They walked on. Nadia kept thinking of her old companion, seeing the photo in her mind’s eye. There was still so much she remembered. The feelings connected to the memories were fading, however, the pain blunted— the fixative leached out, all that flesh and trauma now only a pattern of a certain kind, like a fossil. And very unlike the present moment, which, looking around, feeling her hand in Art’s, was real, vivid, brief, perpetually changing— alive. Anything could happen, everything was felt.

“Shall we go back to our room?”

• • •

The four travelers to Earth returned at last, coming down the cable to Sheffield. Nirgal and Maya and Michel went their ways, but Sax flew down and joined Nadia and Art in the south, a move which pleased Nadia no end. She had come to have the feeling that wherever Sax went was the heart of the action.

He looked just as he had before the trip to Earth, and was if anything even more silent and enigmatic. He wanted to see the labs, he said. They took him through them.

“Interesting, yes,” he said. Then after a while: “But I’m wondering what else we might do.”

“To terraform?” Art asked.

“Well . . .”

To please Ann, Nadia thought. That was what he meant. She gave him a hug, which surprised him, and she kept her hand on his bony shoulder as they talked. So good to have him there in the flesh! When had she gotten so fond of Sax Russell, when had she come to rely on him so much?

Art too had figured out what he meant. He said, “You’ve done quite a bit already, haven’t you? I mean, at this point you’ve dismantled all the metanats’ monster methods, right? The hydrogen bombs under the permafrost, the soletta and aerial lens, the nitrogen shuttles from Titan—”

“Those are still coming,” Sax said. “I don’t even know how we could stop them. Shoot them down I guess. But we can always use nitrogen. I’m not sure I’d be happy if they were stopped.”

“But Ann?” Nadia said. “What would Ann like?”

Sax squinted again. When uncertainty squinched his face, it reverted to precisely its old ratlike expression.

“What would you both like?” Art rephrased it.

“Hard to say.” And his face twisted into a grimace of uncertainty, indecision, split motives.

“You want wilderness,” Art suggested.

“Wilderness is a, an idea. Or an ethical position. It can’t be everywhere, it’s not that kind of idea. But . . .” Sax waggled a hand, fell back into his own thoughts. For the first time in the century she had known him, Nadia had the sense that Sax did not know what to do. He solved the problem by sitting down before a screen and typing instructions into it. He appeared to forget their presence.