The music tore his senses into raw, aching shreds. The catch in his throat burst. He bent his head and the tears came unbidden, racked from his eyes by great, gasping sobs -- nothing, nothing, nothing.

A hand touched him, taking his in a gentle grasp. "They didn't give me tear ducts," she said, "and yet I share the sorrow." The curls of her nylon-filament hair shook, trembling like leaves driven before a storm. Her whole body was trembling. Poor silicon-based life-form, having to learn so much. David pulled her up beside him.

His tears were quickly spent, the paroxysm leaving him weak and numb. Her trembling ceased and she lay, eyes closed and lips tight, against his shoulder. The music died away into one last resonance passed from body to body. Some robot, he thought with that faint prick of intuition, she's too much more than a robot. But the luxury of not thinking was seductive, and he surrendered to thoughtlessness.

Soon after dawn the outside sensors registered three dust devils wavering above the Noctis Labyrinthus, the vanguard of a sandstorm. David and Irene barely had time to secure the rover and prepare the heavy-duty filters before a tidal wave of dark crimson dust like dried blood crashed over them. The wind that drove it screamed and sobbed and howled, the proverbial soul in torment.

The work had to be done, so they turned on lights that gleamed oddly pale in the artificial dusk, and worked. Therapy, David explained; Irene nodded as if she understood. His tears had been cathartic, he assured himself; he was calm now, and his thoughts ticked over as quietly as the numbers on the chronometer. But he needed to play disk after disk, pulling the music like a cloak around him, warming the cold kernel of grief in his heart.

That day wore on, and night came, and day again. The harsh blue-gray luminescence of the fluoros left David's eyes raw, slightly unfocussed, like the waving stalks of some sea-creature. No seas here. Just the wind, trying to speak, trying to blot out his music -- Andrei, the child. He botched an oxygen measurement, spat an oath between his teeth, strode into the other room to check on Irene.

She was hunched over a readout, staring expressionlessly at Andrei's still sealed sample cases. With a sigh he leaned over her shoulder to squint at the flickering screen before her.

"Don't get any bright ideas," she said. "Tear ducts aren't the only body parts I'm missing."

David stepped back from her so quickly he almost tripped over his own feet. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You know darn well. Breathing down my neck while I'm trying to work." She extinguished the readout, wrenched the covers from Andrei's sample cases and sent them crashing onto the table.

"It's my work, too. And I've been at it a lot longer than you have. Just because you don't even breathe." He spun away, exasperated. Lord, she was getting to be more like Marian every moment. He had quite a talent, it seemed, for turning perfectly pleasant women into bitches. But this one wasn't a woman, wasn't human. She was a pawn. He was a pawn.

Dust matted the portholes, clogged his throat. The life unit was less a shelter than a trap. David kicked petulantly at a chair, which turned over and dealt his table a resounding blow. The disk player plunged to the floor. The "Liebestod" died, squealing, and the wind laughed hysterically at the window.

"No," David said, too stricken even to swear. Not the music. He couldn't even keep that. "David!" Irene was in the doorway, eyes wide, excited. "Come look at these samples."

He didn't care. He was tired. Maybe the wind was in itself music, calling to him. The Labyrinth, and the embrace of the Minotaur.

"David." She was beside him, her hand on his arm. "I -- I'm sorry I spoke harshly -- I don't know why."

Wearily he looked at her. No, she didn't know. But she did care. The machine cared more than the man. He shook himself, awakening his intellect, and followed her into the lab.

A row of rock samples lay under the light, cores of the everlasting sandstone, layers of orange and pink like a birthday cake. Although these particular samples seemed to have come from a less weathered area. Where was it Andrei had gone -- beyond the second marker in the Labyrinth?

David lifted a small pick and chipped at the largest sample. His eyes focused and he blinked. No, he wasn't seeing it.

He was seeing it. Green. Minute threads of green inside the rock. "I'll be damned," he whispered. "There it is."

"Just like Vishniac predicted sixty years ago," said Irene. "Algae living inside the rock itself, sheltered from the cold, from the germicidal ultraviolet."

Such algae had been discovered in the dry valleys of Antarctica; David had trained for the Mars mission there, where the bleak wastes had seemed so in tune with his mood. But to find it here, to find the first evidence of naturally-evolving extra-terrestrial life...

"I'll be damned," he said. And he grinned in a sudden dry irony. Maybe he had been damned.

Maybe he was a lost soul -- but, but, it was life. "God," he said, not in an expletive but a prayer. "We're not alone. A lousy handful of algae but it's alive, evolving..."

Irene watched, alert; he could almost hear the molecular gates in her mind opening and closing, building a frame, learning. "Algae here. What will we find on Titan? Further?"

"Just wait. There'll be lawsuits into the next century, the leave-it-alone environmentalists against the industrialists who would use this little scrap of green as a genetic base for terraforming." He laughed. "A future, you see? It's a future."

"Yes," she said. "A future. Not alone. I understand."

And, David told himself, she did.