"What about your mother?" he asked apprehensively. "Do you think she'll let you come to Orchy with me?"

"You leave her to me."

His hands went around her, pressing into the small of her back. "Sounds good to me." They kissed. He could taste the sharp tang of the margarita on her lips.

"Er, guys, I think we should get over there," Vinnie said.

Alan was so engrossed with making obscene small talk to the girl in the blue top that he hadn't noticed her boyfriend standing behind him.

"No way." John was shaking his head. "Look at the effing size of him!"

"Bigger they are, the harder they fall," Rob declared. He was almost as drunk as Alan.

"As long as he falls on you, not me," Nigel said.

"He's our friend," Lawrence said. Somehow he couldn't summon up much conviction. The boyfriend had a couple of friends with him, too.

"Just tell the bar staff," Roselyn said urgently. "The bouncers will sort it out."

"Too late," Vinnie groaned.

Alan had finally noticed the boyfriend.

They looked on incredulously as their friend employed his own never-fail method of getting out of sticky situations by telling the one about the parrot and the starship stewardess.

"...the airlock slammed shut, and as they were tumbling through interstellar space the bloke turned to the parrot and said, 'Pretty ballsy for a guy with no spacesuit'." Alan giggled hysterically at the punch line.

The boyfriend, it turned out, didn't have much of a sense of humor.

Lawrence finally got home at half past three in the morning, after his father and the family lawyer bailed him out from the police station.

Amethi's turbulent climate was changing again, emerging from its snowfall phase. Over the last few years, billions of tons of water had been liberated from Barclay's Glacier as the meltoff accelerated. The contribution it made to atmospheric pressure and density was small, but effective. Thicker and heavier, the planet's envelope of gas now retained more heat than before. Overall temperature was up by a couple of degrees. On the side of the planet away from the glacier, the snow was giving way to rain. Templeton even had weeks of broken cloud cover as the winds slowly strengthened.

A lot of people saw that as a bad omen, predicting the Wakening would end in hurricanes ripping the domes apart. The official line was that increased air speed was a natural and inevitable part of acquiring a normal weather pattern. There might be a few peaks on the graph along the way, but it would level out in the end.

Whether you believed that or not, the clearer skies did mean that passenger jets were returning to commercial service after their near-hiatus of the preceding years. Lawrence and Roselyn caught the morning flight out from Templeton, taking fifteen hours to reach Oxendale. One day, Oxendale would be the major city on a long chain of islands in the middle of the ocean. For the moment, it was sitting on the top of a massive, flat-topped mountain, the largest in a ridge of similar mountains rising out from a slushy saltwater quagmire.

On this side of the planet, facing Nizana, the glacier still dominated the environment. The air was a lot colder, and clouds still sprinkled snow as they migrated out to the warmer tropics. Their jet touched down on a runway that was coated in white, powdery ice. They glimpsed it only a few seconds before the wheels hit. For the last hour, they'd been flying blind through thick fog. Oxendale's altitude a kilometer above the salty marsh meant that it was almost permanently in the clouds.

They had a half-hour wait in the airport lounge while their luggage was transferred; then they trooped on board a thirty-seater STL plane, built for arctic conditions. Orchy was another two hours' flying time away. Forty minutes after takeoff, they cleared the base of the cloud layer to see Barclay's Glacier in the distance.

With Amethi a quarter of the way around its orbit from superior conjunction, the sun was shining almost directly onto the vertical cliff face of the glacier. It split the land from the sky with a silver-white glare stretching from north to south, as if a crack had appeared in the landscape to allow another, closer sun to shine through from behind the planet. Lawrence had to put his sunglasses on to look at it directly. Colors here were all monotone. The surface of the glacier was pure white; even the clouds didn't seem to cast a shadow. Features, at least from this distance, were nonexistent. The most that could be said was that the ice was rumpled, with long, gentle curves overlapping all the way to the boundary. Overhead, the sky shone with an astonishingly bright metallicblue sheen. Nizana's dominant ocher crescent appeared intrusively alien, its darkness in some way negative. Squashed streamers of cloud swirled about, almost as bright as the glacier itself. All of them were sliding in the same direction, out from the ice shelf and away over the ocean floor.

When Lawrence looked straight down, he could see nothing but dunes of slick auburn mud, their crests dusted white. Slivers of grubby water shimmered in the cirques amid the dunes, forming an infinite plexus of connected rills. Every few kilometers there would be a deep river cutting its way through the mud. Here the water was fast-flowing and filthy, clawing at the gully sides to loosen great swaths of mud. Lumps of ice bobbed along, colliding against each other with enough violence to produce small explosions of splinters, or even split apart.

For all the physical activity, the vista got to Lawrence. He used to think the tundra desert outside Templeton was bleak, but this was pure desolation. There was no sign here that any of the terraforming algae had ever bloomed in the slushy puddles, no meandering tracks of slowlife organisms as they impregnated the mud with their spores and bacteria. This was impassive, ancient geology at its most aloof, untouched by life's Machiavellian tendrils. It made him feel small, irrelevant.

After a while, the little aircraft curved around and headed in over the glacier. A lot of the edge was still sheer cliff, but a quantity had crumbled into giant talus falls extending for kilometers out into the mud. The top of the glacier was bisected by deep rifts that carried the rivers out from the interior. Some of these fractured canyons were over a kilometer deep and still expanding as the water gnawed away at their floor, but that still left them terminating high over the ocean floor. The edge of Barclay's Glacier was host to the most spectacular array of waterfalls on any known world. Over a thousand prodigious rivers ended abruptly hundreds of meters above the ground, projecting their waters in monumental arcs to thunder into ragged craters gouged out by their own relentless torrent.

The town of Orchy was situated on the top of one of these rifts, Coniston's Flaw, a long jagged gully extending well over a thousand kilometers toward the east. In some places it was over three kilometers wide, its steep angled sides resembling the Alpine valleys of France and Switzerland. Orchy was currently sitting on top of a broad, curving section, with the river churning along the rift floor six hundred meters below. The curve meant that the water constantly chewed into the ice, an erosion that pulled down vast avalanches from the sides. Once they'd settled, they were excellent skiing slopes, although the flow of water that created them would ultimately undermine them, changing the valley's profile once again. The entire length of Coniston's Haw was a variable geometry, flexing in month-long undulations, with only its terminal waterfall holding reasonably steady. Even the tributaries would forsake it after abrupt and violent shifts, defecting to other rivers.