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By Root 2243 0

than ten meters away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.

Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, “behind him.” And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.

So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix on his position and his car’s. He had a very good map program in his wristpad these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees north latitude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so apt, this anthropomorphic analogizing) was some small purple saxifrage, stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.

Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in the light— the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him— the delicious weariness in his feet— and then something indefinable, he had to admit it— unexplainable— in that the individual elements of the experience were insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this was love. Spirit of place, love of place— the areophany, not only as Hiroko had described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko— could she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, to learn to feel it oneself . . . love of planet. Love of a planet’s life. Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one’s regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One’s regard focused, in the center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.

Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological scale something rather like Hiroko’s viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in “little bangs” at the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread was as far removed from the others as it was possible to