Adrienne described with great gusto the destruction of the town in 2061. The falling elevator cable had, of course, crushed the suburbs east of its socket in the very first moments of the fall. But then the cable had wrapped all the way around the planet, delivering a massive second blow to the south side of town, a blow which had caused an undiscovered fault in the basalt rim to give way. About a third of the town had been on the wrong side of this fault, and had fallen the five kilometres to the caldera floor. The remaining two-thirds of the town had been knocked flat. Luckily the occupants had mostly evacuated in the four hours between the detachment of Clarke and the second coming of the cable, so loss of life had been minimised. But Sheffield had been utterly destroyed.
For many years after that, Adrienne told them, the site had lain abandoned, a wreck like so many other towns after the unrest of ’61. Most of those other towns had been left in ruins, but Sheffield’s location remained the ideal place for tethering a space elevator, and when Subarashii began organising the in-space construction of a new one in the late 2080s, construction on the ground had rapidly followed. A detailed areological investigation had found no other faults in the southern rim, which had justified rebuilding right on the edge, on the same site as before. Demolition vehicles had cleared the wreckage of the old town, shoving most of it over the rim, and leaving only the easternmost section of town, around the old socket, as a kind of monument to the disaster—also as the central element of a little tourist industry, which had clearly been an important part of the town’s income in the fallow years before an elevator had been reinstalled.
Adrienne’s next point on the tour led them out to see this preserved bit of history. They took a tram to a gate in the east wall of the tent, and then walked through a clear tube into a smaller tent, which covered the blasted ruins, the concrete mass of the old cable facility, and the lower end of the fallen cable. They walked a roped path that had been cleared of wreckage, staring curiously at the blasted ruins, the foundations and twisted pipes. It looked like the results of saturation bombing.
They came to a halt under the butt end of the cable, and Art observed it with professional interest. The big cylinder of black carbon filaments looked nearly undamaged by the fall, although admittedly this was the part that had hit Mars with the least force. The end had jammed down into the Socket’s big concrete bunker, Adrienne said, then been dragged a couple of kilometres as the cable had fallen down the eastern slope of Pavonis. That wasn’t that much of a beating for material designed to withstand the pull of an asteroid swinging beyond the areosynchronous point.
And so it lay there, as if waiting to be straightened up and put back in place: cylindrical, three storeys high, its black bulk encrusted by steel tracks and collars and the like. The tent only covered a hundred metres 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 kilometres 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 couple of 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 café 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 Tblisi or Ottawa, in some neighbourhood 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 window pane 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 curtains.
And after that he kept the curtains 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 Seven Swedes, Shellalco, Gentine, and so on—each occupying a complex of buildings, or even entire neighbourhoods 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 co-ordination; but they were in a distinct minority in Sheffield, and Art wondered if that were 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 skyscrapers, faces 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 may have been interested in bio-infrastructure, 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 areothermal plants. The latter two were widely regarded as marginal endeavours, 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 speciality 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 rubbish output on Mars;