He was back outside, looking for the Coyote. Not an easy task, ever. What did Desmond recall of Underhill— hiding, whispers, the lost farm crew, then the lost colony, slipping away with them— out there driving around Mars in disguised boulder cars, being loved by Hiroko, flying over the night surface in a stealthed plane, playing the demimonde, knitting the underground together— Sax could almost remember it himself, it was so vivid to him. Telepathic transfer of all their stories to all of them; one hundred squared, in the square of barrel vaults. No. That would be too much. Just the imagination of someone else’s reality was stunning enough, was all the telepathy one required or could handle.

But where had Desmond gone? Hopeless. One could never find Coyote; one only waited for him to find you. He would show up when he chose. For now, out northwest of the pyramids and the Alchemist’s Quarter, there was a very ancient lander skeleton, probably from the original pre-landing-equipment drop, its metal stripped of paint and encrusted with salt. The beginning of their hopes, now a skeleton of old metal, nothing really. Hiroko had helped him unload this one.

Back into the Alchemist’s Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank God for Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit bulldozer to run.

But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, slowly, gasping.

“Ann? Ann?”

She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. “I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the— the beauty until it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined— and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.