Susurrus on Mars

by Hal Duncan

  •

  THE FOLIAGE IN the Arboretum’s thick enough. No one will see. Besides, like they’d bat a lash if so, says Jaq. It’s naught they couldn’t snoop if they wist it. That’s what the hylenet means.

  His doublet dangles in one hand, the other poised over his britches’ drawstring. Just one sharpish snapshot of a stance, he wants, the two of them kissing in the folly, skin to skin, framed in marble and vine. Why not? All the tourist couples do it here, like they once threw lire coins in the Trevi Fountain, released tealight balloons from the top of the Pierian Tower, clicked a lover’s padlock on the Pont des Arts. It’ll be a jape. See, there’s even a bench for togs.

  Puk can’t. No, really. No, he savvies it’s not like Earth, and, yes, he’s the one suggested the Jardins Rochester in the first place, and was gabbling on about fresh air fornication all the walk, but now... yes, he savvies it’s silly. It’s just... different—oh, and now they just got a courtesy dint from the old couple benched down by the water lily pond, terribly Xanthean about their inadvertent eavesdrop, offering inattention as an Erehwynan offers wine; it must be awkward for an Earther and all, what.

  See? says Jaq, then clocks the point in a double take: the poke of jujubes in a waving hand, Puk flapping in a loop, self-conscious that he’s self-conscious that he’s—

  Look, Jaq says, pointing, and—as Puk turns his head toward nothing—plants a kiss on his cheek. Dips fingers. A baffling surprise is blinked, smiled.

  What was that f—?

  Jaq pops a jujube in the open mouth.

  Zen sneak attack, he says. Tell you what; togs on, cool?

  I know it’s daft, chews Puk as Jaq draws him in.

  Ah, husht.

  •

  NYMPHAEA CAERULEA, EGYPTIAN Blue Water Lily.

  Her leaves are peltate, twenty-five to forty centimetres across, with a radial notch from the circumference to the petiole, forming pads that float upon the water. She takes her name from the mauve or cerulean or blue-white blossoms, ten to fifteen centimetres in diameter, shading to pale yellow in the centre, which rise above the surface, opening in the morning, closing early for the night, late afternoon.

  Her rhizomes are edible, as Isis herself is said to have informed humanity. Psychoactive, sedative, like the mandrakes and poppies she was often rendered with in Egyptian art, as in a bas-relief in the tomb of Tutankhamun where her petals were also scattered freely, she might well be imagined the lotus of the Odyssey’s lotus-eaters. But this Sacred Blue Lily, as she is also known, is not a woman transformed to plant; rather the metamorphosis ran the other direction. Rising and falling with the sun, this is the cosmogonic blossom out of which stepped leonine Nefertem, He Who is Beautiful.

  •

  JAQ IS A jaguar in the jungle of the Arboretum, or might be if the freckles dotting his shoulders and forearms were spots, if the jaguar were carved in carnelian but could still somehow pace, leisurely in ease of stone dominion, an apex predator of blood, amber and fire. A shock of sunlight for a mane—heading more to mohawk. Puk is mixing up his cats; he doesn’t care.

  It’s not warped the way he’d think, Puk is explaining. On Earth. Even growing up in a Heartland canton. They haven’t fixed kinseys for fifty years now. Shit, the one time he got hassle as a sixer, for getting tender with his squeeze at a wake, well, it was the doctor himself, about as hardcore a Geister as they come, who flamed the maggots to a crisp, scorched them to ash with a rant on the unreason of prejudice.

  Puk recalls his Da late on the scene, the handshake from a man who could barely broach without venom the Geisters he’d forsworn. Doesn’t mention it.

  What’s warped, he says, it’s that... it’s like anyone being a sixer reminds them of kinseys, of hankers, the whole mire of being meat. I never got that.

  Jaq looks up from the path they stroll, his gaze of golden eyes serene, balancing query in his knitted brows. Patient.

  I used to jabber Ana’s head hollow about Mars. Why can’t we live in a civilised world? I was a puke. On Mars you can hanker how you want.

  Jaq lays a hand on his shoulder, runs it down his back, a stance of comfort for sorrows unspoken, skirted. For a moment, Puk is sure he’s about to ask, fraught that he’s about to ask. The shift that brought him here is still so keen.

  You’re here now, says Jaq simply.

