He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma was not the place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge vistas made it a hard place to see as home— it was too vast, too inhuman. The canyon floors were designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the streams surging with snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be buried under enormous landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The locals were going to stay up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors during the day. The mesa would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the mesa— it was an island in the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for flying vacations, for partying through the nights, for expensive hotels, for the young and the in-love . . . all that was fine, wonderful. But crowded, perhaps even overrun— or else always battling the influx of visitors, and newly settled residents enchanted by the sublime views, people who would arrive like Nirgal himself, dropping in at some dusk in their life and never going away, while the old residents looked on helplessly and grumbled about the good old days when the world had been new, and unoccupied.

No— that was not the kind of home he had in mind. Although he loved the way dawn flushed the fluted west walls of Candor, flaring all across the Martian spectrum, the sky turning indigo or mauve, or a startling earthly cerulean . . . a beautiful place, so beautiful that on some days as he flew about he felt it would be worth it to stand on Shining Mesa and hold his ground, to try to preserve it, to swoop down and learn the gnarly wilderness floor, float back up every afternoon to dinner. Would that work, make him feel at home? And if wilderness was what he wanted, weren’t there other places less spectacular but more remote, thus more wild?

Back and forth he went, back and forth. One day, flying over the foaming opaque series of waterfalls and rapids in the Candor Gap, he remembered that John Boone had been through this area, in a solo rover just after the Transmarineris Highway had been built. What would that master equivocator have said about this amazing region?

Nirgal called up Boone’s AI, Pauline, and asked for Candor, and found a voice diary made during a drive through the canyon in 2046. Nirgal let the tape run as he looked down on the land from above, listening to the hoarse voice with the friendly American accent, a voice unselfconscious about talking to an AI. Listening to the voice made Nirgal wish he could really talk to the man. Some people said Nirgal had filled John Boone’s empty shoes, that Nirgal had done the work John would have done had he lived. If that were so, what would John have done afterward? How would he have lived?