Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More loft than was needed, more power . . . the one he had rented (using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls— up up and up and up, to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an individual in his own private life.

He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple pain as well— pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.