Blue Mars(181)

Then soaring up past him in a rising spiral, Nirgal spotted the face of the diana, the woman who had led the ferals’ hunt. She recognized him too, raised her chin and bared her teeth in a quick smile, then pulled her wings in and tipped over, dropping away with a tearing sound. Nirgal watched her from above with fearful excitement, then a moment of terror as she dove right past the edge of Santorini’s cliff; from his vantage point it had looked like she was going to hit. Then she was back up, soaring on the updraft in tight spirals. It looked so graceful he wanted to learn to fly in a birdsuit, even as he felt his pulse still hammering at the sight of her dive. Stoop and soar, stoop and soar; no blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds were the greatest fliers, and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with everything else, people were birds.

With him, past him, around him, as if performing one of those darting courtships that members of some species put on for each other; after about an hour of this, she smiled at him one last time and tipped away, then drifted in lazy circles down to the gliderport at Phira. Nirgal followed her down, landing half an hour later with a swoop into the wind, running and then stopping just short of her. She had been waiting, wings spread around her on the ground.

She stepped in a circle around him, as if still doing a courtship dance. She walked toward him, pulling her hood back and offering her head, her black hair spilling out in the light like a crow’s wing. The diana. She stretched up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth, then stood back, watching him gravely. He remembered her running naked ahead of the hunt, a green sash bouncing from one hand.

“Breakfast?” she said.

It was midafternoon, and he was famished. “Sure.”

They ate at the gliderport restaurant, looking out at the arc of the island’s little bay, and the immensity of the Sharanov cliffs, and the acrobatics of the fliers still in the air. They talked about flying, and running the land; about the hunt for the three antelope, and the islands of the North Sea, and the great fjord of Kasei, pouring its wind over them. They flirted; and Nirgal felt the pleasant anticipation of where they were headed, he luxuriated in it. It had been a long time. This too was part of the descent into the city, into civilization. Flirting, seduction— how wonderful all that was when one was interested, when one saw that the other was interested! She was fairly young, he judged, but her face was sunburned, skin lined around the eyes— not a youth— she had been to the Jovian moons, she said, and had taught at the new university in Nilokeras, and was now running with the ferals for a time. Twenty m-years old, perhaps, or older— hard to tell these days. An adult, in any case; in those first twenty m-years people got most of whatever experience was ever going to give them, after that it was only a matter of repetition. He had met old fools and young sages almost as often as the reverse. They were both adults, contemporaries. And there they were, in the shared experience of the present.

Nirgal watched her face as she talked. Careless, smart, confident. A Minoan: dark-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline nose, dramatic lower lip; Mediterranean ancestry, perhaps, Greek, Arabic, Indian; as with most of the yonsei, it was impossible to tell. She was simply a Martian woman, with Dorsa Brevia English, and that look in the eye as she watched him— ah yes— how many times in his wandering had it happened, a conversation turning at some point, and then suddenly he was flying with some woman in the long glide of seduction, the courtship leading to some bed or hidden dip in the hills. . . .

“Hey Zo,” the butcher woman said in passing. “Going with us to the ancestral neck?”

“No,” Zo said.

“The ancestral neck?” Nirgal inquired.

“Boone’s Neck,” Zo said. “The town up on the polar peninsula.”

“Ancestral?”

“She’s John Boone’s great-grandaughter,” the butcher woman explained.

“By way of?” Nirgal asked, looking at Zo.

“Jackie Boone,” she said. “My mother.”

“Ah,” Nirgal managed to say.

He sat back in his seat. The baby he had seen Jackie nursing, in Cairo. The similarity to her mother was obvious once he knew. His skin was goose-pimpling, the hairs lifting from the skin of his forearms. He hugged himself, shivered. “I must be getting old,” he said.

She smiled, and he saw suddenly that she had known who he was. She had been toying with him, laying a little trap— as an experiment, perhaps, or to displease her mother, or for some other reason he could not imagine. For fun.

Now she was frowning at him, trying to look serious. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.