Ann nodded at all this. And there— there it was, something more in her than the crimping fear: a passion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes could fix on anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it peculiar to be among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage point was coming clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to Miranda, to show it to Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the strangest moon of all, for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. “I’d like to come along,” she said earnestly.

• • •

And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.

It was the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, only 470 kilometers in diameter. In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the present, its smaller precursor had run into another moon of about the same size; the two had shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision, coalesced into a single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing was quite finished.

The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and disarranged. Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some were metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the fragments met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems bent at acute angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the tremendous torques involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that they were visible from space as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep into the side of the gray sphere.

• • •

They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked chasms, called Prospero’s Rift. They suited up, then left the spacecraft, and walked out to the rift’s edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to be on a different world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the distinct feeling of flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all Martian conditions suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead Uranus floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pushing off on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in little pliés, her heart full of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the gas lanterns, surfing on Uranus’s stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung across a round green paper lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested. Everything glowing with its own internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of every thing— and yet everything still and motionless forever, except for them, the intruders, the observers. Zo danced.