The little town had grown since its early days as the terraforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen — a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the other — more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underbill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding paradise.

Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars apparatchiks working for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she wanted to fly. So she checked her old San-torini hawksuit out of storage at the gliderport, and went to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the smooth muscly texture of the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the smooth path, trailing her tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural overhang that had been artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked to the edge of this slab and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters down, to the umber floor of Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline she tipped forward and fell off the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind picking up in a swift whoosh over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity, which she recognized by the pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her arms, and felt the suit stiffen and help her muscles to hold the beautiful wings wide, and with a loud crumping smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun, turned her head, arched her back, pointed her toes and set the tail feathers, left right left; and the wind was pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and arms together, turn then in a tight gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor, around and around: flying. Zo the hawk, wild and free. She was laughing happily, and tears streamed this way and that in her goggles, dashed away by the force of the g.

The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding the updraft most fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting down one of the clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and it was possible to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity. Zo too, when she had gotten about five thousand meters above Overlook, and was breathing the pure oxygen of her helmet’s enclosed air system, turned her head right and dipped her right wing, and curved through the exhilaration of a run across the wind, feeling it keen over her body in a rapid continuous fingering. No sound but the hard whoosh of wind in her wings. The somatic pressure of the wind all over her body was a subtly sensuous massage, and she felt it through the tightened suit as if the suit were not there, as if she were naked and feeling the wind directly on her skin, as she wished she could be. A good suit reinforced this impression, of course, and she had used this one for three m-years before leaving for Mercury; it fit like a glove, it was great to be back in it.

She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver called Jesus Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and began to dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly over her, and she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal velocity. Passing the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as the cliff was, at full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap in the face, and it took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and skill and nerve, and the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and popped her wings, and felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous pressure even though the suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing precen-tage of the load. Tail feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then she was jinking across the chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse off it.

She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into developing high clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing pleasure to tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.

She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward Overlook, feeling tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of fliers, if there was a bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely than birders had ever before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and flutter to try to learn the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this cliff would be innocently wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of fliers would be above it following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.

Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the placement of the wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that she craved but could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing clouds, indigo sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms when she peeled over into a stoop … eternal moments of no-mind. The best, cleanest use of human time.

But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the hawk to its day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail her landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if she had never left.

The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside, and it was a mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by fliers, and tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and roving and talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the night. And there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and Ella and Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and delighted to see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to celebrate the reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail catching up on gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making ribald commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends spotted in the crowd.

Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the crowds of Topside, and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the bathhouses. They piled into the changing room and took off their clothes, and wandered naked through the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep, ankle-deep, chest-deep — hot, cold, lukewarm — splitting up, finding each other later, having sex with scarcely visible strangers, Zo working slowly through several partners to her own orgasm, purring happily as her body clamped down on itself and her mind went away. Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at the sight of the stars in the skylight overhead, at the feel of warm water and of some boy who came in her and stayed in her, nearly hard, and three minutes later stiffened and started humping again, laughing at the approach of another bright orgasm. After that she sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar and found the others there, Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was usually the best, with an exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a good bit of semen left to ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an effort, you have to be wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third anyway.” Zo and Rose and the rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many other ways, being female was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely had several wonderful orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the status orgasmus, a kind of running continuous orgasm that could last half an hour if one were lucky and one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this that they studied assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they all agreed: one had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd … lately they had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily Zo demanded proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her and the rest down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep lay on his back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted up by the others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an un-differentiated mass of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they all kept going, more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then she was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going, until she cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and kept her going until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled violently off Imhotep and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even stand. Someone said they had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like two, or eternity. All her abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt. “Cold bath,” she said, and crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.