First he had to learn the land. With that as his project it was amazing how busy every day became, there was an endless number of things to do; but no structure, no schedule, no rush; no one to consult; and every day, in the last hours of summer light, he would walk around the ridge, and inspect the basin in the failing light. It was already colonized by lichen and the other first settlers; fellfields filled the hollows, and there were small mosaics of arctic ground cover in the sunny exposures, mounds of green moss humped on red soil less than a centimeter thick. Snowmelt coursed down a number of rivulet channels, pooling and dropping through any number of potential meadow terraces, little diatom oases, falling down the basin to meet in the gravel wadi at the gate to the land below, a flat meadow-to-be behind the residual rim. Ribs higher in the basin were natural dams, and after some consideration, Nirgal carried some ventifacts to these low ribs, and assembled them with their facets touching so that the ribs were heightened by just one or two rocks’ height. Snowmelt would collect in meadow ponds, banked by moss. The moors just east of Sabishii resembled what he had in mind, and he called up ecopoets who lived on those moors, and asked about species compatibility, growth rates, soil amendment and the like. In his mind developed a vision of the basin; then in second March the autumn came, the year heading toward aphelion, and he began to see how much of the landscaping would be done by wind and winter. He would have to wait and see.

He spread seeds and spores by hand, casting them away from bags or growth media dishes latched to his belt, feeling like a figure from Van Gogh or the Old Testament; it was a peculiar sensation of mixed power and helplessness, action and fate. He arranged for loads of topsoil to be trucked up and dumped on some of the little fields, and then he spread it out by hand, thinly. He brought in worms from the university farm at Sabishii. Worms in a bottle, Coyote had always called people in cities; observing the writhing mass of moist naked tubules, Nirgal shuddered. He released the worms onto his new little plots. Go, little worm, prosper on the land. He himself, walking around on the sunny mornings after a shower, was no more than moist linked naked tubules. Sentient worms, that’s what they were, in bottles or on the land.