Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Karna shrugged. “I never knew her name. I thought she was a Tamil, from the south of India. She’s gone over to Southend I hear.”

“She helped to set this up?”

“Yeah. She brought the bubbles in from Vlissingen, her and a bunch like her. Great what they did here, we were groveling in High Halstow before they came.”

“Why did they come?”

“Don’t know. Some kind of coastal support group, no doubt.” He laughed. “Though they didn’t come on like that. Just moving around the coasts, building stuff out of the wreckage for the fun of it, what it looked like. Intertidal civilization, they called it. Joking as usual.”

“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”

“Yeah.”

“Care for some scrod?”

The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Karna cried “Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”

“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”

Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”

Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.

“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?”

None. Still . . . if Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nirgal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour of need . . . the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a reinhabitation. . . .

“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”

Nirgal looked at Bly, who nodded; they could cross too.