Maya shrugged. “They could be crazy and not know it. It looked like it might be that way to me, when I went around the basin.”

Michel eyed her. “Do you mean crazy or just different?”

“I don’t know. They just seem unaware of what they’re doing.”

“Every generation is its own secret society. And these are what you might call areurges. It is their nature to operate the planet. You have to give them that.”

Usually by the time Maya got home the apartment would already be fragrant with the smells of Michel’s attempts at Provençal cooking, and there would be an open bottle of red wine on the table. Through most of the year they ate out on the balcony, and when he was in town and feeling up to it Spencer joined them, as would their frequent visitors. As they ate they talked over the day’s work, and the events around the world, and back on Earth.

And so she lived the ordinary days of an ordinary life, la vie quotidienne, and Michel would share it with his sly smile, a bald man with an elegant Gallic face, ironic and good-humored, and ever so objective. The evening light would concentrate itself into the band of sky over the black jagged peaks of the Hellespontus, brilliant pinks and silvers and violets shading up into dark indigos and bruised blacks, and their voices would soften in that last part of the twilight Michel called entre chien et loup. And then they would pick up the plates, and go back inside, and clean up the kitchen— everything habitual, everything known, deep in that déjà vu that one determines oneself, that makes one happy.

• • •

And then, on some evenings, Spencer would have arranged for her to attend a meeting, usually in one of the communes in the upper town. These were loosely affiliated with Marsfirst, but the people who came to the meetings did not seem much like the radical Marsfirsters whom Kasei had led at the Dorsa Brevia congress— they were more like Nirgal’s friends in Dao, younger, less dogmatic, more self-absorbed, happier. It disturbed Maya to meet them even though she wanted to, and she spent the day before a meeting in a state of restless anticipation. Then after dinner a small band of Spencer’s friends would join them at the Praxis building, and accompany her as they made their way through town, taking trams and then walking, usually up into the upper reaches of Odessa, where the more crowded apartments were located.