“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”

“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who ever lived.”

“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a pretzel.”

“Fuck the rocks.”

“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change.”

Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat glasslike, but otherwise utterly nondescript. “You’re obsessed,” she said.

“Yes. But I like my obsessions.”

After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence. Over the course of the day they descended to Bottom’s Landing. Now they were a kilometer below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead, Uranus fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo felt herself to be flying. “You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,” she said to all of them, over the common band. “It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”

“That’s just saying there is no intrinsic worth,” one of the guardians replied. “It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there’s no need to include human participation. These places exist without us and before us, and that is their intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence, if we want to be in a right attitude to the universe, if we want to actually see it.”

“But I see it,” Zo said happily. “Or almost see it. You people will have to sensitize your eyes with some addition to your genetic treatments. Meanwhile it’s glorious, it truly is. But that glory is in our minds.”

They did not answer. After a while Zo went on:

“All these issues have been raised before, on Mars. The whole matter of environmental ethics was raised to a new level by the experience on Mars, raised right into the heart of our actions. Now you want to protect this place as wilderness, and I can see why. But I’m a Martian, and so I understand. A lot of you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical position, and in the end wilderness is an ethical position. Terrans won’t understand you as well as I do. They’ll come out here and build a big casino right on this promontory. They’ll cover this rift from rim to rim, and try terraforming it like they have everywhere else. The Chinese are still jammed into their country like sardines, and they don’t give a damn about the intrinsic worth of China itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the solar system. They need room and they see it’s out here, and they’ll come and build and look at you funny when you object, and what are you going to do? You can try sabotage like the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons here just as easy as you can them, and they’ve got a million replacements for every colonist they lose. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about Earth. We’re like the Lilliputians with Gulliver. We’ve got to work together, and tie him down with as many little lines as we can devise.”

No response from the others.

Zo sighed. “Well,” she said, “maybe it’s for the best. Spread people around out here, they won’t be pressuring Mars so hard. It might be possible to work out deals whereby the Chinese are free to settle out here all they want, and we on Mars are free to cut down immigration to nearly nothing. It might work rather well.”

Again no response from the others.

Finally Ann said, “Shut up. Let us concentrate on the land here.”

“Oh of course.”

Then, as they were approaching the very end of the buttress, the promontory standing out in a gap of air beyond all telling, under the bejeweled jade disk and the brilliant diamond chip beyond it, the whole solar system suddenly triangulated by these celestial objects, the true size of things revealed — they saw moving stars overhead. The rocket jets of their spacecraft.

“See?” Zo said. “It’s the Chinese, coming to have a look.”

Suddenly one of the guardians was on her in a fury, striking her directly on the faceplate. Zo laughed. But she had forgotten Miranda’s ultralight gravity, and was surprised when a ridiculous uppercut lifted her right off her feet. Then she hit the railing with the back of her knees, spun head over heels, twisting to catch herself, bang — a hard blow to the head, but the helmet protected her, she was still conscious, tumbling down the incline at the edge of the promontory — beyond it the void — fear shot through her like an electric shock, she fought for balance but was tumbling, out of control — she felt a jolt — ah yes, the end of her harness! Then the sickening sensation of a farther slide down — the harness clip must have given way. Second surge of adrenal fear — she turned inward and grabbed at the passing rock. Human power in .005 g; the same gravity that had sent her flying now allowed her to catch herself by a single fingertip, and bring the whole weight of her falling body to a halt, as in a miracle.

She was on the edge of a long drop. Sparking lights in her eyes, nausea, darkness beyond; she couldn’t see the floor of the chasm, it was like a bottomless pit, a dream image, black falling… “Don’t move,” said Ann’s voice in her ear. “Hold on. Don’t move.” Above her, a foot, then legs. Very slowly Zo turned her head up to look. A hand clutched her right wrist, hard. “Okay. There’s a hold for your left hand, above it by half a meter. Higher. There. Okay, climb. You above, pull us up.”

They were hauled up like fish on a line.

Zo sat on the ground. The little space ferry was landing soundlessly, over on a pad on the far side of the flat spot. Brief flare of light from its rockets. The concerned looks of the guardians, standing over her.

“Not such a funny joke,” Ann suggested.

“No,” Zo said, thinking hard about how she could use the incident. “Thanks for helping me.” It was impressive how quickly Ann had jumped to her help — not impressive that she had decided to, for this was the code of nobility, one had obligations to one’s peers, and enemies were just as important as friends; enemies were equals, they were necessary, they were what made it possible to be a good friend. But just as a physical maneuver it had been impressive. “Very quick of you.”

On the flight back to Oberon they were all silent, until one of the ferry’s crew turned to Ann and mentioned that Hiroko and some of her followers had been seen here in the Uranian system recently, on Puck.

“Oh what crap,” Ann said.

“How do you know?” Zo asked. “Maybe she decided to get as far away from Earth and Mars as possible. I wouldn’t blame her.”

“This isn’t her kind of place.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe she hasn’t heard this is your private rock garden.”

But Ann simply waved her away.

Back to Mars, the red planet, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The only real world.

Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days, decelerated; and in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on the elevator, going down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked out at Echus, there to the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North Sea. So good to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn’t leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn’t as deep as Prospero’s Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again.