Blue Mars

PART EIGHT The Green and the White

Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the good of China we need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars. You’ll go there together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your friends and neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years if you decide you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to the new Xiazha. We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the harbor town ofNilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile. There are other Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections in all the big cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can begin in a month — train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space elevator into orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down their elevator to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say? Let’s have a unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.

Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong Kong, and told an operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the information along to Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner there named Amy added the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat thinking for a morning. That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman emeritus William Fort, who was surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described the situation to him. “The blue world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty. There’s going to be problems. Let’s talk about them.”

The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team, including many of the Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf camp. The demographers laid out the situation. “Everyone is getting the longevity treatment now,” Amy said. “We are fully into the hypermalthusian age.”

It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration to Mars was often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the problem. Even with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as Earth, and hardly any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group, were already sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were members of ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack of autonomy in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the elevator cars of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the Maldives, were constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a stream of Sikhs and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space and moving to Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from Israel. Kurds from Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that sense,” Amy said, “Mars is becoming the new America.”

“And like the old America,” a woman named Elizabeth added, “there’s a native population already there to be impacted. Think about the numbers for a while. If every day the cars of all the space elevators on Earth are full, then that’s a hundred people per car, therefore twenty-four hundred per day per elevator taking off, and a different twenty-four hundred leaving the cars at the top of each elevator, and transferring into shuttles. There are ten elevators, so that’s twenty-four thousand people a day. Therefore eight million seven hundred and sixty thousand people every year.”

“Call it ten million a year,” Amy said. “That’s a lot, but at that rate it will still take a century to transfer just one of Earth’s sixteen billions to Mars. Which won’t make any difference here to speak of. So it doesn’t really make sense! No major relocation is possible. We can never move a significant fraction of the Terran population to Mars. We have to keep our attention on solving Earth’s problems at home. Mars’s presence can only help as a kind of psychological vent. In essence, we’re on our own.”

William Fort said, “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “Lots of Terran governments are trying it, whether it makes sense or not. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil — they’re all going for it, and if they keep emigration at the system’s capacity, Mars’s population will double in about two years. So nothing changes on Earth, but Mars is totally inundated. “

One of the Immortals noted that an emigration surge of a similar scale had helped to cause the first Martian revolution.

“What about the Earth-Mars treaty,” someone else asked. “I thought it specifically forbade such overwhelming influxes.”

“It does, “Elizabeth said. “It specifies no more than ten percent of the Martian population to be added every Terran year. But it also states that Mars should take more if they can.”

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

William Fort said, “We’ll have to send them somewhere else.” The others looked at him. “Where?” said Amy.

No one replied. Fort waved a hand vaguely. “We’d better think of somewhere,” Elizabeth said grimly. “The Chinese and Indians have been good allies of the Martians, so far, and even they aren’t paying much attention to the treaty. I was sent a tape recording of an Indian policy meeting about this, and they spoke about running their program at capacity for a couple of centuries, and then seeing where they stand.”

The elevator car descendedand Mars grew huge beneath their feet. Finally they slowed down, low over Sheffield, and everything felt normal, Martian gravity again, without the Coriolis force pulling reality to the side. And then they were in the Socket, and back home.

Friends, reporters, delegations, Mangalavid. In Sheffield itself people hurried about their business. Occasionally Nir-gal was recognized, and waved at happily; some even stopped to shake his hand, or give him a hug, inquiring about his trip or his health. “We’re glad you’re back!”

Still, in most people’s eyes… Illness was so rare. Quite a few looked away. Magical thinking: Nirgal saw suddenly that for many people the longevity treatments equaled immortality. They did not want to think otherwise; they looked away.

But Nirgal had seen Simon die even though Simon’s bones had been stuffed with Nirgal’s young marrow. He had felt his body unravel, felt the pain in his lungs, in every cell of him. He knew death was real. Immortality had not come to them, and never would. Delayed senescence, Sax called it. Delayed senescence, that was all it was; Nirgal knew that. And people saw that knowledge in him, and recoiled. He was unclean, and they looked away. It made him angry.

He took the train down to Cairo, looking out at the vast tilted desert of east Tharsis, so dry and ferric, the Ur landscape of red Mars: his land. His eyes felt it. His brain and body glowed with that recognition. Home.

But the faces on the train, looking at him and then looking away. He was the man who had not been able to adjust to Earth. The home world had nearly killed him. He was an alpine flower, unable to withstand the true world, an exotic to whom Earth was like Venus. This is what their eyes were saying with their darting glances. Eternal exile.

Well, that was the Martian condition. One out of every five hundred Martian natives who visited Earth died; it was one of the most dangerous things a Martian could do, more dangerous than cliff flying, visiting the outer solar system, childbirth. A kind of Russian roulette, with lots of empty chambers in the gun to be sure, but the full one was full.

And he had dodged it. Not by much, but he had dodged it. He was alive, he was home! These faces in the train, what did they know? They thought he had been defeated by Earth; but they also thought he was Nirgal the Hero, who had never been defeated before — they thought he was a story, an idea only. They didn’t know about Simon or Jackie or Dao, or Hiroko. They didn’t know anything about him. He was twenty-six m-years old now, a middle-aged man who had suffered all that any middle-aged man might suffer — death of parents, death of love, betrayal of friends, betrayal by friends. These things happen to everyone. But that wasn’t the Nirgal that people wanted.

The train skirted the first curved head walls of the Labyrinth of Night’s sapped canyons, and soon it floated into Cairo’s old station. Nirgal walked out into the tented town, looking around curiously. It had been a metanat stronghold, and he had never been in it before; interesting to see the little old buildings. The physical plant had been damaged by the Red Army in the revolution, and was still marked by broken black walls. People waved at him as he walked down the broad central boulevard to the city offices. And there she was, in the concourse of the town hall, by the window walls overlooking the U of Nilus Noctis. Nirgal stopped, breath short. She had not yet seen him. Her face was rounder but otherwise she was as tall and sleek as ever, dressed in a green silk blouse and a darker green skirt of some coarser material, her black hair a shiny mane spilling down her back. He could not stop looking at her.

Then she saw him, and flinched ever so slightly. Perhaps the wrist images had not been enough to tell her how much the Terran illness had hurt him. Her hands extended on their own recognizance, and then she followed them, hands still out even while her eyes were calculating, her grimace at his appearance carefully rearranged for the cameras that were always around her. But he loved her for those hands. He could feel the warmth of his face, blushing as they kissed, cheek to cheek like friendly diplomats. Up close she still looked fifteen m-years old, just past the unblemished bloom of youth — at that point that is even more beautiful than youth. People said she had taken the treatment from the age of ten.

“It’s true then,” she said, “Earth almost killed you.”

“A virus, actually.”

She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took him by the arm, led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew several of them she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the inner circle of the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could not notice that, and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were interrupted by a great wail. There was a baby among them.

“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my daughter.” She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a few months old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright with squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an adjacent room.

Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to the window. He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled their eyes, shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a quick undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had done the same.

The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.

The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noc-tis. Jackie was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all culture, right there in that clutch. Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”

Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth-Mars relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was considerable — it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars-led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth-Mars relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power…

Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The princess of Mars. “Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her with her head. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the aides and jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the room with the infant.

“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,” Jackie said. “You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned friendly.”

“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on: “We helped them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of moving their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for emigration to make any difference.”

“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can send a steady stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.” Nirgal shook his head. “It’ll never be enough.”

“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”

“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to properly imagine. And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a significant fraction of that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”

“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han Chinese, and it didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but they kept doing it anyway.”

Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”

“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy when there is no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the Arab caravans out there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”

“The environmental courts?”

Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and whimpered. Jackie shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive curve. “ Antar doesn’t think the environmental courts will be able to function for long. We had a fight with them while you were gone, and we only went along with them to give the process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no teeth. And everything everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly they should be judging everything. But tents are coming down in the lower elevations and not one in a hundred is going to the courts to ask permission for what they do once their town is part of the outside. Why should they? Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. The court system isn’t going to work.”

“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”

Jackie shrugged.

Anyone could be the father — Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John Boone could be, if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage. That would be like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the infant’s head toward her.

“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”

“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were all one-parent children.” “But was that good?” “Who knows?”

There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her mouth just slightly tight with resentment, defiance… impossible to say. She knew who both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had not been much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the brutal response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.

She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or seven, isn’t that right?”

“True, but not right.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t right.” And he looked her in the eye.

But she looked away, down at the baby. “Better than having your parents tearing each other up in front of you.”

“Is that what you would do with the father?”

“Who knows?”

“So it’s safer this way.”

“Maybe it is. Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.”

“In Dorsa Brevia.”

“Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian institution, is it.”

“I don’t know.” Nirgal considered it. “Actually, I saw a lot of families in the canyons. We come from an unusual group in that respect.”

“In many respects.”

