For the final work on the treatment Sax called up Bao Shuyo and asked her to come join them in Acheron for some consulations. Again, her work was much more theoretical, and very much more fine-grained, but after her work with the fusion group in Da Vinci, he had a healthy respect for her ability to help in any problem that involved quantum gravity and the ultramicrostructure of matter. Just to have her run through what they had done and comment on it would be valuable, he was sure.

Unfortunately, Bao’s obligations in Da Vinci were heavy, as they had been ever since her much-heralded return from Dorsa Brevia. Sax was put in the unusual position of manipulating his home labs in order to extricate one of their best theorists, but he did it without compunction, getting Bela’s help to put the arm on the current administration, to twist their arms as hard as ever he could. “Ka, Sax,” Bela exclaimed during one call, “I never would have guessed that you would turn out to be such a fierce headhunter.”

“It’s my own head I’m hunting,” Sax replied.

5

Usually tracking someone down was as simple as contacting their wristpad, and looking to see where the person was. Ann’s wristpad, however, had been left on the rim of the Olympus Mons caldera, at the descent station near the festival grounds at Crater Zp. This struck Sax as peculiar, since they had worn wristpads of some kind or another since the very beginning in Underhill, Ann as much as anyone, as he recalled. Hadn’t she? He called Peter to ask, but Peter did not know, of course, having been born well after the Underhill years. In any case, to go without a wristpad now was to borrow a behavior from the neoprimitive nomads wandering the canyonlands and the North Sea coast— not a lifestyle he would have expected Ann to take any interest in. One couldn’t live in anything like the Paleolithic style up on Olympus Mons, indeed it required the kind of continuous technological support that was no longer necessary in most places, with wristpads an integral part of it. Perhaps she only wanted to get away. Peter didn’t know.

But he did know how to contact her: “You have to go in and find her.”

At Sax’s expression he laughed. “It isn’t so bad. There’s only a couple hundred people in the caldera, and when they’re not staying in one of their huts, they’re on the cliff walls.”

“She’s become a climber?”

“Yes.”

“She climbs for— for recreation?”

“She climbs. Don’t ask me why.”

“So I just go look at all the cliffs?”

“That’s how I had to do it when Marion died.”

• • •