But Michel was often contrary with her these days. He had learned to explode rather than soothe if she showed signs she needed a fight, and she appreciated that so much that she found she didn’t need to fight nearly so often. “Come on,” she objected at this characterization of Frank, and shoved Michel onto their bed and ravished him, just for the fun of it, just to drag him into the realm of joy and make him admit it. She knew perfectly well that he felt it was his duty to pull her always back toward the midline of her mood oscillations, and she could see his point, no one more so, and appreciated the anchoring he tried to provide; but sometimes, soaring up at the top of the curve, she saw no reason not to enjoy it a little, those brief moments of no-g flight, something like a spiritual status orgasmus. . . . And so she would pull him up by the cock to that level, and make him smile for an hour or two. Then it was possible for them to walk together downstairs and out the gate, and down through the park, over to her café in a mood of relaxation and peace, there to sit with their backs to the bar, and listen to the flamenco guitarist or the old tango band, playing its piazzollas. Talking casually about the work around the basin. Or not talking at all.

• • •

One evening in the late summer of M-year 49, they walked down with Spencer to the café and sat through the long twilight, watching dark copper clouds that sat glowing over the distant ice, under the purple sky. The prevailing westerlies drove air masses up over the Hellespontus, so that dramatic fronts of cloud over the ice were part of their daily life, but some clouds were special— metallic lobed solid objects, like mineral statues which could never just waft away on a wind. Spitting lightning from their black bottoms onto the ice below.

And then as they watched these particular statues, there was a low rumble, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the silverware chattered across the table. They grabbed their glasses and stood, along with everyone else in the café— and in the shocked silence Maya saw they were all automatically looking to the south, out toward the ice. People were pouring out of the park onto the corniche, and then standing against the tent wall in silence, looking outward. There in the fading indigo of sunset, under the copper clouds, it was just possible to see movement, a winking black and white at the edge of the white-and-black mass. Moving toward them across the plain. “Water,” someone at the next table said.