After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, and several times a week he made a date with Monica or one of her friends, and went out to the cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.

Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.

It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars— son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage— very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia.

Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.