“This obsession with rock is so pathetic,” Zo said to her on a private band. “To be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world of inert matter, a world that will never surprise you, never do a single thing. So that you won’t be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really.”
A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.
Zo laughed.
“You’re an impertinent girl,” Ann said.
“Yes I am.”
“And stupid as well.”
“That I am not!” Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then she saw Ann’s face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice hissed in the intercom over sharp heavy breaths.
“Don’t ruin the walk,” Ann snapped.
“I was tired of being ignored.”
“So who’s afraid now?”
“Afraid of the boredom.”
Another disgusted hiss. “You’ve been very poorly brought up.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results.”
“Suffer on. I’m the one that got you here, remember.”
“Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart.”
“Everyone’s little to you.”
“Compared to this. . . .” The movement of her helmet showed she had glanced down into the rift.
“This speechless immobility that you’re so safe in.”
“This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other planetessimal collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too. That’s the matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time, understand?”
“I understand, but I don’t care.”
“You don’t think it matters.”
“Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to all this. It’s just an accident of the Big Bang.”
“Oh please,” Ann said. “Nihilism is so ridiculous.”
“Look who’s talking! You’re a nihilist yourself! No meaning or value to life or to your senses— it’s weak nihilism, nihilism for cowards, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“My brave little nihilist.”
“Yes— I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed.”
“Which is?”
“Pleasure. The senses and their input. I’m a sensualist, really. It takes some courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses really roaring. . . .”
“You think you’ve faced pain?”
Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain of broken legs and ribs. “Yes. I have.”
Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps Ann was allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was no great generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. “Do you really think it takes centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase of Hyperion? Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed from the moment you touched Mars. . . .”
“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”
“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who ever lived.”
“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a pretzel.”
“Fuck the rocks.”
“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change.”
Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat glasslike, but otherwise utterly nondescript. “You’re obsessed,” she said.
“Yes. But I like my obsessions.”
• • •
After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence. Over the course of the day they descended to Bottom’s Landing. Now they were a kilometer below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead, Uranus fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo felt herself to be flying. “You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,” she said to all of them, over the common band. “It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”