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.