They danced in the arena center, drank at a table under the blurry stars. One star was red, and Michel had his suspicions, but did not voice them. They went back to his hotel room and made love on the narrow bed, and at some point it seemed to Michel that there were several people in him, all coming at once; he cried out at the strange rapture of that sensation. . . . Maya fell asleep and he lay beside her awake, in a tristesse reverberating somewhere outside time, drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the slowly diminishing cacophony of the town. Home at last.

• • •

In the days that followed, he introduced her to his nephew and to the rest of his relatives, rounded up by Francis. That whole gang took her in, and through the use of translation AIs asked her scores of questions. They also tried to tell her everything about themselves. It happened so often, Michel thought; people wanted to seize the famous stranger whose story they knew (or thought they knew), and give them their story in return, to redress the balance of the relationship. Some kind of witnessing, or confessional. The reciprocal sharing of stories. And people were naturally drawn to Maya anyway. She listened to their stories, and laughed, and asked questions— utterly there. Time after time they told her how the flood had come, drowning their homes, their livings, throwing them out into the world, to friends and family they hadn’t seen in years, forcing them into new patterns and reliances, breaking the mold of their lives and thrusting them out into the mistral. They had been exalted by this process, Michel saw, they were proud of their response, of how people had pulled together— also very indignant at any counterexamples of gouging or callousness, blots on an otherwise heroic affair: “Can you believe it? And it did no good, he was jumped one night in the street and all that money gone.”

“It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep forever.”

They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around Hellas Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics— because of the way they focused on others, the way they exalted people’s stories. Perhaps that was what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.