But there still were some surprises, nevertheless. The natives from the northern cities, for instance — and not only them, but almost everyone not from Zygote — were much less physical with each other than Nirgal was used to being. They did not touch or hug or caress each other as much, or shove or strike — nor did they bathe together, although some learned to in Sabishii’s public baths. So Nirgal was always surprising people by his touch. He said odd things; he liked to run all day; whatever the reasons, as the months passed and he got involved in endlessly connected groups, bands, cells, and gangs, he was aware that he stuck out somehow, that he was the focal point of some groups — that a party was following him from cafe to cafe, from day to day. That there was such a thing as “Nirgal’s crowd.” Quickly he learned to deflect this attention if he didn’t want it. But sometimes he found he did.

Often it was when Jackie was there.

“Jackie again!” Art observed. It was not the first time she had come up, or the tenth.

Nirgal nodded, feeling his pulse jump.

Jackie too had moved to Sabishii, soon after Nirgal. She had taken rooms nearby, and attended some of the same classes. And in the fluctuating group of their peers, they sometimes showed off to each other — especially in the very common situation in which one or the other of them was involved in seducing someone or in being seduced.

But they soon learned that they could not indulge themselves in that, if they did not want to drive away other partners. Which neither did. So they left each other alone, except if one actively disliked the other’s choice of partner. So that in a way they were judging each other’s partners, and’ acquiescing to each other’s influence. And all this without a word, with this rare behavior the only visible sign of their power over each other. They were both fooling around with a lot of other people, making new relationships, friendships, having affairs. Sometimes they didn’t see each other for weeks. And yet at some deeper level (Nirgal shook his head unhappily as he tried to express this to Art) they “belonged to each other.”

If one of them ever needed to confirm that bond, the other responded to the seduction in a blaze of excitement, and off they went. That had only happened three times in the three years they were in Sabishii, and yet Nirgal knew by those meetings that the two of them were linked — by their shared childhood and all that had happened in it, certainly, but also by something more. Everything they did together was different than when they did it with other people, more intense.

With the rest of his acquaintances, there was nothing so fraught with significance, or danger. He had friends — a score, a hundred, five hundred. He always said yes. He asked questions and listened, and rarely slept. He went to the meetings of fifty different political organizations, and agreed with them all, and spent many a night talking, deciding the fate of Mars, and then of the human race. Some people he hit it off with better than others. He might talk to a native from the north and feel an immediate empathy, starting a friendship that would endure forever. Much of the time it happened that way. But then once in a while he would be utterly surprised by some action totally foreign to his understanding, and be reminded yet again what a cloistered, even claustrophobic upbringing he had had in Zygote — leaving him as innocent, in some ways, as a fairy brought up under an abalone shell.

“No, it’s not Zygote that made me,” he said to Art, looking behind them to make sure that Coyote was really sleeping. “You can’t choose your childhood, it’s just what happens to you. But after that you choose. I chose Sabishii. And that’s really what made me.”

“Maybe,” Art said, rubbing his jaw. “But childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.”

One dawn the deep plum color of the sky illuminated the spectacular fin ridge of Acheron to the north, looming like a Manhattan of solid rock, as yet uncut into individual skyscrapers. The can-yonland underneath the fin was particolored, giving the fractured land a painted look. “That’s a lot of lichen,” Coyote said. Sax climbed into the seat beside him and leaned almost nose to windshield, showing as much animation as he had since the rescue.

Under the very top of the Acheron fin, there was a line of mirror windows like a diamond necklace, and on top of the ridge itself, a long tuft of green, under the ephemeral glint of tenting. Coyote exclaimed, “It looks like it’s been reoccupied!”

Sax nodded.

Spencer, looking over their shoulders, said, “I wonder who’s in there.”

“No one is,” Art said. They stared at him, and he went on: “I heard about it in my orientation in Sheffield. It’s a Praxis project. They rebuilt it, and got everything ready. And now they’re just waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For Sax Russell, basically. For Taneev, Kohl, Tokareva, Russell …” He looked at Sax, shrugging almost apologetically.

Sax croaked something wordlike.

“Hey!” Coyote said.

Sax cleared his throat hard, tried again. His mouth pursed to a little O, and a horrible noise started deep in his throat: “W-w-w-w-w-” He looked over at Nirgal, gestured as if Nirgal would know.

“Why?” Nirgal said.

Sax nodded.

Nirgal felt his cheeks burn as an electric flush of acute relief ran through his skin, and he leaped up and gave the little man a hard hug. “You do understand!”

“Well,” Art was saying, “they did it as a kind of gesture. It was Fort’s idea, the guy who founded Praxis. ‘Maybe they’ll come back,’ he supposedly said to the Praxis people in Sheffield. I don’t know if he thought out the practicalities or not.”

“This Fort is strange,” Coyote said, and Sax nodded again.

“True,” Art said. “But I wish you could meet him. He reminds me of the stories you tell about Hiroko.”

“Does he know we’re out here?” Spencer asked.

Nirgal’s pulse leapt, but Art showed no sign of discomfort. “I don’t know. He suspects. He wants you to be out here.”

“Where does he live?” Nirgal asked.

“I don’t know.” Art described his visit to Fort. “So I don’t know exactly where he is. Somewhere on the Pacific. But if I could get word to him …”

No one responded.

“Well, maybe later,” Art said.

Sax was looking out the rover’s low windshield at the distant rock fin, at the tiny line of lit windows marking the labs behind them, empty and silent. Coyote reached out and squeezed his neck. “You want it back, don’t you.” Sax croaked something.

On the empty plain of Amazonis there were few settlements of any kind. This was the back country, and they rolled rapidly south through it, night after night, and slept in the darkened cabin of the car through the days. Their biggest problem was finding adequate hiding places. On flat open plains the boulder car stood out like a glacial erratic, and Amazonis was almost nothing but flat open plain. They usually tucked into the apron of ejecta around one of the few craters they passed. After the dawn meals Sax sometimes exercised his voice, croaking incomprehensible words, trying to communicate with them and failing. This upset Nirgal even more than it seemed to bother Sax himself, who, though clearly frustrated, did not seem pained. But then he had not tried to talk to Simon in those last weeks…

Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. “Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. “I’m afraid his interrogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”

“There’s such a thing as fluent aphasia?” Coyote said.

“Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can’t read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”