Procyon keyed up images of those plants, too, getting his own picture of what Marak intended and the sort of growth Marak foresaw covering the thin sandy skin of this rise. He didn’twant to make another statement Auguste could gently imply was foolish.

And he was insatiably curious.

Crazy, his younger sister had said about him. Way too serious. Enjoy life. Who cares about classes? Cut out. Party.

He did enjoy life, precisely because heknew what those plants looked like, because he was planning a way to get into an intelligent dialogue with Auguste in this next report to prove he wasn’t a fool, and because he knew, because Marak hadn’t needed to give his conclusions aloud, but had—that he’d been purposely given a tidbit of information. A living god thought his curiosity was worth rewarding, the way he had rewarded his predecessor’s. Finally.

And thatinspired him beyond all expectation. Curiosity was his life. Curiosity made him enjoy getting up in the morning. Curiosity made him dive right in even before the alarm went off—

Hell!

Anniversary. The parental anniversary.

He’d come in here, isolate from the house system, before Sam gave him the scheduled reminder, and he hadn’t remembered to tend to it before work.

He made a note on his hand, as something he’d carry out of the room.

He could take care of it. He had an idea. Courier delivery. Peace in the family was the important thing.

Marak and Hati rode, meanwhile, talking quietly, and Procyon listened, only listened.

Eavesdropping on God. Tagging along like a five-year-old, learning everything in the whole world as if it were new, and sometimes almost forgetting to type his notes in the excitement of the instant.

They’d come in sight of the rim of the Needle River Gorge, the edge of the western lowlands. They had reached the narrowest part of the rocky spine, from which they could see the deep of the gorge on one hand and the expanse of the pans in the other, both at the same time.

God, that had to be a view.

“GREEN,” MARAK SAID TO HIS wife and his companions, looking back down the curve of the long ridge of rock—desert pans dizzyingly far below on one side, and now the eroding deep of the great gorge on the other side of this resistant, ancient lava flow. He added, for his young watcher, “As far as the eye can see.”

Marak rode comfortably, foot tucked in the curve of the beshta’s neck, rocking gently to a rhythm as steady and eternal as his heartbeat, the line of their caravan still ascending that narrow spit that was part of the Plateau, which became, ultimately, the Southern Wall.

“Green-rimmed like the Paradise,” Hati said, meaning the river of the Refuge, where fields and farms and orchards had skirted the first dependable water of the midlands desert, to welcome the refugees in the days of the Hammerfall.

Plants always came first in their plan. Plants that cleaned and replenished the air, not only plants on the land, but algae blown out onto the vast oceans, mats of algae in shallows, life of more complex sort running down with water from the free-flowing streams of the midlands. Marak understood these things. Hati understood. That was the work they did, slowly remaking the world in a way the ondatmight one day approve, and grant their descendants peace from a war they never began.

They’d seen the rockets go out, trailing fire into the dusty clouds until they were a white and vanishing glare. Such rockets burst far away and showered algae bloom high into the furious winds. Over and over and over, year after year, Ian had sent them out.

They had seen the snow come down, and the hail fall, sometimes breaking rocks, the hail of those days was so large. They had seen monstrous whirlwinds dance across the lowlands, vortices within vortices, whirlwinds that, carrying sand on the high plateaus, would strip an unprotected body to bone as they passed.

From the earliest days of the Hammerfall, rains had begun in the high desert, and the winds dried the rain, and sent it high up into clouds that rained down again, until, year by year, since the great destruction, the wind kicked up less dust. These days, gray-bottomed cloud swept off the heights in regular systems, clouds carried on the winds at the edge of heaven.

These days, dependable streams of water fell in a thundering spray off the escarpment, in a chasm that widened year by year, and, conjoined, they flowed down to the Needle, carving a deep gorge on its way to the sea, working its last bends closer and closer to penetrating this ridge.

They had seen the rains fall until the air itself changed, until, these days, they wore the a’aifad more often against the evening chill than the blowing dust that had been the rule in oldest times.

They had ridden the eastern lowlands hundreds of years ago, finding lichens on once-barren rocks, and scum on the pools. They had carried samples to Ian and Luz. The Ila, on first hearing of their discovery, had avowed herself uninterested. “Tell me something more than scum on the ponds,” she had said, affecting scorn. But she had surely heard, this power who had loosed her own makers on the world in one single pond of free water. And all through these ages, Ian and Luz had watched her very carefully, as if she nursed some secret store of trouble she could loose if ever the world grew amenable. Certainly she might to this day possess knowledge she had never given to them. That she did have such knowledge, Marak was certain.

But Ian and Luz had knowledge, too. They had changed theworld with their skill. On their account, the Ila’s great enemy, the ondat,had called off their war with the world, and only watched from the heavens, waiting, waiting, for what outcome those who dealt with them claimed not to know.

The land went on changing. The ondatseemed satisfied, for now, at least.

The beshta under him had struck a steady pace. Hati’s strode side by side. The boys rode easily behind, with the pack beasts all rocking along at that sustainable rate that could cover considerable ground in a day, climbing up the long, gentle rise of the spine. Machines could go many places where riders might suffer great privation; but Ian lost a good many of his precious drones and robots to uneven ground, to weather and dust, too—metal and materials that had to be searched up out of drifting dunes at great labor…by riders, who had to go after the failures.

And as for the little rovers, their solar panels blew apart in the winds, liquid fuel had to be brought to sustain them, grit from the unseeded places got into their works, and they failed. After all was said and done, in Marak’s opinion, despite Ian and his clever synthesizers, riders were still the best.

Riders fared best here in rough land, for instance, where there was very little space between one fall and the next.

A good day in the heavens, a good day on earth. And the Refuge was far behind them and mostly out of mind for days on end.

“The green has spread down to the river terraces,” Hati said to him, when a deep erosion in the rim of the Needle Gorge afforded them a view of those terraces, hazy with depth below, and indeed a careful eye could make out a gray-green, spiky sort of growth they called knifeweed because of the look of it, a stubborn, windblown plant that had outfought the shifting sand in patches throughout the lowlands, growing tougher year by year.

So it grew on the very rim of the Needle Gorge, and now below it.

“Knifeweed,” Marak named it aloud, for Procyon, “patches all through this place and well down into the gorge.”

There was a great deal else of new growth, some of it unexpected. Where he rode now, well up on the spine, they had never gone, only seen it through eyes in the sky.

For those who lived forever, something new was oftenest measuredin rivers and rocks. And to his eye this dark basalt underlying the red and gold land across the gorge, newly dotted with green and gray, this was already a place of change, a sight already worth their coming. Here, ancient volcanic flows were exposed and uplifted, the red cap worn away—only on this side of the gorge. It was a fault line, and a great one.