Equilateral: A Novel Part 5

Thayer stares directly into the man's face. "Do you speak English?"

The policeman says, "Effendi, he's from a small village. He hasn't been taught a thing in his life."

"Translate, then. Ask him why he doesn't work. Why isn't he being cooperative?"

The policeman speaks a few words. The fellah answers by flicking his head, a gesture that Thayer understands to be equivalent to a shrug.

"I'm sorry, he doesn't care to respond. He's sick in the brain, I think."

"Doesn't he care whether the Equilateral is completed?"

The policeman smiles with visible effort. "He doesn't understand the Equilateral, Effendi. I'm an officer of the police, but even for myself the Equilateral is a strange endeavor. We hear rumors about its real purpose. Some say you wish to speak to the stars."

"I do!" Thayer declares. "That's exactly it! Ask him if he would like to join me."

The policeman blinks as he considers the astronomer's admission. It takes several moments before he can put this in words the fellah can understand. This time there's no response at all.

"We may have chosen for our interview the worst of a bad lot," the policeman observes, anxious about the intensity with which Thayer is gazing at the prisoner. The other fellahin fidget and glare. They don't like standing in the sun, and they don't like being questioned. Thayer evidently doesn't realize that he and the policeman are the only figures of authority here, and that they're both unarmed.

Only inches from the prisoner's face, Thayer demands, "Do you have no manly ambition at all? Do you want to remain immured in squalor forever? Why do you waste this opportunity to bring a measure of grandeur into your life?"

The policeman struggles to understand the questions and compose their judicious translation.

Perhaps he doesn't fully or correctly accomplish this task, but the prisoner's attention is seized. His eyes catch fire. His reply to the policeman begins calmly and then runs off the rails. He becomes pa.s.sionate. He vigorously jabs his finger in Thayer's direction. Even after he makes his point, he goes on. Several fellahin murmur in agreement.

"He's answered with an impertinence," the policeman explains.

"What did he say?"

"It doesn't matter, Effendi."

"What is it?"

The policeman frowns, troubled. He has never before addressed as high a personage as Thayer. He's aware that the astronomer's unexpected arrival may cost him his position. The prisoners may mutiny, and that may cost him his neck. He offers Thayer an apologetic shake of his head while he ponders the fellah's invective. The fellah has replied that his life is already filled with grandeur. He says the word of G.o.d lives within him and that G.o.d's word is sufficient magnificence for a mortal man. He quotes the Prophet: "Those are the ones upon whom are blessings from their Lord and mercy. And it is those who are the rightly guided." It's Thayer with his machines and his foolish works who lives in squalor, by which the fellah means squalor of the spirit.

Clearly the man is a Mahdist, but the policeman knows he speaks the truth. He again chooses his words carefully.

"He says that his corn wilts. His father's ill. His wife has borne a son, who has yet to receive his blessing."

Thayer doesn't reply at once. There's no shade in the yard. The heat of the day can't be distinguished from his recent fever. He recognizes that he hasn't received an accurate rendering of the fellah's speech. He doesn't blame the policeman. A regular translator, like one of the better dragomen, would enjoy a greater command of both languages and know which cultural concepts are held in common and which need to be bridged. Thayer believes everything may be understood in the end: an equal-sided triangle, the elaborations of trigonometry, the motions of celestial objects, the fundamental principles and aspirations of intelligence.

"Send him home, then," he murmurs. He adds fervently, "With my best wishes for the boy."

Thayer doesn't recall fainting, nor does he recall the prisoners carrying him to the chair in the policeman's office, nor the cup of tea being brought to him, nor Bint's arrival. She looms above him now, biting her lip as if he's a damaged item for sale at the bazaar. The policeman and the fellahin stand behind her.

She leads him from the lockup to his carriage, a springless, wide-wheeled araba, and takes the seat next to him.

"Thank you for coming," he says.

She doesn't respond.