  •

  THERE IS NO utopia, only the ocean named as such, on Mars, and Khadir’s novel titled after it, epic of seven ships sailing from the verdant isle of Mie in its white seas, carrying food from a temple that sits at the edge of a spring, in the shadow of a tooba tree; epic of that fleet’s sixteen-day-long journey east, to the northern tip of the Phlegra Montes scissioned from the mainland but for the Isthmus of Hurqalya, to relieve besieged Nakojaabad’s twin emerald cities of Jabarsa and Jabalqa.

  I didn’t savvy your ambit, says Ana browsing the bookcases of Renart’s study while the pataphysician flicks through capsuled stancings to corrade the promised skinny. When Jaq said you were vaunted I didn’t savvy just how high, wasn’t until I gandered you... Stancers aren’t exactly feted on Earth.

  Ambit’s a thorny stance in itself, says Renart, something Jaq’s still to learn, bless him. The glassiest stancer flenses show.

  Ana slides Khadir’s Utopia back into place between Kafka and Kinsey.

  I thought it was all show, she says.

  Only in the shallows, says Renart. Really it should be medicine, affective orthopaedics. I’m hoping Puk might shift Jaq to a glint of that actually.

  He capsules the last of the gleanings with a twirl of thumb, dints it to her, all the echoes of the local phantoms.

  Here we go, he says.

  •

  NYMPHAEA NOUCHALI, RED and Blue Water Lily.

  A diurnal and nonviviparous plant with roots and stems submerged, leaves partly so, partly rising above the surface, with a spread of between one and two metres, each round leaf about twenty centimetres, crenellate with undulating edges, green on top with a darker underside.

  The flower has four or five sepals and thirteen to fifteen angular petals, usually violet blue, edged in red, though some varieties are best described as purple, mauve or fuchsia. The cup-like calyx has a diameter of eleven to fourteen centimetres and a star-shaped appearance from above, hence the flower is known also as the Blue Star Water Lily or simply as the Star Lotus.

  In the Ayurvedic medicine of India, it was known as ambal, used to settle the stomach. In Sri Lanka, it was said that when the Buddha died this flower was one of a hundred and eight signs that sprung up in his footsteps, blossoming wherever he had walked.

  •

  UP CLOSE, SAT on the stone wall that borders the lily pond, the scent is heady, a musk of nectar and swamp. Rutting fairies, Puk fancies, a sparkling unicorn tannery. Not that the water of the pond is stagnant, but it’s earthy with nutrients, hints of the fetid under the fragrant, sweet as banana but edged as dark to the nose as the still surface is to the eye. He taps a fingertip on the surface; the ripple bobs a stray date-palm leaf.

  I just can’t wrapple that they used to twiddle kinseys like that, says Jaq. Here... if you’re a one, sure, you might wist to go three for a bit, or even six, just to taste it; and a doctor—a physician, I mean, not Earther doctor—he can twiddle you in a tick; but stancing it ethics is just creepy.

  Hands wild in the air articulate his flummox.

  It’s not even logic, fixing it as one. Two or five, I can wrapple—that’s just flex with a penchant, versatile with a specialty—but one is half-blind. Why would you nix your options like that—?

  A blink from the sixer.

  —unless you’re going expert I mean you could be going expert cause lots of folk do that here that’s not weird at all I don’t mean...

  Sharp backtrack, says Puk. Don’t fret. I savvy you don’t savvy, bonobo boy.

  Jaq shrugs. Halfways maybe, he says. A jaguar doesn’t change its dots. What?

  Puk peers into his eyes but there’s no misc
hief there, just an honest blink: what did I say?

  I was just thinking about jaguars, says Puk.

  A hand out, palm up, Harlequin presenting their environs.

  Um... jungle, says Jaq.

  •

  ZIZIPHUS LOTUS, THE Lotus Jujube tree.

  An aculeate shrub of the buckthorn family, reaching a height of two to five metres. Foliage is deciduous and appears at the end of spring, the ovate leaves about five centimetres long, glabrous with a thin shiny cuticle, a trident of veins prominent at the base. She was known as the sidr in Arabic, a name which she shared with her evergreen cousin, Ziziphus spina-christa or the Christ’s Thorn Jujube, from which Yeshua’s garland of thorns was made.

  Her yellow flowers are generally pentamerous, though four, six or seven petals may be observed. Inconspicuous at five millimetres in diameter, the jujube flower was nonetheless worn in the hats of Himalayan men, its sweet smell said to make teenagers fall in love.

