They came out of the Medusa’s canyon before dawn, and stopped to hide through the day, and chart their next move. Beyond Burton Crater, which lay before them, the Memnonia Fossae cut the land east to west for hundreds of kilometers, blocking their way south. They had to go west, toward Williams and Ejriksson craters, then south again toward Columbus Crater, and after that weave through a narrow gap in the Sirenum Fossae farther south— and so on. Doing a continuous dance around craters, cracks, escarpments, and hollows. The southern highlands were extremely rough compared to the smooth long vistas of the north— Art commented on the difference, and Coyote said irritably, “It’s a planet, man. There’s all kind of land.”

Every day they woke to an alarm set for an hour before sunset, and spent the last light of day eating a spare breakfast, and watching the garish alpenglow colors spread with the shadows over the rugged landscape. Then every night they drove, without ever being able to use the autopilot, navigating the broken terrain kilometer by kilometer. Nirgal and Art took the graveyard shift together on most nights, and continued their long conversations. Then as the stars faded, and dawn’s pure violet light stained the eastern sky, they found places where the boulder car would be inconspicuous— in this latitude the work of a moment, almost just a matter of stopping, as Art said— and ate a leisurely supper, watching the sharp blast of sunrise and its sudden creation of great fields of shadow. A couple of hours later, after a planning session, and occasional trips out, they would darken the windshield, and sleep through the day.

At the end of another long night’s conversation about their respective childhoods, Nirgal said, “I suppose it wasn’t until Sabishii that I realized that Zygote was . . .”

“Unusual?” Coyote said from his sleeping mat behind them. “Unique? Bizarre? Hirokolike?”

Nirgal was not surprised to discover that Coyote was awake; the old man slept poorly, and often muttered a dreamy commentary to Nirgal and Art’s narrative, which they generally ignored, as he was mostly asleep. But now Nirgal said, “Zygote reflects Hiroko, I think. She’s very inward.”

“Ha,” Coyote said. “She didn’t use to be.”

“When was that?” Art pounced, swiveling in his chair to include Coyote in their little circle of talk.

“Oh, back before the beginning,” Coyote said. “In prehistoric times, back on Earth.”

“Is that when you met her?”

Coyote grunted affirmatively.

This was where he always stopped, when he was talking to Nirgal. But now with Art there, with just the three of them awake in all the world, in a little circle lit by the infrared imager, Coyote’s thin crooked face had a different expression than its usual mulish dismissal, and Art leaned over him and said firmly, “So just how did you get to Mars, anyway?”