11.
 He opened his eyes and saw blue sky. He was alive, and well. He laughed at the joy of it, standing up—and there was Menet Flaun.
She stood on a boulder nearby, looking down at him.
“Menet, it can’t be you. Did I die? Is this a dream?”
Her voice was very much her own, girlish and dry, filled with mischief and some amount of teasing reproach. “You’re very much alive. I don’t know how you lived after falling from there.” She pointed.
He looked up and saw the steep, high inclines. He could picture himself bouncing from one steep, gravelly face to another on the way down. Something—the spirit of the Basilica, the ghost of an ancient thing, the sentient being whose shell the Basilica was, just as Kery’s skull was the shell of his brain and therefore of who he was, had somehow sheltered and healed him, had breathed new life into him with its last breath.
“I didn’t really go on the gravity boat,” she said. She skipped down, bouncing from boulder to boulder, as if seeking his forgiveness. “I didn’t want to leave you.” She added. "There was no place for me to go. I would have died here with the alien bones." Her gaze filled with the dark shape that lay broken across the horizon.
He turned his attention from the hill, on which stood the Basilica, to the woman who stopped several arms’ lengths from him.
“I hope you’re not angry with me.”
“No.”
“I missed you.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m glad you didn’t see what I saw last night. Clifor is dead.”
“Yes, he’s been dead for a week. There was a flap about it, and they’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been here a week?”
“Must have.”
The Basilica.
“Menet, I’m not going to be Governor.”
“Oh? They want you to be so that you’ll pardon everybody.”
He shook his head. “I’m gonna go back to terraforming. I’ll take Engineer II or III wherever I can get it. People will point at me and whisper behind my back, but I won’t care. Maybe I’ll tell what I saw them do in there. Maybe I won’t. If that’s human nature, and if that’s whose wisdom guides us, then people will be better off not knowing.” He said contritely: "Want to come along?"
He opened his arms, and she ran to him.
“Oh, I missed you so much!” they both said in one breath.
They walked up the gravelly water trail that led down into the grotto where he’d been hidden. Arm in arm. He picked up her rucksack.
“My skimmer is on top.”
He accepted water from her, and drank deeply. The ancient being, though it had no substance, had provided well for him. It had healed his bones, restored his tissue, hydrated him. He brushed fine white threads from his body, thinking they looked like the finest plant roots—and realized they probably were; they’d pushed into him and provided minerals, proteins.
“It feels so good to feel you again,” he said.
“Didn’t you ever realize that you loved me?”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Men.”
“Well, it was never part of the contract, and I wasn’t supposed to.”
“But didn’t you realize how good we had it together those years?”
“I guess I realize it now, but I never thought about it much.”
“Right. You were in love, man. That’s why you felt so good.”
“I see it now. How did you find me?’
“I don’t know. That’s the strangest thing. The search parties gave up. I was in Kalopolis, living on the stipend and wishing I would die for loneliness. I wanted to come see you from distance, but I knew my heart would break.”
Adjuni. “It’s just as well you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t give up on you. Something told me I must keep looking for you. Like a voice in my head. Something that knew I loved you very much.”
He hugged her. “I never knew that I was looking for you, but now I’ll never let you go.”
“Silly, isn’t it? There are no voices, are there?”
“Not voices, exactly,” he said. “But there was something.
They came to the top of the ridge, where they could look down into the Basilica. All the debris among the ruins had been perfectly picked up. Clifor’s body had been removed, as if nothing had happened.
The Basilica was dead now, finally, pushed over the edge by the new owners of this world. It would not sing to the stars ever again. But it had lived a long, long time. It had seen many things—enough things to be satisfied, and tired. Ready to join its ancestors. Time for it to go, and new things to begin.
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