One day he came on a new harbor town at the entry to the long skinny fjord of Marwth Vallis, and found his Zygote crèche mates Rachel and Tiu had moved there. Nirgal hugged them, and over a dinner and afterward he stared at their oh-so-familiar faces with intense pleasure. Hiroko was gone but his brothers and sisters remained, and that was something; proof that his childhood was real. And despite all the years they looked just like they had when they were children; there was no real difference. Rachel and he had been friends, she had had a crush on him in the early years, and they had kissed in the baths; he recalled with a little shiver a time when she had kissed him in one ear, Jackie in the other. And, though he had almost forgotten it, he had lost his virginity with Rachel, one afternoon in the baths, shortly before Jackie had taken him out into the dunes by the lake. Yes, one afternoon, almost accidentally, when their kissing had suddenly become urgent and exploratory, a matter of their bodies moving outside their own volition.

Now she regarded him fondly— a woman his age, her face a map of laugh lines, cheery and bold. She may have recalled their early encounter as little as he did— hard to say what his siblings remembered of their shared bizarre childhood— but she looked like she remembered. She had always been friendly, and she was again now. He told her about his flights around the world, carried by the ceaseless winds, diving slowly against the blimp’s buoyancy down to one little habitation after another, asking after Hiroko.

Rachel shook her head, smiling ironically. “If she’s out there, she’s out there. But you could look forever and never find her.”

Nirgal heaved a troubled sigh, and she laughed and tousled his hair.

“Don’t look for her.”

That evening he walked along the strand, just uphill from the devastated berg-strewn shoreline of the northern sea. He felt in his body that he needed to walk, to run. Flying was too easy, it was a dissociation from the world— things were small and distant— again, it was the wrong end of the telescope. He needed to walk.

Still he flew. As he flew, however, he looked more closely at the land. Heath, moor, streamside meadows. A creek falling directly into the sea over a short drop, another one crossing a beach. Salt creeks into a fresh ocean. In some places they had planted forests, to try to cut down on dust storms that originated in this area. There were still dust storms, but the trees of the forest were saplings still. Hiroko might be able to sort it out. Don’t look for her. Look at the land.

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