Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,193

was Andy Jahns among them.

If Ann was pleased, Andy would be furious. Frank walked up to him, wanting to witness that.

Andy saw him, and his face went still for a moment. “Frank Chalmers,” he said. “What brings you down here?”

His tone was amiable, but his eyes were unamused, even cold. Yes, he was angry. Frank, feeling better every second, said, “I’m just walking around, Andy, getting the blood flowing again. What about you?”

After the briefest of hesitations Jahns said, “We’re looking at office space.”

He watched as Frank digested the implications of the statement. His smile took on an edge, became a genuine smile. He went on: “These are friends of mine from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. We’re thinking of moving our home office there next year. And so—” his smile broadened, no doubt in response to the look on Frank’s face, which Frank could feel hardening over the front of his skull—“we have a lot to discuss.”

Al-Qahira is the name for Mars in Arabic, and Malaysian, and Indonesian. The latter two languages got it from the former; look at a globe, then, and see how far the Arabs’ religion spread. The whole middle of the world, from West Africa to the West Pacific. And most of that in a single century. Yes, it was an empire in its time; and like all empires, after death it had a long half-life.

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 15 (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 coast of Egypt west of the Nile delta. 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 percent of the country desert, and 99 percent 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 percent carbon dioxide and 10 percent oxygen, the remainder mostly nitrogen from the new nitrite conversion plants. 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