They ran on battery power, which would not last long. In the dark of the unlit car, the light cast by the white world outside was ghostly. None of them talked, except to discuss the essentials of driving. Coyote was confident that the distance the batteries would take them would be enough to see them home, but they were cutting it awfully fine, and if anything failed, if one of the ice-clogged wheels jammed in its well— they would have to try walking, Nirgal thought. Running. But Spencer and Sax wouldn’t be able to run far.

On the sixth night after the raid on Senzeni Na, however, around the end of the timeslip, the frosty ground ahead became a pure white line, which thickened on the horizon, and then came clear of it: the white cliffs of the southern polar ice cap. “It looks like a wedding cake,” Art said, grinning.

They were almost out of battery power, to the point that the car was slowing down. But Gamete was just a few kilometers clockwise around the polar cap. And so just after dawn, Coyote guided the halting car into the outlying garage in Nadia’s crater rim complex. They walked the last stretch, crunching over new frost in the raw long-shadowed morning light, under the great white overhang of dry ice.

5

Gamete gave Nirgal the same feeling it always did, that he was trying to fit into old clothes that were much too small. But this time Art was there with him, and so the visit had the interest of showing a new friend an old home. Every day Nirgal took him around, explaining features of the place and introducing him to people. As he watched the range of expressions plainly exposed on Art’s face, from surprise to amazement to disbelief, the whole enterprise of Gamete began to strike Nirgal as truly odd. The white ice dome; its winds, mists, birds; the lake; the village, always freezing, weirdly shadowless, its white-and-blue buildings dominated by the crescent of bamboo treehouses . . . it was a strange place. And Art found all of the issei equally amazing; he shook their hands, saying, “I’ve seen you on the vids, very pleased to meet you.” After introductions to Vlad and Ursula, Marina and Iwao, he muttered to Nirgal, “It’s like a wax museum.”

Nirgal took him down to meet Hiroko, and she was her usual benign, distant self, treating Art with about the same reserved friendliness she gave to Nirgal. Mother goddess of the world. . . . They were in her labs, and feeling obscurely annoyed by her, Nirgal took Art by the ectogene tanks, and explained what they were. Art’s eyes went perfectly round when he was surprised, and now they were like big white-and-blue marbles. “They look like refrigerators,” he said, and stared closely at Nirgal. “Was it lonesome?”