She stumbled over an unseen rock, and a memory shot into her from her youth: one time she and some coworkers had had their truck break down, in the southern Urals in winter. They had had to walk from the outskirts of the abandoned Chelyabinsk-65 to Chelyabinsk-40, over fifty frozen kilometers of devastated Stalinist industrial wasteland— black abandoned factories, broken smoke-stacks, downed fences, gutted trucks . . . all in the snowy frigid winter night, under low clouds. Like something out of a dream it had been, even at the time. She told Maya and Art and Sax about it, her voice hoarse. Her throat hurt, but not as badly as her eyes. They had gotten so used to intercoms, it was funny to have to talk through the air separating them. But she wanted to talk. “I don’t know how I ever could have forgotten that night. But I haven’t thought of it in the longest time. I’d forgotten it. It must have happened, what, a hundred and twenty years ago.”

“This is another one you’ll remember,” Maya said.

They shared brief stories about the coldest they had ever been. The two Russian women could list ten incidents colder than the very coldest experiences Sax or Art could come up with. “How about the hottest?” Art said. “I can win that one. One time I was in a log-cutting contest, in the chainsaw division, and that just comes down to who has the most powerful saw, so I replaced my saw’s engine with one off a Harley-Davidson, and cut the log in under ten seconds. But motorcycle engines are air-cooled, you know, and did my hands get hot!”

They laughed. “Doesn’t count,” Maya declared. “It wasn’t your whole body.”

Fewer stars were visible than before. At first Nadia put it down to the fines in the air, or the trouble with her sanded eyes. But then she looked at her wristpad, and saw it was almost five A.M. Dawn soon. And Libya Station was only a few kilometers away. It was 256° Kelvin.

• • •

They came in at sunrise. People were passing around cups of hot tea that smelled like ambrosia. The station was too crowded to enter, and there were several thousand people waiting outside. But the evacuation had been proceeding smoothly for several hours, organized and run by Vlad and Ursula and a whole crowd of Bogdanovists. Trains were still coming in on all three pistes, from east south and west, and loading up and leaving soon thereafter. And dirigibles were floating in over the horizon. The population of Burroughs was going to be split up immediately— some taken to Elysium, some to Hellas, and farther south to Hiranyagarbha, and Christianopolis— others to the small towns on the way to Sheffield, including Underhill.

• • •