“Are you trying to educate me, Ben? What is there to see in Australia?”

“Will you come?”

It would eat up time. “Yes,” she said.

From the air Australia looked flat, rust-red, and littered with rippling, continent-spanning sand dunes and shining salt flats, the relics of dead seas. It was eroded, very dry, very ancient; even the sand dunes, she learned, were thirty thousand years old. Human occupancy seemed limited to the coastal strip, and a few scattered settlements in the interior.

They flew into Alice Springs, in the dry heart of the island continent.

As they approached the airport she saw a modern facility: a huge white globe, other installations. In among the structures she saw the characteristic gleaming cones of Gaijin landers. New silvery fencing had been flung out across the desert for kilometers around the central structures.

The extent of the Gaijin holding, here in central Australia, startled her. The days when the Gaijin had been restricted to a heavily guarded compound on a Greek island were long past, it seemed.

Ben grimaced. “This is an old American space-tracking facility called Pine Gap. There used to be a lot of local hostility to it. It was said that even the prime minister of Australia didn’t know what went on in there. And the local Aboriginal communities were outraged when their land was taken away.”

“But now,” she said dryly, “the Americans have gone. We don’t do any space tracking, because we don’t have a space program that requires it anymore.”

“No,” he murmured. “And so they gave Pine Gap to the Gaijin.”

“When?”

He shrugged. “Forty years ago, I think.” Before he was born.

It was the same all over the planet, Madeleine knew. Everywhere they touched the Earth, the Gaijin were moving out: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it was all one-way. And every year there were more weary human refugees, forced to flee their homes.

Few people protested strongly, because few saw the trends. Nemoto is right, she thought. The Gaijin are exploiting our short lives. Nemoto is right to try to survive, to stretch out her life, to see what is being done to us.

But Ben surprised her. Being here, seeing this, he lost his detachment; he became unhappy, angry. “The Gaijin care even less about our feelings than the Europeans. But we were here before the Gaijin, long before the Europeans. They are all Gaijin to us. Some of us are fleeing. But maybe one day they will all have gone, all the foreigners, and we will slip off our manufactured clothes and walk into the desert once more. What do you think?”

The plane landed heavily, in a cloud of billowing red dust.

Alice Springs — Ben called it the Alice — turned out to be a dull, scrubby town, a grid of baking-hot streets. Its main strip was called Todd Street, a dreary stretch of asphalt that dated back to the days of horses and hitching posts. Now it might have been transplanted from small-town America, a jumble of bars, soda fountains, and souvenir stores.

Madeleine studied the store windows desultorily. There were Australian mementoes — stuffed kangaroos and wallabies, animated T-shirts and books and data discs — but there was also, to cash in on the nearness of the Pine Gap reserve, a range of Gaijin souvenirs, models of landers and flower-ships, and animated spiderlike Gaijin toys that clacked eerily back and forth across the display front. But there were few tourists now, it seemed; that industry, already dwindling before Madeleine’s first Saddle Point jaunt, was now all but vanished.

They stayed in an anonymous hotel a little way away from Todd Street. There was an ugly old eucalyptus outside, pushing its way through the asphalt. The tree had small, tough-looking dark green leaves, and it was shedding its bark in great ash-gray strips that dangled from its trunk. “A sacred monument,” Ben said gently. “It’s on the Caterpillar Dreaming.” She didn’t know what that meant. SmartDrive cars wrenched their way around the tree’s stubborn, ancient presence; once, in the days when people drove cars, it must have been a traffic hazard.

A couple of children ambled by — slim, lithe, a deep black, plastered with sunblock. They stared at Ben and Madeleine as they stared at the tree. Ben seemed oddly uncomfortable under their scrutiny.

It’s because he’s a foreigner too, she thought. He’s been away too long, like me. This place isn’t his anymore, not quite. She found that saddening, but oddly comforting. Always somebody worse off than yourself.

They rested for a night.

At her window the Moon was bright. Fat bugs swarmed around the hotel’s lamps, sparking, sizzling. It was so hot it was hard to sleep. She longed for the simple, controllable enclosure of a spacecraft.

The next morning they prepared to see the country — to go out bush, as Ben called it. Ben wore desert boots, a loose singlet, a yellow hard hat and tight green shorts he called “stubbies.” Meacher wore a loose poncho and a broad reflective hat and liberal layers of sunblock on her face and hands. After all, she wouldn’t even be able to tell when this ferocious Sun burned her.

They had rented a car, a chunky four-wheel-drive with immense broad tires, already stained deep red with dust. Ben loaded up some food — tucker, he called it, his accent deepening as he spoke to the locals — and a lot of water, far more than she imagined they would need, in big chilled clear-walled tanks called Eskis, after Eskimo. In fact the car wouldn’t allow itself to be started unless its internal sensors told it there was plenty of water on board.

The road was a straight black strip of tarmac — probably smart-concrete, she thought, self-repairing, designed to last centuries without maintenance. It was empty of traffic, save for themselves.

At first she glimpsed fences, windmills with cattle clustered around them, even a few camels.

They passed an Aboriginal settlement surrounded by a link fence. It was a place of tin-roof shacks and a few central buildings that were just brown airless boxes: a clinic, a church perhaps. Children seemed to be running everywhere, limbs flashing. Rubbish blew across the ground, where bits of glass sparkled.

They didn’t stop; Ben barely glanced aside. Madeleine was shocked by the squalor.

Soon they moved beyond human habitation, and the ground was crimson and treeless. Nothing moved but the wispy shadows of high clouds. It was too arid here to farm or even graze.

“A harsh place,” she said unnecessarily.

“You bet,” Ben said, his eyes masked by mirrored glasses. “And getting harsher. It’s becoming depopulated, in fact. But it was enough for us. We touched the land lightly, I suppose.”

It was true. After tens of millennia of trial and error and carefully accumulated lore, the Aborigines had learned to survive here, in a land starved of nutrient and water. But there was no room for excess: There had been no fixed social structure, no prophets or chiefs, no leisured classes, and their myths were dreams of migration. And, before the coming of the Europeans, the weak, infirm, and elderly had been dealt with harshly.

In a land the size of the continental United States, there had been only three hundred thousand of them. But the Aborigines had survived, where it might seem impossible.

As the ground began to rise, Ben stopped the car and got out. Madeleine emerged into hot, skin-sucking dust, flat dense light, stillness.

She found herself walking over a plateau of sand hills and crumbled, weathered orange-red rock, red as Mars, she thought, broken by deep dry gulches. But there was grass here, tufts of it, yellow and spiky; even trees and bushes, such as low, spiky-leaved mulgas. Some of the bushes had been recently burned, and green shoots prickled the blackened stumps. To her eyes, there was the look of park land about these widely separated trees and scattered grass; but this land had been shaped by aridity and fire, not western aesthetics.