“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”

“Breathing vapors all his life.”

The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the sun a brighter white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he breathed deeply a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His stomach was queasy, and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation. Things rocked a bit more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for. The sky turned to zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal stayed sitting, breathed faster and shallower. “Did you like it?”

“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.” They laughed at the thought. “Here have a cup.”

Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g never felt right again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse was so wet that he felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand. His throat hurt, and his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was thirsty. The gleaming walls dripped, and nothing the people said was comprehensible, it was all ay and eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian English. A different language. Now they all spoke different languages. Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.

He slept again in the little bed on Ely’s boat. The next day the escort gave the okay, and they motored out of Sheer-ness, and north across the Thames estuary, in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.

Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea. Nirgal had been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis, where fronts ran up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water. And every time before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds a kind of flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and coating it with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there was very little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over it, the liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat rocked in a violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of the mist, but Ely paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a window beaded with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of screens under the window.

Suddenly Ely killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to a vicious side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered through the watery window, trying to see what had caused Ely to stop. “That’s a big ship for Southend,” Ely remarked, motoring on very slowly. “Where?”

“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal saw nothing.

Ely brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to it on both sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of Southend-on-Sea, which ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of buildings.

A number of men greeted Ely — “Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant” — and began to unload boxes from his hold.

Ely inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men shook their heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.” “They’re saying in Sheerness she and her group came to Southend.”

“Why would they say that?” “Because that’s what they think happened.” “That’s what you get listening to people who live underwater.”

“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other side of the pier. “She went over to Shoebury-ness, sometime back.”

Ely glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were here, these men would know.” “Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.

So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through the mist. From time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their left. They rounded a point, turned north. Ely brought them in to another floating dock, with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.

“That Chinese gang?” a toothless old man cried. “Gone up to Pig’s Bay they have! Gave us a greenhouse! Some kind of church.”

“Pig’s Bay’s just the next pier,” Ely said, looking thoughtful as he wheeled them away from the dock.

So they motored north. The coastline here was entirely composed of drowned buildings. They had built so close to the sea! Clearly there had been no reason to fear any change in sea level. And then it had happened; and now this strange amphibious zone, an intertidal civilization, wet and rocking in the mist.

A cluster of buildings gleamed at their windows. They had been filled by the clear bubble material, pumped out and occupied, their upstairs just above the foamy waves, their downstairs just below. Ely brought the boat in to a set of linked floating docks, greeted a group of women in smocks and yellow rain slickers mending a big black net. He cut his engine: “Has the Asian lady been to see you too then?”

“Oh yeah. She’s down inside, there in the building at the end.”

Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left him, he had to hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last building, a seafront boarding-house or something like, now much broken up and glimmering in all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants, vague and blurry seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Ely’s shoulder. The little man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room with one whole wall exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.

A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far door. White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She stared at them.

“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Ely asked, after glancing up at Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a British accent. She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other people in the room, more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the cliffside, in Medusa Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one, wandering the two planets building things…

Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The light, so dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Ely had made their farewells. Back into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A ruse, to get him out of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.

Ely sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”

Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down. Dark dim day on the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and mist turned into each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little drowsy. No doubt she was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual secrecy, yes. It had been absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would find her. Yes: it was a goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and make her come back out into the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the only way to be sure, the only way to remove this horrible weight from his heart. Yes: he would find her.

Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted. Low gray clouds rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The tide was ebbing now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the Thames was released full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken to mush, waves coming from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of foamy dark water, all carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam and jetsam. Ely’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails with grapnels and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to approach them. They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?” Nirgal asked Bly.