Her child pulled away, and Jackie tucked her breast in her bra and let down her shirt. “Marie?” she called, and her assistant entered. “I think her diaper needs changing.” And she handed the infant up to the woman, who left without a word.

“Servants now?” Nirgal said.

Jackie’s mouth went tight again, and she stood, calling “Mem?”

Another woman came in, and Jackie said, “Mem, we’re going to have to meet with those environmental court people about this Chinese request. It could be that we can use it as leverage to get the Cairo water allotment reconsidered.”

Mem nodded and left the room.

“You just make the decisions?” Nirgal said.

Jackie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Nice to have you back, Nirgal, but try to catch up, all right?”

Catch up. Free Mars was now a political party, the biggest on Mars. It had not always been that way; it had begun as something more like a network of friends, or the part of the underground that lived in the demimonde. Mostly ex-students of the university in Sabishii, or, later, the members of a very loose association of communities in the tented canyons, and in clandestine clubs in the cities, and so forth. A kind of vague umbrella term for those sympathetic to the underground, but not followers of any more specific political movement or philosophy. Just something they said, in fact — “free Mars.”

In many ways it had been Nirgal’s creation. So many of the natives had been interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the thoughts of one early settler or another, did not appeal to them; they had wanted something new. And so Nirgal had traveled around the planet, and stayed with people who organized meetings or discussions, and this had gone on for so long that eventually people wanted a name. People wanted names for things.

And so, Free Mars. And in the revolution it had become a rallying point for the natives, rising up out of society as a kind of emergent phenomenon, with many more people declaring themselves members than one would have guessed possible. Millions. The native majority. The very definition of the revolution, in fact; the main reason for its success. Free Mars as a sentence, an imperative; and they had done it.

But then Nirgal had left for Earth, determined to make their case there. And while he was gone, during the constitutional congress, Free Mars had gone from a movement to an organization. That was fine, it was the normal course of events, a necessary part of institutionalizing their independence. No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic — or, along with heroic, had been also suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia — the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression. No — he did not want it to be like it had been before. He was happy they were in control (at least partially) of their fate. That wasn’t the problem. Nor was he bothered by the tremendous growth in the numbers of supporters Free Mars had. The party seemed on the edge of becoming a supermajority, with three of the seven executive councillors coming from the party leadership, and most other global positions filled by other members. And now a fair percentage of new emigrants were joining the party — and old emigrants as well — and natives who had supported smaller parties before the revolution — and, last but not least, quite a few people who had supported the UNTA regime, and were now looking for the new power to follow. All in all, it made for a huge group. And in the first years of a new socioeconomic order, this massing of political power, of opinion and belief, had some advantages, no doubt about it. They could get things done. But Nirgal wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.

One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he watched a group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff, west of town. There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft: gliders and ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose inside the thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then a variety of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected to the undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the people who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly they were made of ultralight materials; sqme were transparent and nearly invisible, so that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots landed them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them — to crash, in other words.

The hang gliders, on the other hand, looked as dangerous as ever. The people who used those were the rowdiest members of the flying crowd, Nirgal could see when he went out there — thrill seekers who ran off the edge of the cliff shouting in an adrenalated exhilaration that crackled over the intercoms — they were running off a cliff, after all, and no matter what rig they were strapped to, their bodies still saw what was happening. No wonder their shouts had that special ring!

Nirgal got on the subway and went out to the launchpad, drawn by some quality of the sight. All those people, free in the sky… He was recognized, of course, he shook hands; and accepted an invitation from a group of fliers to go up and see what it was like. The hang gliders offered to teach him to fly, but he laughed and said he would try the little blimpgliders first. There was a two-person blimpglider tethered there, slightly larger than the rest, and a woman named Monica invited him up, fueled the thing, and sat him beside her; and up the launch mast they went, to be released with a jerk into the strong downslope afternoon winds and over the city, now revealed as a small tent filled with greenery, perched on the edge of the northwestern-most of the network of canyons etching the slope of Tharsis.

Flying over Noctis Labyrinthus! The wind keened over the blimp’s taut transparent material, and they bounced unpre-dictably up and down on the wind, while also rotating horizontally in what seemed an uncontrolled spin; but then Monica laughed and began manipulating the controls before her, and quickly they were proceeding south across the labyrinth, over canyon after canyon making their irregular X intersections. Then over the Compton Chaos, and the torn land of the Illyrian Gate, where it dropped into the upper end of the Marineris Glacier.

“These things’ jets are much more powerful than they need to be,” Monica told him through their headphones. “You can make headway into the wind until it reaches something like two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, although you wouldn’t want to try that. You also use the jets to counteract the blimp’s loft, to get us back down. Here, try it. That’s left jet throttle, that’s right, and here are the stabilizers. The jets are dead easy, it’s using the stabilizer that needs some practicing.”

In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put his hands on the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then left. “Wow.”

“It’s fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous, it’ll just cut out.”

“How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?”

“You’re doing it already, right?” She laughed. “No, it takes a hundred hours or so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There’s the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. But that’s mostly hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the real thing, so you can put in your hours on those, and then when you’re actually up here you’ll have it wired even though you haven’t officially reached the flying time limit.”

“Interesting!”

And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, lying under them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds tossed them; the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola seats… . “It’s like becoming a bird!”

“Exactly.”

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart is pleased by one thing after another.

After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, “ and several times a week he made a date with Monica or” one of her friends, and went out to the cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.

Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days , passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.

It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars — son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage — very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia. Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.

So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.

Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him — to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.

Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system entirely…

There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend — he and Dao had fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.

Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.

The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than that… it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie’s route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.

He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone mentioned Hi-roko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone said, “working on a new commune of communes up there.”

“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.

Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I know.”

Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of the stories, however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have been made up. Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to think she was dead. Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.

“They just wish she were here,” Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned it the next day.

“Don’t you wish it?”

“Of course” — (though she didn’t) — “but not enough to make up stories about it.”

“You really think they’re all made up? I mean, who would do that? What would they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn’t make sense.”

“People don’t make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People see an elderly Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko. That night they tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down in the marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site, says my roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!”

Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the stories. For the rest, though, the few that didn’t fit that pattern…

“Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court position,” Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court. “We can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually be more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I suppose. But we have to know.”

“Yeah yeah.”

People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it — it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.

Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have to overcome the hostility of the people who didn’t want him back in the party, he would have to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people who would help him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their favor; play them off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in order to establish preeminence over the others… He could see all these processes at work right there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser after the next, discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then working them to establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she would say if he pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in control of Mars now, and this work had to be done if they were to create the new world they had hoped for. One couldn’t be overfastidious, one had to be realistic, you held your nose and did it. It had a certain nobility to it, really. It was the necessary work.

Nirgal didn’t know-if those justifications were true or not. Had they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?

He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at Jackie’s daughter’s face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the Free Mars delegates from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by the northern sea, they were more determined than ever to take control of their fate, including immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing much past its current state. “All very well,” Jackie was saying, “but it’s a very large island now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will be especially humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine harbor sites, fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep a hand on development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a particular interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed to say to them? That the Elysian locals don’t like Chinese? That we’ll take their help in a crisis, but we don’t want them moving into the neighborhood?”

“It’s not that they’re Chinese!” the delegate said.

“I understand. Really I do. Tell you what — you go back to South Fossa and explain the difficulties we face here, and I’ll do everything I can here to help you. I can’t guarantee results, but I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks,” the delegate said, and left.

Jackie turned to her assistant. “Idiot. Who’s next. Ah, naturally; the Chinese ambassador. Well, let him in.”

The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and her AI translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of pleasantries, the woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements, preferably somewhere in the equatorial provinces.

Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been started from the very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and built a tent town or a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater… Now, however, Jackie looked polite and said, “It’s possible. Everything of course will have to be referred to the environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a great deal of empty land on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be arranged there, especially if China was willing to contribute to infrastructure and mitigation and the like.”

They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.

Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. “Nirgal, could you get Rachel in here? And try to decide what you’re going to do soon, please?”

Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He packed his little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out to the launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person blimp-gliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in Marineris, on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad; they were willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it returned by another flier later.

It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would only get stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the pilot’s seat. The little blimp-glider slid up the launching mast, held by the nose; and was let free.**

He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over the maze of interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below. Flight out of the labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun, gotten burned, survived the fall — and now flew again, this time down, down, down, ever down. Taking advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting down over the shattered dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the great channel outbreak had begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down lus Chasma; but Nirgal angled north, away from the glacier’s flow, and then flew east again, down into the head of Ti-thonium Chasma, which paralleled lus Chasma just to the north.

