The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.

Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites.

The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and greenhouse-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.

One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.

Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”

“Yes,” Zo said.

“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.

“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.

“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.

The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.

They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.

His forehead wrinkled at this.

“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.

“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”

“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff” — she gestured at the green fronds around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees — “this stuff is nameless, really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”

He thought about this.

“Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.

“Everywhere.”

“Do you have favorite places?”

“I like Echus Overlook.”

“Good updrafts?”

“Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to work.”

“It’s not your work?”

“Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”

“Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”

“Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”

“Then you will emigrate?”

“No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”

“Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see Miranda.”

“Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”

“Ah.”

They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones. Birds called, insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but under the forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns and wires of slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek they had crossed.

“What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.

“Jackie?”

He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding with exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”

“Was she in love with Nirgal?”

“I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”

“I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter Clayborne, was she in love with him?”

“In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t know.”

“You aren’t much help.”

“No.”

“Forgotten it all?”

“Not all. But what I remember is — hard tc characterize. I remember Jackie asking about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about her. More than once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”

“She still is. And I’m proud of her.”

“And — I remember her crying, once.”

“Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”

This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost human. “She was sad.”

“Oh very good!”

“Because her mother had left. Esther?”

“That’s right.”

“Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for — I don’t know. But Kasei and Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a day I was teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and Esther. And then she cried.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I don’t… Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say. Hmm… I thought she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is crucial.”

“Come on.”

“You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were sociobiologists.”

“What’s that?”

“Urn — someone who believes that most cultural traits have a biological explanation.”