So Pirius stepped out onto the surface of yet another world. Sol was halfway up the sky, a diamond of light.

He took a few experimental steps. Gravity was only a few percent of standard. The ice crunched, compressing, but the fractured surface supported his weight. Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. He made out patterns, dimly, in the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing up around his footsteps.

The group began to climb the shallow ridge. There were five of them out on the ice, if you included Nilis. Draq led the way, and Pirius and Nilis followed, with two other Plutinos, including Mara, who walked with Pirius. Nilis floated serenely a few centimeters above the ice, barefoot and without so much as a face mask, once more blithely ignoring all Virtual protocols. It was crassly discourteous, Pirius thought, irritated. But the Plutinos were too polite, or too cowed, to mention it.

Where the ground was steeper, the frost covering had slipped away. The “bedrock” here was water ice, but ice so cold it was hard as granite on Earth, and Pirius thought he could feel its chill through the heated soles of his boots. But it wasn’t slippery; at Pluto’s temperatures even the heat his suit leaked wasn’t sufficient to melt the surface.

And when Pirius stepped onto the bare ice, he thought he heard music. He stopped, surprised. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization he could feel in his chest. It was as if he heard the frozen planet’s beating heart.

Mara smiled. “Wait and see,” she said.

They reached the shallow breast of the ridge. Pirius saw now that the ridge was one of a line of shallow, eroded hills that circled a basin. It was a crater, he realized, but clearly a very ancient one. Though the floor was cracked and tumbled, its unevenness was worn down almost to smoothness. Over perhaps billions of years, the remnants of the great scar had sublimated away, the icy hillocks of its rim relaxed to shallowness, and the invisible hail of cosmic rays had battered at the crust, turning it blood red, like the ice of Port Sol.

And Pirius saw what he had been brought to witness. On the floor of this palimpsest of a crater nestled a city.

At first all Pirius could make out was a pale, scattered sparkle, as if stars from the silent sky had fallen down to the ice. Then he realized he was seeing the reflections of the stars, returned from silvered forms that nestled on the crater floor.