Some of Michel’s relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water— the sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste of his old beach swims.

Back on land they went out on drives. Once they went out to see the Pont du Gard, and there it was, same as ever, the Romans’ greatest work of art— an aqueduct: three tiers of stone, the thick lower arches foursquare in the river, proud of their two thousand years’ resistance to running water; lighter taller arches above, then the smallest on top of them. Form following function right into the heart of the beautiful— using stone to take water over water. The stone now pitted and honey blond, very Martian in every respect— it looked like Nadia’s Underhill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge of the Gard, in Provence; but now, to Michel, almost more Mars than France.

Maya loved its elegance. “See how human it is, Michel. This is what our Martian structures lack, they are too big. But this— this was built by human hands, with tools anyone could construct and use. Block and tackle and human math, and perhaps some horses. And not our teleoperated machines and their weird materials, doing things no one can understand or even see.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if we could build things by hand. Nadia should see this, she would love it.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Michel was happy. They ate a picnic there. They visited the fountains of Aix-en-Provence. Went out to an overlook above the Grand Canyon of the Gard. Nosed around the street docks of Marseilles. Visited the Roman sites in Orange, and Nîmes. Drove past the drowned resorts of the Côte d’Azur. Walked out one evening to Michel’s ruined mas, and into the middle of the old olive grove.

And every night of these few precious days they returned to Arles, and ate in the hotel restaurant, or if it was warm out, under the plane trees in the sidewalk cafés; and then went up to their room and made love; and at dawn woke and made love again, or went down directly for fresh croissants and coffee. “It’s lovely,” Maya said, standing one blue evening in the tower of the arena, looking over the tile roofs of the town; she meant all of it, all of Provence. And Michel was happy.