So she went back to the station and got on the train for Echus, and felt the train fly down the piste, off the great cone of Pavonis, down the pure xeriscape of east Tharsis, to Cairo and a Swiss-precision exchange onto the train north to Echus Overlook. The train came in near midnight, and she checked in at the co-op’s hostel and walked over to the Adler, feeling the last of the pandorph buzz through her like the feather in the cap of her happiness, and the whole gang was there as if no time had passed, and they cheered to see her, they all hugged her, singly and severally, they all kissed her, they gave her drinks and asked questions about her trip, and told her about the recent wind conditions, and caressed her in her chair, until quickly it was the hour before dawn and they all trooped down to the ledge and suited up and took off, out into the darkness of the sky and the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of it coming back instantly like breathing or sex, the black mass of the Echus escarpment bulking to the east like the edge of a continent, the dim floor of Echus Chasma so far below— the landscape of her heart, with its dim lowland and high plateau, and the vertiginous cliff between them, and over it all the intense purples of the sky, lavender and mauve in the east, black indigo out to the west, the whole arch lightening and taking on color each second, the stars popping out of existence— high clouds to the west flaring pink— and as several stoops had taken her well below the level of Overlook, she was able to close on the cliff and catch a hard westerly updraft and sail on it, inches over Underlook and then up in a tight gyre, motionless herself and yet cast violently up by the wind, until she burst out of the shadow of the cliff into the raw yellows of the new day, an incredibly joyful combination of the kinetic and the visual, of sense and world, and as she soared up into the clouds she thought, To hell with you, Ann Clayborne— you and the rest of your kind can go on forever about your moral imperatives, your issei ethics, values, goals, strictures, responsibilities, virtues, grand purposes of life, you can pour out those words to the end of time in all their hypocrisy and fear, and still you will never have a feeling like this one, when the grace of mind and body and world are all in perfect consort— you can rant your Calvinist rant until you are blue in the face, what humans should do with their brief lives, as if there were any way to tell for sure, as if you didn’t turn out to be a bunch of cruel bastards in the end— but until you get out here and fly, surf, climb, jump, exert yourself somehow in the risk of space, in the pure grace of the body, you just don’t know, you have no right to speak, you are slaves to your ideas and your hierarchies and so can’t see that there is no higher goal than this, the ultimate purpose of existence, of the cosmos itself: the free play of flight.