And so it lay there, as if waiting to be straightened up and put back in place: cylindrical, two stories high, its black bulk encrusted by steel tracks and collars and the like. The tent only covered.a hundred meters or so of it; after that it ran on uncovered, east along the wide rounded plateau of the rim, until it disappeared over the rim’s outer edge, which formed their horizon — they could see nothing of the planet below. But out away from the town they could see better than ever that Pavonis Mons was huge — its rim alone was an impressive expanse, a doughnut of flat land perhaps thirty kilometers wide, from the abrupt inner edge of the caldera to the more gradual drop-off down the volcano’s flanks. Nothing of the rest of Mars could be seen from their vantage point, so it seemed they stood on a high circular ring world, under a dark lavender sky.
Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable, standing alone as if in some version of the Indian rope trick, thin and black and straight as a plumb line dropping down from heaven — visible for only a few tall skyscrapers’ worth of height, at most — and, given the wreckage they stood in, and the immensity of the volcano’s bare rocky peak, as fragile-looking as if it were a single carbon nanotube filament, rather than a bundle of billions of them, and the strongest structure ever made. “This is weird,” Art said, feeling hollow and unsettled.
After their tour of the ruins, Adrienne took them back to a plaza cafe in the middle of the new town, where they had lunch. Here they could have been in the heart of a fashionable district in any town anywhere — it could have been Houston or Tbilisi or Ottawa, in some neighborhood where a lot of noisy construction marked a fresh prosperity. When they went back to their rooms, the subway system was likewise familiar to the eye — and when they got out, the halls of the Praxis floors were those of a fine hotel. All utterly familiar — so much so that it was again a shock to walk into his room and look out the window and see the awesome sight of the caldera — the bare fact of Mars, immense and stony, seeming to exert a kind of vacuum pull on him through the window. And in fact if the windowpane were to break the pressure blowout would certainly suck him immediately into that space; an unlikely eventuality, but the image still gave him an unpleasant thrill. He closed the drapes.
And after that he kept the drapes closed, and tended to stay on the side of his room away from the window. In the mornings he dressed and left the room quickly, and attended orientation meetings run by Adrienne, which were joined by a score or so of new arrivals. After lunching with some of them, he spent his afternoons touring the town, working earnestly on his walking skills. One night he thought to send a coded report off to Fort: On Mars, going through orientation. Sheffield is a nice town. My room has a view. There was no reply.
Adrienne’s orientation took them to a number of Praxis buildings, both in Sheffield and up the east rim, to meet people in the transnational’s Martian operations. Praxis had much more of a presence on Mars than it did in America. During Art’s afternoon walks he tried to gauge the relative strengths of the transnationals, just by the little plates on the sides of the buildings. All the biggest transnats were there — Armscor, Subarashii, Oroco, Mitsubishi, The 7 Swedes, Shellalco, Gentine, and so on — each occupying a complex of buildings, or even entire neighborhoods of the town. Clearly they were all there because of the new elevator, which had made Sheffield once again the most important city on the planet. They were pouring money into the town, building submartian subdivisions, and even entire tent suburbs. The sheer wealth of the transnats was obvious in all the construction — and also, Art thought, in the way people moved: there were a lot of people bouncing around the streets just as clumsily as he was, newcomer businessmen or mining engineers or the like, concentrating with furrowed brow on the act of walking. It was no great trick to pick out the tall young natives, with their catlike coordination; but they were in a distinct minority in Sheffield, and Art wondered if that was true everywhere on Mars.
As for architecture, space under the tent was at a premium, and so the completed buildings were bulky, often cubical, occupying their lots right out to the street and right up to the tent. When all the construction was finished there would only be a network of ten triangular plazas, and the wide boulevards, and the curving park along the rim, to keep the town from being a continuous mass of squat skycrapers, faced with polished stone of various shades of red. It was a city built for business.
