Blue Mars Part 34

Around Ura.n.u.s. four times as far from the sun as Jupiter, objects were struck by one quarter of a percent the light that would have struck them on Earth. This was a problem for powering major terraforming projects, although as Zo found when they entered the Uranian system, it still provided quite enough illumination for visibility; the sunlight was 1,300 times as bright as the full moon on Earth, the sun still a blinding little chip in the black array of stars, and though things in the region were a bit dim and drained of their color, one could see them perfectly well. Thus the great power of the human eye and spirit, functioning well so far from home.

But there were no big moons around Ura.n.u.s to attract a major terraforming effort; Ura.n.u.s's family consisted of fifteen very small moons, none larger than t.i.tania and Oberon at six hundred kilometers in diameter, and most considerably smaller- a collection of little asteroids, really, named after Shakespeare's women for the most part, all circling the blandest of the gas giants, blue-green Ura.n.u.s, rolling around with its poles in the plane of the ecliptic, its eleven narrow graphite rings scarcely visible fairy loops. All in all, not a promising system for inhabitation.

Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no surprise to Zo; there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on Pluto, on Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent out to it, they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens already squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of outside interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.

The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the biggest and farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the travelers from Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a ferry down to the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.

This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that were common to all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more meager than the light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully three-dimensional s.p.a.ce, with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell waiters, cliffside balconies and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards and trampolines, hanging restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by bright white floating lamp globes. Zo saw immediately that so much paraphernalia in the air made flying inside the tent impossible; but in this gravity daily life was a kind of flight, and as she bounded in the air with a flex of her foot, she decided to join those residents who treated daily life that way; she danced. And in fact very few people tried to walk in the Terran way; here human movement was naturally airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan loops. The lowest level of the city was netted.~;~;De0#0;: The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the system, although of course they were mostly Martian or Terran. At this point there were no native Uranians, except for a single creche of young children who had been born to mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied, and recently they had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper atmosphere of Ura.n.u.s, to swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in the planet's blue-green like pinp.r.i.c.ks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond necklace around the middle of the giant. These lanterns had increased the system's light enough so that everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much more color there was in things, but Zo was not impressed. "I'd hate to have seen it before," she said to one of the local enthusiasts, "it's Monochromomundos." Actually all the buildings in the town were brightly painted in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath happened to be was sometimes beyond Zo's telling. She needed a pupil dilator.

But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of moving on after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, "the next great problem," or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in here for good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to the low g, to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding in comets from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or three of the smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer bodies to work with, "artificial Mirandas" as one person called them.

Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a railing, unable to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto streets covered with luxuriant green gra.s.s. She looked up: aquamarine giant, slender dim rings; a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human standard, and perhaps untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity. But back in the meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet's subtle beauties, inventing an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to modify everything they could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors, the cool warmth of the tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a dream.... Some of them had even become patriots to the point of arguing against radical transformation; they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place could logically sustain.

And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to Ann in a group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her, kiss the top of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw the look on Ann's face and laughed. "Come on," she said to the group, who apparently had been a.s.signed a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda. The local version of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no sense at all, and long after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on Mars. But they flowed or pulled themselves into position around a table set out in the middle of the tent on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the discussion ranged all over the system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of the tent, with the diamond necklace in its round jade setting s.h.i.+ning down on them; it seemed the center of town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such oases, and no doubt they seemed like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real town, but Oberon could hold scores of towns like it, and so would t.i.tania, Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, these satellites all had surfaces covering hundreds of square kilometers. This was the attraction of these sun-forsaken moons: free land, open s.p.a.ce- a new world, a frontier, with its ever-receding chance to start new, to found a society from scratch. For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or gravity. And so they had gathered the programs and the starter robots, and taken off for the high frontier with plans for a tent and a const.i.tution, to be their own first hundred.

But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in hearing about Jackie's plans for a systemwide alliance. And already there had been local disagreements strong enough to have caused trouble; among the people sitting around the table were some serious enemies, Zo could tell. She watched their faces closely as the head of their delegation, Marie, laid out the Martian proposal in the most general terms: an alliance designed to deal with the ma.s.sive historical-economic-numerical gravity well of Earth, which was huge, teeming, flooded, mired in its past like a pig in a sty, and still the dominant force in the diaspora. It was in the best interests of all the other settlements to band with Mars and present a united front, in control of their own immigration, trade, growth- in control of their destinies.

