“Dusty.”

Luru barked laughter.

Nilis sighed. “I suppose that sums it up. On Mars there is dust everywhere. It piles up in the craters; it covers these great Tharsis mountains. Even the air is full of it—scattering the light, whipping itself into murky storms . . .”

Luru Parz said, “And Mars is old. The oldest landscapes on Earth would be among the youngest on Mars. But of course even the old can hide a few surprises.” She was still staring at Pirius.

Pirius dropped his gaze, his cheeks hot. But he wasn’t much interested in comparative planetology; born in a tube and raised in a box, he had no preconceptions about how planets were supposed to work. “So where’s the big mountain?”

Nilis said, “Ensign, you’re standing on it. Olympus is a shield volcano, seven hundred kilometers across at its base, rising some twenty-five kilometers above the mean level. Its caldera juts out of the atmosphere! But the whole thing’s so vast it dwarfs human perspectives.”

Luru was watching him again. “Disappointed, Ensign? Everything about Mars seems to disappoint. But before spaceflight, Mars was the only world whose surface was visible from Earth, save for the unchanging Moon. And it was the repository of a million dreams—wasn’t it, Commissary? We even dreamed of making Mars like Earth. Of course, it’s technically possible. Can you see why it was never done?”

Pirius glanced around at the worn landscape, the dust-choked sky. “Why bother? If you want to make an Earth there are better candidates.”

“Yes,” Nilis said sadly. “By the time we had the capability to terraform, we had already found other Earths. Nobody could be bothered with Mars. What an irony! And so Mars was bypassed. This is very ancient stuff, Pirius. But I sometimes wonder if something of those lost dreams still lingers in the thin air of Mars, an ineradicable whiff of disappointment that makes Martians as dull as they are today.”

“We aren’t here to dream of the past,” Pirius said.

Luru Parz laughed. “Well spoken, young soldier! All this talk of pre-Coalition fantasies is of course non-Doctrinal. Let’s get on with it.” With a flourish she gestured at the Archive hatch.

The great door began to swing open. The thin air brought only the faintest of sighs to Pirius’s ears. A semitransparent tube snaked out of the hatchway and nuzzled against the hull of the flitter.

“Don’t forget your face masks,” Luru Parz said. She snapped her fingers and disappeared into a cloud of scattering pixels.

The woman smiled at them, though the gaze of her pale gray eyes slid away from their faces. “My name is Maruc. I am an Interface Specialist.”

Pirius and Nilis had climbed down a metal-runged ladder into a kind of antechamber, roughly cut from the rock. They faced this Maruc, their mouths and noses hidden by snug semisentient masks. It had been made clear that though the air in the Archive was breathable, such masks were to be worn at all times; nobody had explained why to Pirius, but he wasn’t in the habit of asking such questions.