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labors, a deviation locked away in vaults of rock and therefore unable to reveal its vigor. Hence the impression that such places were not usual in nature but, rather, spawning grounds for monstrosities only on the fringe of things. Infrequent exceptions to the statistical rule of chaos.
    In turn, on globes parched like Mars or, like Mercury, immersed in a violent solar wind, the surfaces, due to that rarefied but incessant exhalation from the mother star, were lifeless wastes, since all raised forms were eroded by the fiery heat and reduced to dust that filled the crater basins. It was only in places where eternal, still death reigned, where neither the sieves nor the mills of natural selection were at work, shaping every creature to fit the rigors of survival, that an amazing realm opened up—of compositions of matter that did not imitate anything, that were not controlled by anything, and that went beyond the framework of the human imagination.
    For this reason, the fantastic landscapes of Titan were a shock to the first explorers. People equated order with life, and chaos with a dreary inanimateness. One had to stand on the outer planets—on Titan, the greatest of their moons—to appreciate the full error of this dichotomy-dogma. The strange formations of Titan, whether relatively safe or treacherous, were ordinary rubble heaps of chaos when viewed from a distance and a height. But they did not appear so when one set foot on the soil of this moon. The intense cold of this whole sector of space, in which the Sun shone but gave no heat, proved to be not a throttle but a spur to the creativity of matter. The cold, indeed, slowed the creativity, but in that very slowing gave it an opportunity to display its talent, providing a dimension that was indispensable to a nature untouched by life and unwarmed by sun: time—time on a scale where one million centuries, or two million, was of no significance.
    The raw materials here were the same chemical elements as on Earth. But on Earth they had entered the servitude, so to speak, of biological evolution and only in that context amazed man with subtlety—the subtlety of the complex bondings that combined to form organisms and the interdependent hierarchies of species. It was therefore thought that high complexity was a property not of all matter but only of living matter, and that chaos in the inorganic state produced nothing more than haphazard volcanic spasms, lava flows, rains of sulfurous ash.
    The Roembden Crater had cracked, once, at the northeast on its large circle. Then a glacier of frozen gas crept through the gap. In the following millennia, the glacier retreated, leaving on that furrowed terrain mineral deposits—the delight and vexation of the crystallographers and other, no less dumbfounded scientists. It was indeed a sight to see. The pilot (now operator of a strider) faced a sloping plain ringed by distant mountains and strewn with … with what, exactly? It was as if the gates of unearthly museums had been flung open and the remains of decrepit monsters had been dumped in a cascade of bones. Or were these the aborted, insane blueprints for monsters, each one more fantastic than the last? The shattered fragments of creatures that only some accident had kept from participating in the cycles of life? He saw enormous ribs, or they could have been the skeletons of spiders whose tibiae eagerly gripped blood-speckled, bulbous eggs; mandibles that clung to each other with crystal fangs; the platelike vertebrae of spinal columns, as if spilled out in coin rolls from the bodies of prehistoric reptiles after their decay.
    This eerie scene was best viewed, in all its wealth, from the height of the Digla. The area near Roembden was called, by the people there, the Cemetery—and in fact the landscape seemed a battlefield of ancient struggles, a burial ground that was an exuberant tangle of rotting skeletons. Parvis saw the smooth surfaces of joints that could have emerged