Except none of the Uranians, despite their arguments with each other, looked at all convinced. An elderly woman who was the mayor of Hippolyta spoke, and even the Mirandan "Reds" nodded: they would deal with Earth on their own. Earth or Mars was equally dangerous to freedom. Out here they planned on dealing with all potential alliances or confrontations as free agents, in temporary collusion or opposition with equals, depending on circ.u.mstances. There was simply no need for any more formal arrangements to be made. "All that alliance stuff smacks of control from above," the woman concluded. "You don't do it on Mars, why try it out here?"

"We do do it on Mars," Marie said. "That level of control is emergent from the complex of smaller systems below it, and it's useful for dealing with problems at the holistic level. And now at the interplanetary level. You're confusing totalization with totalitarianism, a very serious error."

They did not look convinced. Reason had to be backed with leverage; that was why Zo was along. And the application of leverage would go easier with the reasoning laid out like this beforehand.

Throughout the dinner Ann remained silent, until the general discussion ended and the Miranda group began to ask her questions. Then she came alive, as if switched on, and asked them in return about current local planetology: the cla.s.sification of different regions of Miranda as parts of the two colliding planetessimals, the recent theory that identified the tiny moons Ophelia, Desdemona, Bianca, and Puck as ejected pieces of the Mirandan collision, and so on. Her questions were detailed and knowledgeable; the guardians were thrilled, in transports, their eyes as big as lemurs' eyes. The rest of the Uranians were likewise pleased to see Ann's interest. She was The Red; now Zo saw what that really meant; she was one of the most famous people in history. And it seemed possible that all the Uranians had a little Red in them; unlike the settlers of the Jovian and Saturnian systems, they had no plans for large-scale terraforming, they planned to live in tents and go out on the primal rock for the rest of their lives. And they felt- at least its guardian group felt- that Miranda was so unusual that it had to be left entirely alone. That was a red idea, of course. Nothing humans did there, one of the Uranian Reds said, would do anything but reduce what was most valuable about it. It had an intrinsic worth that transcended even its value as a planetological specimen. It had its dignity. Ann watched them carefully as they said this, and Zo saw in her eyes that she did not agree, or even quite understand. For her it was a matter of science- for these people, a matter of spirit. Zo actually sympathized more with the locals' view than Ann's, with its cramped insistence on the object. But the result was the same, they both had the Red ethic in its pure form: no terraforming on Miranda, of course, also no domes, no tents, no mirrors; only a single visitor's station and a few rocket pads (though this too appeared to be controversial within the guardian group); a ban on anything except no-impact foot travel, and rocket hops high enough over the surface to avoid disturbing the dust. The guardian group conceived of Miranda as wilderness, to be walked through but never lived on, never changed. A climber's world, or even better, a flier's world. Looked at and nothing more. A natural work of art.

Ann nodded at all this. And there- there it was, something more in her than the crimping fear: a pa.s.sion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes could fix on anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it peculiar to be among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage point was coming clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to Miranda, to show it to Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the strangest moon of all, for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. "I'd like to come along," she said earnestly.

And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.

It was the smallest of Ura.n.u.s's five big moons, only 470 kilometers in diameter. In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the present, its smaller precursor had run into another moon of about the same size; the two had shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision, coalesced into a single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing was quite finished.

The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and disarranged. Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some were metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the fragments met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems bent at acute angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the tremendous torques involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that they were visible from s.p.a.ce as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep into the side of the gray sphere.

They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked chasms, called Prospero's Rift. They suited up, then left the s.p.a.cecraft, and walked out to the rift's edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to be on a different world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the distinct feeling of flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all Martian conditions suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead Ura.n.u.s floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pus.h.i.+ng off on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in little plies, her heart full of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the gas lanterns, surfing on Ura.n.u.s's stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung across a round green paper lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested. Everything glowing with its own internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of every thing- and yet everything still and motionless forever, except for them, the intruders, the observers. Zo danced.

Ann hiked along much more comfortably than she had in Hippolyta, with the unconscious grace of someone who has spent a lot of time walking on rock. Boulder ballet; she carried a long angular hammer in her thick glove, and her thigh pockets bulged with specimens. She didn't respond to the exclamations of Zo or the guardian group, she was oblivious to them. Like an actor playing the part of Ann Clayborne. Zo laughed: that one could become such a cliche!

