Irene was fully equipped with waldos in her fingers and arms and legs; she needed the rope only to steady herself. Like a fly she crept downwards, clinging to the rough face of the rock. Once she slipped, but by the time David could clutch convulsively at the rope she was already clasped to another microscopic cranny.

She stopped on a narrow ledge, excavated handholds and footholds, reached over to the spire. The silver helmet wobbled loosely as she touched it. She paused a moment, her head bowed as if genuflecting; then she pulled the smashed form into her arms.

A twenty-first century Pieta. David knelt a meter back from the rim, his stomach yawning, dizzy. The vertigo. He'd never before left the rover. Sitting in the rover he'd felt safe. But Andrei had climbed out and walked to the edge, enjoying the view. Too close to the edge; the footprints, the red gash where the sand had given way, were painfully apparent. If only he -- if only -- what could he ever have done? Andrei, no, not you too.

Night gathered in the depths of the Labyrinth. The wind shrieked down the galleries, spinning swirls of dust upward into the dusk. Irene was moving, carrying the carbon-based husk of what had one been a life form. Numbly David pulled on the rope, helped her to wrestle her burden over the edge, placed it with less reverence than despair in the rover. Behind the scratched visor Andrei's eyes, a piercing blue, stared stubbornly upwards into the sky, but this sky did not reflect their color.

"Come on," David said. He snapped his teeth shut on the words. They drove in silence back to the shelter, and the shadows of night followed close behind them.

David threw himself down in the chair. He was so tired even his bones ached. His geologist's pick seemed to be embedded in his head, its point caught in his throat, choking him. He reached desperately for his box of disks and inserted one into the player.

It hadn't taken long. The emergency call to Chryse Base, the shuttlecraft's landing lights flaring through the portholes, the poor, weak, smashed human form bundled away. "Yeah, I'll stay here," he told the commander. "Don't have anywhere else to go."

Music. Soothing music. Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending." Ascending, perhaps, like a human soul with wings into the blue vault of Earth's heaven -- carbon-based life forms died too easily, too easily.

He noticed that Irene was bringing in the sample containers from the rover. The ones Andrei had filled. She set them down, glanced at David, reached for the chess set. "You don't play, do you?" she murmured.

"No." The music filled the labyrinth of his consciousness; a violin, a clean melodic line spiraling upwards, upwards, until its clarity burst like a bubble and the orchestra answered, caught it, brought it back down to human grief.

"You don't feel a thing, do you?"

"Marian, how..."

"You could get blood from a stone easier than I could get some emotion out of you, a tear, for God's sake, one lousy tear."

"Marian, please..."

It hurts too much, it hurts -- the purity of the music, the violin floating effortlessly up -- the orchestra embracing it.

Irene opened the box, picked out a pawn, held it a moment and then crushed it to powder in her hydraulically tightened fist.