And it looked to Art like Praxis was going to get a good share of that business. Subarashii was the general contractor for the elevator, but Praxis was supplying the software as they had for the first elevator, and also some of the cars, and part of the security system. All these allocations, he learned, had been made by a committee called the United Nations Transitional Authority, supposedly part of the UN, but controlled by the transnats; and Praxis had been as aggressive on this committee as any of the others. William Fort might have been interested in bioinfrastructure, but the ordinary kind was obviously not outside Praxis’s field of operations; there were Praxis divisions building water supply systems, train pistes, canyon towns, wind-power generators, and areother-mal plants. The latter two were widely regarded as marginal endeavors, as the new orbiting solar collectors and a fusion plant in Xanthe were turning out so well, not to mention the older generation of integral fast reactors. But local energy sources were the specialty of the Praxis subsidiary Power From Below, and so that was what they did, working hard in the outback.
Praxis’s local salvage subsidiary, the Martian equivalent of Dumpmines, was called Ouroborous, and like Power From Below it was also fairly small. In truth, as the Ouroborous people were quick to tell Art when they met one morning, there was not a large garbage output on Mars; almost everything was recycled or put to use in creating agricultural soil, so each settlement’s dump was really more of a holding facility for miscellaneous materials, awaiting their particular reuse. Ouroborous therefore got its business by finding and collecting the garbage or sewage that was somehow recalcitrant — toxic, or orphaned, or simply inconvenient — and then finding ways to turn it to use.
The Ouroborous team in Sheffield occupied one floor of Praxis’s downtown skyscraper. The company had gotten its start excavating the the old town, before the ruins had been so unceremoniously shoved over the side. A man named Zafir headed the fallen cable salvage project, and he and Adrienne accompanied Art to the train station, where they got on a local train and took a short ride around to the east rim, to a line of suburb tents. One of the tents was the Ouroborous storage facility, and just outside it, among many other vehicles, was a truly gigantic mobile processing factory, called the Beast. The Beast made a SuperRathje look like a compact car — it was a building rather than a vehicle, and almost entirely robotic. Another Beast was already out processing the cable in west Tharsis, and Art was slated to go out and make an on-site inspection of it. So Zafir and a couple of technicians showed him around the inside of the training vehicle, ending up in a wide compartment on the top floor, where there were living quarters for any humans who might be visiting.
Zafir was enthusiastic about what the Beast out on west Tharsis had found. “Of course just recovering the carbon filament and the diamond gel helixes gives us a basic income stream,” he said. “And we are doing well with some brecciated exotics metamorphosed in the final hemisphere of the fall. But what you’ll be interested in are the buckyballs.” Zafir was an expert in these little carbon geodesic spheres called buckminsterfullerenes, and he waxed enthusiastic: “Temperatures and pressures in the west Tharsis zone of the fall turned out to be similar to those used in the arc-reactor-synthesis method of making fullerenes, and so there’s a hundred-kilometer stretch out there where the carbon on the bottom side of the cable consists almost entirely of buckyballs. Mostly sixties, but also some thirties, and a variety of superbuckies.” And some of the super-buckies had formed with atoms of other elements trapped inside their carbon cages. These “full f
ullerenes” were useful in composite manufacturing, but very expensive to make in the lab because of the high amounts of energy required. So they were a nice find. “It’s sorting out the various superbuckies where your ion chromatog-raphy will come in.”
“So I understand,” Art said. He had done work with ion chro-matography during analyses in Georgia, and this was his ostensible reason for being sent into the outback. So over the next few days Zafir and some Beast technicians trained Art in dealing with the Beast, and after these sessions they had dinner together at a small restaurant in the suburb tent on the east rim. After sunset they had a great view of Sheffield, some thirty kilometers around the curve of the rim, glowing in the twilight like a lamp perched on the black abyss.
