The icon in the transit station—two hills enclosed in a bubble—was a simplified depiction of what Cradle actually looked like. Its total inhabitable footprint was a circular zone about two thousand meters in diameter, which put it on about the same scale as downtown Boston or the City of London. This was cleaved by the Vale of the Eves, whose walls had once been nearly vertical. Now this was true only of the bottom-most ten meters or so: a slot that snaked through the bottom of the town like a gully. It became a rust-brown river when there was heavy rain, and so they had maintained an island in the middle of the stream, exactly on the site where Endurance had touched down. Once, it had been possible to go there and touch the little nubs of steel where Eve Dinah had welded the ship into place. These, however, had since been protected under glass domes so that they would not rust, or get worn away by tourists’ fingers. The ship itself was long gone, of course; the survivors had begun dismantling it almost as soon as they had arrived, and what little they hadn’t used was radioactive waste, long since shipped away to carefully tended locations in boneyards.