“What! You're kidding! Where?”
“Over there, behind that rock.”
Behind the rock is Stephan, relieving himself. “Don't come over here!”
“You liar,” Arthur says.
“It must have slipped off. I think a Weddell fox was chasing it.”
“You're kidding!”
“Yes.”
Eileen: “Let's switch to a private band. I can't hear you over all the rest."
Roger: “Okay. Band 33.”
“Why that one?”
“Ah—” It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of weird fact his memory will pop up with. “It may be our private band from our first hike together.”
She laughs. They spend the afternoon behind the others, talking.
One morning Roger wakes early, just after mirror dawn. The dull horizontal rays of the quartet of parhelia light their tent. Roger turns his head, looks past his pillow, through the tent's clear floor. Thin soil over rock, a couple of meters below. He sits up; the floor gives a little, like a gel bed. He walks over the soft plastic slowly so that he will not bounce any of the others, who are sleeping out where the cap of the roof meets the gills of the floor. The tent really does resemble a big clear mushroom; Roger descends clear steps in the side of the stalk to get to the lavatory, located down in what would be the mushroom's volva. Emerging he finds a sleepy Eileen sponging down in the little bath next to the air compressor and regulator. “Good morning,” she says. “Here, will you get my back?"
She hands him the sponge, turns around. Vigorously he rubs down the hard muscles of her back, feeling a thrill of sensual interest. That slope, where back becomes bottom: beautiful.
She looks over her shoulder: “I think I'm probably clean now.”
“Ah.” He grins. “Maybe so.” He gives her the sponge. “I'm going for a walk before breakfast.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Roger dresses, goes through the lock, walks over to the head of the meadow they are camped by: a surarctic meadow, covered with moss and lichen, and dotted with mutated edelweiss and saxifrage. A light frost coats everything in a sparkling blanket of white, and Roger feels his boots crunch as he walks.
Movement catches his eye and he stops to observe a white-furred mouse hare, dragging a loose root back to its hole. There is a flash and flutter, and a snow finch lands in the hole's entrance. The tiny hare looks up from its work, chatters at the finch, nudges past it with its load. The finch does its bird thing, head shifting instantaneously from one position to the next and then freezing in place. It follows the hare into the hole. Roger has heard of this, but he has never seen it. The hare scampers out, looking for more food. The finch appears, its head snaps from one position to the next. An instant swivel and it is staring at Roger. It flies over to the scampering hare, dive-bombs it, flies off. The hare has disappeared down another hole.
Roger crosses the ice stream in the meadow, crunches up the bank. There beside a waist-high rock is an odd pure white mass, with a white sphere at the center of it. He leans over to inspect it. Slides a gloved finger over it. Some kind of ice, apparently. Unusual-looking.
The sun rises and a flood of yellow light washes over the land. The yellowish white half globe of ice at his feet looks slick. It quivers; Roger steps back. The ice is shaking free of the rock wall. The middle of the bulge cracks. A beak stabs out of the globe, breaks it open. Busy little head in there. Blue feathers, long crooked black beak, beady little black eyes. “An egg?” Roger says. But the pieces are definitely ice—he can make them melt between his gloved fingers, and feel their coldness. The bird (though its legs and breast seem to be furred, and its wings stubby, and its beak sort of fanged) staggers out of the white bubble and shakes itself like a dog throwing off water, although it looks dry. Apparently the ice is some sort of insulation—a home for the night, or no—for the winter, no doubt. Yes. Formed of spittle or something, walling off the mouth of a shallow cave. Roger has never heard of such a thing, and he watches openmouthed as the bird-thing takes a few running steps and glides away.
A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.
That afternoon they hike out of the realm even of the surarctic meadow. No more ground cover, no more flowers, no more small animals. Nothing now but cracks filled with struggling moss, and great mats of otoo lichen. Sometimes it is as if they walk on a thin carpet of yellow, green, red, black—splotches of color like those seen in the orbicular jasper, spread out as far as they can see in every direction, a carpet crunchy with frost in the mornings, a bit damp in the midday sun, a carpet crazed and parti-colored. “Amazing stuff,” Hans mutters, poking at it with a finger. “Half our oxygen is being made by this wonderful symbiosis. . ."