That was the Plateau, magnificent in itself. But the Colorado River had just cut through the whole thing, as clean as a knife gouge, dynamic and unstable. And the complex channels and incisions had exposed, in the outcrops and walls, the layers of sedimentary rocks laid down in that vanished ocean. Looking around the fragmented landscape, her gaze could complete the lines of distinct layers, invisibly spanning the Canyon’s channels. And she could see where the eroding river waters had met stiffer resistance, from the older, deeper rocks; scree piles flared against the base of surviving plugs.

It was inhumanly vast. And yet she could see that this was a canyon, a channel cut into the softly swelling Earth. If this had been the Valles Marineris on Mars — compared to which the Canyon would have been just a tributary — it would have been so huge as to make its nature incomprehensible, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so striking. It was as if it had been placed here, this great wound in the land, with exactly the right dimensions to force a response from the human soul.

As the sun set, the colours in the Canyon walls turned to gold. The sky up to the zenith was already stained pink. The sun was scattering light from haze layers fifteen or twenty miles above sea level. LIDAR measurements, pulsed laser beams scattered from the haze layers, had confirmed that the Edinburgh event had spread dust and aerosol particles throughout the stratosphere, all across the middle latitudes of Earth.

The ozone layer was taking a beating from the chlorine injected up there. The meteorologists and climatologists and oceanographers were having fun predicting the impact on the atmosphere’s heat balance. A global cooling of maybe a half a degree. Acid rain, from all the sulphuric acid being created up there. Disruption to El Niño, in the equatorial Pacific, over the coming summer and fall.

Droughts in Australia. Heavy rain and waves on the coast of California. And so on.

And this, she thought, is evidently just the start.

The first star was already out, low in the east. Maybe it was Jupiter.

She knew if she dragged herself out of bed in the morning, she would see Venus, still bright enough to dazzle and cast shadows, surrounded by a halo from all the shit in the upper atmosphere.

Beautiful. Deadly.