With a sinking feeling Michel drove as close as he could to the pope’s palace in Avignon, parked, and took her for a walk along the swollen river, past the bridge that did not reach to the other side, then to the wide promenade leading south from the palace, where sidewalk cafes nestled in the shade of the ancient plane trees. There they ate lunch, and Michel tasted the olive oil and the cassis, running them luxuriously over his tongue as he watched his companion relax into her metal chair like a cat. “This is nice,” she said, and he smiled. It was nice: cool, relaxed, civilized, the food and drink very fine. But for him the taste of cassis was unleashing its flood of memories, emotions from previous incarnations blended with the emotions he felt now, heightening everything, colors, textures, the feel of metal chairs and wind. While for Maya cassis was just a tart berry drink.
It occurred to him as he watched her that fate had led him to a companion even more attractive than the beautiful Frenchwomen he had consorted with in that earlier life. A woman somehow greater. In that too he had done well on Mars. He had taken on a bigger life. This feeling and his nostalgia clashed in his heart, and all the while Maya swallowed mouthfuls of cassoulet, wine, cheeses, cassis, coffee, oblivious to the interference pattern of his lives, moving in and out of phase inside him.
They talked desultorily. Maya was relaxed, enjoying herself. Happy at her accomplishment in Bern. In no hurry to go anywhere. Michel felt a glow like omegandorph all through him. Watching her he was slowly becoming happy himself; simply happy. Past, future — neither was ever real. Just lunch under plane trees, in Avignon. No need to think of anything but that. “So civilized,” Maya said. “I haven’t felt so calm in years. I can see why you like it.” And then she was laughing at him, and he could feel an idiot grin plastering his face.
“Would you not like to see Moscow again?” he asked curiously.
“Ah no. I would not.”
She dismissed the idea as an intrusion on the moment. He wondered what she felt about this return to Earth. Surely one could not be completely without feelings about such a thing?
But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free self. And while he was one of the former type, Maya was one of the latter. And there was no use struggling against that fact. Nevertheless he wanted her to like Provence. Or at least to see why he loved it.
And so, when they were done eating, he drove her south through Saint-Remy, to Les Baux.
She slept during the drive, and he was not displeased; between Avignon and Les Baux the landscape consisted mostly of ugly industrial buildings, scattered on a dusty plain. She woke up at just the right time, when he was negotiating the narrow twisting road that wandered up a crease in the Alpilles to the old hilltop village. One parked in a parking lot, then walked up into the town; it was clearly a tourist arrangement, but the single curving street of the little settlement was now very quiet indeed, as if abandoned; and very picturesque. The village was shuttered for the afternoon, asleep. On the last turn to the hill’s top, one crossed open ground like a rough tilted plaza, and beyond that were the limestone knobs of the hilltop, every knob hollowed out by some eremite of the ancient hermitage, tucked above Saracens and all the other dangers of the medieval world. To the south the Mediterranean gleamed like gold plate. The rock itself was yellowish, and as a thin veil of bronzed cloud lay in the western sky, the light everywhere took on a metallic amber cast, as if they walked in a gel of years.
They clambered from one tiny chamber to the next, marveling at how small they were. “It’s like a prairie-dog nest,” Maya said, peering down into one squared-out little cave. “It’s like our trailer park in Underbill.”
Back on the tilted plaza, littered with limestone blocks, they stopped to watch the Mediterranean shine. Michel pointed out the lighter sheen of the Camargue. “You used to see only a bit of water.” The light deepened to a dark apricot, and the hill seemed a fortress above the oh-so-spacious world, above time itself. Maya put an arm around his waist and hugged him, shivering. “It’s beautiful. But I couldn’t live up here like they did, it’s too exposed somehow.”
They went back to Aries. As it was a Saturday night, the town center had become a kind of gypsy or North African festival, the alleys crowded with food and drink stands, many of them tucked into the arches of the Roman arena, which was open to all, with a band playing inside it. Maya and Michel walked around arm in arm, bathed in the smells of frying food and Arabic spices. Voices around them spoke in two or three different languages. “It reminds me of Odessa,” Maya said as they made their promenade around the Roman arena, “only the people are so little. It’s nice not to feel dwarfed for once.”
They danced in the arena center, drank at a table under the blurry stars. One star was red, and Michel had his suspicions, but did not voice them. They went back to his hotel room and made love on the narrow bed, and at some point it seemed to Michel that there were several people in him, all coming at once; he cried out at the strange rapture of that sensation… Maya fell asleep and he lay beside her awake, in a tristesse reverberating somewhere outside time, drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the slowly diminishing cacophony of the town. Home at last.
In the days that followed, he introduced her to his nephew and to the rest of his relatives, rounded up by Francis. That whole gang took her in, and through the use of translation AIs asked her scores of questions. They also tried to tell her everything about themselves. It happened so often, Michel thought; people wanted to seize the famous stranger whose story they knew (or thought they knew), and give them their story in return, to redress the balance of the relationship. Some kind of witnessing, or confessional. The reciprocal sharing of stories. And people were naturally drawn to Maya anyway. She listened to their stories, and laughed, and asked questions — utterly there. Time after time they told her how the flood had come, drowning their homes, their livings, throwing them out into the world, to friends and family they hadn’t seen in years, forcing them into new patterns and reliances, breaking the mold of their lives and thrusting them out into the mistral. They had been exalted by this process, Michel saw, they were proud of their response, of how people had pulled together — also very indignant at any counterexamples of gouging or callousness, blots on an otherwise heroic affair: “Can you believe it? And it did no good, he was jumped one night in the street and all that money gone.”
“It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep forever.”
They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around Hellas Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics — because of the way they focused on others, the way they exalted people’s stories. Perhaps that was what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.
Some of Michel’s relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water — the sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste of his old beach swims.