Even the floors of the long straight canyons called the Tempe Fossa were too broken to drive over, so Ann made her way indirectly, on higher land. The most recent lava flows (a billion years old) were harder than the disaggregated ejecta they had run over, and now they stood on the land as long dikes or berms. On the softer land between there were a lot of splosh craters, their aprons clearly the remnants of liquid flow, like drip castles at the beach. Occasional islands of worn bedrock stuck up out of all this debris, but by and large it was regolith, with signs everywhere of water in the land, of the permafrost underfoot, causing slow slumps and creeps. And now, with the increase in temperatures, and perhaps the heat coming up from the Vastitas underground explosions, all that creep had speeded up. There were new landslides all over the place: a well-known Red trail had been wiped out when a ramp into Tempe 12 had been buried; the walls of Tempe 18 had collapsed on both sides, making a U-shaped canyon into a V-shaped one; Tempe 21 was gone, covered by the collapse of its high west wall. Everywhere the land was melting. She even saw some taliks, which were liquified zones on top of permafrost, basically icy swamps. And many of the oval pits of the great alases were filled with ponds, which melted by day and froze by night, an action that tore the land apart even faster.

She passed the lobate apron of Timushenko Crater, buried on its northern flank by the southernmost waves of lava from Coriolanus Volcano, the largest of the many little volcanoes in Tempe. Here the land was extensively pitted, and snow had fallen, melted and then refrozen in myriad catchment basins. The land was slumping in all the characteristic permafrost patterns: polygonal pebble ridges, concentric crater fill, pingos, solifluction ridges on hillsides. In every depression an ice-choked pond or puddle. The land was melting.

On sunny south-facing slopes, wherever there was a bit of protection from the wind, trees were growing, over understories of moss and grass and shrub. In the sun-filled hollows were krummholz dwarf trees, gnarled over their matted needles; in the shaded hollows, dirty snow and firn. The ruination of so much land. Broken land, empty but not empty, rock and ice and boggy meadow all lined by shattered low ridges. Clouds puffed out of nothing in the afternoon heat, and their shadows were another set of patches on things, a crazy quilt of red and black, green and white. No one would ever complain of homogeneity on Tempe Terra. Everything perfectly still under the rapidly moving shadows of the clouds. And yet there, one evening in the dusk, a white bulk slipping behind a boulder. Her heart jumped, but there was nothing further to see.