Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened. The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nirgal could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The viroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardly even find it, no matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.

Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more robust. . . .” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hiroko about it.”

“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.

“Yes.”

“But?”

“I don’t think she’s there. And— I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still . . . I’m waiting.”

“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.

Sax nodded.

They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko— mother, lover— she had abandoned them both.

But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”

“What will you do now?”

“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”

“Ah! Good luck.”

Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.

• • •

So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and microbial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.

Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na— at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.

They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.