Save for the lingering rain ghost, it was as if the storm had never been.

“I guess we can go back,” Benacerraf said. “The sleds are full.”

“Yes,” Rosenberg said. “Your walk-back limit—”

“Oh, fuck our walk-back limit,” Angel said abruptly. “Rosenberg, how far are we from the top of this mountain?”

Rosenberg said reluctantly, “Give me an altitude.”

Benacerraf consulted her altimeter. “Around eight thousand feet.”

“That leaves you three thousand shy of the summit. I don’t recommend going further,” Rosenberg said strongly. “You’re climbing above the planetary boundary layer, and the winds are going to pick up. And in another thousand feet or so you’ll be in the methane cloud layer.”

“Actually, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Benacerraf said slowly. “The cloud is pretty broken up after the rain, Rosenberg.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Rosenberg snapped. “Maybe the altitude’s affecting your oxygen supply.”

“Come on, double-dome,” Angel said. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Bill—” Rosenberg hesitated. “What’s the point? You won’t be able to see anyhow. I’m sorry to be brutal, but—”

“The point, dipshit, is that I’ll make it to the top. The point is, I haven’t crossed two billion miles just to stop a few thousand fucking feet shy of the highest point on the moon. Or isn’t that logical enough for you?”

“Paula, if you go along with this, you’re as crazy as he is.”

Anger flared in her. “Drop it, Rosenberg.”

They were, she decided there and then, going to climb the mountain.

For today, anyhow, Bill Angel was out of his craziness. And if anything was going to keep him together, this kind of experience was.

Anyhow he was right. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of exploration they had come so far to make?

She floated over to Angel. She took his hand. “Rosenberg, I’ll leave markers, and give you an altitude every few hundred feet.”

“How can I stop you doing this?”

“You can’t,” Angel said. “So shut the fuck up, and enjoy the ride.”

Hand in hand, Benacerraf and Angel began to climb the icy regolith.

With the methane clouds broken up, it was bright enough to walk without helmet lamps.

Free of the gumbo, free of the sled, the landscape opening up around her, she felt as if she was floating above the surface. She felt the way Marcus White and some, of the others had described walking on the Moon. Only the stiffness of her surface suit, the disconcerting mass of her backpack, encumbered her now.

It was like being eight years old again, she thought: her adult cares sloughed away, her body light and compact and the air fresh and new and full of light.

Soon they were in the lower layers of the cloud. It was like being in a thick, dark mist, like smoke from a forest fire. Benacerraf could still see, roughly, where she was, but she was glad to have the slope of the ground for orientation.

After a couple of hundred feet they emerged above the cloud layer, into clear orange air. The regolith here was still pretty much grey-white, cleansed by methane rain. The lighting was orange and grey, surreal, dim like an early dawn, but bright enough they didn’t need their helmet lamps to see.

She strode on, into the light.

They came upon the summit suddenly.

The regolith slope foreshortened before Benacerraf, and she realized they were approaching some kind of ridge. She slowed, and pulled at Angel’s hand to warn him.

Still hand in hand, they approached the ridge. The slope flattened out, to a broad ledge maybe twenty feet wide. Leaving Angel behind, Benacerraf walked cautiously forward.

She was standing on the rim of a crater, puncturing the summit of Othrys.

“Take it easy, Paula,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t know how friable that surface is. Don’t go close to the edge.”

The crater was like a huge amphitheatre, bathed in the ubiquitous orange glow. “It must be four miles across, maybe five… I can see the far rim quite clearly. And in the base there is a dome structure. No central peak—”

“It’s a caldera,” Rosenberg said. “A cryovolcano. Fuelled by ammonia-water lava, a remnant of the primeval ocean.”

She looked down towards the ground.

The light was bright — better than twilight up here, like an autumn sunset, perhaps. The sky was empty of cloud, save for a scattering of light cirrus clouds around the zenith, probably methane and nitrogen ice.

The methane clouds formed a distinct layer, a thousand feet below her. They were black, fat cumuli with lumpy tops and flat bases, like froth riding on an invisible membrane in the air. The clouds stretched to the horizon, but through them she could make out the ground. It was an orange sheet, punctured by the jet black of ethane crater lakes, like a photographic negative of the Everglades. She thought she could make out Clear Lake, its compact cashew-nut shape far below, all but hidden by cloud and mist.

The horizon was visible, even through the orange haze. It was the dark band where the parallel sheets of sky-haze, methane cloud layer and punctured land met, all around her. It seemed close by: seventy or eighty miles away, she judged. And it was curved, quite sharply, as if seen through a distorting lens.

Titan was visibly round; she had a powerful sense that she was standing on a sphere, that she was clinging to the surface of a small, three-dimensional object, suspended in space, swathed by a duck layer of air.

“Paula.” Angel was waiting for her, a few yards short of the summit. “Are we here?”

“Yes, Bill. We made it. We climbed Othrys.”

He was standing slumped forward to balance his pack, and with his arms held loose at his sides. It was like an ape’s gait, she thought.

And so they were: two clever apes, who had made it to the highest point on Titan.

She walked down, took Angel’s hand, and began to lead him to the summit. “It’s beautiful, Bill, so beautiful.”

His blind face turned, the orange curve of Titan reflected in his visor. The crunch of the regolith beneath his boots was loud and sharp in the still, huge air.

When they got back to Tartarus, Rosenberg insisted on passing the Titan water through the life support system’s filters to get rid of the remnant tholins. At last, though, he was able to bring Benacerraf a bowl — in fact an EMU visor — brimming full of cool, clear Titan water.

She raised it to her lips.

It was the finest drink she’d taken in seven years, sweeter than wine.

Jiang Ling first saw the asteroid with her naked eyes when Tianming was ninety days out from Earth, ten days from its closest encounter.

At first the asteroid was barely more than a point of light — indistinguishable from the remote stars, had she not known where, precisely, to look. But by the day after that 2002OA had grown to a distinct oval shape: almost like a potato, she thought irreverently, battered and irregular. She knew that from now on the asteroid would grow visibly, day by day, and then hour by hour, until at last its battered grey hide filled the small viewing window of her living compartment.

After the closest approach, the asteroid would then recede, just as rapidly.

But that, for her, was only a theoretical possibility.

Every day she performed two softscreen shows: one in Han Chinese for the benefit of her countrymen, one in English for the foreigners. She was allowed to say what she wished, although the Party expressed clear, if rather obvious, preferences.

Jiang adjusted the angle of her big S-band antenna, ensuring it was centered on the fat disc of Earth. Then she positioned herself before the Tianming’s single camera, fixed to a bracket on the wall. She had no props or charts or effects; none were necessary. It was sufficient that she simply talk into the camera, smoothly and plausibly, and production crews on the ground would later patch in such illustrations and other footage as was required.