So she walked around the ancient site of Gournia, in the peculiar, somewhat submarine flow of the suit. Gournia was her favorite of all the Ariadnean ruins, the only ordinary village of that civilization to have been found and excavated; the other sites were all palaces. This village had probably been a satellite of the palace at Malia: now a warren of waist-high walls made of stacked stones, covering a hilltop overlooking the Aegean. All the rooms were very small, often one meter by two, with alleys running between shared walls; little labyrinths, yes, and very much like the white-washed villages that still dotted the countryside. People said that Crete had been hard hit by the great flood, as the Ariadneans had been by theirs following the explosion of Thera; and it was true that all the pretty little fishing harbors were flooded to one extent or another, and the Ariadnean ruins at Zakros and Malia entirely drowned. But what Zo saw on Crete was an everlasting vitality. There was no other place on Earth she had seen that had handled the population surge as well; everywhere small whitewashed villages clung to the land, like beehives, covering hilltops, filling valleys, and surrounded by crops and orchards, with the dry knobby hills still sticking out of the cultivated land, in sculptured ridges rising to the central spine of the island. The island’s population had risen to over forty million, she had heard, and yet the island still looked much the same; there were just more villages, built to match the pattern not only of the existing ones but of the ancient ones like Gournia and Itanos as well. Town planning with a continuity five thousand years old, continuity with that first peak of civilization or final peak of prehistory, so tall as to be glimpsed even by classical Greece a thousand years later, enduring by oral transmission alone as the myth of Atlantis— and then also in the shapes of all their subsequent lives, not only on Crete, but now on her Mars as well. Because of the names used in Dorsa Brevia, and that culture’s valorization of the Ariadnean matriarchy, the two places had developed a relationship; many Martians came to Crete to visit the ancient sites, and there were new hotels near all of them now, built on a slightly larger scale to accommodate the tall young pilgrims, visiting the holy places station to station— Phaistos, Gournia, Itanos, Malia and Zakros under the water, even the ridiculous “reconstruction” at Knossos. They came and saw how it had all begun, back in the morning of the world. Zo too— standing in the brilliant blue Aegean light, straddling a stone alleyway five thousand years old, she felt pouring into her the reverberations of that greatness, up through the spongy red stones underfoot and into her own heart. Nobility that would never end.

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