Rachel gave me a wool chuba to pull on over my therm jacket. I noticed the nylon harness she wore over her jacket and trousers, the metal climbing equipment hanging on straps, and asked about it.

“Aenea has a harness for you at the temple site,” she said, rattling the hardware on the sling. “This is the most advanced technology on this world. The metalworkers at Potala demand and receive a king’s ransom for this stuff—crampons, cable pulleys, folding ice axes and ice hammers, chocks, ’biners, lost arrows, bongs, birdbeaks, you name it.”

“Will I need it?” I said dubiously. We had learned some basic ice-climbing techniques in the Home Guard—rappelling, crevasse work, that sort of thing—and I had done some roped-up quarry climbing when I worked with Avrol Hume on the Beak, but I wasn’t sure about real mountaineering. I didn’t like heights.

“You’ll need it but you’ll get used to it quickly,” assured Rachel and set off, hopping across the stepping stones and running lightly up the path toward the cliff’s edge. The gear jangled softly on her harness, like steel chimes or the bells around some mountain goat’s neck.

The ten-klick walk south along the sheer rockface was easy enough once I got used to the narrow ledge, the dizzy-making sheer drop to our right, the bright glare from the incredible mountain to the north and from the churning clouds far below, and the heady surge of energy from the rich atmosphere.

“Yes,” said Rachel when I mentioned the air. “The oxygen-rich atmosphere here would be a problem if there were forests or savannahs to burn. You should see the monsoon lightning storms. But the bonsai forest back there at the fissure and the fern forests over on the rainy side of Phari is about all we have in terms of combustible materials. They’re all fire species. And the bonsai wood that we use in the building is almost too dense to burn.”

For a while we walked in single file and in silence. My attention was on the ledge. We had just come around a sharp corner that required me to duck my head under the overhang when the ledge widened, the view opened up, and there was Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the “Temple Hanging in Air.”

From this closer view, a bit below and to the east of the Temple, it still looked to be magically suspended in midair above nothing. Some of the lower, older buildings had stone or brick bases, but the majority were built out over air. These pagoda-style buildings were sheltered by the great rock overhang some seventy-five meters above the main structures, but ladders and platforms zigged and zagged up almost to the underside of that overhang.

We came in among people. The many-hued chubas and ubiquitous climbing slings were not the only common denominators here: most of the faces that peered at me with polite curiosity seemed to be of Old Earth Asian stock; the people were relatively short for a roughly standard-g world; they nodded and stepped aside respectfully as Rachel led the way through the crowds, up the ladders, through the incense-and-sandalwood-smelling interior halls of some of the buildings, out and across porches and swinging bridges and up delicate staircases. Soon we were in the upper levels of the Temple where construction proceeded at a rapid pace. The small figures I had seen through binoculars were now living, breathing human beings grunting under heavy baskets of stone, individual people smelling of sweat and honest labor. The silent efficiency I had watched from the ship’s terrace now became a clamorous mixture of hammers pounding, chisels ringing, pick-axes echoing, and workers shouting and gesturing amid the controlled chaos common to any construction site.

After several staircases and three long ladders rising to the highest platform, I paused to catch my breath before climbing the last ladder. Rich oxygen atmosphere or no, this climbing was hard work. I noticed Rachel watching me with the equanimity that could easily be mistaken for indifference.

I looked up to see a young woman stepping over the edge of the high platform and descending gracefully. For the briefest of seconds I felt my heart pound with nervousness—Aenea!—but then I saw how the woman moved, saw the short-cropped dark hair from the back, and knew that it was not my friend.

Rachel and I stepped back from the base of the ladder as the woman jumped down the last few rungs. She was large and solid—as tall as I was—with strong features and amazing violet eyes. She looked to be in her forties or early fifties, standard, was deeply tanned and very fit, and from the white wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, it seemed that she also enjoyed laughing. “Raul Endymion,” she said, thrusting out her hand. “I’m Theo Bernard. I help build things.”

I nodded. Her handshake was as firm as Rachel’s.

“Aenea’s just finishin’ up.” Theo Bernard gestured toward the ladder.

I glanced at Rachel.

“You go on up,” she said. “We’ve got things to do.”

I went up hand over hand. There were probably sixty rungs on the bamboo ladder, and I was aware as I climbed that the platform below was very narrow if one fell, the drop beyond it endless.

Stepping onto the platform, I saw the rough construction shacks and areas of chiseled stone where the last temple building would be. I was aware of the countless tons of stone starting just ten meters above me where the overhang angled up and out like a granite ceiling. Small birds with v-shaped tails darted and swooped among the cracks and fissures there.

Then all my attention became fixed on the figure emerging from the larger of the two construction shacks.

It was Aenea. The bold, dark eyes, the unself-conscious grin, the sharp cheekbones and delicate hands, the blond-brown hair cut carelessly and blowing now in the strong wind along the cliff face. She was not that much taller than when I had seen her last—I could still have kissed her forehead without bending—but she was changed.

I took in a sudden breath. I had watched people grow and come of age, of course, but most of these had been my friends when I was also growing and coming of age.

Obviously I had never had children, and my careful observation of someone maturing had only been during the four years and some months of my friendship with this child. In most ways, I realized, Aenea still looked much as she had on her sixteenth birthday, five of her years earlier, minus now the last of her baby fat, with sharper cheekbones and firmer features, wider hips and slightly more prominent breasts. She wore whip trousers, high boots, a green shirt I remembered from Taliesin West, and a khaki jacket that was blowing in the wind. I could see that her arms and legs were stronger, more muscled, than I remembered from Old Earth—but not that much was changed about her.

Everything was changed about her. The child I had known was gone. A woman stood in her place; a strange woman walking quickly toward me across the rough platform. It was not just strong features and perhaps a bit more firm flesh on her lean form, it was… a solidity. A presence. Aenea had always been the most alive, animated, and complete person I had ever known, even as a child.

Now that the child was gone, or at least submerged in the adult, I could see the solidity within that animated aura.

“Raul!” She crossed the last few steps to me, stood close, and grasped my forearms in her strong hands.

For a second I thought that she was going to kiss me on the mouth the way she had… the way the child of sixteen had… during the last minutes we had been together on Old Earth. Instead, she raised one long-fingered hand and set it against my face, running fingers down the line of my cheek to my chin. Her dark eyes were alive with… what? Not amusement. Vitality, perhaps.

Happiness, I hoped.

I felt tongue-tied. I started to speak, stopped, raised my right hand as if to touch her cheek, dropped it.