It was a hard thing to drive across such lumpy terrain, and very easy to get lost when out walking, particularly if one’s car looked just like all the other boulders scattered about; particularly if one was distracted. More than once Ann had to find the car by radio signal rather than visual sighting, and sometimes she walked right up to it before recognizing it— and then would wake up, or come to, hands shaking in the aftershock of some forgotten reverie.

The best driving routes were along the low ridges and dikes of exposed bedrock. If these high basalt roads had connected one to the next, it would have been easy. But they commonly were broken by transverse faults, at first no more than line cracks, which then got deeper and wider as one progressed, in sequences like loaves of sliced bread tipping open, until the faults gaped and were filled with rubble and fines, and the dike became nothing but part of a boulder field again.

• • •

She continued north, onto Vastitas Borealis. Acidalia, Borealis: the old names were so strange. She was doing her best never to think, but during the long hours in the car it was sometimes impossible not to. At those times it was less dangerous to read than it was to try staying blank. So she would read randomly in her AI’s library. Often she ended up staring at areological maps, and one evening at sunset after such a session, she looked into this matter of Mars’s names.

It turned out most of them came from Giovanni Schiaparelli. On his telescope maps he had named over a hundred albedo features, most of which were just as illusory as his canali. But when the astronomers of the 1950s had regularized a map of the albedo features everyone could agree on— features that could be photographed— many of Schiaparelli’s names had been retained. It was a tribute to a certain power he had had, a power evocative if not consistent; he had been a classical scholar, and a student of biblical astronomy, and among his names there were Latin, Greek, biblical, and Homeric references, all mixed together. But he had had a good ear, somehow. One proof of his talent was the contrast between his maps and the competing Martian maps of the nineteenth century. A map by an Englishman named Proctor, for instance, had relied on the sketches of a Reverend William Dawes; and so on Proctor’s Mars, which had no recognizable relations even to the standard albedo features, there was a Dawes Continent, a Dawes Ocean, a Dawes Strait, a Dawes Sea, and a Dawes Forked Bay. Also an Airy Sea, a DeLaRue Ocean, and a Beer Sea. Admittedly this last was a tribute to a German named Beer, who had drawn a Mars map even worse than Proctor’s. Still, compared to them Schiaparelli had been a genius.