The birds struggled in it with reckless skill. She stood for a while and watched: they were skuas, out hunting over dark streaks of open water. These polynyas were just the surface signs of immense pods of liquid water under the ice; she had heard that a continuous channel of under-ice water now wrapped the globe, winding east over old Vastitas, tearing frequent polynyas in the surface, gaps which then stayed liquid for an hour or a week. Even with the air so cold, the underwater temperatures were warmed by the drowned Vastitas moholes, and rising heat from the thousands of thermonuclear explosions set off by the metanats around the turn of the century. These bombs had been placed deep enough in the megaregolith to trap their radioactive fallout, supposedly, but not their heat, which rose in a thermal pulse through the rock, a pulse that would continue for years and years. No; Michel could talk about it being Mars’s water, but there was little else that was natural about this new sea.

Ann hiked up a ridge to get a wider view. There it lay: ice, mostly flat, sometimes shattered. All as still as a butterfly on a twig, as if the whiteness might suddenly lift off and fly away. The birds’ wheeling and the clouds’ scudding showed how hard the wind blew, everything in the air pouring east; but the ice remained still. The wind’s voice was deep and huge, scraping over a billion cold edges. A strip of gray water was striated by windchop, the strength of each gust precisely registered by the flayed cat’s paws, each brush of harder wind feathering the larger waves with exquisite sensitivity. Water. And below that brushed surface, plankton, krill, fish, squid; she had heard they were producing in hatcheries all the creatures of the extremely short Antarctic food chain, and then releasing them to the sea. Teeming water.

The skuas wheeled overhead. One cloud of them whirlpooled down onto something along on the shore, behind some rocks. Ann hiked toward them. Suddenly she saw the birds’ target, lying in a cleft at the edge of the ice: the mostly eaten remains of a seal. Seals! The corpse lay on tundra grass, in the lee of a patch of sand dunes, sheltered by another rocky ridge running down into the ice. The white skeleton emerged from dark red flesh, ringed by white blubber, black fur. All torn open to the sky. Eyes pecked out.