These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of physicist-priests, who were a black box for those on the outside, but like all good oligarchies predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would take the hint, and be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left their offices, and walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall. Her work was done, and so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.

She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a call to Jackie letting her know that the next move had been made. After that she walked out onto the balcony to have a smoke.

Her color vision surged under the impact of the chromotropics lacing her cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a Fauvist fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower strips, until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally) were a mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it. Tile roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held the greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Fabergé egg, elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were. But to be trapped inside one . . . well, there was nothing for it but to pass the hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got the word to go home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.

So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dôme, to party with Miguel and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians, writers and other artists and aesthetes who hung out at the café. It was a wild bunch. Mercury’s craters had all been named centuries before after the most famous artists in Terran history, and so as Terminator rolled along it passed Dürer and Mozart, Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on the planet were Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger Pushkin, in one of many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped Sophocles, Van Gogh was inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so on and so forth, in a most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and started tossing named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this party, a huge escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.