The sun set on these memories. Maya returned to the Praxis building, still located up under the bridge, the final staircase to it as steeply pitched as a ladder. Ascending it with pushes on her thighs to help, Maya suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu. She had done this before — not only climbed these steps, but climbed them with the sense that she had climbed them before — with precisely the same feeling that in a yet earlier visit, she had been an effective part of the world.

Of course — she had been one of the first explorers of Hellas Basin, in the years right after Underhill. That had slipped her mind. She had helped to found Lowpoint, and then had driven around, exploring the basin before anyone else had, even Ann. So that later, when working for Deep Waters, and seeing the new native settlements, she had felt similarly removed from the contemporary scene. “My God,” she exclaimed, appalled. Layer on layer, life after life — they had lived so long! It was like reincarnation in a way, or eternal recurrence.

There was some little kernel of hope at the middle of that feeling. Back then, in that first feeling of slipping away, she had started a new life. Yes she had — she had moved to Odessa, and made her mark on the revolution, helping it to succeed by hard work, and a lot of thought about why people support change, about how to change without engendering a bitter backlash, which though perhaps decades removed yet always seemed to smash back into any revolutionary success, wrecking what was good in it. And it looked as though they had indeed avoided that bitterness.

At least until now. Perhaps that was the best way of looking at what was happening in this election; an inevitable backlash of some kind. Perhaps she had not succeeded as much as she had thought — perhaps she had only failed less drastically than Arkady, or John, or Frank. Who could be sure; so hard to say anymore what was really going on in history, it was too vast, too inchoate. So much was happening everywhere that anything might be happening anywhere. Co-ops, republics, feudal monarchies … no doubt there were Oriental satrapies out there in the back country, in some caravan gone wrong … so that any characterization one made of history would have some validity somewhere. This thing she was involved in now, the young native settlements demanding water, going off the net and outside UNTA’s control — no — it wasn’t that — something else…

But standing there at the Praxis flat door, she couldn’t remember what it was. She and Diana would take a piste train south the next morning, around the southeast bend of Hellas to see the Zea Dorsa, and the lava-tube tunnel they had converted to use as an aqueduct. No. She was here because…

She couldn’t bring it back. On the tip of the tongue… Deep Waters. Diana — they had just finished driving up and down Dao Vallis, where on the canyon floor natives and immigrants were starting up an agrarian valley life, creating a complex biosphere under their enormous tent. Some of them spoke Russian, it had brought tears to her eyes to hear it! There — her mother’s voice, sharp and sarcastic as she ironed clothes in their little apartment kitchen nook-sharp smell of cabbage —

No. It wasn’t that. Look to the west, to the sea shimmering in the dusk air. Water had flooded the sand dunes of east Hellas. It was a century later at least, it had to be. She was here for some other reason… scores of boats, little dots down in a postage-stamp harbor, behind a breakwater. It wouldn’t come back to her. It wouldn’t come. A horrible sense of tip-of-the-tongueism made her dizzy, then sick, as if she would get it out by vomiting. She sat down on the step. On the tip of the tongue, her whole life! Her whole life! She groaned aloud, and some kids throwing pebbles at gulls stared at her. Diana. She had met Nirgal by accident, they had had a dinner… But Nirgal had gotten sick. Sick on Earth!

And it all came back with a physical snap, like a blow to her solar plexus, a wave rolling over her. The canal voyage, of course, of course, the dive down into drowned Burroughs, Jackie, poor Zo the crazy fool. Of course of course of course. She hadn’t really forgotten, of course. So obvious now that it was back. It hadn’t really been gone; just a momentary lapse in her thinking, while her attention had wandered elsewhere. To another life. A strong memory had its own integrity, its own dangers, just as much as a weak memory did. It was only the result of thinking that the past was more interesting than the present. Which in many ways was true. But still…

Still, she found she preferred to sit a while longer. The little nausea persisted. And there was a bit of residual pressure in her head, as if that tongue’s hard tipping had left things sore; yes, it had been a bad moment. Hard to deny when you could still feel the throbbing from that tongue’s desperate thrusts.

She watched the end of dusk turn the town a deep dark orange, then a glowing color like light shining through a brown bottle. Hell’s Gate indeed. She shivered, got up, stepped unsteadily down the stairs into the harborside district, where the restaurants ringing the quays were bright moth-flittering globes of tavern light. The bridge loomed overhead like a negative Milky Way. Maya walked behind the docks, toward the marina.

There was Jackie, walking toward her. There were some aides following some way back, but in front it was just Jackie, coming toward her unseeing; then seeing. At the sight of Maya a corner of her mouth tightened, no more, but it was enough to allow Maya to see that Jackie was, what, ninety years old? A hundred? She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now. No sailboard would keep you up with that wave, not even a birdsuit allowing you to air-surf the wave in pelican style, like Zo. Ah, that was it; it was Zo’s death she saw on Jackie’s face. Jackie had tried her best to ignore it, to let it run off her like water off a duck’s back. But it hadn’t worked, and now she stood in Hell’s Gate over star-smeared water, an old woman.

Maya, shocked by the intensity of this vision, stopped. Jackie stopped. In the distance the clack of dishes, the loud burble of restaurant conversations. The two women looked at each other. This was not something Maya could remember doing with Jackie — this fundamental act of acknowledgment, meeting the other’s eye. Yes, you are real; I am real. Here we are, the both of us. Big sheets of glass, cracking inside. Something freer, Maya turned and walked away.

Michel found them a passenger schooner, going to Odessa byway of Minus One Island. The boat’s crew told them that Nirgal was expected to be on the island for a race, news which made Maya happy. It was always good to see Nirgal, and this time she needed his help as well. And she wanted to see Minus One; the last time she had been there it had not been an island at all, just a weather station and airstrip crn a bump in the basin floor.

Their ship was a long low schooner, with five bird’s-wing mast sails. Once beyond the end of the jetty the mast sails extruded their taut triangular expanses, and then, as the wind was from behind, the crew set a big blue kite spinnaker out front. After that the ship leaped into the clear blue swells, knocking up sheets of spray with every slam into an oncoming wave. After the confinement of the Grand Canal’s black banks it felt wonderful to be out on the sea, with the wind in her face and the waves coursing by — it blew all the confusion of Hell’s Gate out of her head — Jackie forgotten — the previous month now understood to be a kind of malignant carnival that she would never have to revisit — she would never return there — the open sea for her, and a life in the wind! “Oh Michel, this is the life for me.”