# # #

They glissaded down the steep face of the dune on their boot heels.  At the bottom Nadia gave Ann an impulsive hug:  "Oh Ann, I don't know how to thank you for that."  Even through the tinted faceplates she could see Ann grin.  A rare sight.

# # #

After that things looked different to Nadia.  Oh she knew it was in herself, that it was a matter of paying attention in a new way, of looking.  But the landscape conspired in this sensation, feeding her new attentiveness; because the very next day they left the black dunes, and drove on to what her companions called layered or laminate terrain.  This was the region of flat sand that in winter would lie under the CO2 skirt of the polar cap.  Now in midsummer it lay revealed, a landscape made entirely of curvilinear patterns.  They drove up broad flat washes of yellow sand that were bounded by long sinuous flat-topped plateaus; the sides of the plateaus were stepped and benched, laminated both finely and grossly, looking like wood that had been cut and polished to show a handsome grain.  None of them had ever seen any land remotely like it, and they spent the mornings taking samples and borings, and hiking around in a loping martian ballet, talking a blue streak, Nadia as excited as any of them.  Ann explained to her that each winter's frost caught a lamina on the surface.  Then wind erosion had cut arroyos, and stripped away at their sides, and each strata was stripped back farther than the one below it, so that the arroyo walls consisted of hundreds of narrow terraces.  "It's like the land is a contour map of itself," Simon said.

They drove during the days, and went out every evening, in purply dusks that lasted until just before midnight.  They drilled borings, and came up with cores that were gritty and icy, laminated for as far down as they could drill.  One evening Nadia was climbing with Ann up a series of parallel terraces, half-listening to her explain about the precession of aphelion and perihelion, when she looked back across the arroyo and saw that it was glowing like lemons and apricots in the evening light, and that above the arroyo were pale green lenticular clouds, mimicking perfectly the terrain's French curves.   "Look!" she exclaimed.

Ann looked back and saw it, and was still.  They watched the low banded clouds float overhead.

Finally a dinner call from the rovers brought them back.  And walking down over the contoured terraces of sand, Nadia knew that she had changed-that, or else the planet was getting much more strange and beautiful as they traveled north.  Or both.

# # #

They rolled over flat terraces of yellow sand, sand so fine and hard and clear of rocks that they could go at full speed, slowing down only to shift up or down from one bench to another.  Occasionally the rounded slope between terraces gave them some trouble, and once or twice they even had to backtrack to find a way.  But usually a route north could be found without difficulty.