Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,147

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, have 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