Louis Wu’s apartment was twelve stories up the side of the north face of the canyon. Night shadowed the canyon floor as he stepped outside, but the southern face still glowed with daylight. Hanging gardens of native lichen dripped from the rim. Old elevators were silver threads standing miles high against the cut stone. Transfer booths had made these obsolete for travel, but tourists still used them for the view.

The balcony overlooked the belt of parkland that ran down the center of the island. The vegetation had the wild look of a kzinti hunting park, with pink and orange blended into the imported terrestrial biosphere. Kzinti life was common throughout the canyon.

There were as many kzinti as human tourists down there. The kzinti. males looked like fat orange cats walking on their hind legs… almost. But their ears flared like pink Chinese parasols, and their tails were nude and pink, and their straight legs and big hands marked them as toolmakers. They stood eight feet tall, and though they scrupulously avoided bumping human tourists, carefully tended claws slid out above black fingertips if a human passed too close. Reflex. Maybe.

Sometimes Louis wondered what impulse brought them back to a world once theirs. Some might have ancestors here, alive in frozen time in the domes buried beneath this lava island. One day they’d have to be dug up…

There were so many things he hadn’t done on Canyon, because the wire was always calling. Men and kzinti had climbed those sheer cliffs for sport, in the low gravity.

Well, he would have one last chance to try that. It was one of his three routes out. The second was the elevators; the third, a transfer booth to the Lichen Gardens. He’d never seen them.

Then overland in a pressure suit light enough to fold into a large briefcase.

On the surface of Canyon there were mines, and there was a large, indifferently tended preserve for the surviving varieties of Canyon lichen.