LITMIR.BIZ

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for miscellaneous materials, awaiting their particular use. 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 got its start excavating the ruins of 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 onsite 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 that 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 and buckytubes. Temperatures and pressures in the west Tharsis zone turned out to be similar to those used in the arc-reactor-synthesis method of making fullerenes, and so there is a hundred-kilometre stretch out there where carbon on the bottom side of the cable consists of buckyballs—mostly sixties, but also some thirties, and a variety of superbuckies and buckytubes of all lengths.” And some of the superbuckies had formed with other elements trapped inside their carbon cage. These full fullerenes 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. “And it’s sorting out the various superbuckies where your ion chromatography will come in.”

      “So I understand,” Art said. He had done work with ion chromatography 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 kilometres 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, and 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 curtains 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 drugs was a local custom, apparently 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 anti-gravitational 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?” he asked—and his voice, and the look on his face, made the question into something other than a superficial enquiry. 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. Any time 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 train 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 curtains. 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

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