko was alive. And in England of all places. Alive anywhere. Hiroko and therefore Iwao, Gene, Rya — the whole group — his family. His real family. He shuddered, hard; and when he tried to tell the impatient Maya about his family in Aries, the words stuck in his throat. His real family had all disappeared four years before, and that was the truth. Finally, sick at heart, he could only say, “Please, Maya. Please come.”
“Soon. I’ve told Sax I’ll go as soon as we’re finished here. That will leave all the rest of it to him, and he can barely talk. It’s ridiculous.” She was exaggerating, they had a full diplomatic team there, and Sax was perfectly competent, in his way. “But okay, okay, I’m going to do it. So stop pestering me.”
She came the next week.
Michel drove to the new train station and met her, feeling nervous. He had lived with Maya, in Odessa and Burroughs, for almost thirty years; but now, driving her to Avignon, she seemed like a stranger sitting there beside him, an ancient beauty with hooded eyes and an expression hard to read, speaking English in harsh rapid sentences, telling him everything that had happened in Bern. They had a treaty with the UN, which had agreed to their independence. In return they were to allow some emigration, but no more than ten percent of the Martian population per year; some transfer of mineral resources; some consultation on diplomatic issues. “That’s good, really good.” Michel tried to concentrate on her news, but it was hard. Occasionally as she spoke she glanced at the buildings shooting past their car, but in the dusty windy sunlight they looked tawdry enough in all truth. She did not seem impressed.