Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man’s voice, and surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just these recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch John Boone negotiate Mars’s wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that role, among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy voice. And that did not solve his problem.

• • •

Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs and restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views, over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they did not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was distracted to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall into reveries and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in the steamy streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the torrential monsoon. How often he found himself there again; everything that had happened since was so pale by comparison!

But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice say “Hiroko.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope.”

It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge of who he was.

“You saw her yourself?” he said sharply.

“Yes. She’s not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier.”

“I don’t know,” an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather. Voice hoarse: “I heard she was down in the chaos where the first hidden colony used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay.”

Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen there, had been confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had seen her there on Earth—

“This here’s Nirgal,” one said to the last comment, pointing and grinning. “He should be able to confirm or deny that one!”

Nirgal, taken aback, nodded. “I didn’t see her on Earth,” he said. “There were rumors only.”

“Same as here, then.”

Nirgal shrugged.