Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,107
the nimbus of starlight and leaf gleam, and he recognized members of the farm team, Iwao, Raul, Ellen, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all of the farm team except for Hiroko herself.
After a moment’s hesitation Michel stepped out of his slippers and took off his clothes, and put them on top of the slippers and sat down in an empty spot in the circle. He didn’t know what he was taking part in, but it didn’t matter. Several of the figures nodded at him in welcome, and Ellen and Evgenia, seated on each side of him, touched him on the arms. All of a sudden the children got up and ran together down one of the aisles, squealing and giggling. They came back in a tight knot around Hiroko, who walked into the middle of the circle, her naked form dark in the darkness. Trailed by the kids she walked slowly around the circle, pouring from her two outstretched fists a little bit of dirt into each person’s offered hands. Michel held up his palms with Ellen and Evgenia as she approached, he stared at her lustrous skin. Once on the night beach at Villefranche he had walked by a gang of African women splashing in the phosphorescent waves, white water on black gleaming skin—
The dirt in his hand was warm and smelled rusty. “This is our body,” Hiroko said. She walked to the other side of the circle, gave the children each a fistful of dirt and sent them back to sit among the adults. She sat across from Michel and began to chant in Japanese. Evgenia leaned over and whispered a translation or rather an explanation in his ear. They were celebrating the areophany, a ceremony they had created together under Hiroko’s guidance and inspiration. It was a kind of landscape religion, a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself. Kami was manifested most obviously in certain extraordinary objects in the landscape—stone pillars, isolated ejecta, sheer cliffs, oddly smoothed crater interiors, the broad circular peaks of the great volcanoes. These intensified expressions of Mars’s kami had a Terran analogue within the colonists themselves, the power that Hiroko called viriditas, that greening fructiparous power within, which knows that the wild world itself is holy. Kami, viriditas; it was the combination of these sacred powers that would allow humans to exist here in a meaningful way.
When Michel heard Evgenia whisper the word “combination,” all the terms immediately fell into a semantic rectangle: kami and viriditas, Mars and Earth, hatred and love, absence and yearning. And then the kaleidoscope clicked home and all the rectangles folded into place in his mind, all antinomies collapsed to a single, beautiful rose, the heart of the areophany, kami suffused with viriditas, both fully red and fully green at one and the same time. His jaw was slack, his skin was burning, he could not explain it and did not want to. His blood was fire in his veins.
Hiroko stopped chanting, brought her hand to her mouth, began to eat the dirt in her palm. All the others did the same. Michel lifted his hand to is face: a lot of dirt to eat, but he stuck his tongue out and licked up half of it and felt a brief electric shiver as he rubbed it against the roof of his mouth, sliding the gritty stuff back and forth until it was mud. It tasted salty and rusty, with an unpleasant whiff of rotten eggs and chemicals. He choked it down, gagging slightly. He swallowed the other mouthful in his hand. There was an irregular hum coming from the circle of celebrants as they ate, vowel sounds shifting from one to the next, aaaay, ooooo, ahhhh, iiiiiii, eeee, uuuuuu, lingering over each vowel for a minute it seemed, the sound spreading into two and sometimes three parts, with head tones creating odd harmonies. Hiroko began to chant over this song. Everyone stood and Michel scrambled up with them. They all moved into the center of the circle together, Evgenia and Ellen taking Michel by the arms and pulling him along. Then they were all pressed together around Hiroko, in a mass of close-packed bodies, surrounding Michel so that warm skin squashed up against every side of him. This is our body. A lot of them were kissing, their eyes closed. Slowly they moved, twisting to keep maximum contact as they shifted