Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [174]
“As is Praxis,” Art put in.
“Yes yes. Anyway, we’ll talk to the group at Overhangs. They’ll have contacts with the surface Swiss, I’m sure.”
Northeast of the volcano Hadriaca Patera, they visited a town that had been founded by Sufis. The original structure was built into the side of a canyon cliff, in a kind of high-tech Mesa Verde— a thin line of buildings, inserted into the break point where the cliff’s imposing overhang began to slope back out and down to the canyon floor. Steep staircases in walktubes ran down the lower slope to a small concrete garage, and around the garage had sprung up a number of blister tents and greenhouses. These tents were occupied by people who wished to study with the Sufis. Some came from the sanctuaries, some from the cities of the north; many were natives, but quite a few were newcomers from Earth. Together they hoped to roof the entire canyon, using materials developed for the new cable to support an immense spread of tent fabric. Nadia was immediately drawn into discussions of the construction problems such a project would encounter, which she happily told them would be various and severe. Ironically, the thickening atmosphere made all dome projects more difficult, because the domes could not be floated by the air pressures underneath them to the extent they once had been; and though the tensile and load-bearing strengths of the new carbon configurations were more than they would need, anchoring points that would hold such weights as they had in mind would be almost impossible to find. But the local engineers were confident that lighter tent fabrics and new anchoring techniques might serve, and the walls of the canyon, they said, were solid. They were in the very upper reach of Reull Vallis, and ancient sapping had cut back into very hard material. Good anchoring points should be everywhere.
No attempt was being made to hide any of this activity from satellite observation. The Sufis’ circular mesa dwelling in Margaritifer, and their main settlement in the south, Rumi, were similarly unconcealed. Yet they had never been harassed in any way by anybody, or even contacted by the Transitional Authority. This made one of their leaders, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, think the fears of the underground were exaggerated. Nadia politely disagreed, and when Nirgal pressed her on the point, curious about it, she looked at him steadily. “They hunt the First Hundred.”
He thought it over, watching the Sufis lead the way up the walktube staircases to their cliff dwelling. They had arrived well before dawn, and Dhu had invited everyone up to the cliff for a brunch to welcome the visitors. So they followed the Sufis up to the dwelling, and sat at a great long table, in a long room with its outer wall a continuous great window, overlooking the canyon. The Sufis dressed in white, while the people from the tents in the canyon wore ordinary jumpers, most of them rust-colored. People poured each other’s water, and talked as they ate. “You are on your tariqat,” Dhu el-Nun said to Nirgal. This was one’s spiritual path, he explained, one’s road to reality. Nirgal nodded, struck by the aptness of the description— it was just how his life had always felt to him. “You must feel lucky,” Dhu said. “You must pay attention.”
After a meal of bread and strawberries and yogurt, and then mud-thick coffee, the tables and chairs were cleared, and the Sufis danced a sema or whirling dance, spinning and chanting to the music of a harpist and several drummers, and the chanting of the canyon dwellers. As the dancers passed their guests, they placed their palms very briefly to the guests’ cheeks, their touches as light as the brush of a wing. Nirgal glanced at Art, expecting him to be as goggle-eyed as he usually was at the various phenomena of Martian life, but in fact he was