Eventually the whole group walked up a spiraling ridge, above the—1 contour to a knoll just north of the station, where they were high enough to get a view of the ice on the western horizon. The airport lay below them, reminding Maya of Underhill or the Antarctic stations— unplanned, unstructured, with no sense at all of the island town that was sure to come. The youngsters as they stepped gracefully over the rocks speculated about what that town would look like— a seaside resort, they were sure, every hectare built up or gardened, with boat harbors in every little indentation of the shoreline, and palm trees, beaches, pavilions. . . . Maya closed her eyes and tried to imagine what the young ones were describing— opened them again, to see rock and sand and scrubby little plants. Nothing had come to her mind. Whatever the future brought would be a surprise to her— she could form no image of it, it was a kind of jamais vu, pressing at the present. A sudden premonition of death washed over her, and she struggled to shrug it off. No one could imagine the future. A blank there in her mind meant nothing; it was normal. It was only the presence of Sax that was disturbing her, reminding her of things she could not afford to think of. No, it was a blessing that the future was blank. The freedom from déjà vu. An extraordinary blessing.

Sax trailed behind, looking off at the basin below them.

• • •

The next day they climbed back in the Three Diamonds and took to the air again and floated southeast, until the captain dropped an anchor line just to the west of the Zea Dorsa. It had been quite a while since Maya had driven out onto them with Diana and her friends, and now the ridges were no more than skinny rock peninsulas, extending out into the shattered ice toward Minus One, and diving under the ice one after the next— all except for the largest one, which was still an unbroken ridge, dividing two rough ice masses, the western ice mass clearly about two hundred meters lower than the eastern one. This, Diana said, was the final line of land connecting Minus One and the basin rim. When this isthmus was overwhelmed, the central rise would be an actual island.