Hiroko, Nirgal thought as he regarded his mother after this exchange, was very strange. She talked to him and to everyone else as an equal, and clearly to her everyone was an equal; but no one was special. He remembered very keenly when it had been different, when the two of them had been like two parts of a whole. But now she only took the same interest in him that she took in everyone else, her concern impersonal and distant. She would be the same no matter what happened to him, he thought. Nadia, or even Maya, cared for him more. And yet Hiroko was mother to them all. And Nirgal, like most of the rest of the regulars in Zygote, still went down to her little stand of bamboo when he was in need of something he couldn’t find from ordinary people— some solace, or advice. . . .

But as often as not, when he did that he would find her and her little inner group “being silent,” and if he wanted to stay he would have to stop talking. Sometimes this lasted for days at a time, until he stopped dropping by. Then again he might arrive during the areophany, and be swept up in the ecstatic chanting of the names of Mars, becoming an integral part of that tight little band, right in the heart of the world, with Hiroko herself at his side, her arm around him, squeezing hard.

That was love of a sort, and he cherished it; but it was not as it had been in the old days, when they had walked the beach together.

• • •

One morning he went into the school and came on Jackie and Dao in the coatroom. They jumped as he entered, and by the time he had gotten his coat off and gone into the schoolroom he knew they had been kissing.