So strange. She led the group of silent Reds to a ramp that got them down onto a broad bench to the west of the ice fjord. By then it was evening, and she led them out of the rovers and down to the shore for a sunset walk.

At the moment of sunset itself, they found themselves standing in a tight unhappy cluster before a solitary ice block some four meters tall, its melted convexities as smooth as muscle. They stood so that the sun was behind the ice block and shining through it. To both sides of the block brilliant light gleamed off the glassy wet sand. An admonition of light. Undeniable, blazingly real; what were they to make of it? They stood and stared in silence.

When the sun blinked out over the black horizon, Ann walked away from the group and went alone up to her rover. She looked back down the slope; the Reds were still there by the beached iceberg. It looked like a white god among them, tinted orange like the crumpled white sheet of the ice bay. White god, bear, bay, a dolmen of Martian ice: the ocean would be there with them forever, as real as the rock.

3

The next day she drove up Hasei Vallis to the west, toward Echus Chasma. Up and up she drove, on broad bench after bench, making easy progress, until she came to where Kasei curved left and up onto the floor of Echus. The curve was one of the biggest, most obvious water-carved features on the planet. But now she found that the flat arroyo floor was covered by dwarf trees, so small they were almost shrubs: black-barked, thorny, the dark green leaves as glossy and razor-edged as holly leaves. Moss blanketed the ground underneath these black trees, but very little else; it was a single-species forest, covering Kasei Vallis from canyon wall to canyon wall, filling the great curve like some oversized smut.