LITMIR.BIZ

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lives.”

      “In any case we were on too many news shows. We have to take care.”

      By day Gamete was slowly completed. But it never seemed right to Nirgal, no matter how much he tried to focus on the making of it. It wasn’t his place.

      News came from another traveller that Coyote would be by soon. Nirgal felt his pulse quicken; to get back under the starry sky again, wandering by night in Coyote’s boulder car, from sanctuary to sanctuary …

      Jackie stared at him attentively as he talked about it to her. And that afternoon, after they were dismissed from the day’s work, she led him down to the tall new dunes and kissed him. When he recovered his wits he kissed back, and then they were kissing passionately, hugging each other hard and steaming all over each other’s faces. They knelt in the trough between two high dunes, under a pale thin fog, and then lay together in a cocoon made of their down coats, and kissed and touched each other, peeling down each other’s pants and creating a little envelope of their own warmth, huffing out steam and crackling the frost on the sand underneath their coats. All this without a word, merging in one great hot electric circuit, in defiance of Hiroko and all the world. Under the strands of her black hair grains of sand gleamed like jewels, as if minute ice flowers were contained within them. Glories inside every thing.

      When they were done they crawled up to glance over the dune crest, to make sure no one was coming their way, and then returned to their nest and pulled their clothes over them, for the warmth. They huddled together, kissing voluptuously and without haste. And Jackie prodded him in the chest with a finger and said, “Now we belong to each other.”

      Nirgal could only nod happily and kiss the long expanse of her throat, his face buried in her black hair. “Now you belong to me,” she said.

      He sincerely hoped it was true. It was how he had wanted it, for as long as he could remember.

      But that evening in the bathhouse Jackie sloshed across the pool, and caught up Dao and gave him a hug, body to body. She pulled back and stared at Nirgal with a blank expression, her dark eyes like holes in her face. Nirgal sat frozen in the shallows, feeling his torso stiffen as if preparing for a blow. His balls were still sore from coming in her; and there she stood draped against Dao, as she hadn’t been in months, staring at him with a basilisk stare.

      The strangest sensation swept over him—he understood that this was a moment he would remember all his life, a pivotal moment, right there in the steamy comfortable bath, under the osprey eye of the statuesque Maya, whom Jackie hated with a fine hate, who was now watching the three of them closely, suspecting something. So this was how it was. Jackie and Nirgal might belong to each other, and he certainly belonged to her—but her idea of belonging was not his. The shock of this knocked his breath out, it was a kind of collapse of the roof of his understanding of things. He looked at her, stunned, hurt, becoming angry—she hugged Dao all the more—and he understood. She had collected both of them. Yes, it made sense, it was certain; and Reull and Steve and Frantz were all equally devoted to her—perhaps that was just a holdover from her rule over the little band, but perhaps not. Perhaps she had collected all of them. And clearly, now that Nirgal was a kind of foreigner to them, she was more comfortable with Dao. So he was an exile in his own home, and in his own love’s heart. If she had a heart!

      He didn’t know if any of these impressions were true, didn’t know how to find out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. He got out of the bath and retreated into the men’s room, feeling Jackie’s gaze boring into his back, and Maya’s too.

      In the men’s room he caught sight of an unfamiliar face in one of the mirrors. He stopped short and recognised it as his own face, twisted with distress.

      He approached the mirror slowly, feeling the strange sensation of momentousness sweep through him again. He stared at the face in the mirror, stared and stared; it came to him that he was not the centre of the universe, nor its only consciousness, but a person like all the rest, seen from the outside by others, the way he saw others when he looked at them. And this strange Nirgal-in-the-mirror was an arresting black-haired brown-eyed boy, intense and compelling, a near twin to Jackie, with thick black eyebrows and a … a look. He didn’t want to know any of this. But he felt the power burning at his fingertips, and recalled how people looked at him, and understood that for Jackie he might represent the same sort of dangerous power that she did for him—which would explain her consorting with Dao, as an attempt to hold him off, to hold a balance, to assert her power. To show they were a matched pair—and a match. And all of a sudden the tension left his torso, and he shuddered, and then grinned, lopsidedly. They did indeed belong to each other. But he was still himself.

      So when Coyote showed up and came by to ask Nirgal to join him on another trip, he agreed instantly, very thankful for the opportunity. The flash of anger on Jackie’s face when she heard the news was painful to see; but another part of him exulted at his otherness, at his ability to escape her, or at least to get some distance. Match or not, he needed it.

      A few evenings later he and Coyote and Peter and Michel drove away from the huge mass of the polar cap, into the broken land, black under its blanket of stars.

      Nirgal looked back at the luminous white cliff with a tumultuous mix of feelings; but chief among them was relief. Back there they would burrow ever deeper under the ice, it seemed, until they lived in a dome under the South Pole—while the red world spun through the cosmos, wild among the stars. Suddenly he understood that he would never again live under the dome, never return to it except for short visits; this was not a matter of choice, but simply the way it was going to happen. His fate, or destiny. He could feel it like a red rock in his hand. Henceforth he would be homeless—unless it be that the whole planet someday became his home, every crater and canyon known to him, every plant, every rock, every person—everything, in the green world and the white. But that (remembering the storm seen from the edge of Promethei Rupes) was a task to occupy many lives. He would have to start learning.

       PART TWO The Ambassador

      

       Asteroids with elliptical orbits that cross inside the orbit of Mars are called Amor asteroids. (If they cross inside the orbit of Earth they are called Trojans.) In 2088 the Amor asteroid known as 2034 B crossed the path of Mars some eighteen million kilometres behind the planet, and a clutch of robotic landing vehicles originating from Luna docked with it shortly thereafter. 2034 B was a rough ball about five kilometres in diameter, with a mass of about fifteen billion tons. As the rockets touched down, the asteroid became New Clarke.

       Quickly the change became obvious. Some landers sank to the dusty surface of the asteroid and began drilling, excavating, stamping, sorting, conveying. A nuclear reactor power plant switched on, and fuel rods moved into position. Elsewhere ovens fired, and robot stokers prepared to shovel. On other landers payload bays opened, and robot mechanisms spidered out onto the surface and anchored themselves to the irregular planes of rock. Tunnellers bored in. Dust flew off into the space around the asteroid, and fell back down or escaped forever. Landers extended pipes and tubes into each other. The asteroid’s rock was carbonaceous chrondrite, with a good percentage of water-ice shot through it in veins and bubbles. Soon the linked collection of factories in the landers began to produce a variety of carbon-based materials, and some composites. Heavy water, one part in every six thousand of the water-ice in the asteroid, was separated out. Deuterium was made from the heavy water. Parts were made from the carbon composites, and other parts, brought along in another payload, were brought together with the new ones in factories. New robots appeared, made mostly of Clarke itself. And so the number of machines grew, as computers on the landers directed the creation of an entire industrial complex.

       After that the process was quite simple, for many years. The principal factory on New Clarke made a cable of carbon nanotube filaments. The nanotubes were made of carbon atoms linked in chains so that the bonds holding them together were as strong as any that humans could manufacture. The filaments were only a few score metres long, but

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