Tithonium was one of the deepest and narrowest of the Marineris canyons — four kilometers deep, ten wide. He could fly well below the level of the plateau rims and still be thousands of meters over the canyon floor. Tithonium was higher than lus, wilder, untouched by human hands, seldom traveled in, because it was a dead end to the east, where it narrowed and became rough-floored as it got shallower, then abruptly stopped. Nirgal spotted the road that switchbacked up the eastern head wall, a road he had traveled a few times in his youth, when all the planet had been his home.

The afternoon sun dipped behind him. The shadows on the land lengthened. The wind continued to blow strong, thrumming over the blimpglider, whining and whooshing and keening. It blew him over the caprock of the rim plateau again, as Tithonium became a string of oval depressions, pocking the plateau one after the next: the Tithonia Catena, each dip a giant bowl-shaped depression in the land.

And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out over the immense open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of its eastern wall in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the sunset’s light. To the noilh was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the south the spectacular buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central giant of the Marineris system. It was Mars’s version of Concordiaplatz, he saw, but much bigger than Earth’s, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic beyond all human scale, as if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or two eons, to a time before the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!

And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond mesa, a caprock island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor. And in the sunset’s hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent town, at the southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the common band on his intercom, then guided him in to the town’s landing pad. The sun was winking out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimp-glider around and descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure of Kokopelli painted as a target on the^landing pad.

Shining mesa had a large top. more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty kilometers long and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a Monument Valley mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the southern point of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached fragment of the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a tremendous vantage point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views through the deep, steep gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to the south.

Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over the years, and the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five kilometers above the datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of removing it. The floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum, was patched with growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on Shining Mesa flew down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize, floating back up to the mesa’s top in the late afternoons. A few of these flying foresters were old underground acquaintances of Nirgal’s, and they were pleased to take him along and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.

The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In Candor, they curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously south into Melas. Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under the western walls where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow ran down in a faint tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided streambeds that ran together into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which collected at a confluence just above the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild foaming rapids to the floor of Melas Chasma, where it pooled against the remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly against its northern flank.

On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were springing up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other very rapidly growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older krummholz. These days it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big sun-reflecting bowl, protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing a great number of plant and animal species to flourish underneath them; Nirgal’s acquaintances said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars. They had to carry sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around, because of bears, snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of the galleries was becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and aspen.

All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate that had been lying in Candor and Ophir canyons — great white bench terraces made of extremely water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now melting over the canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new soils with lots of nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits were being buried under landslides — the water that was dissolving the sodium nitrate was also hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical acceleration of the mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near the foot of the canyon walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as they soared around in their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides everywhere. Several high talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods were one of the many topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the omegandorph got into the blood; in fact there was little they could do. If chunks of a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was going to stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on Shining Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in the pit of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to spot the slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of dust. Fliers in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble with tales of being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day Nirgal was about halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was like a sonic boom that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More loft than was needed, more power… the one he had rented (using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls — up up and up and up, to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an –individual in his own private life.

He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple pain as well — pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.

So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some image of himself. The fractured, layered, scarred canyon walls were so many stupendous mineral mirrors; and indeed he saw clearly that he was a tiny creature, smaller than a gnat in a cathedral. Flying around studying each great palimpsest of facets, he scried two very strong impulses in himself, distinct and mutually exclusive, yet infolded, like the green and the white. On the one hand he wanted to stay a wanderer, to fly and walk and sail over all the world, a nomad forever, wandering ceaselessly until he knew Mars better than anyone else. Ah yes; it was a familiar euphoria. On the other hand it was familiar, he had done that all his life. It would be the form of his previous life, without the content. And he knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness that made him feel so detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope vision. Coming from everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now he wanted that home, as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.

Both these desires existed, strongly and together — or, to be more exact, in a subtle rapid oscillation, which jangled his emotions, and left him insomniac and restless. He could see no way to reconcile the two. They were mutually exclusive. No one he talked to had any useful suggestions as to how to resolve the difficulty. Coyote was dubious about setting down roots — but then he was a nomad, and didn’t know. Art considered the wandering life impossible; but he was fond of his places now.

Nirgal’s nonpolitical training was in mesocosm engineering, but he found that little help to his thinking. At the higher elevations they were always going to be in tents, and mesocosm engineering would be needed; but it was becoming more of a science than an art, and with increasing experience solving the problems would be more and more routinized. Besides, did he want to pursue a tented profession, when so much of the lower planet was becoming land they could walk on?

No. He wanted to live in the open air. To learn a patch of land, its soil and plants and animals and weather and skies, and everything else … he wanted that. Part of him. Part of the time.

He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma was not the place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge vistas made it a hard place to see as home — it was too vast, too inhuman. The canyon floors were designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the streams surging with snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be buried under enormous landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The locals were going to stay up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors during the day. The mesa would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the mesa — it was an island in the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for flying vacations, for partying through the nights, for expensive hotels, for the young and the in-love … all that was fine, wonderful. But crowded, perhaps even overrun — or else always battling the influx of visitors, and newly settled residents enchanted by the sublime views, people who would arrive like Nirgal himself, dropping in at some dusk in their life and never going away, while the old residents looked on helplessly and grumbled about the good old days when the world had been new, and unoccupied.

No — that was not the kind of home he had in mind. Although he loved the way dawn flushed the fluted west walls of Candor, flaring all across the Martian spectrum, the sky turning indigo or mauve, or a startling earthly cerulean… a beautiful place, so beautiful that on some days as he flew about he felt it would be worth it to stand on Shining Mesa and hold his ground, to try to preserve it, to swoop down and learn the gnarly wilderness floor, float back up every afternoon to dinner. Would that work, make him feel at home? And if wilderness was what he wanted, weren’t there other places less spectacular but more remote, thus more wild?

Back and forth he went, back and forth. One day, flying over the foaming opaque series of waterfalls and rapids in the Candor Gap, he remembered that John Boone had been through this area, in a solo rover just after the Transmari-neris Highway had been built. What would that master equivocator have said about this amazing region?

Nirgal called up Boone’s AI, Pauline, and asked for Candor, and found a voice diary made during a drive through the canyon in 2046. Nirgal let the tape run as he looked down on the land from above, listening to the hoarse voice with the friendly American accent, a voice unselfconscious about talking to an AI. Listening to the voice made Nirgal wish he could really talk to the man. Some people said Nirgal had filled John Boone’s empty shoes, that Nirgal had done the work John would have done had he lived. If that were so, what would John have done afterward? How would he have lived?

“This is the most unbelievable country I’ve ever seen. Really, it’s what you think of when you think of Valles Mari-neris. Back in Melas the canyon was so wide that out in the middle you couldn’t see the walls at all, they were under the horizon! This small-planet curvature is producing effects no one ever imagined. All the old simulations lied so bad, the verticals exaggerated by factors of five or ten, as I recall, which made it look like you were down in a slot. It’s not a slot. Wow, there’s a rock column just like a woman in a toga, Lot’s wife I guess that would be. I wonder if it is salt, it’s white, but I guess that doesn’t mean much. Have to ask Ann. I wonder what those Swiss road builders made of all this when they built this road, it’s not very alpine. Kind of like an anti-Alps, down instead of up, red instead of green, basalt instead of granite. Well, but they seemed to like it anyway. Of course they’re anti-Swiss Swiss, so it makes a kind of sense. Whoa, pothole country here, the rover is bouncing around. Might try that bench there, it looks smoother than here. Yep, there we go, just like a road. Oh — it is the road. I guess I got off it a bit, I’m driving manually for the fun of it, but it’s hard to keep an eye out for the transponders when there’s so much else to look at. The transponders are made more for automatic pilot than the human eye. Hey, there’s the break into Ophir Chasma, what a gap! That wall must be, I don’t know — twenty thousand feet tall. My Lord. Since the last one was called Candor Gap, this one should be called Ophir Gap, right? Ophir Gate would be nicer. Let’s check the map. Hmm, the promontory on the west side of the gap is called Candor Labes, that’s lips, isn’t it? Candor Throat. Or, hmm. I don’t think so. It’s one hell of an opening though. Steep cliffs on both sides, and twenty thousand feet tall. That’s about six or seven times as tall as the cliffs in Yosemite. Sheeee-it. They don’t look that much taller, to tell the truth. Foreshortening no doubt. They look about twice as tall, or — who knows. I can’t remember what Yosemite really looked like, in terms of size anyway. This is the most amazing canyon you could ever even imagine. Ah, there’s Candor Mensa, on my left. This is the first time I could see that it isn’t part of the Candor Labes wall. I’ll bet that mesa top has one hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up there, sure. I wish I could get up there and see it! This would be a fun place to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see dust devils every now and then, vicious little things, real tight and dark. There’s a shaft of sunlight there hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar of butter hanging in the air. Ah, God, what a beautiful world!”

Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man’s voice, and surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just these recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch John Boone negotiate Mars’s wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that role, among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy voice. And that did not solve his problem.

Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs and restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views, over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they did not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was distracted to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall into reveries and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in the steamy streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the torrential monsoon. How often he found himself there again; everything that had happened since was so pale by comparison!

But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice say “Hiroko.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope.”

It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge of who he was.

“You saw her yourself?” he said sharply.

“Yes. She’s not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier.”

“I don’t know,” an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather. Voice hoarse: “I heard she was down in the chaos where the first hidden colony used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay.”

Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen there, had been confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had seen her there on Earth —

“This here’s Nirgal,” one said to the last comment, pointing and grinning. “He should be able to confirm or deny that one!”

Nirgal, taken aback, nodded. “I didn’t see her on Earth,” he said. “There were rumors only.”

“Same as here, then.”

Nirgal shrugged.

The young woman, flushed now that she knew who Nirgal was, insisted she had met Hiroko herself. Nirgal watched her closely. This was different; no one had ever made such a direct claim to him (except in Switzerland). She looked worried, defensive, but was holding her ground. “I talked with her, I say!”

Why lie about something like that? And how would it be possible for someone to get fooled about it? Impersonators? But why do that?

Despite himself Nirgal’s pulse had quickened, and he was warmer. The thing was, it was possible Hiroko would do something like this; hide but not hide; live somewhere without bothering to contact the family left behind. There was no obvious motive for it, it would be weird, inhumane, inhuman; and perfectly within Hiroko’s range of possibilities. His mother was a kind of insane person, he had understood that for years — a charismatic who led people effortlessly, but was mad. Capable of almost anything.

If she was alive.

He did not want to hope again. He did not want to go chasing off after the mere mention of her name! But he was watching this girl’s face as if he could read the truth from it, as if he could catch the very image of Hiroko still there in her pupils! Others were asking the questions he would have asked, so he could stay silent and listen, he did not have to make her overselfconscious. Slowly she told the whole story; she and some friends had been flying clockwise around Elysium, and when they stopped for the night up on the new peninsula made by the Phlegra Montes, they had walked down to the icy edge of the North Sea where they had spotted a new settlement, and there in the crowd of construction workers was Hiroko; and several of the construction crew were her old associates, Gene, and Rya, and Iwao, and the rest of the First Hundred who had followed Hiroko ever since the days of the lost colony. The flying group had been amazed, but the lost colonists had been faintly perplexed at their amazement. “No one hides anymore,” Hiroko had told the young woman, after complimenting her flier. “We spend most of our time near Dorsa Brevia, but we’ve been up here for months now.”

And there it was. The woman seemed perfectly sincere, there was no reason to believe she were lying, or subject to hallucination.

Nirgal didn’t want to have to think about this. But he had been considering leaving Shining Mesa anyway, and having a look around at other places. So he could. And — well — he was going to have to at least have a look. Shigata ga nail.

The next day the conversation seemed much less compelling. Nirgal didn’t know what to think. He called Sax on the wrist, told him what he had heard. “Is it possible, Sax? Is it possible?”

A strange look passed over Sax’s face. “It’s possible,” he said. “Yes, of course. I told you — when you were sick, and unconscious — that she…” He was picking his words, as he so often did, with a squint of concentration. “ — that I saw her myself. In that storm I was caught out in. She led me to my car.”

Nirgal stared at the little blinking image. “I don’t remember that.”

“Ah. I’m not surprised.”

“So you … you think she escaped from Sabishii.”

“Yes.”

“But how likely was that?”

“I don’t know the — the likelihood. That would be difficult to judge.”

“But could they have slipped away?”

“The Sabishii mohole mound is a maze.”

“So you think they escaped.”

Sax hesitated. “I saw her. She — she grabbed my wrist. I have to believe.” Suddenly his face twisted. “Yes, she’s out there! She’s out there! I have no doubt! No doubt! No doubt she’s expecting us to come to her.”

And Nirgal knew he had to look.

He left Candor Mesa without a goodbyeto anyone. His acquaintances there would understand; they often flew away themselves for a time. They would all be back someday, to soar over the canyons and then spend their evenings together on Shining Mesa. And so he left. Down into the immensity of Melas Chasma, then downcanyon again, east into Co-prates. For many hours he floated in that world, over the 61 glacier, past embayment after embayment, buttress after buttress, until he was through the Dover Gate and out over the broadening divergence of Capri and Eos chasmas. Then above the ice-filled chaoses, the crackled ice smoother by far than the drowned land below it had been. Then across the rough jumble of Margaritifer Terra, and north, following the piste toward Burroughs; then, as the piste approached Libya Station, he banked off to the northeast, toward Elysium.

The Elysium massif was now a continent in the northern sea. The narrow strait separating it from the southern mainland was a flat stretch of black water and white tabular bergs, punctuated by the stack islands which had been the Aeolis Mensa. The North Sea hydrologists wanted this strait liquid, so that currents could make their way through it from Isidis Bay to Amazonis Bay. To help achieve this liquidity they had placed a nuclear-reactor complex at the west end of the strait, and pumped most of its energy into the water there, creating an artificial polynya where the surface stayed liquid year-round, and a temperate mesoclimate on the slopes on each side of the strait. The reactors’ steam plumes were visible to Nirgal from far up the Great Escarpment, and as he floated down the slope he crossed over thickening forests of fir and ginkgo. There was a cable across the western entrance to the strait, emplaced to snag icebergs floating in on the current. He flew directly over the bergjam west of the cable, and looked down on chunks of ice like floating driftglass. Then over the black open water of the strait — the biggest stretch of open water he had ever seen on Mars. For twenty kilometers he floated over the open water, exclaiming out loud at the sight. Then ahead an immense airy bridge arced over the strait. The black-violet plate of water below it was dotted with sailboats, ferries, long barges, all trailing the white Vs of their wakes. Nirgal floated over them, circling the bridge twice to marvel at the sight — like nothing he had ever seen on Mars before: water, the sea, a whole future world.

He continued north, rising over the plains of Cerberus, past the volcano Albor Tholus, a steep ash cone on the side of Elysium Mons. The much bigger Elysium Mons was steep as well, with a Fujiesque profile that served as the label illustration for many agricultural co-ops in the region. Sprawled over the plain under the volcano were farms, mostly ragged at the edges, often terraced, and usually divided by strips or patches of forest. Young immature orchards dotted the higher parts of the plain, each tree in a pot; closer to the sea were great fields of wheat and corn, cut by windbreaks of olive and eucalyptus. Just ten degrees north of the equator, blessed with rainy mild winters, and then lots of hot sunny days: the people there called it the Mediterranean of Mars.

Farther north Nirgal followed the west coast as it rose up out of a line of foundered icebergs embroidering the edge of the ice sea. As he looked down at the expanse of land below, he had to agree with the general wisdom: Elysium was beautiful. This western coastal strip was the most populated region, he had heard. The coast was fractured by a number of fossae, and square harbors were being built where these canyons plunged into the ice — Tyre, Sidon, Pyriphlegethon, Hertzka, Morris. Often stone breakwaters stopped the ice, and marinas were in place behind the breakwaters, filled with fleets of small boats, all waiting for open passage.

At Hertzka Nirgal turned east and inland, and flew up the gentle slope of the Elysian massif, passing over garden belts banding the land. Here the majority of Elysium’s thousands lived, in intensively cultivated agricultural-residential zones, sloping up into the higher country between Elysium Mons and its northern spur cone, Hecates Tholus. Between the great volcano and its daughter peak, Nirgal flew through the bare rock saddle of the pass, flung like a little cloud by the pass wind.

Elysium’s east slope looked nothing like the west; it was bare rough torn rock, heavily sand-drifted, maintained in nearly its primordial condition by the rain shadow of the massif. Only near the eastern coast did Nirgal see greenery below him again, no doubt nourished by trade winds and winter fogs. The towns on the east side were like oases, strung on the thread of an island-circling piste.

At the far northeast end of the island, the ragged old hills of the Phlegra Montes ran far out into the ice, forming a spiny peninsula. Somewhere around here was where that young woman had seen Hiroko. As Nirgal flew up the western side of the Phlegras, it struck him as a likely place to find her; it was a wild and Martian place. The Phlegras, like many of the great mountain ranges of Mars, was the only remaining arc of an ancient impact basin’s rim. Every other aspect of that basin had long since disappeared. But the Phlegras still stood as witness to a minute of inconceivable violence — impact of a hundred-kilometer asteroid, big pieces of the lithosphere melted and shoved sideways, other pieces tossed into the air to fall in concentric rings around the impact point, with much of the rock metamorphosed instantly into minerals much harder than their originals. After that trauma the wind had cut away at things, leaving behind only these hard hills.

