It was a feeling generally shared, apparently. Spring lasted 143 days in the southern hemisphere, coming all the way back from the harsh aphelion winter. More plants bloomed as the spring months passed, first early ones like promise-of-spring and snow liverwort, then later ones such as phlox and heather, then saxifrage and Tibetan rhubarb, moss campion and alpine nailwort, cornflowers and edelweiss, on and on until every patch of green carpet in the rocky palm of the basin was touched with brilliant dots of cyanic blue, dark pink, yellow, white, each color waving in a layer at the characteristic height of the plant holding it, all of them glowing in the dusk like drips of light, welling out into the world from nowhere— a pointillist Mars, the ribbiness of the seamed basin etched in the air by this scree of color. He stood in a cupped rock hand which tilted its snowmelt down a lifeline crease in the palm, down into the wide world so far below, a vast shadowy world that loomed to the west under the sun, all hazy and low. The last light of day seemed to shine slightly upward.

One clear morning Jackie appeared on his house AI screen, and announced she was on the piste from Odessa to Libya, and wanted to drop by. Nirgal agreed before he had time to think.

He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little high basin . . . there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old impact. Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining Mesa, the stupendous yellow view at dawn.

They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like kids. Jackie was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing hard as they got out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole group of young Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves, amazingly so; it had been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had not changed at all. The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done early and often, ensuring perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases that still killed people from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps. Early, often. They still looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie was a year older than Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now, and feeling older. Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to get the treatment myself someday.

So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and oohing and ahhing at the flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every exclamation they made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side, looking serious.