“A lot of creatures are.”

“Yes, isn’t it marvelous? Oh excuse me, have you eaten? Would you like some soup? I was just making soup, leek soup, I guess it must be obvious.”

It was. “Sure,” Ann said.

Over soup and bread she asked him questions about the polar bear. “Surely there can’t be a whole food chain here for something that huge?”

“Oh yes. In this area there is. It’s well-known for that — the first bioregion robust enough for bears. The bay is liquid to the bottom, you see. The Ap mohole is at the center of the crater, so it’s like a bottomless lake. Iced over in winter of course, but the bears are used to that from the Arctic.”

“The winters are long.”

“Yes. The female bears make dens in the snow, near some caves in dike outcroppings to the west. They don’t truly hibernate, their body temperatures drop just a few degrees, and they can wake up in a minute or two, if they need to adjust the den for heat. So they den for as much of the winters as they can, then live in there and forage out till spring. Then in spring we tow some of the ice plates through the mouth of the bay out to sea, and things develop from there, bottom to top. The basic chains are Antarctic in the water, Arctic on the land. Plankton, krill, fish and squid, Weddell seals, and on land rabbits and h’ares, lemmings, marmots, mice, lynx, bobcat. And the bears. We’re trying with caribou and reindeer and wolves, but there isn’t the forage for ungulates yet. The bears have been out just a few years, the air pressure hasn’t been adequate until recently. But it’s a four-thousand-meter equivalent here now, and the bears do very well with that, we find. They adapt very quickly.”

“Humans too.”

“Well, we haven’t seen too much at the four-thousand-meter level yet.” He meant four thousand meters above sea level on Earth. Higher than any permanent human settlement, as she recalled.

He was going on: “… eventually see thoracic-cavity expansion, bound to happen…” A man who talked to himself. Big, bulky; white fur in a fringe around his bald pate. Black eyes swimming behind round spectacles.

“Did you ever meet Hiroko?” she said.

“Hiroko Ai? I did, once. Lovely woman. I hear she’s gone back to Earth, to help them adapt to the flood. Did you know her?”

“Yes. I’m Ann Clayborne.”

“I thought so. Peter Clayborne’s mother, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s been in Boone recently.”

“Boone?”

“That’s the little station across the bay. This is Botany Bay, and the station is Boone Harbor. A kind of joke. Apparently there was a similar pairing in Australia.”

“Indeed.” She shook her head. John would be with them forever. And by no means the worst of the ghosts haunting them.

As for instance this man, the famous animal designer. He clattered about the kitchen, pawing at things shortsightedly. He put the soup before her and she ate, watching him furtively as she did. He knew who she was, but he did not seem uncomfortable. He did not try to justify himself. She was a red areologist, he designed new Martian animals. They worked on the same planet. But that did not mean they were enemies, not to him. He would eat with her without malice. There was something chilling in that, overbearing despite his gentle manner. Obliviousness was so brutal. And yet she liked him; that dispassionate power, vagueness — something. He bumbled around his kitchen, sat and ate with her, quickly and noisily, his muzzle wet with the clear soup stock. Afterward they broke pieces of bread from a long loaf. Ann asked questions about Boone Harbor.

“It has a good bakery,” Whitebook said, indicating the loaf. “And a good lab. The rest is just an ordinary outpost. But we took the tent down last year, and now it is very cold, especially in the winter. Only forty-six degrees latitude, but we feel it as a northern place. So much so that there is some talk of putting the tent back up, in winter at least. And there are people who say we should leave it on until things warm up.” “Till the ice age is over?”

“I don’t think there will be an ice age. This first year without the soletta was bad, of course, but various compensations ought to be possible. A cold couple of years, that’s all it will be.”

He waggled a paw: it could go either way. Ann almost threw her chunk of bread at him. But best not to startle him. She controlled herself with a shudder.

“Is Peter still in Boone?” she asked.

“I think so. He was a few days ago.”

They talked some more about the Botany Bay ecosystem. Without a fuller array of plant life, animal designers were sharply limited; it was still more like the Antarctic than the Arctic in that respect. Possibly new soil-enhancement methods could speed the arrival of higher plants. Right now it was a land of lichen, for the most part. The tundra plants would follow.

“But this displeases you,” he observed.

“I liked it the way it was before. All Vastitas Borealis was barchan dunes, made of black garnet sand.”

“Won’t some remain, up next to the polar cap?”

“The ice cap will go right down to the sea line in most places. As you say, kind of like Antarctica. No, the dunes and the laminate terrain will be underwater, one way or another. The whole northern hemisphere will be gone.”

“This is the northern hemisphere.”

“A highland peninsula. And it’s gone too, in a way. Botany Bay was Arcadia Crater Ap.”

He looked at her through the spectacles, peering. “Perhaps if you lived at high altitude, it might seem like the old days. The old days, with air.”

“Perhaps,” she said cautiously. He was circling the chamber, shambling about with heavy steps, cleaning big kitchen knifes at the sink. His fingers ended in short blunt claws; even clipped they made it hard for him to work with small objects.

She stood up carefully. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, backing toward the lock door. She grabbed her jacket on the way out and slammed the door on his look of surprise. Out into the hard cold slap of the night, into her jacket. Never run away from a predator. She walked back to her car and climbed in without looking back.

The ancient highland of Tempe Terrawas dotted by a number of small volcanoes, so there were lava plains and channels everywhere; also viscous creep features caused by ground ice, and the occasional small outflow channel that had run down the side of the Great Escarpment; all this along with the usual collection of Noachian impact and deformational features, so that on the areological maps Tempe looked like an artist’s palette, colors splashed everywhere to indicate the different aspects of the region’s long history. Too many colors, in Ann’s opinion; for her the smallest divisions into different areological units were artificial, remnants of sky areology, attempting to distinguish between regions that were more cratered or more dissected or more etched than the rest, when in the field it was all one, with all of the signature features visible everywhere. It was simply rough country — the Noachian landscape, none rougher.

Even the floors of the long straight canyons called the Tempe Fossa were too broken to drive over, so Ann made her way indirectly, on higher land. The most recent lava flows (a billion years old) were harder than the disaggregated ejecta they had run over, and now they stood on the land as long dikes or berms. On the softer land between there were a lot of splosh craters, their aprons clearly the remnants of liquid flow, like drip castles at the beach. Occasional islands of worn bedrock stuck up out of all this debris, but by and large it was regolith, with signs everywhere of water in the land, of the permafrost underfoot, causing slow slumps and creeps. And now, with the increase in temperatures, and perhaps the heat coming up from the Vastitas underground explosions, all that creep had speeded up. There were new landslides all over the place: a well-known Red trail had been wiped out when a ramp into Tempe 12 had been buried; the walls of Tempe 18 had collapsed on both sides, making a U-shaped canyon into a V-shaped one; Tempe 21 was gone, covered by the collapse of its high west wall. Everywhere the land was melting. She even saw some taliks, which were liquified zones on top of permafrost, basically icy swamps. And many of the oval pits of the great alases were filled with ponds, which melted by day and froze by night, an action that tore the land apart even faster.