"If they domed this dark backward and abysm of time, it would make a beautiful place to live," she said. "Lots of land for the amount of tent needed, eh? And such a view. It would be a wonder."

No response to such a blunt provocation, of course. But it would set them thinking. Zo followed the guardian group like an albatross. They had started descending a broken staircase of rock that lined the edge of a slim b.u.t.tress, extending far out from the chasm wall, like a fold of drapery in a marble statue. This feature ended in a flat swirl several kilometers out from the wall, and a kilometer or more lower than the rim. After the flat spot the b.u.t.tress fell away abruptly, in a sheer drop to the chasm floor, some twenty kilometers straight down. Twenty kilometers! Twenty thousand meters, some seventy thousand feet.... Even great Mars itself could boast no such wall.

There were a number of b.u.t.tresses and other deformations on the wall similar to the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in a limestone cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten rock had dripped into the abyss until the chill of s.p.a.ce had frozen it forever. Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been bolted to the b.u.t.tress's edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by lines, connected to harnesses in their s.p.a.cesuits; a good thing, as the edge of the b.u.t.tress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out into the s.p.a.ce of the chasm. The spidery little s.p.a.cecraft that had dropped them off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the staircase, from the flat spot at the end of the b.u.t.tress promontory. So they could descend without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute after minute, in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin; you could almost hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was palpable. Except for Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the cracks between their rough stairs.

"This obsession with rock is so pathetic," Zo said to her on a private band. "To be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world of inert matter, a world that will never surprise you, never do do a single thing. So that you won't be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really." a single thing. So that you won't be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really."

A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.

Zo laughed.

"You're an impertinent girl," Ann said.

"Yes I am."

"And stupid as well."

"That I am not!" Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then she saw Ann's face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice hissed in the intercom over sharp heavy breaths.

"Don't ruin the walk," Ann snapped.

"I was tired of being ignored."

"So who's afraid now?"

"Afraid of the boredom."

Another disgusted hiss. "You've been very poorly brought up."

"Whose fault is that?"

"Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results."

"Suffer on. I'm the one that got you here, remember."

"Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart."

"Everyone's little to you."

"Compared to this...." The movement of her helmet showed she had glanced down into the rift.

"This speechless immobility that you're so safe in."

"This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other planetessimal collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too. That's the matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time, understand?"

"I understand, but I don't care."

"You don't think it matters."

"Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to all this. It's just an accident of the Big Bang."

"Oh please," Ann said. "Nihilism is so ridiculous."

"Look who's talking! You're a nihilist yourself! No meaning or value to life or to your senses- it's weak nihilism, nihilism for cowards, if you can imagine such a thing."

"My brave little nihilist."

"Yes- I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed."

"Which is?"

"Pleasure. The senses and their input. I'm a sensualist, really. It takes some courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses really roaring...."

"You think you've faced pain?"

Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain of broken legs and ribs. "Yes. I have."

Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps Ann was allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was no great generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. "Do you really think it takes centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase of Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase of Hyperion? Hyperion? Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven't changed from the moment you touched Mars...." Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven't changed from the moment you touched Mars...."

"Quite an accomplishment, eh?"

"An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who ever lived."

"And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a pretzel."

"f.u.c.k the rocks."

"I'll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn't changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change."

Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat gla.s.slike, but otherwise utterly nondescript. "You're obsessed," she said.

"Yes. But I like my obsessions."

After that they hiked down the spine of the b.u.t.tress in silence. Over the course of the day they descended to Bottom's Landing. Now they were a kilometer below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead, Ura.n.u.s fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonis.h.i.+ng; again Zo felt herself to be flying. "You've located intrinsic worth in the wrong place," she said to all of them, over the common band. "It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some s.p.a.ce created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth."

"That's just saying there is no intrinsic worth," one of the guardians replied. "It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there's no need to include human partic.i.p.ation. These places exist without us and before us, and that is their intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence, if we want to be in a right att.i.tude to the universe, if we want to actually see it."

"But I see it," Zo said happily. "Or almost see it. You people will have to sensitize your eyes with some addition to your genetic treatments. Meanwhile it's glorious, it truly is. But that glory is in our minds."

