Nirgal cuffed them along, giggling despite himself. The ranters were very drunk, and Nirgal was not much more sober himself. When they got to their hostel he looked into the bar across the street, saw the butcher woman was sitting in there, and so went in with the rest of the rough boys. He sat back watching them while he drank a glass of cognac, swishing it over his tongue. Ferals, the passersby had called them. The butcher woman was eyeing him, wondering what he thought. Much later he stood, with difficulty, and left the bar with the others, walking unsteadily across the cobbled street, humming along with the others as they bellowed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” On the obsidian water of Kasei Fjord the stars rode up and down. Mind and body full of feeling, sweet fatigue a state of grace.

The next morning they slept inand woke up late, dopey and hungover. They lay around for a while in their dorm room, slurping kavajava. Then they went downstairs, and even though they claimed to be still stuffed, ate a huge hostel breakfast. While they ate they decided to go flying. The winds that poured down Kasei Fjord were as powerful as any on the planet, and windsurfers and fliers of all kinds had come to Nilokeras to take advantage of them. Of course at any time howlers could take the situation “off scale” and shut down the fun for everyone except the big wind riders; but the average day’s hard blow was glorious.

The fliers’ base of operations was an offshore crater rim island, called Santorini. After breakfast the group went down to the docks together and got on a ferry, and debarked half an hour later on the little arcuate island, and trooped with the other passengers up to the gliderport.

Nirgal had not flown for years, and it was a great joy to strap into a blimpglider’s gondola and rise up the mast, and let loose and soar on the powerful updrafts pushing off San-torini’s steep inner rim. As Nirgal ascended he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another; it looked like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which resembled not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid like the griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several different kinds, imitating in some respects the configurations of different species — albatross, eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in what was in effect an ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior pressure from the flier’s body, to take and then hold positions, or make certain movements, all reinforced in proportion to the pressure exerted inside them, so that a human’s muscles could flap the big wings, or hold them in place against the great torque of the wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the streamlined helmets and tail feathers in the proper positions. Suit AIs helped fliers who wanted help, and they could even function as automatic pilots; but most fliers preferred to do the thinking for themselves, and controlled the suit as a waldo, exaggerating many times the strength of their own muscles.

Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and trepidation as these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward the sea, then popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the inner-wall updraft. It looked to Nirgal like the suits took a high level of skill to fly; they were the opposite of the blimp-gliders, a few of which soared with Nirgal over the island, rising and falling in much gentler swoops, taking in the view like agile balloonists.

Then soaring up past him in a rising spiral, Nirgal spotted the face of the diana, the woman who had led the ferals’ hunt. She recognized him too, raised her chin and bared her teeth in a quick smile, then pulled her wings in and tipped over, dropping away with a tearing sound. Nirgal watched her from above with fearful excitement, then a moment of terror as she dove right past the edge of Santo-rini’s cliff; from his vantage point it had looked like she was going to hit. Then she was back up, soaring on the updraft in tight spirals. It looked so graceful he wanted to learn to fly in a birdsuit, even as he felt his pulse still hammering at the sight of her dive. Stoop and soar, stoop and soar; no blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds were the greatest fliers, and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with everything else, people were birds.

With him, past him, around him, as if performing one of those darting courtships that members of some species put on for each other; after about an hour of this, she smiled at him one last time and tipped away, then drifted in lazy circles down to the gliderport at Phira. Nirgal followed her down, landing half an hour later with a swoop into the wind, running and then stopping just short of her. She had been waiting, wings spread around her on the ground.

She stepped in a circle around him, as if still doing a courtship dance. She walked toward him, pulling her hood back and offering her head, her black hair spilling out in the light like a crow’s wing. The diana. She stretched up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth, then stood back, watching him gravely. He remembered her running naked ahead of the hunt, a green sash bouncing from one hand.

“Breakfast?” she said.

It was midafternoon, and he was famished. “Sure.”

They ate at the gliderport restaurant, looking out at the arc of the island’s little bay, and the immensity of the Shar-anov cliffs, and the acrobatics of the fliers still in the air. They talked about flying, and running the land; about the hunt for the three antelope, and the islands of the North Sea, and the great fjord of Kasei, pouring its wind over them. They flirted; and Nirgal felt the pleasant anticipation of where they were headed, he luxuriated in it. It had been a long time. This too was part of the descent into the city, into civilization. Flirting, seduction — how wonderful all that was when one was interested, when one saw that the other was interested! She was fairly young, he judged, but her face was sunburned, skin lined around the eyes — not a youth — she had been to the Jovian moons, she said, and had taught at the new university in Nilokeras, and was now running with the ferals for a time. Twenty m-years old, perhaps, or older — hard to tell these days. An adult, in any case; in those first twenty m-years people got most of whatever experience was ever going to give them, after that it was only a matter of repetition. He had met old fools and young sages almost as often as the reverse. They were both adults, contemporaries. And there they were, in the shared experience of the present.

Nirgal watched her face as she talked. Careless, smart, confident. A Minoan: dark-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline nose, dramatic lower lip; Mediterranean ancestry, perhaps, Greek, Arabic, Indian; as with most of the yonsei, it” was impossible to tell. She was simply a Martian woman, with Dorsa Brevia English, and that look in the eye as she watched him — ah yes — how many times in his wandering had it happened, a conversation turning at some point, and then suddenly he was flying with some woman in the long glide of seduction, the courtship leading to some bed or hidden dip in the hills…

“Hey Zo,” the butcher woman said in passing. “Going with us to the ancestral neck?”

“No,” Zo said.

“The ancestral neck?” Nirgal inquired.

“Boone’s Neck,” Zo said. “The town up on the polar peninsula.”

“Ancestral?”

“She’s John Boone’s great-grandaughter,” the butcher woman explained.

“By way of?” Nirgal asked, looking at Zo.

“Jackie Boone,” she said. “My mother.”

“Ah,” Nirgal managed to say.

He sat back in his seat. The baby he had seen Jackie nursing, in Cairo. The similarity to her mother was obvious once he knew. His skin was goose-pimpling, the hairs lifting from the skin of his forearms. He hugged himself, shivered. “I must be getting old,” he said.