They travel in silence for a while. He gazes from the carriage into the unfamiliar neighborhoods through which they must pa.s.s. Was.h.i.+ng hangs to dry above the streets. Women bring back produce from the local markets. Children play in the ditches. It seems that every quarter is centered around a new mosque whose s.p.a.cious courtyard is misted by the spray of a voluptuously flowing fountain.

Bint is looking away and it occurs to Thayer that she is somehow cross with him. This may have been expected. Any kind of dependence on an Arab engenders insolence, even if she's a simple, illiterate, probably much-handled serving girl.

He turns away too and sees a half-naked child gazing at the carriage in delighted surprise. Thayer throws him a coin.

Bint says, "This is no place for a casual stroll. You've been ill. If you die here, the project fails. We will never speak with Mars. We will never learn from them."

"Pardon?"

Her eyes flash.

"And when you put men to death, you place the Equilateral in moral jeopardy! It no longer serves the people. It serves ..." She pauses before she decides on the next words. "The Devil!"

Still pleased by his encounter with the boy, who caught the copper in midair, Thayer almost grins at Bint's attempt at speech, none of which he can follow.

"I believed once that the Equilateral was the gift of G.o.d, directly from the mind of G.o.d," she says hesitantly. Her eyes are moist. She moans softly before she continues: "I believe that no longer. It is the work of man, with all the compromises and imperfections of man. But I have confidence that the Equilateral can still be completed. It may yet find favor in G.o.d's eyes, if we complete it according to His law."

Thayer is puzzled by the Arab girl's attempt at complex expression, which comes out as a series of freakish grunts and cries. He says, "I don't understand you at all."

Attentive to the m.u.f.fled impact of the horse's hooves on the sand-blanketed pavement, Thayer wonders when they'll reach his quarters. They've been traveling through the settlement for what now seems like hours. He's lost sight of the pitch factory and other distinctive tall structures. The carriage rattles down crooked alleyways that spill out onto broad, dusty thoroughfares before the vehicle returns to another warren of small lanes and cul-de-sacs that is perhaps the same neighborhood as the one they just left. Bint has a.s.sumed a poutish scowl as she stares directly ahead, past the driver. Thayer reflects how tiresome these girls can be. He'll have her replaced this very afternoon.

The scent of jasmine reaches him. He can't imagine that an ordinary Arab serving girl would perfume herself, so either this is a natural scent, a compound a.n.a.logous to the floral fragrance and exuded by her pores, or in fact an ordinary Arab serving girl does perfume herself, proffering another mystery of the East, one of the many arrayed about her: Bint's provenance, her desires and ambitions, what she's seen, and the arts in which she's been instructed, especially the carnal ones. He can't be surprised by the feminine affectation now, he's always sensed in the girl the heat, the light, and the natural pa.s.sions that have necessarily been made recessive in European women. Even as he feels himself relapsing into illness, Thayer speculates about what may lie beneath her robe, the distinct tawny-dusky colorations of her naked self. He begins to regard her pout as nearly coquettish.

By the time they reach his quarters, where Miss Keaton waits anxiously, the day's heat has abated, but Thayer is running a fever. Bint and the driver remove him from the carriage. Coming from his tent, Miss Keaton observes the flush that mottles his face, his frailty, and also the tenderness with which he allows himself to be supported by the girl, and how it's reciprocated. He mumbles a vague good-afternoon to his secretary. The girl firmly propels him inside. Miss Keaton stands by the tent flap for a moment before realizing that the driver stands with her, patiently antic.i.p.ating his baksheesh.

Bint sponges off the astronomer and later, when he wakes in the evening dusk, the events of the afternoon have receded down a dimly lit pa.s.sageway. His determination to dismiss her flickers in and out of visibility.

Nineteen.

The Arab needs to be beaten. He demands to be flogged. He hungers for the cudgel and the whip, and a kick or a slap from his betters. He considers every blow a sign of respect, or even love, evidence that he has been judged worthy of discipline and instruction. Strike, strike, strike-and pray to wake him from his millennia-long torpor.

