Ann nodded at all this.: And there — there it was, something more in her than the crimping fear: a passion 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 Uranus’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 space 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 spacecraft, 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 Uranus floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pushing 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 Uranus’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 buttress, 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 buttress 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 buttresses 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 space had frozen it forever. Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft 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 buttress 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 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? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl 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…”