They did not answer. After a while Zo went on: "All these issues have been raised before, on Mars. The whole matter of environmental ethics was raised to a new level by the experience on Mars, raised right into the heart of our actions. Now you want to protect this place as wilderness, and I can see why. But I'm a Martian, and so I understand. A lot of you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical position, and in the end wilderness is an ethical position. Terrans won't understand you as well as I do. They'll come out here and build a big casino right on this promontory. They'll cover this rift from rim to rim, and try terraforming it like they have everywhere else. The Chinese are still jammed into their country like sardines, and they don't give a d.a.m.n about the intrinsic worth of China itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the solar system. They need room and they see it's out here, and they'll come and build and look at you funny when you object, and what are you going to do? You can try sabotage like the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons here just as easy as you can them, and they've got a million replacements for every colonist they lose. That's what we're talking about when we talk about Earth. We're like the Lilliputians with Gulliver. We've got to work together, and tie him down with as many little lines as we can devise."

No response from the others.

Zo sighed. "Well," she said, "maybe it's for the best. Spread people around out here, they won't be pressuring Mars so hard. It might be possible to work out deals whereby the Chinese are free to settle out here all they want, and we on Mars are free to cut down immigration to nearly nothing. It might work rather well."

Again no response from the others.

Finally Ann said, "Shut up. Let us concentrate on the land here."

"Oh of course."

Then, as they were approaching the very end of the b.u.t.tress, the promontory standing out in a gap of air beyond all telling, under the bejeweled jade disk and the brilliant diamond chip beyond it, the whole solar system suddenly triangulated by these celestial objects, the true size of things revealed- they saw moving stars overhead. The rocket jets of their s.p.a.cecraft.

"See?" Zo said. "It's the Chinese, coming to have a look."

Suddenly one of the guardians was on her in a fury, striking her directly on the faceplate. Zo laughed. But she had forgotten Miranda's ultralight gravity, and was surprised when a ridiculous uppercut lifted her right off her feet. Then she hit the railing with the back of her knees, spun head over heels, twisting to catch herself, bang bang- a hard blow to the head, but the helmet protected her, she was still conscious, tumbling down the incline at the edge of the promontory- beyond it the void- fear shot through her like an electric shock, she fought for balance but was tumbling, out of control- she felt a jolt- ah yes, the end of her harness! Then the sickening sensation of a farther slide down- the harness clip must have given way. Second surge of adrenal fear- she turned inward and grabbed at the pa.s.sing rock. Human power in .005 g; the same gravity that had sent her flying now allowed her to catch herself by a single fingertip, and bring the whole weight of her falling body to a halt, as in a miracle.

She was on the edge of a long drop. Sparking lights in her eyes, nausea, darkness beyond; she couldn't see the floor of the chasm, it was like a bottomless pit, a dream image, black falling.... "Don't move," said Ann's voice in her ear. "Hold on. Don't move." Above her, a foot, then legs. Very slowly Zo turned her head up to look. A hand clutched her right wrist, hard. "Okay. There's a hold for your left hand, above it by half a meter. Higher. There. Okay, climb. You above, pull us up."

They were hauled up like fish on a line.

Zo sat on the ground. The little s.p.a.ce ferry was landing soundlessly, over on a pad on the far side of the flat spot. Brief flare of light from its rockets. The concerned looks of the guardians, standing over her.

"Not such a funny joke," Ann suggested.

"No," Zo said, thinking hard about how she could use the incident. "Thanks for helping me." It was impressive how quickly Ann had jumped to her help- not impressive that she had decided to, for this was the code of n.o.bility, one had obligations to one's peers, and enemies were just as important as friends; enemies were equals, they were necessary, they were what made it possible to be a good friend. But just as a physical maneuver it had been impressive. "Very quick of you."

On the flight back to Oberon they were all silent, until one of the ferry's crew turned to Ann and mentioned that Hiroko and some of her followers had been seen here in the Uranian system recently, on Puck.

"Oh what c.r.a.p," Ann said.

"How do you know?" Zo asked. "Maybe she decided to get as far away from Earth and Mars as possible. I wouldn't blame her."

"This isn't her kind of place."

"Maybe she doesn't know that. Maybe she hasn't heard this is your private rock garden."

But Ann simply waved her away.

Back to Mars, the red planet, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The only real world.

Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days, decelerated; and in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on the elevator, going down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked out at Echus, there to the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North Sea. So good good to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn't leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn't as deep as Prospero's Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again. to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn't leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn't as deep as Prospero's Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again.

