Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.

“There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” he said as he put water on to boil.

“The Big Bang?” Michel suggested.

“As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the— the clumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier— clumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.”

“I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.”

“Singularities are strange— outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.” Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. “But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.”

“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there and see, eh?”

As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.”

“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim. . . .” Michel shuddered.

“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”

“Well— we’ll hold down the fort for you.”

As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be there. “The cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.

Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.”

Sax frowned.

Before he left, he called Ann.

“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobiosphere, together?”

She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over— the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: “No.” And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.

Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the rocky first biomes of the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.

Well, one couldn’t make people see things.

He went to say good-bye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann. As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it— to fall in love with all the objects of his “scientific study.” Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew.