“The Holocene.”

And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years of ceaseless wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely rimless, everything stripped at by the relentless winds strata by strata, leaving behind a wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically speaking, but wild, speaking its unimaginable age in polyglot profusion, in rimless craters and etched mesas, dips, hummocks, escarpments, and oh so many blocky pitted rocks.

Often they stopped the rover and walked around. Even small mesas seemed to tower over them. Sax found himself staying near their rover, but nevertheless he came upon all kinds of interesting features. Once he discovered a rover-shaped rock, cracked vertically all the way through. To the left of the block, off to the west, he had a view to a distant horizon, the rocky land out there a smooth yellow glaze. To the right, the waist-high wall of some old fault, pocked as if by cuneiform. Then a sand drift bordered by ankle-high rocks, some of them pyramidal dark basaltic ventifacts, others lighter pitted granulated rocks. There a balanced shattercone, big as any dolmen. There a sand tail. There a crude circle of ejecta, like an almost completely weathered Stonehenge. There a deep snake-shaped hollow— the fragment of a watercourse, perhaps— behind it another gentle rise— then a distant prominence like a lion’s head. The prominence next to it was like the lion’s body.

In the midst of all this stone and sand, plant life was unobtrusive. At least at first. One had to look for it, to pay close attention to color, above all else to green, green in all its shades, but especially its desert shades— sage, olive, khaki, and so on. Nanao and Tariki kept pointing out specimens he hadn’t seen. Closer he looked, and closer again. Once attuned to the pale living colors, which blended so well with the ferric land, they began to jump out from the rust and brown and umber and ocher and black of the rockscape. Hollows and cracks were likely places to see them, and near the shaded patches of snow. The closer he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one high basin, it seemed there were plants tucked everywhere. In that moment he understood; it was all fellfield, the whole Tyrrhena massif.

Then, coating entire rockfaces, or covering the inside areas of drip catchments, were the dayglow greens of certain lichens, and the emerald or dark velvet greens of the mosses. Wet fur.

The diversicolored palette of the lichen array; the dark green of pine needles. Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers. Life’s colors. It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to another, over ruined walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery; a vast ballroom; a number of tiny interlocked chambers; a sitting room. Some rooms held krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch, each plant, each open room, as shaped as any bonsai— and yet effortless.