She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?

The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing fackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.

Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.

The northern polarisland had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.

Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.

Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau was cut with tributary streams like the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the territory to a great depth.

It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast deserts of red shifting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the best.

He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more than ten meters away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.

Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, “behind him.” And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.

So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix on his position and his car’s. He had a very good map program in his wristpad these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees north latitude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so apt, this anthropomorphic analogizing) was some small purple saxifrage, stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.

Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in the light — the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him — the delicious weariness in his feet — and then something indefinable, he had to admit it — unexplainable — in that the individual elements of the experience were insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this was love. Spirit of place, love of place — the areophany, not only as Hiroko had described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko — could she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, to learn to feel it oneself… love of planet. Love of a planet’s life. Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one’s regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One’s regard focused, in the center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.

Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological scale something rather like Hiroko’s viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in “little bangs” at the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread was as far removed from the others as it was possible to be. Thus all the life islands were widely separated in timespace, making contact between any two islands very unlikely simply because they were all late phenomena, and at a great distance from the rest; there hadn’t been time for contact. This hypothesis, if true, seemed to Sax a more than adequate explanation for the failure of SETI, that silence from the stars that had been ongoing for nearly four centuries now. A blink of the eye compared to the billion light-years that Deleuze estimated separated all life islands each a tertiary emergent phenomenon.