He turned and ran on, feeling as if he were flying, and was astonished to see Art racing over the canyon floor ahead of him, every stride a huge wild leap, bounding like some cheetah-bear all the way to the escarpment, where he had to wait for Coyote to catch up and lead them back through the crevasse maze. Once out of it he took off again, so fast that Nirgal decided to try to catch him, just to feel how fast it was. He got into the rhythm of the sprint, pressing harder and harder, and as he passed Art he saw that his own springbok strides were almost twice as long as Art’s even in sprint mode, where both their legs were pumping as fast as possible.

They got to the boulder car long before Coyote, and waited for him in the lock, catching their breath, grinning through their faceplates at each other. A few minutes later Coyote was there and in with them, and Spencer had the rover moving, with the timeslip just past, and six more hours of night to drive in.

Inside they laughed hard at Art’s mad run, but he only grinned and waved them off. “I wasn’t scared, it’s this Martian gravity I tell you, I was just running the way I usually would but my legs were leaping along like a tiger! Amazing.”

They rested through the day, and after dark they were off again. They passed the mouth of a long canyon that ran from Ceraunius to Jovis Tholus; it was an oddity in that it was neither straight nor sinuous, and was called Crooked Canyon. When the sun rose they were hidden on the apron of Crater Qr, just north of Jovis Tholus. Jovis Tholus was a bigger volcano than Tharsis Tholus, bigger in fact than any volcano on Earth, but it was located on the high saddle between Ascraeus Mons and Olympus Mons, and both were visible on skysills to east and west, bulking like vast plateau continents, and making Jovis seem compact, friendly, comprehensible — a hill you could walk up if you wanted to.

That day Sax sat and stared silently at his screen, tapping at it tentatively and getting a random assortment of texts, maps, diagrams, pictures, equations. He tilted his head at each, with no sign of recognition. Nirgal sat down beside him. “Sax, can you hear what I’m saying?”

Sax looked at him.

“Can you understand my words? Nod if you understand.”

Sax tilted his head to the side. Nirgal sighed, held by that inquisitive look. Sax nodded, hesitantly.

That night Coyote drove west again, toward Olympus, and near dawn he directed the rover right up to a wall of pocked and riven black basalt. This was the edge of a tableland cut by innumerable narrow twisting ravines, like Tractus Traction only on a much larger scale, creating a badlands like an immense expansion of the Traction’s maze. The tableland was a fan of broken ancient lava, the remnant of one of the earliest flows from Olympus Mons, capping softer tuff and ash from even earlier eruptions. Where the wind-cut ravines had worn deep enough, their bottoms broke through into the layer of softer tuff, so that some ravines were narrow slots with tunnels at their bottoms, rounded by eons of wind. “Like upside-down keyholes,” Coyote said, though Nirgal had never seen a keyhole remotely like these shapes.

Coyote drove the rover right into one of the black-and-gray tunnel ravines. Several kilometers up the tunnel he stopped the car, beside a wall of tenting that cut off a kind of embolism in the tunnel, a widened outer curve.

This was the first hidden sanctuary that Art had ever seen, and he looked suitably startled. The tent was perhaps twenty meters tall, containing a section of the curve a hundred meters long; Art exclaimed over the size of it until Nirgal had to laugh. “Someone else is already here using it,” Coyote said, “so be quiet for a second.”

Art nodded quickly, and leaned over Coyote’s shoulder to hear what he was saying over the intercom. Parked before the tent lock was another car, just as lumpish and rocky as their own. “Ah,” said Coyote, pushing Art back. “It’s Vijjika. They’ll have oranges, and maybe some kava. We’ll have a party this morning for sure.”

They rolled up to the tent lock, and a coupler tube reached out and clamped around their exterior door. When all the lock doors were opened they made their way into the tent, bending and shuffling to carry Sax through the tube with them.

They were met inside by eight tall, dark-skinned people, five women and three men — a loud group, happy to have company. Coyote introduced them all, although Nirgal knew Vijjika from the university in Sabishii, and gave her a big hug. She was pleased to see him again, and led them all back to the smooth curve of the cliff wall, into a clearing between trailers, under a skylight provided by a vertical crack in the old lava. Under this shaft of diffuse daylight, and the even more diffuse light from the deep ravine outside the tent, the visitors sat on broad flat pillows around low tables, while several of their hosts went to work at a clutch of round-bellied samovars. Coyote was talking with acquaintances, catching up on the news. Sax looked around, blinking, and Spencer, beside him, did not look much less confused; he had been living in the surface world since ‘61, and his knowledge of the sanctuaries must have been almost entirely secondhand. Forty years of a double life; it was no wonder he looked stunned.

Coyote went to the samovars, and began handing out tiny cups from a freestanding cabinet. Nirgal sat next to Vijjika, an arm around her waist, soaking in her warmth and buzzing with the long contact of her leg against his. Art sat down on her other side, his broad face thrust into the conversation like a dog’s. Vijjika introduced herself to him, and shook his hand; he clasped her long delicate fingers in his big paw as if he wanted to kiss them. “These are Bogdanovists,” Nirgal explained to Art, laughing at. his expression and handing him one of the little ceramic cups from Coyote. “Their parents were prisoners in Korolyov before the war.”

“Ah,” Art said. “We’re a long way from there, right?”

Vijjika said, “Yes, well, our parents took the Transmarineris Highway north, just before it was flooded, and eventually they came here. Here, take that tray from Coyote and go pass out cups, and introduce yourself to everyone.”

So Art made the rounds, and Nirgal caught up on news with Vijjika. “You won’t believe what we’ve found in one of these tuff tunnels,” she told him. “We’ve become most fantastically rich.” Everyone had their cup, so they all paused for a moment and took their first sips together, then after some whoops and a general smacking of the lips they went back to their conversations. Art returned to Nirgal’s side.

“Here, have some yourself,” Nirgal told him. “Everyone needs to join the toast, that’s the way they do it.”

Art took a sip from his cup, looking dubious at the liquid, which was blacker than coffee, and foul-smelling. He shuddered. “It’s like coffee with licorice mixed into it. Poisoned licorice.”

Vijjika laughed. “It’s kavajava,” she said, “a mixture of kava and coffee. Very strong, and it tastes like hell. And hard to come by. But don’t give up on it. If you can get a cup down you’ll find it’s worth it.”

“If you say so.” Manfully he downed another swallow, shuddering again. “Horrible!”

“Yes. But we like it. Some people just extract the kavain from the kava, but I don’t think that’s right. Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly.”

“Hmm,” Art said. Nirgal and Vijjika watched him. “I’m in a refuge of the Martian underground,” he said after a while, “Getting high on some weird awful drug, in the company of some of the most famous lost members of the First Hundred. As well as young natives never known to Earth.”

“It’s working,” Vijjika observed.

Coyote was talking to a woman, who, though sitting in the lotus position on one of the pillows, was just below his eye level as he stood before her. “Sure I’d like to have romaine lettuce seeds,” the woman said. “But you have to take fair for something so valuable.”