Kahra, and Mars itself, struck Pirius as an oddly halfhearted place—a Conurbation without a number, a world whose most interesting ruin was alien, a sparse population of unenthusiastic people. The ancient stasis of this world, which had given up on geological processing about the time the first oceans were pooling on Earth, seemed to have sunk into the minds of the settlers. Little controversy from this small dead world trickled up the chain of command to trouble the councils on Earth. There wasn’t much news on Mars.

The next morning Pirius left Kahra without regret.

From Kahra it was a short hop to Olympus.

Their flitter landed on an uninteresting, gently sloping plain, featureless save for a massive hatchway set in the ground. Nothing else showed of the Secret Archive above the surface of Mars.

But this was, after all, the highest mountain in Sol system. So Pirius asked permission to spend a few minutes out on the surface. He pulled on his skinsuit, inflated the flitter’s blister airlock, and dropped a couple of meters to the Martian ground.

He landed in dust. He broke through a crust of darker, loosely bound material, and sank into thicker material beneath that compacted under his weight. Perhaps that crust was an irradiated mantle, like Port Sol. When he took a step he found the going wasn’t so difficult, but soon his legs and back were stained by the dust, which was fine and clinging. He remembered Torec’s complaints about Moon dust, and how hard that had been to clean off.

The slope was featureless save for a gully a few meters away, cut into the ground. The sky was reddish, too, and the sun was a shrunken yellow-brown circle, still rising on this Martian morning. The light of the more remote sun was diluted, and the shadows it cast, though sharp, were not deep. The only motion was near the horizon, where a narrow pillar, tracking across the ground, seemed to be shorting between ground and sky. Perhaps it was a dust devil. It was rarefied, feeble compared to the mighty meteorological features he had glimpsed on Earth.

All he could see of the works of mankind were the flitter and the white-painted Archive hatch, set in the ground. And he could see no mountain, no mighty summit or precipitous cliffs.

The air shimmered; a Virtual coalesced. It was Luru Parz, appropriately dressed in a skinsuit of her own.

Pirius felt his heart hammering. He had been unable to come to terms with Luru Parz’s revelation that she was effectively immortal, millennia old; it defied his imagination. Standing on this inhuman planet, the most alien thing in his universe was the patient, silent woman before him.

From the flitter the Commissary called, “Luru Parz. I wasn’t expecting you to accompany us.”

“I’m not. Gramm has bent a little, but he won’t allow me anywhere near the planet, let alone into the Archive. He won’t even let me send a Virtual in there. Isn’t that petty?” She winked at Pirius, with a kind of gruesome flirtatiousness. “Still, I thought I should come see you off. What do you think of Mars, Ensign?”