He got the line, although that in itself meant nothing. But later, in the first moment he had approached Art on the street in Sheffield, he knew that he had done well. That Praxis had done well. There had been, just in the look of the big man, some quality that Nirgal had found instantly reassuring— some openness, an easy, friendly ability. To use his childhood vocabulary, a balance of the two worlds. A man he trusted.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable. Now, as the long rolling nights of their journey passed in the light of the IR imagers, the two men spoke to each other as if they too saw each other in the infrared. Their dialogue went on and on and on, and they got to know each other— to become friends. Nirgal’s impulsive reach to Earth was going to work out, he could see it right there in front of him hour after hour, just in the look on Art’s face, the curiosity, the interest.

They talked about everything, in the way people will. Their pasts, their opinions, their hopes. Nirgal spent most of his time trying to explain Zygote, and Sabishii. “I spent some years in Sabishii. The issei there run an open university. There’s no records kept. You just attend the classes you want, and deal with your teacher and no one else. A lot of Sabishii operates off the record. It’s the capital of the demimonde, like Tharsis Tholus only much bigger. A great city. I met a lot of people there, from all over Mars.”

The romance of Sabishii poured through his mind, memories flooding speech in all their profusion of incident, of feeling— all the individual emotions of that time, contradictory and incompatible though they were, experienced again simultaneously, in a dense polyphonic chord.

“That must have been quite an experience,” Art remarked, “after growing up in a place like Zygote.”

“Oh it was. It was wonderful.”

“Tell me about it.”

Nirgal crouched forward in his chair, shivering a bit, and tried to convey some of what it had been like.

• • •