One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he watched a group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff, west of town. There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft: gliders and ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose inside the thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then a variety of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected to the undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the people who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly they were made of ultralight materials; some were transparent and nearly invisible, so that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots landed them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them— to crash, in other words.

The hang gliders, on the other hand, looked as dangerous as ever. The people who used those were the rowdiest members of the flying crowd, Nirgal could see when he went out there— thrill seekers who ran off the edge of the cliff shouting in an adrenalated exhilaration that crackled over the intercoms— they were running off a cliff, after all, and no matter what rig they were strapped to, their bodies still saw what was happening. No wonder their shouts had that special ring!

Nirgal got on the subway and went out to the launchpad, drawn by some quality of the sight. All those people, free in the sky. . . . He was recognized, of course, he shook hands; and accepted an invitation from a group of fliers to go up and see what it was like. The hang gliders offered to teach him to fly, but he laughed and said he would try the little blimpgliders first. There was a two-person blimpglider tethered there, slightly larger than the rest, and a woman named Monica invited him up, fueled the thing, and sat him beside her; and up the launch mast they went, to be released with a jerk into the strong downslope afternoon winds and over the city, now revealed as a small tent filled with greenery, perched on the edge of the northwestern-most of the network of canyons etching the slope of Tharsis.