When it did pass, she did her best to forget the experience. And then when it recurred, she would say to Michel “Oh my God, I’m feeling it again,” and he would say “Hasn’t this happened before?” and they would laugh, and she would do her best to make do. She would dive into the particulars of her current work, planning for the dowsing teams, giving them their assignments based on the areographers’ reports from the rim, and the results of other dowsing teams coming back in. It was interesting, even exciting work, a sort of gigantic treasure hunt, which necessitated a continuing education in areography, in the secret habits of submartian water. This absorption helped with the déjà vu quite a bit, and after a while it became just another of the odd sensations with which her mind afflicted her, worse than the exhilarations but better than the depressions, or the occasional moments when rather than feeling that something had happened before, she was struck by the sense that nothing like this had ever happened ever, even though she might be doing something like stepping onto a tram. Jamais vu, Michel called it, looking concerned. Quite dangerous, apparently. But nothing to be done about it. Sometimes it was less than helpful, living with someone trained in psychological problems. One could easily become nothing more than a spectacular case study. They would need several pseudonyms to describe her.

In any case, on the days she was lucky and feeling well she worked completely abstracted, and quit somewhere between four and seven, tired and satisfied. She walked home in the characteristic light of the late day in Odessa: the whole town in the shadow of the Hellespontus, the sky therefore intense with light and color, the clouds brilliantly lit as they sailed east over the ice, and everything below burnished with reflected light, in that infinite array of colors between blue and red, different every day, every hour. She strolled lazily under the leaves of the trees in the park, and through the locked gate into the Praxis building, then up to the apartment to eat supper with Michel, who usually had finished a long day of doing therapy with homesick newcomers from Earth, or old-timers with a variety of complaints like Maya’s déjà vu or Spencer’s dissociation— memory loss, anomie, phantom smells and the like— odd gerontological problems, which had seldom cropped up in shorter-lived people, giving ominous warnings that the treatments might not be penetrating the brain quite as fully as they needed them to.

Very few nisei or sansei or yonsei ever came to visit him, however, which surprised him. “No doubt it is a good sign for the long-term prospects of Martian habitation,” he said one evening as he came up from a quiet day in his office on the bottom floor.