Yet except in difficult cases Ballard has forbidden the bastinado, the Spanish-imported flogging that breaks the small bones and tendons of a man's feet and often leaves him crippled for life. A cripple incurs dishonor. He begs at the mosque and the market, sprawled in the dirt to be sniffed at by dogs. He can't marry-but he can't excavate more sand either. Depending on circ.u.mstance, exquisitely balancing Christian leniency against the demands of their undertaking, Ballard has formulated other means of compulsion. The Arabs appreciate this, he says.

Miss Keaton notes that most of the fellahin bear with perverse pride distinctive marks or raised calluses on their foreheads that have emerged over a lifetime of bowing and sc.r.a.ping against their prayer mats. The prayer b.u.mps usually a.s.sume irregular shapes, but she occasionally encounters a man with a k.n.o.b so perfectly round and evenly raised from his head that she has to resist the urge to pull on its stalk. She has discovered b.u.mps that are circular disks and b.u.mps that form ovals for which the two foci can be computed. Some prayer b.u.mps are small, some are grand dominating features that take up most of the region between eyebrows and scalp. Often these calluses bleed, scab, and fall off, leaving peculiar depressions on the foreheads, difficult to distinguish from the effects of cancer or venereal disease. She once met a man, employed in a ware house at Point B where the spades are kept, whose forehead accurately mapped Trivium Charontis, the intriguing oasis slightly north of the Martian equator.

These prayer b.u.mps are acquired characteristics, to be sure, not in the blood, not heritable. Yet nearly every Egyptian boy is destined to bow and sc.r.a.pe and be so disfigured. Every race of man is defined by qualities incurred through experience as well as attributes transmitted at birth; its virtues and faults are mutable across the centuries. A productive race's industry and respect for legitimate authority can be engendered no less than its good dent.i.tion.

Now she contemplates the ca.n.a.l builders of Mars, who have already dug broad waterways thousands of miles long and are extending them at great dispatch, under Earth's straining, watchful, ever-astonished eye. They've invented ingenious, powerful machinery for the task. They've given their machines n.o.ble purpose. They've comprehended their world's tenuous atmosphere, dwindling bodies of water, hardy flora, exotic fauna, and embattled intelligence as interrelated elements of a single imperiled environment. Mars evidently commands much better laborers as well: more disciplined than their terrestrial a.n.a.logues, more committed to their planet's survival.

Yet the engineers of Mars and their laborers are no more than victors in a brutal rivalry to survive their environment, just as the men of Earth are. Compet.i.tion is intrinsic to the character of every living thing, including the ca.n.a.l builders. To ensure their continued procreation, they may have developed through natural selection broad lungs with which to suck in their atmosphere's thin gruel. They may have gained long flexible appendages to transport themselves in low gravity more conveniently. The inexorable drive for survival must have demanded beings endowed with G.o.dlike capabilities and judgment. And through natural selection and nonbiological processes, through brutality and education, through calculated humiliations and measures of grace, by pitting every individual against the other to determine who was more suited to their purposes, the engineers would have forged a separate, servile race that has put its servility to productive use, for the salvation of the planet they share with their masters. That's what it's taken to carve their lines into the fourth planet's hard red rock.

Miss Keaton finds Thayer with Ballard in the central bureau, standing over the long drafting table on which maps of the Western Desert are laid out. When she comes in the men look up without seeing her. They're entombed in grim thoughts.

"Now we're making no progress at all," Miss Keaton announces. She's already seen the day's reports. "More delays, more breakdowns, more sabotage. We haven't excavated ten miles in the last week."

"The fellahin are useless," Thayer replies.

Ballard adds, "We should have hanged all eight."

"Twice," Miss Keaton says. "That would have done it, I'm sure."

The engineer glares; Thayer remains contemplative. The bureau is not as busy as it should be: a few clerks chat idly among themselves near the filing cabinets, while most of the desks remain unoccupied. The Turk from the water bureau studies some tanker requisition doc.u.ments. He looks up at Miss Keaton. She turns away and recovers her purpose.

"Sanford. Mr. Ballard," she says. "I've given this some thought. We need better men to accomplish the task-stronger men, more dependable men. These are not the men of Egypt."