As they ate and drank, the conversation seldom turned to the matter of Art’s project, and, considering it, Art decided that this was probably a deliberate courtesy on his colleagues’ part. The Beast was fully self-operating, and though there were some problems to be solved in sorting out the recently discovered full fullerenes, there must have been local ion chromatographers who could have done the job. So there was no obvious reason why Praxis should have sent Art up from Earth to do it, and there had to be something more to his story. And so the group avoided the topic, saving Art the embarrassment of lies, or awkward shrugs, or an explicit appeal to confidentiality.
Art would have been uncomfortable with any of these dodges, so he appreciated their tact. But it put a certain distance in their conversations. And he seldom saw the other Praxis newcomers, outside of orientation meetings; and he didn’t know anyone else in town, or elsewhere on the planet. So he was a little lonely, and the days passed in an increasing sense of uneasiness, even oppression. He kept the drapes closed on his window view, and ate in restaurants away from the rim. It began to feel a bit too much like the weeks on the Ganesh, which he now understood to have been a miserable time. Sometimes he had to fend off the feeling that it had been a mistake to come.
And so after their last orientation lecture, at a reception luncheon in the Praxis building, he drank more than was his custom, and took a few inhalations from a tall canister of nitrous oxide. Inhalation of recreational drags was a local custom, fairly big among Martian construction workers, he had been told, and there were even little canisters of various gases for sale from dispensers in some public men’s rooms. Certainly the nitrous added a certain extra bubbly quality to the champagne; it was a nice combination, like peanuts and beer, or ice cream and apple pie.
Afterward he walked down the streets of Sheffield bouncing erratically, feeling the nitrous champagne as a kind of antigravita-tional effect, which, added to the Martian baseline, made him feel altogether too light. Technically he weighed about forty kilos, but as he walked along it felt more like five. Very strange, even unpleasant. Like walking on buttered glass.
He nearly ran into a young man, slightly taller than him — a black-haired youth, as slender as a bird and as graceful, who quickly veered away from him and then steadied him with a hand to his shoulder, all in one smooth flow of movement.
The youth looked him in the eye. “Are you Arthur Randolph?”
“Yes,” Art said, surprised. “I am. And who are you?”
“I’m the one who contacted William Fort,” the young man said.
Art stopped abruptly, swaying to get back over his feet. The young man held him upright with a gentle pressure, his hand hot on Art’s upper arm. He regarded Art with a direct look, a friendly smile. Perhaps twenty-five, Art judged, perhaps younger — a handsome youth with brown skin and thick black eyebrows, and eyes that were slightly Asian, set wide over prominent cheekbones. An intelligent look, full of curiosity and a kind of magnetic quality, hard to pin down.
Art took to him instantly, for no reason he could tell. It was just a feeling. “Call me Art,” he said.
“And I am Nirgal,” the youth said. “Let’s go down to Overlook Park.”
So Art walked with him down the grassy boulevard to,the park on the rim. There they strolled the path next to the coping wall, Nirgal helping Art with his drunken turns by frankly seizing his upper arm and steering him. His grasp had an electric penetrating quality to it, and was really very warm, as if the youth had a fever, though there was no sign of it in his dark eyes.
“Why are you here?” Nirgal asked — and his voice, and the look on his face, made the question into something other than a superficial inquiry. Art checked his response, thought about it.
“To help,” he said.
“So you will join us?”
Again the youth somehow made it clear that he meant something different, something fundamental.
And Art said, “Yes. Anytime you like.”
Nirgal smiled, a quick delighted grin that he only partly overmastered before he said, “Good. Very good. But look, I’m doing this on my own. Do you understand? There are people who wouldn’t approve. So I want to slip you in among us, as if it were an accident. That’s okay with you?”
“That’s fine.” Art shook his head, confused. “That’s how I was planning on doing it anyway.”
Nirgal stopped by the observation bubble, took Art’s hand and held it. His gaze, so open and unflinching, was contact of another kind. “Good. Thanks. Just keep doing what you’re doing, then. Go out on your salvage project, and you’ll be picked up out there. We’ll meet again after that.”
