“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.

“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking — it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’ — and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”

But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.

And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!

But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.

He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.

Well — still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.

“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something — good. See how beautiful it is — in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere… It’s self-organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”

“Well…” Michel demurred.

“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”

“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”

“Life?”

“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow consciousness?”

“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.

“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”

“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What are you thinking? “I mean — here it all is. Still here.”

“But not the same.”

“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically opposed to mysticism, but still…”

Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”

“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a … such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”

“You always want to know.”

“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”

“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”

They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.

PART TEN

Werteswandel

It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with hand-screens.

From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”

“A matter of nanoseconds.”

“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields — there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled minor apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”

“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.

“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”

“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel — then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”

“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”

“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”

“And these spheres are how big?”

The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we bum twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”

“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”

The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”

“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”

“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”