"The men of Egypt are entirely contemptible. Worse than Hindus."

"In that case, Mr. Ballard, we must forge new men-from the dross we've been given."

He shakes his head.

"From our first day here, Miss Keaton, we've sought to improve the workers-in health and in spirit. We've built them schools and mosques. The Egyptians have never had overseers as generous as we are. We've worked ourselves to distraction trying to summon from them their greatest strengths and virtues."

"I believe that may have been our error," she says. "To excavate the Equilateral, we can't appeal to the men's best qualities. We must appeal to their worst! To see our work completed, we have to employ the most refractory of the fellahin, the most rapacious, envious, dishonest, distrustful, and depraved of them."

Ballard mutters darkly, "They're worse than that. You don't know their depravity by half."

Thayer nods in affirmation. Depravity-yes, that's exactly what it is, these slowdowns and these strikes, this obstinacy, this refusal to cooperate in human history's grandest undertaking, its most elevating common enterprise. Depravity. The word strikes Thayer somewhere deep.

Miss Keaton says, "So we have to bring into play another fundamental force in human life: compet.i.tiveness, instilled into man by his species' fight for survival. Every individual, even the lowliest Arab, needs to come out ahead of his neighbor. The desire to win is universal, regardless of the stakes or the level of racial development." She pauses, to see if they're accepting her a.s.sertion. The engineer's frown has developed into a full glower. She says, "I propose a contest-"

"Ridiculous."

"Conducted among the work teams a.s.signed to each side. Each worker on the first completed side will receive an extra week's wages."

"A week's wages," Ballard repeats. "That should bankrupt the Concession right away."

"The Concession's full value depends on the Flare being ignited at maximum elongation. And it's entirely worthless if we don't complete the Equilateral at all."

"We can't do it. We don't have the funds. There's already an inquiry into disburs.e.m.e.nts. The French have threatened to withdraw."

Thayer interrupts them, for the first time, to scoff: "And leave the triumph to Albion? I doubt it. The money can be found. It will be."

Shaking his head, Ballard realizes that the lady has reached her man. He has seen this happen time and again, a woman interfering: in the Nyasaland mines, on the Twante Ca.n.a.l between the Irrawaddy and Rangoon, and once more when they raised the Jubilee Bridge in Bengal. He says, "A day's supplemental pay is sufficient."

"I'll cable Sir Harry myself," Thayer declares. "I'll urge a full week of extra pay, and money placed in reserve for another compet.i.tion, to complete the second side. It will take two weeks to get the amount authorized, but we have to announce the compet.i.tion today, at this hour. I take full responsibility for the decision."

"You better. The governors will raise h.e.l.l."

Thayer knows that at this late date Sir Harry will give in. The project has cost far more than originally envisioned, but in London, Paris, and Berlin the Concession's bankers have succeeded in performing whatever financial machinations have been necessary. The extra wages are in fact a trivial addition to this month's expenses, less than what it takes to bring them the water that keeps the men alive.

Thayer himself announces the compet.i.tion from the most prominent structure in the center of Point A, the scaffold. A dragoman translates for the few hundred fellahin who are a.s.sembled there. It's a difficult a.s.signment, for the astronomer employs abstract terms and sophisticated language. He's trying to tell them more than the terms of the contest. He's explaining, again, the fame that will be theirs once the Equilateral is realized. The dragoman struggles to keep up. For the fellahin Thayer remains a mysterious figure-another European, in a vest and tailored trousers, who spends most of his days alone in his quarters. Some understand him as the shaman who secretly directs their divine labors. In some hearts he inspires fear; in others loyalty and wonder.

Every fellah in attendance will be deputized to transmit to another company in the field Thayer's speech and the underlying rationale for the contest. Given the peculiar ideas embedded within his rhetoric-for example, about how compet.i.tion allows a man to find his place in the social order, as if G.o.d were unable to locate it for him-the speech will be misheard and distorted, bent to the cultural and religious mores of its audience. The emissaries with the farthest to ride will have the most opportunities to adjust what they identify as the statement's inconsistencies, tautologies, and false antecedents. By the time the message reaches the farthest segments of the Equilateral, it will bear no relations.h.i.+p to what was said by the man who issued it, except of course for the promise of more pay.