And he was off, walking across the park in the direction of the trr.m station, moving with the long graceful lope that all the young natives seemed to have. Art stared after him, trying to remember everything about the encounter, trying to put his finger on what had made it so charged. Simply the look on the youth’s face, he decided — not just the unself-conscious intensity one sometimes saw on the faces of the young, but more — some humorous power. Art remembered the sudden grin unleashed when Art had said (had promised) that he would join them. Art grinned himself.
When he got back to his room, he walked right to the window and opened the drapes. He went over to the table by his bed, and sat and turned on his lectern, and looked up Nirgal. No person listed by that name. There was a Nirgal Vallis, between Argyre Basin and Valles Marineris. One of the best examples of a water-carved channel on the planet, the entry said, long and sinuous. The word was the Babylonian name for Mars.
Art went back to the window and pressed his nose against the glass. He looked right down the throat of the thing, into the rocky heart of the monster itself. Horizontal banding of the curved walls, the broad round plain so far below, the sharp edge where it met the circular wall — the infinite shadings of maroon, rust, black, tan, orange, yellow, red — everywhere red, all the variations of red… He drank it in, for the first time unafraid. And as he looked down this enormous coring into the planet, a new feeling leaped into him to replace the fear, and he shivered and hopped in place, in a little dance. He could handle the view. He could handle the gravity. He had met a Martian, a member of the underground, a youth with a strange charisma, and he would be seeing more of him, more of all of them… He was on Mars.
And a few days later he was on the west slope of Pavonis Mons, driving a small rover down a narrow road that paralleled a band of disturbed volcanic rubble, with what looked like a cog railway track running right down it. He had sent a final coded message to Fort, telling him that he was taking off, and had gotten the only reply of his journey so far: Have a nice trip.
The first hour of his drive held what everyone had told him would be its most spectacular sight: going over the western rim of the caldera, and starting down the outer slope of the vast volcano. This occurred about sixty kilometers west of Sheffield. He drove over the southwest edge of the vast rim plateau, and started downhill, and a horizon appeared very far below, and very far away — a slightly curved hazy white bar, like the view of Earth as seen from a space plane’s window — which made sense, as the peak of Pavonis was about eighty-five thousand feet above Amazonis Planitia. So it was a huge view, the most forcible reminder po
ssible of the stupendous height of the Tharsis volcanoes. And he had a great view of Arsia Mons at that moment, in fact, the southernmost of the three volcanoes lined up on Tharsis, bulking over the horizon to his left like a neighboring world. And what looked like a black cloud, over the far horizon to the northwest, could very possibly be Olympus Mons itself!
So the first day’s drive was all downhill, but Art’s spirits remained high. “Toto, there is no chance we are in Kansas anymore. We’re …offto see the wizard! The wonderful wizard of Mars!”
The road paralleled the fall line of the cable. The cable had hit the west side of Tharsis with a tremendous impact, not as great as during the final wrap, of course, but enough to create the interesting superbuckies Art had been sent out to investigate. The Beast he was going down to meet had already salvaged the cable in this vicinity, however, and the cable was almost entirely gone; the only thing left of it was a set of old-fashioned-looking train tracks, with a third cog rail running down the middle. The Beast had made these tracks out of carbon from the cable, and then used other parts of the cable, and magnesium from the soil, to make little self-powered cog rail mining cars, which then carried salvage cargo back up the side of Pavonis to the Ouroborous facilities in Sheffield. Very neat, Art thought as he watched a little robot car roll past him in the opposite direction, up the tracks toward the city. The little train car was black, squat, powered by a simple motor engaging the cog track, filled with a cargo that was no doubt mostly carbon nanotube filaments, and capped on top by a big rectangular block of diamond. Art had heard about this in Sheffield, and so was not surprised to see it. The diamond had been salvaged from the double helixes strengthening the cable, and the blocks were actually much less valuable than the carbon filament stored underneath them — basically a kind of fancy hatch door. But they did look nice.
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