of the tallest dunes were still in sunlight; the world was a black surface, marred by short scimitar curves of steely gray. Horizon about five kilometers off. Ann was crouching, a scoop of sand in her palm.
“What’s it made of?” Nadia asked.
“Dark solid mineral particles.”
Nadia snorted. “I could have told you that.”
“Not before we got here you couldn’t. It might have been fines aggregated with salts. But it’s bits of rock instead.”
“Why so dark?”
“Volcanic. On Earth sand is mostly quartz, you see, because there’s a lot of granite there. But Mars doesn’t have much granite. These grains are probably volcanic silicates. Obsidian, flint, some garnet. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
She held out a handful of sand for Nadia’s inspection. Perfectly serious of course. Nadia peered through her faceplate at the black grit. “Beautiful,” she said.
They stood and watched the sun set. Their shadows went right out to the eastern horizon. The sky was a dark red, murky and opaque, only slightly lighter in the west over the sun. The clouds Ann had mentioned were bright yellow streaks, very high in the sky. Something in the sand caught at the light, and the dunes were distinctly purplish. The sun was a little gold button, and above it shone two evening stars: Venus, and the Earth.
“They’ve been getting closer every night lately,” Ann said softly. “The conjunction should be really brilliant.”
The sun touched the horizon, and the dune crests faded to shadow. The little button sun sank under the black line to the west. Now the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion. Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain. Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord thrum. Beauty could make you shiver! It was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kind of sex. And this beauty was so strange, so alien. Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her past. But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her head and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in her head. Weight seeped inward from her skin, and she didn’t feel hollow anymore; on the contrary she felt extremely solid, compact, balanced. A little thinking boulder, set spinning like a top.
• • •
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.