There were settlements out here, of course, as there were everywhere, in the sinkholes and dead-end valleys and on the passes overlooking the sea. Isolated farms, villages often or twenty or a hundred. It looked like Iceland. There were always people who liked such remote land. One village perched on a flat knob a hundred meters over the sea was called Nuannaarpoq, which was Inuit for “taking extravagant pleasure in being alive.” These villagers and all the others in the Phlegras could float to the rest of Elysium on blimps, or walk down to the circum-Elysian piste and catch a ride. For this coast in particular, the nearest town would be a shapely harbor called Firewater, on the west side of the Phlegras where they first became a peninsula. The town stood on a bench at the end of a squarish bay, and when Nirgal spotted it, he descended onto the tiny airstrip at the upper end of town, and then checked into a boardinghouse on the main square, behind the docks standing over the ice-sheeted marina.

In the days that followed, he flew out along the coast in both directions, visiting farm after farm. He met a lot of interesting people, but none of them was Hiroko, or anyone from the Zygote crowd — not even any of their associates. It was even a little suspicious; a fair number of issei lived in the region, but every one of them denied ever having met Hiroko or any of her group. Yet all of them were farming with great success, in rocky wilderness that did not look easy to farm — cultivating exquisite little oases of agricultural productivity — living the lives of believers in viriditas — but no, never met her. Barely remembered who she was. One ancient geezer of an American laughed in his face. “Whachall think, we got a guru? We gonna lead ya to our guru?”

After three weeks Nirgal had found no sign of her at all. He had to give up on the Phlegra Montes. There was no other choice.

Ceaseless wandering. It did not make sense to search for a single person over the vast surface of a world. It was an impossible project. But in some villages there were rumors, and sometimes sightings. Always one more rumor, sometimes one good sighting. She was everywhere and nowhere. Many descriptions but never a photo, many stories but never a wrist message. Sax was convinced she was out there, Coyote was sure she wasn’t. It didn’t matter; if she was out there, she was hiding. Or leading him on a wild-goose chase. It made him angry when he thought of it that way. He would not search for her.

Yet he could not stop moving. If he stayed in one place for more than a week, he began to feel nervous and fretful in a way he had never felt in his life. It was like an illness, with tension everywhere in his muscles, but concentrated in his stomach; an elevated temperature; inability to focus on his thoughts; an urge to fly. And so he would fly, from village to town to station to caravanserai. Some days he let the wind carry him where it would. He had always been a nomad, no reason to stop now. A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived? The winds of Mars were amazing. Strong, irregular, loud, ceaseless live beings, at play.

Sometimes the wind carried him out over the northern sea, and he flew all day and never saw anything but ice and water, as if Mars were an ocean planet. That was Vastitas Borealis — the Vast North, now ice. The ice was in some places flat, in others shattered; sometimes white, sometimes discolored; the red of dust, or the black of snow algae, or the jade of ice algae, or the warm blue of clear ice. In some places big dust storms had stalled and dropped their loads, and then the wind had carved the detritus so that little dune fields were created, looking just like old Vastitas. In some places ice carried on currents had crashed over crater-rim reefs, making circular pressure ridges; in other places ice from different currents had crashed together, creating straight pressure ridges, like dragon backs.

Open water was black, or the various purples of the sky. There was a lot of it — polynyas, leads, cracks, patches — perhaps a third of the sea’s surface now. Even more common were melt lakes lying on the surface of the ice, their water white and sky-colored both, which at times looked a brilliant light violet but other times separated out into the two colors; yes, it was another version of the green and the white, the infolded world, two in one. As always he found the sight of a double color disturbing, fascinating. The secret of the world.

Many of the big drilling platforms in Vastitas had been seized by Reds and blown up: black wreckage scattered over white ice. Other platforms were defended by greens, and being used now to melt the ice: large polynyas stretched to the east of these platforms, and the open water steamed, as if clouds were pouring up out of a submarine sky.

In the clouds, in the wind. The southern shore of the northern sea was a succession of gulfs and headlands, bays and peninsulas, fjords and capes, seastacks and low archipelagoes. Nirgal followed it for day after day, landing in the late afternoons at little new seaside settlements. He saw crater islands with interiors lower than the ice and water outside the rim. He saw some places where the ice seemed to be receding, so that bordering the ice were black strands, raked by parallel lines running down to ragged drift errata of jumbled rock and ice. Would these strands flood again, or would they grow wider still? No one in these seaside towns knew. No one knew where the coastline would stabilize. The settlements here were made to be moved. Diked polders showed that some people were apparently testing the newly exposed land’s fertility. Fringing the white ice, green crop rows.

North of Utopia he passed over a low peninsula that extended from the Great Escarpment all the way to the north polar island, the only break in the world-wrapping ocean. A big settlement on this low land, called Boone’s Neck, was half-tented and half in the open. The settlement’s occupants were engaged in cutting a canal through the peninsula.

A wind blew north and Nirgal followed it. The winds hummed, whooshed, keened. On some days they shrieked. Live beings, at war. In the sea on both sides of the long low peninsula were tabular ice shelfs. Tall mountains of jade ice broke through these white sheets. No one lived up here, but Nirgal was not searching anymore — he had given up, very near despair, and was just floating, letting the winds take him like a dandelion seed: over the ice sea, shattered white; over open purple water, lined by sun-bright waves. Then the peninsula widened to become the polar island, a white bumpy land in the sea ice. No sign of the primeval swirl pattern of melt valleys. That world was gone.

Over the other side of the world and the North Sea, over Orcas Island on the east flank of Elysium, down over Cimmeria again. Floating like a seed. Some days the world went black and white: icebergs on the sea, looking into the sun; tundra swans against black cliffs; black guillemots flying over the ice; snow geese. And nothing else in all the day.

Ceaseless wandering. He flew around the northern parts of the world two or three times, looking down at the land and the ice, at all the changes taking place everywhere, at all the little settlements huddling in their tents, or out braving the cold winds. But all the looking in the world couldn’t make the sorrow go away.

One day he came on a new harbor town at the entry to the long skinny fjord of Marwth Vallis, and found his Zy-gote creche mates Rachel and Tiu had moved there. Nirgal hugged them, and over a dinner and afterward he stared at their oh-so-familiar faces with intense pleasure. Hiroko was gone but his brothers and sisters remained, and that was something; proof that his childhood was real. And despite all the years they looked just like they had when they were children; there was no real difference. Rachel and he had been friends, she had had a crush on him in the early years, and they had kissed in the baths; he recalled with a little shiver a time when she had kissed him in one ear, Jackie in the other. And, though he had almost forgotten it, he had lost his virginity with Rachel, one afternoon in the baths, shortly before Jackie had taken him out into the dunes by the lake. Yes, one afternoon, almost accidentally, when their kissing had suddenly become urgent and exploratory, a matter of their bodies moving outside their own volition.

Now she regarded him fondly — a woman his age, her face a map of laugh lines, cheery and bold. She may have recalled their early encounter as little as he did — hard to say what his siblings remembered of their shared bizarre childhood — but she looked like she remembered. She had always been friendly, and she was again now. He told her about his flights around the world, carried by the ceaseless winds, diving slowly against the blimp’s buoyancy down to one little habitation after another, asking after Hiroko.

Rachel shook her head, smiling ironically. “If she’s out there, she’s out there. But you could look forever and never find her.”

Nirgal heaved a troubled sigh, and she laughed and tousled his hair.

“Don’t look for her.”

That evening he walked along the strand, just uphill from the devastated berg-strewn shoreline of the northern sea. He felt in his body that he needed to walk, to run. Flying was too easy, it was a dissociation from the world — things were small and distant — again, it was the wrong end of the telescope. He needed to walk.

Still he flew. As he flew, however, he looked more closely at the land. Heath, moor, streamside meadows. A creek falling directly into the sea over a short drop, another one crossing a beach. Salt creeks into a fresh ocean. In some places they had planted forests, to try to cut down on dust storms that originated in this area. There were still dust storms, but the trees of the forest were saplings still. Hiroko might be able to sort it out. Don’t look for her. Look at the land.

He flew back to Sabishii. There was still a lot of work to be done there, clearing away burned buildings and then building new ones. Some construction co-ops were still accepting new members. One was doing reconstruction but was also building blimps and other fliers, including some experimental birdsuits. He talked with them about joining.

He left his blimpglider in town with them, and took long runs out onto the high moors east of Sabishii. He had run these uplands during his student years. A lot of the ridge runs were familiar still; beyond them, new ground. A high land, with its moorish life. Big kami boulders stood here and there on the rumpled land, like sentinels.

One afternoon, running an unfamiliar ridge, he looked down into a small high basin like a shallow bowl, with a break opening to lower land to the west. Like a glacial cirque, though more likely it was an eroded crater with a break in its rim, making a horseshoe ridge. About a kilometer across — quite shallow. Just a rumple among the many rumples on the Tyrrhena massif. From the encircling ridge the horizons were far away, the land below lumpy and irregular.

