Nirgal bought a position in the Sabishii construction coop he had looked into. He went in often to work on the town’s buildings. Up in the basin he did some assembly and testing of solo blimpgliders. His work cottage was a small building made of stone-stacked walls, with plates of sandstone for shingles. Between that work and the farming in the greenhouse and his potato patch, and the ecopoesis in the basin, his days were full.
He flew the completed blimpgliders down to Sabishii, and stayed in a little studio above in his old teacher Tariki’s rebuilt house in the old city, living there among ancient issei who looked and sounded very much like Hiroko. Art and Nadia lived there too, raising their daughter Nikki. Also in town were Vijjika, and Reull, and Annette, all old friends from his student days — and there was the university itself, no longer called the University of Mars, but simply Sabishii College — a small school that still ran in the amorphous style of the demimonde years, so that the more ambitious students went to Elysium or Sheffield or Cairo; those who came to Sabishii were those fascinated by the mystique of the demimonde years, or interested in the work of one of the issei professors.
All these people and activities made Nirgal feel strangely, even uncomfortably, at home. He put in long days as a plasterer and general laborer on various construction jobs his co-op had around town. He ate in rice bars and pubs. He slept in the loft in Tariki’s garage, and looked forward to the days he returned to the basin.
One night he was walking home late from a pub, asleep on his feet, when he passed a small man sleeping on a park bench: Coyote.
Nirgal stopped short. He walked over to the bench. He stared and stared. Some nights he heard coyotes howling up in the basin. This was his father. He remembered all those days hunting for Hiroko, without a clue where to look. But here his father slept on a city park bench. Nirgal could call him anytime, and always that bright cracked grin, Trinidad itself. Tears started to his eyes; he shook his head, composed himself. Old man lying on a park bench. One saw it fairly frequently. A lot of the issei had gotten here and gone off somehow, into the back country for good, so that when they came into a city they slept in the parks.
Nirgal went over and sat on the end of the bench, just beyond his father’s head. Gray tatty dreadlocks. Like a drunk. Nirgal just sat with him, looking at the undersides of the linden trees around the bench. It was a quiet night. Stars ticked through the leaves.
Coyote stirred, twisted his head and glanced up. “Who dat.”
“Hey,” Nirgal said.
“Hey!” Coyote said, and sat up. He rubbed at his eyes. “Nirgal, man. You startle me there.”
“Sorry. I was walking by and saw you. What are you doing?”
“Sleeping.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Well, I was. Far as I know that was all I was doing.”
“Coyote, don’t you have a home?”
“Why no.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No.” Coyote bleared a grin at him. “I’m like that awful vid program. The world is my home.”
Nirgal only shook his head. Coyote squinted as he saw that Nirgal was not amused. He stared at him for a long time from under half-mast eyelids, breathing deeply. “My boy,” he said at last, dreamily. The whole city was quiet. Coyote muttered as if falling asleep. “What does the hero do when the tale is over? Swim over the waterfall. Drift out on the tide.”
“What?”
Coyote opened his eyes fully, leaned toward Nirgal. “Do you remember when we brought Sax into Tharsis Tholus and you sat with him, and afterward they said you brought him back to life? That kind of thing — think about that.” He shook his head, leaned back on the bench. “It’s not right. It’s just a story. Why worry about that story when it’s not yours anyway. What you’re doing right now is better. You can walk away from that kind of story. Sit in a park at night like any ordinary person. Go anywhere you please.”
Nirgal nodded, uncertain.
“What I like to do,” Coyote said sleepily, “is go to a sidewalk cafe and toss down some kava and watch all the faces. Go for a walk around the streets and look at people’s faces. I like to look at women’s faces. So beautiful. And some of them so … so something. I don’t know. I love them.” He was falling asleep again. “You’ll find your way to live.”
Guests who occasionally visited him in the basin included Sax, Coyote, Art and Nadia and Nikki, who got taller every year; she was taller than Nadia already, and seemed to regard Nadia like a nanny or a great-grandmother — much as Nirgal himself had regarded her, in Zygote. Nikki had inherited Art’s sense of fun, and Art himself encouraged this, egging her on, conspiring with her against Nadia, watching her with the most radiant pleasure Nirgal had ever seen on an adult face. Once Nirgal saw the three of them sitting on the stone wall by his potato patch, laughing helplessly at something Art had said, and he felt a pang even as he too laughed; his old friends were now married, with a kid. Living in that most ancient pattern. Faced with that, his life on the land did not seem so substantial after all. But what could he do? Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners — it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.
So he lived in his high basin, grew some of his food, worked on co-op projects to pay for the rest. He flew down to Sabishii once a month in a new aircraft, enjoyed his stay of a week or two, and went back home. Art and Nadia and Sax came up frequently, and much less often he hosted Maya and Michel, or Spencer, all of whom lived in Odessa — or Zeyk and Nazik, who brought news of Cairo and Mangala that he tried not to hear. When they left he went out onto the arcing ridge and sat on one of his sitting boulders, and looked at the meadows stringing through the talus, concentrating on what he had, on this world of the senses, rock and lichen and moss campion.
The basin was evolving. There were moles in the meadows, marmots in the talus. At the end of the long winters the marmots came out of hibernation early, nearly starving, their internal clocks still set to Earth. Nirgal set out food for them in the snow, and watched from his house’s upper windows as they ate it. They needed help to get through the long winters to spring. They regarded his house as a source of food and warmth, and two marmot families lived in the rocks under it, whistling their warning whistle when anyone approached. Once they warned him of people from the Tyrrhena committee on the introduction of new species, asking him for a species list, and a rough census; they were beginning to formulate a local “native inhabitant” list, which, once formed, would allow them to make judgments on any subsequent introductions of fast-spreading species. Nirgal was happy to join this effort, and apparently so was everyone else doing ecopoesis on the massif; as a precipitation island, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest others, they were developing their own mix of high-altitude fauna and flora, and there was a growing sentiment to regard this mix as “natural” to Tyrrhena, to be altered only by consensus.
The group from the committee left, and Nirgal sat with the house marmots, feeling odd. “Well,” he said to them, “now we’re indigenous.”
He was happy in his basin, above the world and its concerns. In the spring new plants appreared from nowhere, and some he greeted with a trowel of compost, others he plucked out and turned into compost. The greens of spring were unlike any other greens — light electric jades and limes of bud and leaf, new blades of emerald grass, blue nettles, red leaves. And then later the flowers, that tremendous expense of a plant’s energy, the push beyond survival, the reproductive urge all around him … sometimes when Na-dia and Nikki came back from their walks holding miniature bouquets in their big hands, it seemed to Nirgal that the world made sense. He would eye them, and think about children, and feel some wild edge in him that was not usually there.