“Not if it was the last place above the flood.”

Michel sighed. “Well, it’s different for me. Please, come see what I mean.”

“Maybe in a while, when we’ve finished this stage of the negotiations. This is a critical time, Michel! Really it’s you who ought to be here, not me who ought to be there.”

“I can watch on the wrist. There’s no reason to be there in person. Please, Maya.”

She paused, caught finally by something in his tone of voice. “Okay, I’ll try. It won’t be for a while though, no matter what.” “As long as you come.”

After that he spent his days waiting for Maya, though he tried not to think of it like that. He occupied every waking moment traveling about in a rented car, sometimes with Sylvie, sometimes on his own. Despite the evocative moment in the olive grove, perhaps because of it too, he felt deeply dislocated. He was drawn to the new coastline for some reason, fascinated by the adjustment to the new sea level that the local people were making. He drove down to it often, following back roads that led to abrupt cliffs, to sudden valley marshes. Many of the coastal fishing people had Algerian ancestry. The fishing wasn’t going well, they said. The Camargue was polluted by drowned industrial sites, and in the Med the fish were for the most part staying outside the brown water, out in the blue which was a good morning’s voyage away, with many dangers en route.

Hearing and speaking French, even this strange new French, was like touching an electrode to parts of his brain that hadn’t been visited in over a century. Coelacanths exploded regularly: memories of women’s kindnesses to him, his cruelties to them. Perhaps that was why he had gone to Mars — to escape himself, an unpleasant fellow it seemed.

Well, if escaping himself had been his desire, he had succeeded. Now he was someone else. And a helpful man, a sympathetic man; he could look in a mirror. He could return home and face it, face what he had been, because of what he had become. Mars had done that, anyway.

It was so strange how the memory worked. The fragments were so small and sharp, they were like those furry minute cactus needles that hurt far out of proportion to their minuscule size. What he remembered best was his life on Mars. Odessa, Burroughs, the underground shelters in the south, the hidden outposts in the chaos. Even Underbill.

If he had returned to Earth during the Underbill years, he would have been swamped with media crowds. But he had been out of contact since disappearing with Hiroko, and though he had not attempted to conceal himself since the revolution, few in France seemed to have noticed his reappearance. The enormity of recent events on Earth had ineluded a partial fracturing of the media culture — or perhaps it was simply the passage of time; most of the population of France had been born after his disappearance, and the First Hundred were ancient history to them — not ancient enough, however, to be truly interesting. If Voltaire or Louis XIV or Charlemagne had appeared, there might be a bit of attention — perhaps — but a psychologist of the previous century who had emigrated to Mars, which was a sort of America when all was said and done? No, that was of very little interest to anyone. He got some calls, some people came by the Arlesian hotel to interview him down in the lobby or the courtyard, and after that one or two of the Paris shows came down as well; but they all were much more interested in what he could tell them about Nirgal than in anything about he himself. Nirgal was the one people were fascinated by, he was their charismatic.

No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafes eating his meals, feeling as alone as if he were in a solo rover in the far outback of the southern highlands, it was a bit disappointing to be entirely ignored — just one vieux among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than le fleuve blanc, if the truth were told…

It was better this way. He could stop in little villages around Vallabrix, like Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, or Saint-Victor-des-Quies, or Saint-Hippolyte-de-Montaigu, and chat with the shopkeepers, who looked identical to the ones who had been running the shops when he had left, and were probably their descendants, or even possibly the same people; they spoke in an older more stable French, careless of him, absorbed in their own conversations, their own lives. He was nothing to them, and so he could see them clearly. It was the same out in the narrow streets, where many people looked like gypsies — North African blood no doubt, spreading into the populace as it had after the Saracen invasion a thousand years before. Africans pouring in every thousand years or so; this too was Provence. The young women were beautiful: gracefully flowing through the streets in gangs, their black tresses still glossy and bright in the dust of the mistral. These had been his villages. Dusty plastic signs, everything tatttred and run-down…

Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation, memory and forgetfulness. But ever more lonely.

In one cafe he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in that very same cafe, at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of involuntary memory, for one’s long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell — and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus the neurological sequence, smell triggering memory triggering nostalgia. Nostalgia, the intense ache for one’s past, desire for one’s past — not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been, and now was gone. He recalled Eve’s face, talking in this crowded room across from him. But not what she had said, or why they were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment, a cactus needle, an image seen as if by lightning bolt, then gone; and no knowing the rest of it, no matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were all like that, his memories; that was what memories were when they got old enough, flashes in the dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes filled with a vague ache.

He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove home, through Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the ruined mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.

That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time. Flashes, images — a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.

The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they gave him no euphoric connection with lost time; that moment too was past.

In a flickering gray green he drove back to Aries. The clerk in the hotel’s lobby was telling someone that the mistral would never stop. “Yes it will,” Michel said as he passed.

He went up to his room and called Maya again. Please, he said. Please come soon. It was making him angry that he was reduced to such begging. Soon, she kept saying. A few more days and they would have an agreement hammered out, a bona fide written agreement between the UN and an independent Martian government. History in the making. After that she would see about coming.

Michel did not care about history in the making. He walked around Aries, waiting for her. He went back to his room to wait. He went out to walk again.