Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus — Terran nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”

“What? No — oh no.”

“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”

“Oh my God.”

Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining First Hundred — lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy smile … no. She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.

“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.

He sighed. “Maybe.”

Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to Lasswitz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Monies without disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn’t been able to revive him.

So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all people, made a provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that Hiroko’s band was still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy, obvious wishful thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not prone to wishful thinking, so maybe there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain, however, and the youngest of them, Mary (unless Hiroko were alive) was now 212 years old. The oldest, Ann, was 226. Maya herself was 221, an obvious absurdity, but there it was, year 2206 in the Terran news reports…

“But there are people in their two-fifties,” Michel noted, “and the treatments may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may just be a bad coincidence.”

“Maybe.”

Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker and darker, which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have stayed in Provence — that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home that persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had been from the moment they had landed — or from the moment he had joined Hiroko — or perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her breasts his hills, her belly his valley, her sex his beach and ocean. Of course it was an impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner; but as it was all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relationship. Though sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.

Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly he felt that death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the great unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it was a scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the various manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except for the speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave collapse like her jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre — theories were endless, it was a vital concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected to become old — for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely studied. But so far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if it was any one thing; and the deaths kept happening.

For Yeli’s service they cast some portion of his ashes off in another swiftly rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the breakwater they had launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back and see all Odessa. Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel’s apartment. Praxis indeed, the way they held each other then. They went through Michel’s scrapbooks, talking about Olympus Mons, ‘61, Underbill. The past. Maya ignored all that and served them tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia remained in the apartment. The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at the kitchen table, put her hand on Michel’s shoulder, and looked over it at a grainy black-and-white photo, stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti sauce and coffee. A faded picture of a young man grinning right at the camera, grinning with a confident knowing smile.

“What an interesting face,” she said.

Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya knew she had said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost distraught. Maya stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared. Nothing came to her.

She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa, past all the whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the terra-cotta flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out over the indigo plate of the Hellas Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she cried, but without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had happened before.

Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the upper town. There was the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot, or had it been The Winter’s Tale. Yes, The Winter’s Tale. But there would be no coming back to life for them.

Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long staircase alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays, her spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at the apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her, she veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.