But they only stayed a day, and then they drove Coyote’s car into a big elevator, and sat in it for an hour. When Coyote drove out the opposite door they were on top of the rugged plateau that lay behind Promethei Rupes. And here Nirgal was once again shocked. When they had been down at Ray’s Lookout, the great cliff had formed a limit to what they could see, and he had been able to comprehend it. But on top of the cliff, looking back down, the distances were so great that Nirgal could not grasp what he saw. It was nothing but a blurry vertiginous mass of blobs and patches of color— white, purple, brown, tan, rust, white; it made him queasy. “Storm coming in,” Coyote said, and suddenly Nirgal saw that the colors above them were a fleet of tall solid clouds, sailing through a violet sky with the sun well to the west— the clouds whitish above and infinitely lobed, but dark gray on their bottoms. These cloud bottoms were closer to their heads than the ground of the basin, and they were level, as if rolling over a transparent floor. The world below was nothing so even, mottled tan and chocolate— ah, those were the shadows of the clouds, visibly moving. And that white crescent out in the middle of things was the polar cap! They could see all the way home! Recognizing the ice gave him the final bit of perspective needed to make sense of things, and the blobs of color stabilized into a bumpy uneven ringed landscape, mottled by moving cloud shadows.

This dizzying act of cognition had only taken Nirgal a few seconds, but when he finished he saw that Coyote was watching him with a big grin.

“Just how far can we see, Coyote? How many kilometers?”

Coyote only cackled. “Ask Big Man, boy. Or figure it out for yourself! What, three hundred k? Something like that. A hop and a jump for the big one. A thousand empires for the little ones.”

“I want to run it.”

“I’m sure you do. Oh, look, look! There— from the clouds over the ice cap. Lightning, see it? Those little flickers are lightning.”

And there they were, bright threads of light, appearing and disappearing soundlessly, one or two every few seconds, connecting black clouds with white ground. He was seeing lightning at last, with his own eyes. The white world sparking into the green, jolting it. “There’s nothing like a big storm,” Coyote was saying. “Nothing like it. Oh to be out in the wind! We made that storm, boy. Although I think I could make an even bigger one.”