It seemed familiar. Possibly he had visited it on an over-nighter in his student years. He hiked slowly down into the basin, and still felt like he was on top of the massif; something about the dark clean indigo of the sky, the spacious long view out the gap to the west. Clouds rolled overhead like great rounded icebergs, dropping dry granular snow, which was chased into cracks or out of the basin entirely by the hard wind. On the circling ridge, near the northwest point of the horseshoe, there was a boulder sitting like a stone hut. It stood on four points on the ridge, a dolmen worn to the smoothness of an old tooth. The sky over it lapis lazuli.

Nirgal walked back down to Sabishii and looked into the matter. The basin was untended, according to the maps and records of the Tyrrhena Massif Areography and Ecopoesis Council. They were pleased he was interested. “The high basins are hard,” they told him. “Very little grows. It’s a long project.”

“Good.”

“You’ll have to grow most of your food in greenhouses. Potatoes, however — once you get enough soil, of course — ”

Nirgal nodded.

They asked him to drop by the village of Dingboche, the one nearest the basin, and make sure no one there had plans for it.

So he drove back up, in a little caravan with Tariki and Rachel and Tiu and some other friends who had gathered to help. They drove over a low ridge and found Dingboche, set on a little wadi that was now being farmed, mostly in hardscrabble potato fields. There had been a snowstorm, and all the fields were white rectangles, divided by low black walls of stacked stones. A number of long low stone houses, with plate-rock roofs and thick square chimneys, were scattered among the fields, with several more clustered at the village’s upper end. The longest building in this cluster was a two-storied teahouse, with a big mattress-filled room to accommodate visitors.

In Dingboche as in much of the southern highlands the gift economy still predominated, and Nirgal and his companions had to endure a near potlatching when they stayed for the night. The locals were very happy when he inquired about the high basin, which they called variously the little horseshoe, or the upper hand. “It needs looking after.” They offered to help him get started.

So they went up to the high cirque in a little caravan, and dumped a load of gear on the ridge near the house boulder, and stuck around long enough to clear a first little field of stones, walling it with what they cleared. A couple of them experienced in construction helped him to make the first incisions into the ridge boulder. During this noisy drilling some of the Dingboche locals cut away at the exterior of the rock, carving in Sanskrit lettering Om Mani Padme Hum, as seen on innumerable mani stones in the Himalayas, and now all over the southern highlands. The locals chipped away the rock between the fat cursive letters, so that the letters stood out in raised relief against a rougher, lighter background. As for the boulder house itself, eventually he would have four rooms hacked out of the boulder, with triple-paned windows, solar panels for heat and power, water from a snowmelt pumped up to a tank placed higher on the ridge, and a composting toilet and graywater facility.

Then they were off. Nirgal had the basin to himself.

He walked around on it for many days without doing anything but looking. Only the tiniest part of the basin would be his farm — just some small fields inside low stone walls, and a greenhouse for vegetables. And a cottage industry, he wasn’t sure what. It wouldn’t be self-sufficient, but it would be settling in. A project.

And then there was the basin itself. A small channel already ran down the opening out to the west, as if to suggest a watershed. The cupped hand of rock was already a microclimate, tilted to the sun, slightly sheltered from the winds. He would be an ecopoet.

First he had to learn the land, with that as his project it was amazing how busy every day became, there was an endless number of things to do; but no structure, no schedule, no rush; no one to consult; and every day, in the last hours of summer light, he would walk around the ridge, and inspect the basin in the failing light. It was already colonized by lichen and the other first settlers; fellfields filled the hollows, and there were small mosaics of arctic ground cover in the sunny exposures, mounds of green moss humped on red soil less than a centimeter thick. Snowmelt coursed down a number of rivulet channels, pooling and dropping through any number of potential meadow terraces, little diatom oases, falling down the basin to meet in the gravel wadi at the gate to the land below, a flat meadow-to-be behind the residual rim. Ribs higher in the basin were natural dams, and after some consideration, Nirgal carried some ventifacts to these low ribs, and assembled them with their facets touching so that the ribs were heightened by just one or two rocks’ height. Snowmelt would collect in meadow ponds, banked by moss. The moors just east of Sabishii resembled what he had in mind, and he called up ecopoets who lived on those moors, and asked about species compatibility, growth rates, soil amendment and the like. In his mind developed a vision of the basin; then in second March the autumn came, the year heading toward aphelion, and he began to see how much of the landscaping would be done by wind and winter. He would have to wait and see.

He spread seeds and spores by hand, casting them away from bags or growth media dishes latched to his belt, feeling like a figure from Van Gogh or the Old Testament; it was a peculiar sensation of mixed power and helplessness, action and fate. He arranged for loads of topsoil to be trucked up and dumped on some of the little fields, and then he spread it out by hand, thinly. He brought in worms from the university farm at Sabishii. Worms in a bottle, Coyote had always called people in cities; observing the writhing mass of moist naked tubules, Nirgal shuddered. He released the worms onto his new little plots. Go, little worm, prosper on the land. He himself, walking around on the sunny mornings after a shower, was no more than moist linked naked tubules. Sentient worms, that’s what they were, in bottles or on the land.

After the worms it would be moles and voles. Then mice. Then snow rabbits, and ermine, and marmots; perhaps then some of the snow cats wandering the moors would drop by. Foxes. The basin was high, but the pressure they were hoping for at this altitude was four hundred millibars, with forty percent of that oxygen; they were already most of the way there. Conditions were somewhat as in the Himalayas. Presumably all of Earth’s high-altitude flora and fauna would be viable here, and all the new engineered variants; and with so many ecopoets stewarding small patches of the upland, the problem would be mostly a matter of prepping the ground, introducing the basic ecosystem desired, and then supporting it, and watching what came in on the wind, or walked in, or flew. These arrivals could be problematic of course, and there was a lot of talk on the wrist about invasion biology, and integrated microcline management; figuring out one’s locality’s connections to the larger region was a big part of the ongoing work of ecopoesis.

Nirgal got even more interested in this matter of dispersal the next spring, in first November when the snows melted, and poking out of the late slush on the flat terraces of the northern side of the basin were sprigs of snow alumroot. He hadn’t planted them, he had never heard of them, indeed he wasn’t even sure of his identification, until his neighbor Yoshi dropped by one week and confirmed it: Heuchera nivalis. Blown in on the wind, Yoshi said. There was a lot of it in Escalante Crater to the north. Not much of it in between; but that was jump dispersal for you.

Jump dispersal, spread dispersal, stream dispersal: all three were common on Mars. Mosses and bacteria were spread dispersing; hydrophilic plants were stream-dispersing along the sides of glaciers, and the new coastlines; and lichen and any number of other plants were jump-dispersing on the strong winds. Human dispersion showed all three patterns, Yoshi remarked as they wandered over the basin discussing the concept — spreading through Europe and Asia and Africa, streaming down the Americas and along the Australian coasts, jumping out to the Pacific Islands (or to Mars). It was common to see all three methods used by highly adaptable species. And the Tyrrhena massif was up in the wind, catching the westerlies and also the summer trade winds, so that both sides of the massif got precipitation; nowhere more than twenty centimeters a year, which would have made it desert on Earth, but in the southern hemisphere of Mars, that was a precipitation island. In that way too a dispersion catchment, and so very invasible.

So. High barren rocky land, dusted with snow wherever shade predominated, so that the shadows tended to be white. Little sign of life except in basins, where the ecopoets helped along their little collections. Clouds surged in from west in the winter, east in the summer. The southern hemisphere had the seasons reinforced by the perihelion-aphelion cycle, so that they really meant something. On Tyrrhena the winters were hard.

Nirgal wandered the basin after storms, looking to see what had blown in. Usually it was only a load of icy dust, but once he found an unplanted clutch of pale blue Jacob’s ladders, tucked between the splits in a breadloaf rock. Check the botanicals to see how it might interact with what was already there. Ten percent of introduced species survived, then ten percent of those became pests; that was invasion biology’s ten-ten rule, Yoshi said, almost the first rule of the discipline. “Ten meaning five to twenty, of course.” Once Nirgal weeded out a springtime arrival of common street-grass, fearing it would take over everything. Same with tundra thistle. Another time a heavy dust load fell on an autumn wind. These dust storms were small compared to the old global southern-summer storms, but occasionally a hard wind would tear up the desert pavement somewhere and send the dust below flying. The atmosphere was thickening rapidly these days, fifteen millibars a year on average. Each year the winds had more force, and so thicker areas of pavement were at risk of being torn away. The dust that fell was usually a very thin layer, however, and often high in nitrates; so it was like a fertilizer, to be washed into the soil by the next rain.

Nirgal bought a position in the Sabishii construction coop he had looked into. He went in often to work on the town’s buildings. Up in the basin he did some assembly and testing of solo blimpgliders. His work cottage was a small building made of stone-stacked walls, with plates of sandstone for shingles. Between that work and the farming in the greenhouse and his potato patch, and the ecopoesis in the basin, his days were full.

