In Dingboche as in much of the southern highlands the gift economy still predominated, and Nirgal and his companions had to endure a near potlatching when they stayed for the night. The locals were very happy when he inquired about the high basin, which they called variously the little horseshoe, or the upper hand. “It needs looking after.” They offered to help him get started.

So they went up to the high cirque in a little caravan, and dumped a load of gear on the ridge near the house boulder, and stuck around long enough to clear a first little field of stones, walling it with what they cleared. A couple of them experienced in construction helped him to make the first incisions into the ridge boulder. During this noisy drilling some of the Dingboche locals cut away at the exterior of the rock, carving in Sanskrit lettering Om Mani Padme Hum, as seen on innumerable mani stones in the Himalayas, and now all over the southern highlands. The locals chipped away the rock between the fat cursive letters, so that the letters stood out in raised relief against a rougher, lighter background. As for the boulder house itself, eventually he would have four rooms hacked out of the boulder, with triple-paned windows, solar panels for heat and power, water from a snowmelt pumped up to a tank placed higher on the ridge, and a composting toilet and graywater facility.

Then they were off. Nirgal had the basin to himself.

He walked around on it for many days without doing anything but looking. Only the tiniest part of the basin would be his farm — just some small fields inside low stone walls, and a greenhouse for vegetables. And a cottage industry, he wasn’t sure what. It wouldn’t be self-sufficient, but it would be settling in. A project.

And then there was the basin itself. A small channel already ran down the opening out to the west, as if to suggest a watershed. The cupped hand of rock was already a microclimate, tilted to the sun, slightly sheltered from the winds. He would be an ecopoet.

First he had to learn the land, with that as his project it was amazing how busy every day became, there was an endless number of things to do; but no structure, no schedule, no rush; no one to consult; and every day, in the last hours of summer light, he would walk around the ridge, and inspect the basin in the failing light. It was already colonized by lichen and the other first settlers; fellfields filled the hollows, and there were small mosaics of arctic ground cover in the sunny exposures, mounds of green moss humped on red soil less than a centimeter thick. Snowmelt coursed down a number of rivulet channels, pooling and dropping through any number of potential meadow terraces, little diatom oases, falling down the basin to meet in the gravel wadi at the gate to the land below, a flat meadow-to-be behind the residual rim. Ribs higher in the basin were natural dams, and after some consideration, Nirgal carried some ventifacts to these low ribs, and assembled them with their facets touching so that the ribs were heightened by just one or two rocks’ height. Snowmelt would collect in meadow ponds, banked by moss. The moors just east of Sabishii resembled what he had in mind, and he called up ecopoets who lived on those moors, and asked about species compatibility, growth rates, soil amendment and the like. In his mind developed a vision of the basin; then in second March the autumn came, the year heading toward aphelion, and he began to see how much of the landscaping would be done by wind and winter. He would have to wait and see.

He spread seeds and spores by hand, casting them away from bags or growth media dishes latched to his belt, feeling like a figure from Van Gogh or the Old Testament; it was a peculiar sensation of mixed power and helplessness, action and fate. He arranged for loads of topsoil to be trucked up and dumped on some of the little fields, and then he spread it out by hand, thinly. He brought in worms from the university farm at Sabishii. Worms in a bottle, Coyote had always called people in cities; observing the writhing mass of moist naked tubules, Nirgal shuddered. He released the worms onto his new little plots. Go, little worm, prosper on the land. He himself, walking around on the sunny mornings after a shower, was no more than moist linked naked tubules. Sentient worms, that’s what they were, in bottles or on the land.

After the worms it would be moles and voles. Then mice. Then snow rabbits, and ermine, and marmots; perhaps then some of the snow cats wandering the moors would drop by. Foxes. The basin was high, but the pressure they were hoping for at this altitude was four hundred millibars, with forty percent of that oxygen; they were already most of the way there. Conditions were somewhat as in the Himalayas. Presumably all of Earth’s high-altitude flora and fauna would be viable here, and all the new engineered variants; and with so many ecopoets stewarding small patches of the upland, the problem would be mostly a matter of prepping the ground, introducing the basic ecosystem desired, and then supporting it, and watching what came in on the wind, or walked in, or flew. These arrivals could be problematic of course, and there was a lot of talk on the wrist about invasion biology, and integrated microcline management; figuring out one’s locality’s connections to the larger region was a big part of the ongoing work of ecopoesis.

Nirgal got even more interested in this matter of dispersal the next spring, in first November when the snows melted, and poking out of the late slush on the flat terraces of the northern side of the basin were sprigs of snow alumroot. He hadn’t planted them, he had never heard of them, indeed he wasn’t even sure of his identification, until his neighbor Yoshi dropped by one week and confirmed it: Heuchera nivalis. Blown in on the wind, Yoshi said. There was a lot of it in Escalante Crater to the north. Not much of it in between; but that was jump dispersal for you.

Jump dispersal, spread dispersal, stream dispersal: all three were common on Mars. Mosses and bacteria were spread dispersing; hydrophilic plants were stream-dispersing along the sides of glaciers, and the new coastlines; and lichen and any number of other plants were jump-dispersing on the strong winds. Human dispersion showed all three patterns, Yoshi remarked as they wandered over the basin discussing the concept — spreading through Europe and Asia and Africa, streaming down the Americas and along the Australian coasts, jumping out to the Pacific Islands (or to Mars). It was common to see all three methods used by highly adaptable species. And the Tyrrhena massif was up in the wind, catching the westerlies and also the summer trade winds, so that both sides of the massif got precipitation; nowhere more than twenty centimeters a year, which would have made it desert on Earth, but in the southern hemisphere of Mars, that was a precipitation island. In that way too a dispersion catchment, and so very invasible.

So. High barren rocky land, dusted with snow wherever shade predominated, so that the shadows tended to be white. Little sign of life except in basins, where the ecopoets helped along their little collections. Clouds surged in from west in the winter, east in the summer. The southern hemisphere had the seasons reinforced by the perihelion-aphelion cycle, so that they really meant something. On Tyrrhena the winters were hard.

Nirgal wandered the basin after storms, looking to see what had blown in. Usually it was only a load of icy dust, but once he found an unplanted clutch of pale blue Jacob’s ladders, tucked between the splits in a breadloaf rock. Check the botanicals to see how it might interact with what was already there. Ten percent of introduced species survived, then ten percent of those became pests; that was invasion biology’s ten-ten rule, Yoshi said, almost the first rule of the discipline. “Ten meaning five to twenty, of course.” Once Nirgal weeded out a springtime arrival of common street-grass, fearing it would take over everything. Same with tundra thistle. Another time a heavy dust load fell on an autumn wind. These dust storms were small compared to the old global southern-summer storms, but occasionally a hard wind would tear up the desert pavement somewhere and send the dust below flying. The atmosphere was thickening rapidly these days, fifteen millibars a year on average. Each year the winds had more force, and so thicker areas of pavement were at risk of being torn away. The dust that fell was usually a very thin layer, however, and often high in nitrates; so it was like a fertilizer, to be washed into the soil by the next rain.