He flew back to Sabishii. There was still a lot of work to be done there, clearing away burned buildings and then building new ones. Some construction co-ops were still accepting new members. One was doing reconstruction but was also building blimps and other fliers, including some experimental birdsuits. He talked with them about joining.

He left his blimpglider in town with them, and took long runs out onto the high moors east of Sabishii. He had run these uplands during his student years. A lot of the ridge runs were familiar still; beyond them, new ground. A high land, with its moorish life. Big kami boulders stood here and there on the rumpled land, like sentinels.

One afternoon, running an unfamiliar ridge, he looked down into a small high basin like a shallow bowl, with a break opening to lower land to the west. Like a glacial cirque, though more likely it was an eroded crater with a break in its rim, making a horseshoe ridge. About a kilometer across— quite shallow. Just a rumple among the many rumples on the Tyrrhena massif. From the encircling ridge the horizons were far away, the land below lumpy and irregular.

It seemed familiar. Possibly he had visited it on an overnighter in his student years. He hiked slowly down into the basin, and still felt like he was on top of the massif; something about the dark clean indigo of the sky, the spacious long view out the gap to the west. Clouds rolled overhead like great rounded icebergs, dropping dry granular snow, which was chased into cracks or out of the basin entirely by the hard wind. On the circling ridge, near the northwest point of the horseshoe, there was a boulder sitting like a stone hut. It stood on four points on the ridge, a dolmen worn to the smoothness of an old tooth. The sky over it lapis lazuli.

Nirgal walked back down to Sabishii and looked into the matter. The basin was untended, according to the maps and records of the Tyrrhena Massif Areography and Ecopoesis Council. They were pleased he was interested. “The high basins are hard,” they told him. “Very little grows. It’s a long project.”

“Good.”

“You’ll have to grow most of your food in greenhouses. Potatoes, however— once you get enough soil, of course—”

Nirgal nodded.

They asked him to drop by the village of Dingboche, the one nearest the basin, and make sure no one there had plans for it.