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.

2

The ancient highland of Tempe Terra was 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.