Anyhow, such violence felt wrong. This wasn’t her world, after all.

So: hats of leaves, or bark. Maybe they could stuff their suits with grass and lichen to improve insulation. They would have to do some kind of inventory of the vegetation here: investigate what they could eat, what they could use for other purposes, like construction and even medicine…

Thinking, planning, wiping the waxy organic sheen from her face, Benacerraf continued her climb.

At last the gully grew narrower. Looking up, Benacerraf could see she faced maybe ten or fifteen feet of sheer ice, beyond which the land flattened out. She could see tufts of grass-analogue bristling out from the lip of the plateau above her, black and wiry.

It wouldn’t be a difficult climb, she thought. Just a little scary.

She looked down. She’d risen almost all the way out of the mist layer now, she realized. The mist was a lumpy grey-white ocean beneath her, from which thrust this ice cliff. She could make out Rosenberg, as a toiling pink-brown speck in the mist layer, perhaps a hundred feet below her.

She turned again, lodged her fingertips in crevices in the ice, and hauled herself upwards. The low gravity worked in her favor, and the climbing here was actually easier than the slog up the gully.

She reached the top in a few minutes, and dragged herself up over the edge.

The land flattened out here to form a plateau, sharp-edged by this ice cliff. Further off, she could see no sign of further uplands, although a shallow wave-like ridge in the ice hid much of the landscape from her. There was grass growing close to the cliff lip, and some of the swollen mushroom-like things. A layer of thin cirrus cloud coated the eastern sky, stained red by the light of the aged sun.

She peeled open a couple of seams to cool down. She sat at the edge of the cliff, her legs dangling over.

Rosenberg took a further half-hour to reach her. He hauled himself clumsily up over the last lip of rock and threw himself flat against the ice, his arms outspread. His face was coated with a thin frost rime.

“I never thought,” he said, “I’d be so pleased just to be somewhere flat.”

She scraped the frost off his skin with her fingernails. “You’re not a physical kind of guy, are you, Rosenberg?”

“Oh, I’m learning to be. Boy, am I learning.”

She collected some food, mostly mushroom flesh. They drank ice-cold water from a small rivulet nearby, that fed the bigger system that had carved out the gully they’d climbed.

When his breathing had gotten back to normal, Rosenberg pushed himself to his feet. His hands and mouth full of mushroom flesh, he did a slow scan of the world from this new vantage point. He gazed down over the grey, lumpy clouds that covered the lowlands, then turned and looked inland.

He stopped. Even his jaw ceased its chomping.

“Rosenberg? Are you okay?”

He was staring inland, a green light reflecting from his face. “Stand up,” he said. “Stand up and look at this. My God.”

She got to her feet, her legs still aching, and stood alongside him.

The sky to the east, over the interior of this ice continent, had cleared; the cloud layer was breaking up. The sun was a huge blood-red ball, battered and pocked, dominating the orange sky above.

There was a layer of green light at the horizon.

At first she thought it was a smog belt. But it was flat and sharply distinguished, at its upper edge.

It was a roof.

There were tall trees — no, towers — evenly spaced within the green. And the towers were tall, she realized now; they were poking above the horizon, their bases hidden by the curve of the moon.

Some huge form, diamond-shaped, moved between the towers, within the roofed enclosure.

“My God,” said Rosenberg. “I was starting to think I dreamt it. That’s where I was, the first time.”

The first time? “Where?”

“In there. That’s a worldhouse. The last refuge of the old ammonia-based life system. It’s like a greenhouse. Except, colder within than without. In there, the conditions must be as they were when the ammono life was at its peak, when it covered Titan. That’s where they retreated when the sun got too hot, when the ammonia oceans started to boil and the bedrock melted. It must be where these ammono beetles are coming from now.”

“It’s like our CELSS farm.”

“On a gigantic scale… Oh.”

The mist in the air was lifting. And in the east — beyond a horizon obscured by that immense artifact — Saturn was rising.

Saturn was autumn brown, against the green sky. Perhaps a quarter hemisphere showed. Time seemed to have been kind to the huge planet: Benacerraf could make out the familiar bands of cloud, tipped up almost vertically towards the ruined sun, and the splashes of white that marked interior-driven storms…

“The rings,” she said. “Rosenberg, what the hell happened to the rings?”

The planet’s huge face looked denuded, without that narrow, tilted-up ellipse of banded light, the matching, complex shadows in the cloud tops.

Rosenberg said, “They were only chunks of ice, Paula. I guess it just got too hot.” He threw down what was left of his mushroom and dusted off his hands. “Let’s go see what’s over the next ridge.”

He stalked off, eastward. He bounded away, taking big bunny-hops, and was soon fifty yards ahead of her.

His mood had swung to its manic, energetic pole, she thought gloomily.

She followed more sedately, trying not to pine for Saturn’s rings.

The ridge, maybe fifty feet tall, was a pressure wave frozen in the ice, and easy to climb. Rosenberg waited at its crest for her.

From the crest, the landscape seemed to open up, as the horizon receded to the east. The land beyond the ridge was pretty flat, though in places cracked and compressed.

At the foot of the ridge there were beetle ammonos, the first she had seen since leaving the plain. They toiled in complex patterns across the barren ice fields here. They made their way in roughly radial patterns to what looked like a jumble of low hillocks at the center of the plateau, neatly sliding over or around the worst crevasses. That cluster of hills was perhaps five miles from them and a half-mile across, or less. The hills thrust irregularly out of the plain, their contours rounded, as if melted, their facets glimmering in the light of Sol and Saturn.

Glimmering.

Actually, it looked like a downtown.

“Oh, my,” Rosenberg was saying. “Oh, my.”

“That’s artificial,” she breathed. “Isn’t it, Rosenberg? Holy shit. Those aren’t hillocks. They’re buildings. That’s a city.”

“Oh, my.”

They both moved at once, as if some spell had broken. They hurried forward, hopping carelessly down the side of the ridge. Rosenberg led the way, and the pace he set was more a half-run than a fast walk. The ice here was flat and not too badly broken up, and it made for fast progress. Even so, Rosenberg tripped a couple of times.

A part of Benacerraf would have liked to take this a little slower. One bad fall, one twisted ankle — or, worse, a break — could be a catastrophe for both of them.

Part of her felt like that.

The greater part of her soul was with Rosenberg in his desperation, running ahead of the constraints of the ice, running ahead of caution, to the city on the plain.

They ran more frequently into files and clusters of ammonos, as they picked their way earnestly across the ice. Benacerraf, with her residual caution, tried to avoid the ammonos. Not Rosenberg, though: his head was up, and he simply ploughed through the ammonos’ orderly ranks. But they reacted smoothly to him, their files breaking and reforming as he stomped through. It was like, she thought, seeing a column of gigantic ants skirting a boot placed in their path.