  A dark yellow globose drupe usually containing two seeds, her fruit is likewise small, one to one and a half centimetres in diameter, but edible fresh or dried. The whole plant is mucilaginous, so the lotus jujube or nabk is of a similar character to the common jujube, soothing the throat, soothing the nerves too, according to Chinese medicine.

  Were she the lotus of myth, she might, even from the seeded flesh of the last dried jujube now being munched in Puk’s mouth, wish she were here in all her slickly prickly glory to have eased the Earther to the naked kiss his suitor sought, perhaps let drop a little inconspicuous flower or two as the lovers brushed against her, let the blossoms tumble down to lie unnoticed in Jaq’s flaxen scruff of hair or on Puk’s shoulder, to knit their love with her aroma. But she is neither the Lotis of legend nor here at all now, the last chew of jujube swallowed, paper poke passed back from Puk to Jaq, who scrumples a rummage of fingers, finds it empty, aye, and blasé Puk with hands in jerkin pockets sauntering on, detritus dealt with.

  Oi, grumps Jaq.

  Perhaps there is no need of her aroma here.

  •

  A ROBUST ARABICAN scent conjures Colombia and Bourbon, Harar and Java.

  You’ll have some coffee before you leave, Renart had said, ouais?

  Ana didn’t want to trouble him, he had work to do, she was sure, but it was really no trouble, bad form not to offer, bad form to refuse indeed, and in truth, Erehwynan etiquette aside, a conversation that did not careen from what Jaq smelled between his toes to how he would have slept in ancient Gaul, to where he’d heard of vintage doublets going cheap, to when the fob was at its brightest in the sky, to why pirates could be deemed utopian anarchists, to whether gravity had changed the taste of meat on Mars, to which poor farmyard fowl the hero of Gargantua by François Rabelais concluded and maintained to be without comparison as an arsewipe... really, Renart had said, some mature discourse for a change would be a mercy.

  So they sit at the kitchen table, sipping espresso poured from a stainless steel macchinetta into equally Neo-Modern glazed red clay ochoko, chatting about Ana’s phantoms, pataphysician and pataphysicist fumbling for a common language.

  Corbin, says Renart. I think I savvy where you are with Corbin, but it still seems... sneakily mystical. How are you not saying that these phantoms exist on some aetherial plane—higher, deeper, orthogonal, whatever?

  That’s exactly what I’m not saying: alethic persistence is not epistemic continuity; span is not stint on another level, running on another track in the same direction. Look, Corbin is a good start point, but...

  Corbin is pataphysics’s alchemy, she’s trying to express, a corm that has to be devoured for the actual science to sprout. From alchemy to chemistry, and onward. And now, here, ages down the line, they’re flowers on an ancient tree, physician and physicist. Talking of transmutation of elements from here and now doesn’t mean turning lead into gold. But it sounds a whole lot like it, Renart reckons. Sounds like her hylenet phantoms are nothing less than gods in the wind.

  A god, singular, uncapitalised. There’s only been one agency gleaned in that medium so far, Ana tells him.

  •

  THE OLD XANTHEAN couple nod friendly smiles and dints of intro as they pass, hand in hand, Asa and Nkoyo Edet, who are, the politely backdinting Jaq Cartier—with Puk Massinger, intro per pro—gleans from a glance to profile, in Erehwyna to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Which is barely in Jaq’s nous before Puk, slick off the mark, bounces a felicitation via him that turns both women’s smiles to the beaming warmth, now over the shoulder and with crinkling eyes, of aged aunts charmed by a posy gifted quite out of the blue by some young niece’s chivalric paramour. Being Xantheans, their gratitude is as sincere as it’s effusive—Why, thank you both so much!—and echoed in a fuss of warmth, an old dear’s whisper as Mesdames Edet amble for the steps up to the folly: What lovely young men.

  Debonair, says Jaq with a prod of elbow in Puk’s side. If you can’t hack the Erehwynan swagger, least you can always move to Xanthe.

  Oh, I can hack the swagger, says Puk. Earlier was just a side-swipe. I wasn’t ready.

  And now you are?

  If this Libertine Meadow’s as wild as you paint, I’m not that bashful; ask Ana. It’s just... high kicks in the chorus line versus spotlight out of nowhere and dance, monkey, dance!

  A hint of pout. Jaq drapes an arm around Puk’s shoulder as they take the path for the Arboretum doors.

  In that case, he says, I was fancying we might cast it on my tumblespace. That’d be peachy, ouais?

  Willpower alone keeps him blithe and eyes front, playing fox with startled bunny, poised through the pause.

