Olive grove. Wind. Bright sun in a brass sky. The weight of his body, the sour taste in his mouth: he felt himself root right into the ground. This was his home, this and no other. It had changed and yet it would never change— not this grove, not he himself. Home at last. Home at last. He could live on Mars for ten thousand years and still this place would be his home.

2

Back in the hotel room in Arles, he called up Maya. “Please come down, Maya. I want you to see this.”

“I’m working on the agreement, Michel. The UN-Mars agreement.”

“I know.”

“It’s important!”

“I know.”

“Well. It’s why I came here, and I’m part of it, in the middle of it. I can’t just go off on vacation.”

“Okay, okay. But look, that work will never end. Politics will never end. You can take a vacation, and then come back to it, and it will still be going. But this— this is my home, Maya. I want you to see it. Don’t you want to show me Moscow, don’t you want to go there?”

“Not if it was the last place above the flood.”

Michel sighed. “Well, it’s different for me. Please, come see what I mean.”

“Maybe in a while, when we’ve finished this stage of the negotiations. This is a critical time, Michel! Really it’s you who ought to be here, not me who ought to be there.”

“I can watch on the wrist. There’s no reason to be there in person. Please, Maya.”

She paused, caught finally by something in his tone of voice. “Okay, I’ll try. It won’t be for a while though, no matter what.”

“As long as you come.”

• • •

After that he spent his days waiting for Maya, though he tried not to think of it like that. He occupied every waking moment traveling about in a rented car, sometimes with Sylvie, sometimes on his own. Despite the evocative moment in the olive grove, perhaps because of it too, he felt deeply dislocated. He was drawn to the new coastline for some reason, fascinated by the adjustment to the new sea level that the local people were making. He drove down to it often, following back roads that led to abrupt cliffs, to sudden valley marshes. Many of the coastal fishing people had Algerian ancestry. The fishing wasn’t going well, they said. The Camargue was polluted by drowned industrial sites, and in the Med the fish were for the most part staying outside the brown water, out in the blue which was a good morning’s voyage away, with many dangers en route.