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.