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Out there now was a little group of sunwalkers, trudging patiently west. Little silver figures reminiscent of Inspector Genette, disappearing over the horizon. They would walk for a spell and then lie down in carts or travois to sleep while being pulled along by the others. Walking together, pulling sleeping people along-how beautiful the sense of trust and care, the playful handing over of your life to strangers-part of being Mercurial. For a long time it had been all she had needed in the way of company. That and her city.

She got to the bottom of the ledges and came onto the flat rubble plain of Tricrena Albedo. Here the trail disappeared, because any way was equally good. Here she could run into the night, gain ground on the dawn, stand on Yes Tor and watch the highest points of ground light like candles, then burn downward from their brilliant tips. To walk in the dawn perpetually, ah, so devoutly to be wished! Who could stand high noon or the wane of day? Leave the dawn behind, run back into the night. Forestall the day-who knew what it would bring? She had no plan, no idea.

For a long time she ran and didn’t think much beyond the rock under her, the lay of the land. Nothing more needed. They could tear the guts out of Mercury, take out every valuable mineral in it, and the surface would not look one whit different. It was already a clinker of a world. The battered face of an old friend. Rock scattered everywhere, rubble, kipple, ejecta. The blanket of dust. Gold in them thar hills. But friends talk. I want to be able to talk to someone and have it mean something to me. I want to hear things that interest me, that surprise me, no matter how impossible I am to surprise. Except in truth I am so easily surprised. How could it be that someone was not there to surprise someone so easily surprised.

The saturnine person. What if there was a person you could depend on, someone who was steady, reliable, predictable, resolute; decisive after due thought; generous; kind. Phlegmatic, and yet prone to little gusts of enthusiasm, usually aesthetic pleasures of one sort or other. Happy in danger, a little drunk in danger. Someone capable of loving a landscape. Someone who liked to watch animals and chase them for a look. Someone who looked at her as if figuring her out was an interesting project and not just a problem to be solved, or part of the backdrop in some other more important drama. And looked at everyone else met with that same regard. Often with a little smile that seemed to express pleasure in the company shared. A reserved but friendly manner. If all our acquaintances were characterized in language only, we would look like collectors of contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons. For every kind of this there was a balance of that. People cut both ways. In someone like him a little cheery laugh began to seem like boisterousness.

She came to one of her most famous goldsworthies, from a time when she had been experimenting with setting slugs of lead and other metals that would melt in the heat of the day on slopes she had cut with channels, so that over the course of a brightside crossing, the slugs of lead or copper or tin would melt into the channels and form pictures or letters, always stretched such that they looked upright to observers on a viewing platform atop a nearby cliff. For this sculpture north of Mahler she had channeled two sets of letters carefully overlapping and intersecting each other, with gates for one word or other equally matched in their weakness. As the metal pigs melted in the sun they would run against the gates until one gate or other would fail, thus draining the reservoir of its molten contents. So, depending on what happened in the gates, the resulting letters of this installation would have spelled either “LIVE” or “DIE.” It was the last of a series of antinomies she had put to the landscape and the sun in those years, including all the seven virtues and vices overlapped, wrestling with each other like Jacob with God. So far the verdict was out; the process looked random. But in this particular instance both gates had broken at once, resulting in a flow insufficient to fill all the channels; some had filled preferentially over others, and the result, made of a bright swirl of silver and copper, had been the word “LIE.”

Now she stood looking at it from the viewing platform. Even at the time it had struck her as apt; and now it was like a command. One could still see the empty troughs of the two overlaid words, the empty D and V; but certainly the word “LIE,” glowing metallically in the dark land, dominated. Very apt indeed. People said she must have arranged it that way on purpose, but she hadn’t; the dams had been equal, their simultaneous break an act of their own, the letters filled a matter of the first surge, a clinamen. But it told the truth in some sense. They didn’t live or die-they did both-and so lied. You lie and then you lie. So get on with it.