Between this majestic white range and Bern lay a number of lower ranges of green hills, the grassy alps similar to the greens in Trinidad, the conifer forests a darker green. So much green— again Nirgal was astounded by how much of Earth was covered with plant life, the lithosphere smothered in a thick ancient blanket of biosphere. “Yes,” Michel said, along one day to view the prospect with him. “The biosphere at this point has even formed a great deal of the upper layer of rock. Everywhere life teems, it teems.”

Michel was dying to get to Provence. They were near it, an hour’s flight or a night’s train; and everything that was going on in Berne seemed to Michel only the endless wrangling of politics. “Flood or revolution or the sun going nova, it will still go on! You and Sax can deal with it, you can do what needs doing better than I.”

“And Maya even more so.”

“Well, yes. But I want her to come with me. She has to see it, or she won’t understand.”

Maya, however, was absorbed in the negotiations with the UN, which were getting serious now that the Martians back home had approved the new constitution. The UN was turning out to still be very much a metanat mouthpiece, just as the World Court continued to support the new “co-op democracies”; and so the arguments in the various meeting rooms, and via video transmission, were vigorous, volatile, sometimes hostile. Important, in a word, and Maya went out to do battle every day; so she had no patience at all for the idea of Provence. She had visited the south of France in her youth, she said, and was not greatly interested in seeing it again, even with Michel. “She says the beaches are all gone!” Michel complained. “As if the beaches were what mattered to Provence!”

In any case, she wouldn’t go. Finally, after a few weeks had passed, Michel shrugged and gave up, unhappily, and decided to visit Provence on his own.

On the day he left, Nirgal walked him down to the train station at the end of the main street, and stood waving at the slowly accelerating train as it left the station. At the last moment Michel stuck his head out a window, waving back at Nirgal with a huge grin. Nirgal was shocked to see this unprecedented expression, so quickly replacing the discouragement at Maya’s absence; then he felt happy for his friend; then he felt a flash of envy. There was no place that would make him feel so good to be going to, not anywhere in the two worlds.