“I think maintaining sea level keeps a good number of them busy. There’s always some kind of water work.”

“True.”

And then they came to the old Praxis apartment building, its walls now mostly ivy-covered, the white stucco discolored, the blue shutters faded. In need of a bit of work, as Michel said, but Maya loved it that way: old. There on the third floor she spotted their old kitchen window and balcony, and Spencer’s there beside it. Spencer himself was supposed to be inside.

And they went in the gate, and said hello to the new concierge, and indeed Spencer was inside, sort of: he had died that afternoon.

5

It shouldn’t have mattered so much. Maya hadn’t seen Spencer Jackson in years, she had never seen that much of him, even when he lived next door; never known him at all well. No one had. Spencer was one of the least comprehensible of the First Hundred, which was saying a lot. His own man, his own life. And he had lived as part of the surface world under an assumed identity, a spy, working for the security gestapo in Kasei Vallis for almost twenty years, until the night they had blown the town away and rescued Sax, and Spencer as well. Twenty years as someone else, with a false past, and no one to talk to; what would that do to one? But then Spencer had always been withdrawn, private, self-contained. So maybe it hadn’t mattered as much to him. He had seemed all right in their years in Odessa, always in therapy with Michel of course, and a very heavy drinker at times; but easy to have as a neighbor, a good friend, quiet, solid, reliable in his ways. And he certainly had continued to work, his production with the Bogdanovist designers had never flagged, neither during his double life or after. A great designer. And his pen sketches were beautiful. But what would twenty years of duplicity do to you? Maybe all his identities had become assumed. Maya had never thought about it; she couldn’t imagine it; and now, packing Spencer’s things in his empty apartment, she wondered that she had never even tried before— that somehow Spencer had managed to live in such a way that one did not even wonder about him. It was a very strange accomplishment. Crying, she said to Michel, “You have to wonder about everybody!”

He only nodded. Spencer had been one of his best friends.