"Remember this grade?" she asked. Miguel drove the big Cadillac smoothly so that it hardly faltered; but they had babied the Jeep up that rocky hill with its interminable switchbacks, some so narrow that the rear of the car hung far out over the edge as they reversed to ease around the sharp turns.

At the top of the rise they saw the end of Baja laid out like a map: the grey Pacific to their right, and beyond land's end a sharp line where the Pacific waters met the bright blue of the Sea of Cortez . Hills along the shore, and the red tile and palm trees of resort hotels everywhere, green oases on the sandy beaches.

The town of Cabo San Lucas was at the very tip of the peninsula: just beyond it were high, rocky hills, and over them the stormy Pacific. The hills curled around a bay that had once been so lovely Aeneas had cried when he saw it.

He could cry again: the bay was choked with ships, and the pueblo was gone, replaced by rows of town houses, high-bay industrial sheds, a city with the heart and soul of Los Angeles in its days of frantic expansion. And north of Cabo, along the Pacific shore, where the water came in cool and clear, were the reactors: domes fifty meters high, twelve of them, each with its attendant blockhouses and power plants and sea-water ponds where the chemicals of the sea were extracted. There was a vast jungle of insulators and spidery cube towers and finned transformers spewing forth a web of thick cables leading to a line of transmission towers marching inland and northward toward La Paz and ultimately the whole 1600 kilometers to the energy-starved United States.

Laurie Jo moved her head in a sidewise jerk, a peculiar tic to her left ear. She'd done that before, and she saw Aeneas looking at her curiously. "Implant," she said. "I was asking for the time. Miguel, take us to the observation tower."