Kath Two felt some relief the next morning when, after a pleasant and uneventful campout on the beach, they got back into Ark Madiba, now 90 percent empty, and took off north.
The distance to the south coast of Blue Antimer was half what they had covered the day before. Around midday, when the sun was beating down on the deep eaves and shuttered windows of the military complex above, the ark plowed up the harbor there and settled with a vast sigh into a fresh, sparkling azure chop. A smaller TerReForm post, annexed to the military base, sported a single pier long enough to accommodate an ark. The pilots employed a variety of muttering and whining thrusters to get into its general vicinity. The rest was handled by robot tugs pulling on ropes wrapped around massive bitts. The five humans who’d been sharing the cargo hold moved forward to get out of the way of the local TerReForm staff, who boarded the ark, along with a couple of cargo-loading grabbs, to take charge of what little cargo remained: racks of cages housing large carnivores. It was a mix of canids and felids, with a few big snakes. They’d been stashed in different parts of the hold so that they wouldn’t wear themselves out menacing one another. Anyone who was connected with Survey, or, for that matter, who knew anything about the TerReForm at all, would understand what this meant: the ecosystem of Antimer was far more developed than that of Hawaii, and was now producing small fauna and herbivores at a pace that required the introduction of bigger predators to keep them in check.
The harbor was an almost perfectly circular impact crater with only a small outlet to the sea. Most of its circumference was claimed by the military base. From somewhere in that zone, a launch cut across the disk of blue water and came up alongside the ark’s cockpit door. The Seven descended to it by means of a folding stairway, and thus passed out of TerReForm jurisdiction without any formalities, or even contact with the local staff. Half an hour later they were eating lunch in a private officers’ dining room adjoined to a mess hall, and an hour after that they were aboard an airplane—a conventional, powered military craft—that took off from a runway blasted into the stony shore of the island a few miles away and banked northward after it had gained enough altitude to clear the snowcapped peaks along Antimer’s central ridge. From that height the eye was no longer beguiled by the peaks and valleys that, at a smaller scale, made the place seem like an Old Earth mountain range. Here it was possible, for those looking out the windows on the left side of the airplane, to see a thousand kilometers westward. The curvature of the archipelago’s spine made it obvious that this was the rim of a huge impact crater, created by a big chunk of moon that had come in on a somewhat northward trajectory and pushed a high arc of seafloor and ejecta up above sea level. To the south, a smaller archipelago, curved the opposite way, hinted at the crater’s lower rim. That, however, was not visible from the plane’s windows. Instead they all gazed west, tracing the arc of mountains as it grew higher and the land beneath it broadened. Somewhere along the way it was sliced by the invisible line of 166 Thirty. Bard pressed his heavy brow against the window and looked long and thoughtfully at his homeland, seeming to identify hills and bays that he remembered, thinking of vineyards. Then Antimer fell away behind and they flew for some hours over the featureless Pacific.
The water was too deep in these parts for the Hard Rain to have visibly reshaped anything, barring another hyperimpact like the one that had created Antimer, and so the general shape of things was little changed until they verged on the continental shelf, just a hundred kilometers or so south of what had once been Alaska’s coastline. In the shallows between that and the foothills of the coastal range—a strip of sea and land between one and two hundred kilometers wide—visible changes had been wrought. But the coastline was basically where it had always been. More effective than direct bolide strikes in the reshaping of the land had been the disappearance of the glaciers and the endless series of tsunamis that had been funneled into this broad bight over the millennia. The one hurled up by the Antimer impact had overtopped the mountains themselves, cresting over what had formerly been glacier-bound peaks and slamming down far inland to boil dry on the hot rocks. Since the beginning of the Cooling Off, about eleven hundred years ago, and particularly since humans had reconstituted the oceans by dropping comets on the surface, snow had begun falling on those peaks again. But it took a long time for glaciers to form, and it would be millennia more before cracked rivers of old blue ice oozed down the mountain valleys to touch the sea.
When that day came, the settlement of Qayaq would have to move out of the way. It was built on a heap of rubble on the western bank of a cold river that hurtled down out of the mountains, just at the place where it emptied into the Pacific. There was not enough space between sea and snow for an airfield of the size Qayaq required, and so they had constructed one out of the mix of fiber and ice known as pykrete. This floated just offshore, a perfectly flat slab laced with tubes through which refrigerated coolant was circulated to keep it solid—not a difficult task in a place where the temperature of sea and air alike was only a few degrees above freezing. Other than that, nothing was really here. Even the TerReForm presence was minimal, it being easier for TerReForm staff to operate from boats.
The Qayaq airfield had to exist because of the Ashwall. West of here, all the way to 166 Thirty and beyond, the chain of volcanoes formerly known as the Kenai and Alaska Peninsulas and the Aleutian chain were in a nearly continual state of eruption. Any pilot meaning to fly north or south across the sixtieth parallel, in the zone bracketed by 166 Thirty on the west and the Rockies on the east, had to make allowances in the flight plan for the likelihood that their path would abruptly be barred by a plume of volcanic ash hurled into the stratosphere by any of a hundred active volcanoes lying upwind. Airplanes were expensive, even more so than they had been on Old Earth. They were too large to manufacture in the ring and transport down to the surface and so they, and other large productions such as arks and ships, had to be built in factories on the surface. Typically these lay on the outskirts of Cradle sockets. In any case, planes had to be babied, given that high-capacity turbofan engines were extraordinarily difficult to make. Every flight plan had to include a possible emergency landing on the artificial floe of Qayaq, which in turn had to be fully capable of hosting big airplanes. So what had been conceived as an emergency landing site had become something of a hub, where planes tended to land just because it was convenient and predictable. In any case it happened to be the final destination of the military flight on which the Seven had hitched a ride, so they had to get off here anyway.
