The slope was long and steep, and the lights her husband had installed made it stand out sharply against the scattered illumination of Pitville and the much dimmer background hills of the Solid Ocean. Janice Cedar knew that she should have been frightened. In theory, height should scare anyone except, of course, a Crotonite; in practice, after a Common Year under Habranha’s gravity, she could lean over the edge of a hundred-meter ice ridge without a qualm. She just wasn’t being pulled hard enough downward to affect her emotions. Her husband and the few other Erthumoi on the little world had the same trouble.

It took a lot of the fun out of skiing. Even armor full of diving fluid, which made most amusements either less fun or practically impossible, merely increased her inertia enough to make the wind less challenging.

She was able to push off and start accelerating, if one could really call it that, down the ramp without feeling her heart speed up at all. What little thrill the sport could furnish on this world would come a little later.

Her husband Hugh and their supervisor Ged Harrar stood watching her and waiting for their turns; Janice had wished briefly, before pushing off, that she had the Naxian ability to read emotion. The Assistant Director was a Samian, probably no more objective than the average Erthumoi, and she felt quite mystified why someone with no real body of his own, by her standards, should be interested in an Erthumoi sport. His stated reason might be true, but it had left her unconvinced. Barrar had admitted that the Cedars presumably knew what they were doing when they slid around on narrow boards in search of “fun,” and that this might well be worth doing for morale, but that he couldn’t really feel the point.