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eyes–or might as well have been–peering directly into the dense Venusian atmosphere through diamond lenses that took in a 360-degree field of view. Its six jointed legs and claws were hers–even the two that grew out of her midsection–and its stainless steel skin and titanium skeleton were hers. The nuclear reactor–quite realistically palpable in Sparta’s abdomen–generated the warmth of a good turkey dinner.
    The real woman, small and thin-boned, her muscles those of a dancer, sat forward in the vehicle inside a double sphere of titanium aluminide, a sort of diving bell with one overhead hatch and no windows. But the computer-generated Artificial Reality in which she was immersed persuaded her that she was a naked creature, to this planet born. To move, she willed herself to move. Inside her opaque helmet, laser beams tracked her eye movements. Microscopic strain gauges embedded in the skintight control suit monitored and magnified her body’s motions. Surround-sound, retinal projection, and the suit’s orthotactic fabric–200 pressure transducers, a hundred heat-exchange elements, a thousand chemical synapses per square centimeter– fed back a vivid sense of the world outside.
    Inevitably, something was lost in the translation. For the fragile human female inside the bell, the outside temperature–almost 750 degrees Kelvin, sufficient to soften type metal–was scaled down to that of a balmy morning. The air outside was almost pure carbon dioxide, laced with a few rare gases, but inside the bell she breathed a familiar oxygen-nitrogen mix. The outside pressure–ninety Earth atmospheres, enough to crush a submarine–was rendered neutral. Even the light-bending distortion of the thick atmosphere had been corrected, so that her human visual cortex registered a familiar flat world instead of a bowl-shaped one. But its horizon was only a few hundred meters away; if it had not been for her vehicle’s radar and sonar, Sparta would have been traveling blind.
    In twenty minutes she would reach her destination, where the billion-year-old beach ended against the cliffs, and the mouth of an ancient canyon debouched upon the vanished sea. Inside the canyon she would learn if the men in Rover One were dead or alive. . . .
    Venus is an astonishingly round and rocky planet. A sphere almost the size of Earth, its retrograde rotation is a slow 240 Earth days; it shows no noticeable bulge at its equator. Unlike Earth, with its half-dozen floating continents, its cloud-piercing Andes and Himalayas, its mid-ocean ridges and abyssal trenches, most of Venus is as hard and smooth as a billiard ball–
    –with a few prominent exceptions. Ishtar Terra is one. One of the planet’s two “continents,” Ishtar Terra is anchored on its eastern flank by Mount Maxwell, a vast shield volcano higher than Everest. The whole raised mass of land is roughly twice the size of Alaska, and is situated at about the corresponding latitude; its northern and western curves are also belted by mountains, far less spectacular than Maxwell, while most of the continent is taken up by the flat Lakshmi Plateau.
    It was toward the steep southern flanks of the Lakshmi Plateau that Sparta now drove her six-legged rover. The farther and faster Sparta moved, the more confident she felt. Her path took her across a series of shallow impact craters, their steep rims long since melted like putty in the heat. The slope continued to rise, punctuated by traces of wave-cut terraces, remnants of the beach that had continually widened as the planet’s shallow ocean had dried under the heat of a runaway atmospheric greenhouse. As Sparta moved up the beach and crawled over the terraces she moved backward in time, to that era when the ocean had been at its greatest extent, covering all of Venus but for the two small continents and a few scattered islands.
    A volley of immense explosion rattled the pressure bell, and moments later the ground shook violently, throwing the