“But there are people in their two-fifties,” Michel noted, “and the treatments may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may just be a bad coincidence.”

“Maybe.”

Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker and darker, which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have stayed in Provence— that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home that persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had been from the moment they had landed— or from the moment he had joined Hiroko— or perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her breasts his hills, her belly his valley, her sex his beach and ocean. Of course it was an impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner; but as it was all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relationship. Though sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.

Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly he felt that death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the great unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it was a scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the various manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except for the speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave collapse like her jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre— theories were endless, it was a vital concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected to become old— for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely studied. But so far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if it was any one thing; and the deaths kept happening.