Yet he could not stop moving. If he stayed in one place for more than a week, he began to feel nervous and fretful in a way he had never felt in his life. It was like an illness, with tension everywhere in his muscles, but concentrated in his stomach; an elevated temperature; inability to focus on his thoughts; an urge to fly. And so he would fly, from village to town to station to caravanserai. Some days he let the wind carry him where it would. He had always been a nomad, no reason to stop now. A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived? The winds of Mars were amazing. Strong, irregular, loud, ceaseless live beings, at play.

Sometimes the wind carried him out over the northern sea, and he flew all day and never saw anything but ice and water, as if Mars were an ocean planet. That was Vastitas Borealis— the Vast North, now ice. The ice was in some places flat, in others shattered; sometimes white, sometimes discolored; the red of dust, or the black of snow algae, or the jade of ice algae, or the warm blue of clear ice. In some places big dust storms had stalled and dropped their loads, and then the wind had carved the detritus so that little dune fields were created, looking just like old Vastitas. In some places ice carried on currents had crashed over crater-rim reefs, making circular pressure ridges; in other places ice from different currents had crashed together, creating straight pressure ridges, like dragon backs.

Open water was black, or the various purples of the sky. There was a lot of it— polynyas, leads, cracks, patches— perhaps a third of the sea’s surface now. Even more common were melt lakes lying on the surface of the ice, their water white and sky-colored both, which at times looked a brilliant light violet but other times separated out into the two colors; yes, it was another version of the green and the white, the infolded world, two in one. As always he found the sight of a double color disturbing, fascinating. The secret of the world.

Many of the big drilling platforms in Vastitas had been seized by Reds and blown up: black wreckage scattered over white ice. Other platforms were defended by greens, and being used now to melt the ice: large polynyas stretched to the east of these platforms, and the open water steamed, as if clouds were pouring up out of a submarine sky.