  Sure, says Puk with trembling bravado. Sure, why not?

  Jaq squeezes him in a headlock hug and loosens, scrumples Puk’s hair.

  Soothe, he says, just joshing. Truth is, I’ve got a niftier scheme, sudden notion. Come on.

  He stretches his free arm out as they pass the date-plum tree planted just inside the doors, bouncing fingers like a nipper rattling a stick along railings, riffling leaf just for the relish of the moment.

  •

  SHE IS DECIDUOUS, Diospyros lotus, a tree of glossy, glabrous leaves of an ovate form and leathery feel, five to fifteen centimetres long, three to six centimetres wide, shed in winter. Her aging bark she sheds as she grows, striving for a height of fifteen to thirty metres in optimum conditions, generally falling short. She was once the daughter of the Titan Nereus. Lotis was her name. She lived in a world of feasts, a party girl, fell asleep in a drunken blur once, was woken by the braying of the satyr Silenus’s ass; that was the crowd she hung out with. She would have fitted in well in Erehwyna, frolic-fucking on Libertine Meadow, casting on tumblespace.

  She is dioecious. Her flowers are small and yellowy-green, unassuming, which seems at odds with the tale of Dryope being taken with her bloom, unless perhaps, after the plucking that doomed poor Dryope, Lotis reconsidered her own gaudiness, settled on a less alluring perianth. Regardless, these flowers appear in June or July, bearing seeds with thin skin and a hard endosperm, fruit ripening from October to November. It might have been a festival at the turn of autumn to winter when the braying ass woke her, come to think of it. Whatever. She woke to find Priapus leering over her, his ithyphallus like the club of Herakles—albeit wilting at the raucous hee-haw and her wakening. She shoved him away and ran.

  She is delicious. The small fruit, only a few centimetres in diameter, ambercream in colour, not as vibrant orange as a pumpkin or persimmon, but approaching it, is harsh and astringent until fully ripe. If left to cool however, to be frosted, to rot a little even, then this bletting brings out the rich flavour in her juicy flesh, the blend of plummy and dateish (more notable when dried) that gives the fruit its common name—date-plum. The botanical designation of the genus meanwhile comes from her name in ancient Greece, dios pyros, meaning wheat of Zeus or fruit of gods, suggesting no small appreciation.

  Priapus went beyond appreciation to would-b
e rapist prick, chased her until her patience broke. If he ever got the message that she’d rather be a tree than be fucked by him, she doesn’t know; the word no is too subtle for some, it seems, for those dicks to whom drunk equals asking for it and rejection indicates the null hanker of frigidity or the sixer kinsey of a lesbian.

  She sighs as Susurrus slips in the opening doors just to kiss hello, slips back out as they close, following the fleshlings who, contrary to the arrant cock-fluffery of your all too common Priapus, she would totally do if she were still that party girl. They seem quite sweet even barely ripened.

  She is dense and dark in the secondary xylum of her trunk. Of the woods known as ebony, many have been of her genus—which would seem apt for the lotus trees under the shade of which, so we are told in the Book of Job, Behemoth lies, in a covert of reeds and marsh, surrounded by the willows of the brook.

  •

  PUK, WITH THE assistance of one locker room bench of red-painted wood on basalt blocks, undresses.

  Jerkin: synthe filigree three-quarter length jacket, fitted to the waist, flared below; fabric charcoal, thread silvery, pattern paisley; already unbuttoned, now slipped off and hung on peg in locker. Boots: black leather balmorals, polished; knots on both untied first; left lace loosened and boot levered off; ditto right boot; picked up together with one hand; stowed neatly at the back of the locker, toes facing out. Socks: charcoal grey cotton, non-odiferous; removed individually; laid flat on bench with heel underneath, one atop the other; rolled tight from the toes; aperture of bottom sock stretched round and over to capsule neatly; stowed in right boot. Trews: drainpipes of same fabric and style as jerkin; unbuttoned and slid down to thighs; left leg then right hauled off from seated wobble on bench; flapped and folded once vertically, bringing legs together, then twice horizontally; package deposited in locker frontwise of boots. Jersey: stretch cotton, skin-nipped, silver with charcoal grey raglan sleeves; peeled off from waist; turned right side out; folded twice vertically, bringing sleeves together, then over body; folded horizontally letter-style, top-third down then over again; stowed on top of trews. Skivvies: stretch cotton hip-cut trunks, charcoal grey; peeled off with thumbs and flapped; folded once vertically and stowed on top of jersey.