He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.

Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in ecopoesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.

Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was a deep violet blue — clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high altitudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-altitude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the successive positions of a finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.

To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses. Out here in the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge of a cliff, and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered by myriad chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were banded by stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining the basalt. Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the gulfs of air below him.

As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites. The Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a walk along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick grass grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax’s image of the Irish coast. The land’s edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in the cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one walked over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare rocks.

Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell, steady deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air steamed, the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy squish. Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick brown fox, seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra juniper. Away from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its own. Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.

Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in the upper atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by the sun long after everything else was in twilight’s great shadow. So Sax would sit on the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay through the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun’s shadow rose up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would appear noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks gleaming like abalone shells.

The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow. The warmth of the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The patterns of waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.

But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat blurry stars, he grew uneasy. “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” Tennyson had written just a few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this hour that Phobos had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A moment of the areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had completed the desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military base built on Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn’t remember. Some kind of desire for symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality prized more by mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still orbiting the sun. “Hmm.” He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies were starting out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning them to create a gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.

A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read; informal name for an asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and shape. “Hmmm.” Sax tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was superficial: a triaxial ellipsoid, but weren’t they all. Potato-shaped, right size, banged hard on one end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been a nice little settlement tucked into it. What’s in a name? Say they dropped the pseudo. A couple of mass drivers and AIs, some side jets… that peculiar moment, when Phobos had shot up over the western horizon. “Hmmmmm,” Sax said.

The days passed and the seasons. He did field studies and meteorology. Effects of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives out around the peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites. Weather balloons these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than ten grams, lofted by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the exosphere.

Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or grass, the top downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little payload in his fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen into thetoalloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to the line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would cut his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the sand, watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a pinprick and then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand meters, depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479 meters, once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he would read some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like a little piece of him was sailing up into space. Strange what made one happy.