He flew the completed blimpgliders down to Sabishii, and stayed in a little studio above in his old teacher Tariki’s rebuilt house in the old city, living there among ancient issei who looked and sounded very much like Hiroko. Art and Nadia lived there too, raising their daughter Nikki. Also in town were Vijjika, and Reull, and Annette, all old friends from his student days — and there was the university itself, no longer called the University of Mars, but simply Sabishii College — a small school that still ran in the amorphous style of the demimonde years, so that the more ambitious students went to Elysium or Sheffield or Cairo; those who came to Sabishii were those fascinated by the mystique of the demimonde years, or interested in the work of one of the issei professors.

All these people and activities made Nirgal feel strangely, even uncomfortably, at home. He put in long days as a plasterer and general laborer on various construction jobs his co-op had around town. He ate in rice bars and pubs. He slept in the loft in Tariki’s garage, and looked forward to the days he returned to the basin.

One night he was walking home late from a pub, asleep on his feet, when he passed a small man sleeping on a park bench: Coyote.

Nirgal stopped short. He walked over to the bench. He stared and stared. Some nights he heard coyotes howling up in the basin. This was his father. He remembered all those days hunting for Hiroko, without a clue where to look. But here his father slept on a city park bench. Nirgal could call him anytime, and always that bright cracked grin, Trinidad itself. Tears started to his eyes; he shook his head, composed himself. Old man lying on a park bench. One saw it fairly frequently. A lot of the issei had gotten here and gone off somehow, into the back country for good, so that when they came into a city they slept in the parks.

Nirgal went over and sat on the end of the bench, just beyond his father’s head. Gray tatty dreadlocks. Like a drunk. Nirgal just sat with him, looking at the undersides of the linden trees around the bench. It was a quiet night. Stars ticked through the leaves.

Coyote stirred, twisted his head and glanced up. “Who dat.”

“Hey,” Nirgal said.

“Hey!” Coyote said, and sat up. He rubbed at his eyes. “Nirgal, man. You startle me there.”

“Sorry. I was walking by and saw you. What are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Well, I was. Far as I know that was all I was doing.”

“Coyote, don’t you have a home?”

“Why no.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No.” Coyote bleared a grin at him. “I’m like that awful vid program. The world is my home.”

Nirgal only shook his head. Coyote squinted as he saw that Nirgal was not amused. He stared at him for a long time from under half-mast eyelids, breathing deeply. “My boy,” he said at last, dreamily. The whole city was quiet. Coyote muttered as if falling asleep. “What does the hero do when the tale is over? Swim over the waterfall. Drift out on the tide.”

“What?”

Coyote opened his eyes fully, leaned toward Nirgal. “Do you remember when we brought Sax into Tharsis Tholus and you sat with him, and afterward they said you brought him back to life? That kind of thing — think about that.” He shook his head, leaned back on the bench. “It’s not right. It’s just a story. Why worry about that story when it’s not yours anyway. What you’re doing right now is better. You can walk away from that kind of story. Sit in a park at night like any ordinary person. Go anywhere you please.”

Nirgal nodded, uncertain.

“What I like to do,” Coyote said sleepily, “is go to a sidewalk cafe and toss down some kava and watch all the faces. Go for a walk around the streets and look at people’s faces. I like to look at women’s faces. So beautiful. And some of them so … so something. I don’t know. I love them.” He was falling asleep again. “You’ll find your way to live.”

Guests who occasionally visited him in the basin included Sax, Coyote, Art and Nadia and Nikki, who got taller every year; she was taller than Nadia already, and seemed to regard Nadia like a nanny or a great-grandmother — much as Nirgal himself had regarded her, in Zygote. Nikki had inherited Art’s sense of fun, and Art himself encouraged this, egging her on, conspiring with her against Nadia, watching her with the most radiant pleasure Nirgal had ever seen on an adult face. Once Nirgal saw the three of them sitting on the stone wall by his potato patch, laughing helplessly at something Art had said, and he felt a pang even as he too laughed; his old friends were now married, with a kid. Living in that most ancient pattern. Faced with that, his life on the land did not seem so substantial after all. But what could he do? Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners — it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.

So he lived in his high basin, grew some of his food, worked on co-op projects to pay for the rest. He flew down to Sabishii once a month in a new aircraft, enjoyed his stay of a week or two, and went back home. Art and Nadia and Sax came up frequently, and much less often he hosted Maya and Michel, or Spencer, all of whom lived in Odessa — or Zeyk and Nazik, who brought news of Cairo and Mangala that he tried not to hear. When they left he went out onto the arcing ridge and sat on one of his sitting boulders, and looked at the meadows stringing through the talus, concentrating on what he had, on this world of the senses, rock and lichen and moss campion.

The basin was evolving. There were moles in the meadows, marmots in the talus. At the end of the long winters the marmots came out of hibernation early, nearly starving, their internal clocks still set to Earth. Nirgal set out food for them in the snow, and watched from his house’s upper windows as they ate it. They needed help to get through the long winters to spring. They regarded his house as a source of food and warmth, and two marmot families lived in the rocks under it, whistling their warning whistle when anyone approached. Once they warned him of people from the Tyrrhena committee on the introduction of new species, asking him for a species list, and a rough census; they were beginning to formulate a local “native inhabitant” list, which, once formed, would allow them to make judgments on any subsequent introductions of fast-spreading species. Nirgal was happy to join this effort, and apparently so was everyone else doing ecopoesis on the massif; as a precipitation island, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest others, they were developing their own mix of high-altitude fauna and flora, and there was a growing sentiment to regard this mix as “natural” to Tyrrhena, to be altered only by consensus.

The group from the committee left, and Nirgal sat with the house marmots, feeling odd. “Well,” he said to them, “now we’re indigenous.”

He was happy in his basin, above the world and its concerns. In the spring new plants appreared from nowhere, and some he greeted with a trowel of compost, others he plucked out and turned into compost. The greens of spring were unlike any other greens — light electric jades and limes of bud and leaf, new blades of emerald grass, blue nettles, red leaves. And then later the flowers, that tremendous expense of a plant’s energy, the push beyond survival, the reproductive urge all around him … sometimes when Na-dia and Nikki came back from their walks holding miniature bouquets in their big hands, it seemed to Nirgal that the world made sense. He would eye them, and think about children, and feel some wild edge in him that was not usually there.

It was a feeling generally shared, apparently. Spring lasted 143 days in the southern hemisphere, coming all the way back from the harsh aphelion winter. More plants bloomed as the spring months passed, first early ones like promise-of-spring and snow liverwort, then later ones such as phlox and heather, then saxifrage and Tibetan rhubarb, moss campion and alpine nailwort, cornflowers and edelweiss, on and on until every patch of green carpet in the rocky palm of the basin was touched with brilliant dots of cyanic blue, dark pink, yellow, white, each color waving in a layer at the characteristic height of the plant holding it, all of them glowing in the dusk like drips of light, welling out into the world from nowhere — a pointillist Mars, the ribbiness of the seamed basin etched in the air by this scree of color. He stood in a cupped rock hand which tilted its snowmelt down a lifeline crease in the palm, down into the wide world so far below, a vast shadowy world that loomed to the west under the sun, all hazy and low. The last light of day seemed to shine slightly upward.

One clear morning Jackie appeared on his house AI screen, and announced she was on the piste from Odessa to Libya, and wanted to drop by. Nirgal agreed before he had time to think.

He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little high basin… there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old impact. Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining Mesa, the stupendous yellow view at dawn.

They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like kids. Jackie was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing hard as they got out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole group of young Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves, amazingly so; it had been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had not changed at all. The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done early and often, ensuring perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases that still killed people from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps. Early, often. They still looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie was a year older than Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now, and feeling older. Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to get the treatment myself someday.

So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and ooh-ing and ahhing at the flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every exclamation they made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side, looking serious.

She said, “We’re having trouble holding off the Terrans, Nirgal. They’re sending up almost a million a year, just like you said they never could. And these new arrivals aren’t joining Free Mars like they used to. They’re still supporting their home governments. Mars isn’t changing them fast enough. If this goes on, then the whole idea of a free Mars will be a joke. I sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to leave the cable up.”

She frowned and twenty years jumped onto her face all at once. Nirgal suppressed a little shudder.

“It would help if you weren’t hiding here,” she exclaimed with sudden anger, dismissing the basin with a wave of her hand. “We need everyone we can get to help. People still remember you now, but in a few years…”

So he only had to wait a few more years, he thought. He watched her. She was beautiful, yes. But beauty was a matter of the spirit, of intelligence, vivacity, empathy. So that while Jackie grew ever more beautiful, at the same time she grew less beautiful. Another mysterious infolding. And Nirgal was not pleased by this internal loss in Jackie, not in any way; it was only one more note in the chord of his Jackie pain, really. He didn’t want it to be true.

