“This isn’t her kind of place.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe she hasn’t heard this is your private rock garden.”

But Ann simply waved her away.

6

Back to Mars, the red planet, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The only real world.

Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days, decelerated; and in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on the elevator, going down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked out at Echus, there to the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North Sea. So good to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn’t leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn’t as deep as Prospero’s Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again.