After he's been lowered into his camp bed-the fever has returned-but before he can sink into oblivion, Thayer considers the transcript of his speech that will be composed by the Concession and at some time in the future made available to historians on our sister planet. They too may not understand the moral reasoning behind the contest. The premise of Miss Keaton's argument is that compet.i.tion is ingrained in man's universal character because it's encoded in creation through natural selection, the most fundamental of all compet.i.tions. We don't know, however, whether Darwinian evolution is in fact a universal principle in every region of s.p.a.ce. The development of Martian life may very well be governed by some other natural process that does not rely on mutation, adaptation, and natural selection.

If evolution is not a universal process, if compet.i.tion is not a universal principle, if Mars is not subject to Darwinism, the planet's economy may have developed according to entirely different natural laws. How does Mars apportion its commodities and goods? What is the role of capital? Of labor? How is personal status attained? By what means are social hierarchies erected? Does Mars enjoy a gentler s.e.x that raises its young and performs the traditional female duties? If not, then ... Lying in his camp bed, his eyes closed, Thayer struggles to imagine how the inhabitants of Mars conduct their lives on their shrunken, withered sphere.

Twenty.

Whether because the fellahin understand the terms of the compet.i.tion or because they've been frightened by the scaffold, which remains in place, work on the Equilateral a.s.sumes new urgency. Encouraging reports from the desert begin to arrive at Point A. With an influx of fresh diggers from Tripolitania, the excavation of Side AB between miles 100 and 220 is finally under way. The Libyans bring their own vocal compositions and vigor to the task. Before the first spade strikes, their imam blesses each segment to which they've been a.s.signed. The pitch factories augment their output. Thayer a.s.serts again that the Equilateral will be completed in time for maximum elongation. Mars is doing its part, moving into its best position to observe the Flare on the morning of June the seventeenth.

Thayer perceives that the mood in Point A has lifted. The men's shouts and oaths are less rich in complaint, more relevant to their duties. The fellahin don't look us in the eye, but their minds are now engaged to the needs of the Equilateral. The odor of fresh flatbread wafts pleasantly through the administrative quarters most mornings. Thayer has not established the location of the oven, but he presumes it's close.

They should have done this years ago, put their faith in compet.i.tion: the strongest over the weakest, the industrious over the indolent. These are the terms that allow for civilized society's ascendance on Earth in the first place. Once more the universal laws have been confirmed.

But the winners of the compet.i.tion have already been determined. Side AC was closest to completion when the contest was announced, and now nearly all its segments have been excavated. The Point C pitch factory has been steadily supplying the paving crews up and down the side. The petroleum piping is in place, with most of the problematic joints fitted. The fellahin aren't aware of this. They don't receive the reports and wouldn't be able to read them if they did.

The wall-sized map of the Equilateral in Thayer's tent now begins to show progress on each section. The astronomer can look at the map with satisfaction for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, just as he would gaze at a celestial body. Every notation on the chart announces a technical problem solved, a challenge met: another conquest for mankind.

Yet Mars may not be impressed by the Equilateral. Each visible segment of the red planet's ca.n.a.l system surpa.s.ses, by itself, the extent of man's global excavations. The astronomers and engineers of Mars will observe the Equilateral with amused, condescendingly benevolent smiles, if they have smiling-capable organs. They will find the greatest expression of our intellect and labor hardly less primitive than the ceremonial mask carved out by a Hottentot.

Or they will not understand man at all. Their minds may well be too distant from ours; too advanced or too different or too-something in a way that we can't comprehend. The astronomers of Mars will be aware that Earth has lit a ma.s.sive fire on its surface precisely at the moment when the planet's position in the Martian sky is farthest from the sun. They will peer down at the Equilateral and observe its geometric perfection. But they may not find these phenomena sufficiently remarkable to record in their notebooks.

Twenty-One.