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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 i
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, Adrie
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 Adrie
Adrie
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 Adrie
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 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. “It’s sorting out the various superbuckies where your ion chromatog-raphy will come in.”