Down and down. Past the upper edge of Double Decker Butte, past its silvered or coppery windows, standing in rows like mineral extrusions or the one-way mirrors of observers from another dimension. Quickly gone in the murk, however, and she dream-parachuted down again, down and down. Michel and a couple others were following her, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see them. Then a robot trawl shaped like a thick bed frame sank past them all, its powerful headlights shooting forward long cones of crystalline fluidity, cones so long that they became one blurry diffuse cylinder, flowing this way and that as the trawl dipped and bobbed, striking now a distant mesa’s metallic windows, now the black muck down on the rooftops of the old Niederdorf. Somewhere down there, the Niederdorf Canal had run— there, a gleam of white teeth— the Bareiss columns, impervious white under their diamond coating, about half-buried in black sand and muck. She pulled up and kicked her fins back and forth a few times to stop descending, then pushed a button that shot some compressed air into one part of her weight belt, to stabilize herself. She floated then over the canal like a ghost. Yes; it was like Scrooge’s dream, the trawl a kind of robot Christmas Past, illuminating the drowned world of lost time, the city she had loved so much. Sudden darts of pain lanced through her ribs; mostly she was numb to any feeling. It was too strange, too hard to understand or believe that this was Burroughs, her Burroughs, now Atlantis at the bottom of a Martian sea.