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 smiling in a knowing way, and tapping his forefinger and thumb together in time to the beat, and chanting with the rest. And at the end of the dance he stepped out and recited something in a foreign language, which caused the Sufis to smile and, when he was done, to applaud loudly.

“Some of my professors in Tehran were Sufis,” he explained to Nirgal and Nadia and Jackie. “They were a big part of what people call the Persian Renaissance.”

“And what did you recite?” Nirgal asked.

“It’s a Farsi poem by Jalaluddin Rumi, the master of the whirling dervishes. I never learned the English version very well—

‘

I died from a mineral and plant became,

D

ied from the plant, took a sentient frame;

D

ied from the beast, donned a human dress—

W

hen by my dying did I ever grow less . . .’

“Ah, I can’t remember the rest. But some of those Sufis were very good engineers.”

“They’d better be here too,” Nadia said, glancing at the people she had been talking to about doming the canyon.