So she went back to the station and got on the train for Echus, and felt the train fly down the piste, off the great cone of Pavonis, down the pure xeriscape of east Tharsis, to Cairo and a Swiss-precision exchange onto the train north to Echus Overlook. The train came in near midnight, and she checked in at the co-op's hostel and walked over to the Adler, feeling the last of the pandorph buzz through her like the feather in the cap of her happiness, and the whole gang was there as if no time had pa.s.sed, and they cheered to see her, they all hugged her, singly and severally, they all kissed her, they gave her drinks and asked questions about her trip, and told her about the recent wind conditions, and caressed her in her chair, until quickly it was the hour before dawn and they all trooped down to the ledge and suited up and took off, out into the darkness of the sky and the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of it coming back instantly like breathing or s.e.x, the black ma.s.s of the Echus escarpment bulking to the east like the edge of a continent, the dim floor of Echus Chasma so far below- the landscape of her heart, with its dim lowland and high plateau, and the vertiginous cliff between them, and over it all the intense purples of the sky, lavender and mauve in the east, black indigo out to the west, the whole arch lightening and taking on color each second, the stars popping out of existence- high clouds to the west flaring pink- and as several stoops had taken her well below the level of Overlook, she was able to close on the cliff and catch a hard westerly updraft and sail on it, inches over Underlook and then up in a tight gyre, motionless herself and yet cast violently up by the wind, until she burst out of the shadow of the cliff into the raw yellows of the new day, an incredibly joyful combination of the kinetic and the visual, of sense and world, and as she soared up into the clouds she thought, To h.e.l.l with you, Ann Clayborne- you and the rest of your kind can go on forever about your moral imperatives, your issei ethics, values, goals, strictures, responsibilities, virtues, grand purposes of life, you can pour out those words to the end of time in all their hypocrisy and fear, and still you will never have a feeling like this one, when the grace of mind and body and world are all in perfect consort- you can rant your Calvinist rant until you are blue in the face, what humans should do with their brief lives, as if there were any way to tell for sure, as if you didn't turn out to be a bunch of cruel b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the end- but until you get out here and fly, surf, climb, jump, exert yourself somehow in the risk of s.p.a.ce, in the pure grace of the body, you just don't know, you have no right to speak, you are slaves to your ideas and your hierarchies and so can't see that there is no higher goal than this, the ultimate purpose of existence, of the cosmos itself: the free play of flight.

In the northern spring the trade winds blew, pus.h.i.+ng against the westerlies and damping the Echus updrafts. Jackie was on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, distracted from her interplanetary maneuverings by the tedium of local politics; indeed she seemed irritated and tense at having to deal with it, and clearly she did not want Zo around. So Zo went to work in the mines at Moreux for a while, and then joined a group of flying friends on the coast of the North Sea, south of Boone's Neck, near Blochs Hoffnung, where the sea cliffs reared a kilometer out of the cras.h.i.+ng surf. Late-afternoon onsh.o.r.e breezes. .h.i.t these cliffs and sent up a small flock of fliers, wheeling through seastacks that poked out of tapestries of foam surging up and down, up and down, pure white on the wine-dark sea.

This flying group was led by a young woman Zo hadn't met before, a girl of only nine m-years, named Melka. She was the best flier Zo had ever seen. When she was in the air leading them it was as if an angel had come into their midst, darting through them like a raptor through doves, at other times leading them through the tight maneuvers that made flocking such fun. And so Zo worked through the days at her co-op's local partner, and flew every day after her work stint was over. And her heart was always soaring, pleased by one thing after another. Once she even called Ann Clayborne, to try to tell her about flying, about what it really meant; but the old one had nearly forgotten who she was, and did not appear interested even when Zo managed to make it clear when and how they had met.

That afternoon she flew with an ache inside. The past was a dead letter, sure; but that people could become such ghosts....

Nothing for such a feeling but sun and salt air, the everchanging spill of sea foam, rising and falling against the cliffs. There was Melka, diving; Zo chased her, feeling a sudden rush of affection for such a beautiful spirit. But then Melka saw her and tipped away, and clipped the highest rock of a seastack with the end of one wing, and tumbled down like a shot bird. Shocked at the sight of the accident, Zo pulled her wings in and began dolphin-kicking downward next to the seastack, until she was plummeting in a powerful stoop; she caught up the tumbling girl in her arms, she flapped one wing just over the blue waves, while Melka struggled under her; then she saw that they were going to have to swim.