Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

had blank faces, and they were looking at Nirgal. But they did not challenge the crowd. Nirgal headed back toward the camp, turning down a new road. Now the green hills were blazing to his right. The road jarred up through his legs with every step, until his legs were like tree trunks aflame. That running should hurt! And his head was like a giant balloon. All the wet green plants seemed to be reaching out for him, a hundred shades of green flame melding to one dominant colour band, pouring into the world. Black dots swimming. ‘Hiroko,’ he gasped, and ran on with the tears streaming down his face; no one would be able to tell them from sweat. Hiroko, it isn’t the way you said it would be!

      He stumbled into the ochre soil of the compound, and scores of people followed him to Maya. Soaking as he was, he still threw his arms around her and put his head down on her shoulder, sobbing.

      ‘We should get to Europe,’ Maya said angrily to someone over his back. ‘This is stupid, to bring him right to the tropics like this.’

      Nirgal shifted to look back. It was the Prime Minister. ‘This is how we always live,’ she said, and pierced Nirgal with a resentful, proud look.

      But Maya was unimpressed. ‘We have to go to Berne,’ she said.

      They flew to Switzerland in a small spaceplane provided by Praxis. As they travelled, they looked down on the Earth from thirty thousand metres: the blue Atlantic, the rugged mountains of Spain, somewhat like the Hellespontus Monies; then France; then the white wall of the Alps, unlike any mountains he had ever seen. The cool ventilation of the spaceplane felt like home to Nirgal, and he was chagrined to think that he could not tolerate the open air of Earth.

      ‘You’ll do better in Europe,’ Maya told him.

      Nirgal thought about the reception they had got. ‘They love you here,’ he said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the welcome of the duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors as for him; and Maya had been particularly cherished.

      ‘They’re happy we survived,’ Maya said, dismissing it. ‘We came back from the dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we were dead, do you see? From ’61 until just last year, they thought all the First Hundred were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them was dead too. To have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with everything changing – yes. It’s like a myth. The return from underground.’