“We can’t really help them by taking more immigrants,” she said. “That was wrong, when you said that on Earth. They know it too. They can see it better than we can, no doubt. But they send people anyway. And you know why? You know why? Just to wreck things here. Just to make sure there isn’t someplace where people are doing it right. That’s their only reason.”

Nirgal shrugged. He didn’t know what to say; probably there was some truth to what she had said, but it was just one of a million different reasons for people to come; there was no reason to fix on it.

“So you won’t come back,” she said at last. “You don’t care.”

Nirgal shook his head. How to say to her that she was not worried about Mars, but about her own power? He wasn’t the one who could tell her that. She wouldn’t believe him. And maybe it was only true to him anyway.

Abruptly she stopped trying to reach him. A regal glance at Antar, and Antar did the work of gathering their coterie into the cars. A final questioning look; a kiss, full on the mouth, no doubt to bother Antar, or him, or both of them; like an electric shock to the soul; and she was off.

He spent the afternoon and the next day wandering, sitting on flat rocks and watching the little rivulets bounce downstream. Once he remembered how fast water had fallen on Earth. Unnatural. No. But this was his place, known and loved, every dyad and every clump of campion, even the speed of water as it lofted off stone and plashed down in its smooth silver shapes. The way moss felt under the finger pads. His visitors were people for whom Mars was forever an idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the tents and they might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion, while real, was given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. Which was fine. But for Nirgal now it was the land that mattered, the places where water arrived just so, trickling over the billion-year-old rock onto pads of new moss. Leave politics to the young, he had done his part. He didn’t want to do anymore. Or at least he wanted to wait until Jackie was gone. Power was like Hiroko, after all — it always slipped away. Didn’t it? Meanwhile, the cirque like an open hand.

But then one morning when he went out for a dawn walk, there was something different. The sky was clear, its purest morning purple, but a juniper’s needles had a yellowish tinge to them, and so did the moss, and the potato leaves on their mounds.

He plucked the yellowest samples of needles and sprigs and leaves, and took them back to the workbench in his greenhouse. Two hours’ work with microscope and AI did not find any problem, and he went back out and pulled up some root samples, and bagged some more needles and leaves and blades and flowers. Much of the grass had a wilted look, though it wasn’t a hot day.

Heart thudding, stomach taut, he worked all day and into the night. He could discover nothing. No insects, no pathogens. But the potato leaves in particular looked yellow. That night he called Sax and explained the situation. By coincidence Sax was visiting the university in Sabishii, and he drove up the next morning in a little rover, the latest from Spencer’s co-op.

“Nice,” Sax said as he got out and looked around. He checked Nirgal’s samples in the greenhouse. “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder.”

He had brought some instruments in his car, and they lugged them into the boulder and he went to work. At the end of a long day he said, “I can’t find anything. We’ll have to take some samples down to Sabishii.”

“You can’t find anything?”

“No pathogen. No bacteria, no virus.” He shrugged. “Let’s take several potatoes.”

They went out and dug potatoes from the field. Some of them were gnarled, elongated, cracked. “What is it?” Nirgal exclaimed.

Sax was frowning a little. “Looks like spindle tuber disease.”

“What causes it?”

“A viroid.”

“What’s that?”

“A bare RNA fragment. Smallest known infectious agent. Strange.”

“Ka.” Nirgal felt his stomach clamping inward. “How did it get here?”

“On a parasite, probably. This kind seems to be infecting grass. We need to find out.”

So they gathered samples, and drove back down to Sabishii.

Nirgal sat on a futon on the floor of Tariki’s living room, feeling sick. Tariki and Sax talked long after dinner, discussing the situation. Other viroids had been appearing in a rapid dispersal from Tharsis; apparently they had made it across the cordon sanitaire of space, arriving on a world that had been previously innocent of them. They were smaller than viruses, much smaller, and quite a bit simpler. Nothing but strands of RNA, Tariki said, about fifty nanometers long. Individuals had a molecular weight of about 130,000, while the smallest known viruses had molecular weights of over a million. They were so small that they had to be centrifuged at over 100,000 g in order to be pulled out of suspension.

The potato-spindle-tuber viroid was well understood, Tariki told them, tapping around on his screen and pointing at the schematics called up. A chain of merely 359 nucleo-tides, lined out in a closed single strand with short double-strand regions braiding it. Viroids like this one caused several plant diseases, including pale cucumber disease, chrysanthemum stunt, chlorotic mottle, cadang-cadang, citrus exocortis. Viroids had also been confirmed as the agent in some animal brain diseases, like scrapie, and kuru, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The viroids used host enzymes to reproduce, and then were taken to be-regulatory molecules in the nuclei of infected cells, disturbing growth-hormone production in particular.

The particular viroid in Nirgal’s basin, Tariki said, had mutated from potato spindle tuber. They were still identifying it in the labs at the university, but the sick grass made him sure they were going to find something different, something new.

Nirgal felt sick. The names of the diseases alone were enough to do it. He stared at his hands, which had been plunged thick in infected plants. Through the skin, into the brain, some kind of spongiform encephalopathy, mushroom growths of brain blooming everywhere.

“Is there anything we can do to fight it?” he said.

Sax and Tariki looked at him.

“First,” Sax said, “we have to find out what it is.”

That turned out to be no simple matter. After a few days, Nirgal returned to his basin. There he could at least do something; Sax had suggested removing all the potatoes from the potato fields. This was a long dirty task, a kind of negative treasure hunt, as he turned up diseased tuber after tuber. Presumably the soil itself would still hold the viroid. It was possible he would have to abandon the field, or even the basin. At best, plant something else. No one yet understood how viroids reproduced; and the word from Sabishii was that this might not even be a viroid as previously understood.

“It’s a shorter strand than usual,” Sax said. “Either a new viroid, or something like a viroid but smaller still.” In the Sabishii labs they were calling it “the virid.”

A long week later, Sax came back up to the basin. “We can try to remove it physically,” he said over dinner. “Then plant different species, ones that are resistant to viroids. That’s the best we can do.”

“But will that work?”

“The plants susceptible to infection are fairly specific. You got hit by a new one, but if you change grasses, and types of potatoes — perhaps cycle out some of your potato-patch soil…” Sax shrugged.

Nirgal ate with more appetite than he *had had for the previous week. Even the suggestion of a possible solution was a great relief. He drank some wine, felt better and better. “These things are strange, eh?” he said over an after-dinner brandy. “What life will come up with!”

“If you call it life.”

“Well, of course.”

Sax didn’t reply.

“I’ve been looking at the news on the net,” Nirgal said. “There are a lot of infestations. I had never noticed before. Parasites, viruses…”

“Yes. Sometimes I worry about a global plague. Something we can’t stop.”

“Ka! Could that happen?”

“There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t understand.” As always this thought made Sax unhappy.

“Biomes will eventually come into equilibrium,” Nirgal suggested.

“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”

“As equilibrium?”

“Yes. It may be a matter of…” He waved his hands about like gulls. “Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium.”

“Punctuated change?”

“Perpetual change. Braided change — sometimes surging change — ”

“Like cascading recombinance?”

“Perhaps.”

“I’ve heard that’s a mathematics only a dozen people can really understand.”

Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every math. Depends on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You can use it to model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how to use it to suggest any — reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used that way.” He talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were organic units that had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each level combining to create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up and down the great chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical descriptions of these emergences, which turned out to come in more than one kind, with different families of properties for each kind; so if they could get enough information about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level up, they could try to fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what kind of emergence they had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the best approach we can take for things this little.” “ The next day they called up greenhouses in Xanthe, to ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a new strain of Himalayan-based grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had pulled out all the grass in the basin, and much of the moss. The work made him sick, he couldn’t help it; once, seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering at him, he sat down and burst into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary silence, which only made things worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon, and of death generally. He needed Maya or some other courageous expressive speaker of the inner life, of anguish and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in thoughts that seemed to happen in some kind of foreign language, in a private idiolect he was now unwilling to translate.

They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.

Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened.

The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nir-gal could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The yiroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardiy even find it, no matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.

Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more robust…” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hi-roko about it.”

“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.

“Yes.”

“But?”

“I don’t think she’s there. And — I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still… I’m waiting.”

“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.

Sax nodded.

They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko — mother, lover — she had abandoned them both.

But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”

“What will you do now?”

“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”

“Ah! Good luck.”

Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.

So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and mi-crobial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.

Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na — at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.

They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.

But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night — a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled — until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.

As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.

Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper. In time, other winds would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall on the rest of it, and when the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over the spillways, and a new leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal pattern, much like the old one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down the massif and into the world. But by the time that happened, every plant and an-irnal in the basin would be dead.