“But?”

“I don’t think she’s there. And — I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still… I’m waiting.”

“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.

Sax nodded.

They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko — mother, lover — she had abandoned them both.

But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”

“What will you do now?”

“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”

“Ah! Good luck.”

Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.

So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and mi-crobial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.

Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na — at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.

They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.

But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night — a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled — until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.

As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.

Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper. In time, other winds would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall on the rest of it, and when the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over the spillways, and a new leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal pattern, much like the old one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down the massif and into the world. But by the time that happened, every plant and an-irnal in the basin would be dead.

PART NINE

Natural History

Afterward Nirgal went with Sax up to Da Vinci, and stayed with the old man in his apartment. One night Coyote dropped by, after the timeslip when no one else would have thought to visit.

Briefly Nirgal told him what had happened to the high basin.

“Yeah, so?” Coyote said.

Nirgal looked away.

Coyote went to the kitchen and started scrabbling through Sax’s refrigerator, shouting back into the living room through a full mouth. “What did you expect on a windy hillside like that? This world is not a garden, man. Some of it going to get buried every year, that’s just the way it is. Another wind come in a year or ten and blow all that dust off your hill.”

“Everything will be dead by then.”

“That’s life. Now it’s time to do something else. What were you doing before you set in there?”

“Looking for Hiroko.”

“Shit.” Coyote appeared in the doorway, pointing a big kitchen knife right at Nirgal. “Not you too.”

“Yes me too.”

“Oh come on. When you going to grow up. Hiroko is dead. You might as well get used to it.”

Sax came in from his office, blinking hard. “Hiroko is alive,” he said.

“Not you too!” Coyote cried. “You two are like children!”

“I saw her on the south flank ofArsia Mows, in a storm.”

“Join the fucking party, man.”

Sax blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Fuck.”

Coyote went back into the kitchen.

“There have been other sightings,” Nirgal said to Sax. “Reports are fairly common.”

“I know that — ”

“Reports are daily!” Coyote shouted from the kitchen. He charged back into the living room. “People see her every day! There’s a spot on the wrist to report sightings! Last week I see she appeared in two different places on the same night, in Noachis and on Olympus! Opposite sides of the world!”

“I don’t see that that proves anything,” Sax said stubbornly. “They say the same sort of thing about you, and I see you’re still alive.”

Coyote shook his head violently. “No. I am the exception that proves the rule. Anyone else, when they are reported in two places at once, that means they are dead. A sure sign.” He made a stop thrust to forestall Sax’s next remark, shouted “She’s dead! Face it! She died in the attack on Sabishii! Those UNTA storm troopers caught her and Iwao and Gene and Rya and all the rest of them, and they took them to some room and sucked the air or pulled the trigger. That’s what happens! Do you think it never happens? Do you think that secret police haven’t killed dissidents and then disappeared the bodies so that no one ever finds out? It happens! Fuck yes it happens, even on your precious Mars it happens, yes and more than once! You know it’s true! It happened. That’s how people are. They’ll do anything, they’ll kill people and figure they’re just earning their keep or feeding their children or making the world safe. And that’s what happened. They killed Hiroko and all the rest of them too.”

Nirgal and Sax stared. Coyote was quivering, he looked like he was going to stab the wall.

Sax cleared his throat. “Desmond — what makes you so sure?”

“Because I looked! I looked. I looked like no one else could look. She’s not in any of her places. She’s not anywhere. She didn’t get out. No one has really seen her since Sabishii. That’s why you’ve never heard from her. She’s not so inhuman she would let us go all this time without ever letting us know.”

“But I saw her,” Sax insisted.

“In a storm, you said. In a bit of trouble, I suppose. Saw her for a little while, just long enough to get you out of trouble. Then gone for good.”

Sax blinked.

Coyote laughed harshly. “So I thought. No, that’s fine. Dream about her all you want. Just don’t get that confused with reality. Hiroko is dead.”