It was about as warm and welcoming as you would expect of a forward airbase constructed on a slab of ice. A low cloud layer kept it in eternal twilight and converted all colors to shades of gray. Across a strip of water, the town sprawled on its rubble pile like a dead starfish. Beyond that was a black wall that they understood to be the lower slopes of the coastal range, carpeted now with young trees but too obscured by mist and gloom to be identifiable as such. Higher up, just below the cloud ceiling, some of these were dusted with fresh snow, or perhaps just ice condensed directly from the fog. Had those clouds been absent, as they were for a few cumulative weeks out of each year, the Seven would have been able to look up above snowcapped peaks to a sky made black by the Ashwall. One of the big volcanoes on Kenai had been erupting copiously for two weeks.
The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong. Anything to escape the sense of being trapped between ice and sea below, fog and ash above, the Pacific to the south, and the mountain wall to the north. Instead of which Tyuratam Lake announced that he was going into the city to sample its drinking establishments. He did so in a manner so bluff as to make everyone else feel faintly idiotic for even thinking of doing otherwise. Kath Two, Beled, and Langobard said they were in. Doc demurred on grounds of wanting a nap, and Memmie, as always, stayed with Doc. Ariane seemed peeved and conflicted. The politics of race had been gradually coming into play during t
he journey from Cradle, and now Ty was pushing harder.
According to a five-thousand-year-old understanding shared by most who were not Aïdans, and some who were, Ty was going to be the leader of the group. This was partly because he was a native Beringian who knew his way around the place, but it was mostly just because he was the Dinan, and being the leader was a thing that Dinans did. Ariane had been organizing things—it was she who had somehow strung together the series of flights that had taken them from Cradle to Qayaq—and in the early going she’d had Doc’s ear. It had seemed impossible to talk to Doc without going through her. But since then Doc had made a point of spending time privately with the others, and Ariane, after a day or so of confusion and irritation, had accepted this. The natural constraints of group travel had kept them all together. Now Ty was mounting an unauthorized expedition to the mainland, and Ariane was perhaps torn between the desire for that private cup of noodles and the fear that she would miss something.
She ended up coming with them. They broke open one of the chests of gear that had been with them since Cayambe and found warm clothes. Then they hiked across the ice to some steps that led down to a little port for water taxis, and made the trip—just a few hundred meters—to the shore of Beringia. A rambling stair, carved into the rock by mining robots, took them from the water’s edge up to the place where the slope became gentle enough to walk on, and then they found themselves looking down a main street that ran inland for all of about a hundred meters before dead-ending against a vertical wall of rock: a boulder that had been forcibly embedded in the flank of a larger mountain. Even from here they could tell that the boulder was a piece of the moon. Efforts had been made to pep the place up by making use of various light-emitting technologies, which now festooned the fronts of the establishments and bled lurid, saturated colors into the translucent air. It could be inferred from the nature of their advertising that the typical customer was military and lonely.
“I SOMETIMES WONDER,” BARD SAID, GRIMACING AT THE TASTE OF the local cider, “whether the Eves, being women, really got the connection between the male visual system and sex drive.” He was looking sidelong at a naked lady at the opposite end of the room.
Kath Two had little interest in the naked lady, but she had turned her back on the rest of the group, a minute earlier, to watch a disturbance. Now she turned to face Bard. “Well, they were women. They had spent their whole lives under that gaze. Everything they’d ever been taught about how to dress, how to carry themselves—”
“Yes,” Ariane said. “On, if memory serves, Day 287 of the Epic, we have the ‘reality television’ conversation in which Ivy talks specifically about the importance of Dinah’s persona and its treatment in social media.”
“How can you remember shit like that?” Ty asked.
Kath Two gave him a somewhat reproachful look. “How can you not? That conversation took place only minutes before your Eve met the love of her life.”
Ty thought about it. “First bolo?” His eyes flicked away from the naked lady toward a screen above the bar, where a scene from the Epic had been playing with the sound off: Dinah in a space suit, going out on the exterior of Endurance to figure out what was wrong with a misbehaving robot. No one was watching it.
“Yes. First bolo,” Kath Two said, slightly mollified.
Bard, for his part, was focusing a little too hard on the tiny bubbles in his cider, the dents and scratches in the surface of the table, the electrical wiring bracketed to the ceiling. It was different for him. Ty and Beled could look all they want—that was, after all, the whole point of the establishment. For a Neoander, however, to stare in that way at a woman—she looked like a Dinan or perhaps a Dinan/Teklan breed—was a different matter. Not as far as the proprietors were concerned. The place was actually run, and presumably owned, by women. But there were other customers who had marked Bard when he had come in and who were devoting almost as much attention to him as to the dancers. Had he not been in the company of a larger than normal Teklan and a middle-aged Dinan man with a certain hard-to-pin-down “don’t fuck with me” vibe, there might have been trouble. A few of the other patrons might have joined forces to find out whether the stories about Neoanders were tall tales. As matters stood, the only thing Bard had to worry about was being glared at a lot, and possibly coming down with something because of whatever feral strain of yeast had infected the cider.
The template, and the general set of expectations, for communities of this type had been set beginning around five hundred years after Zero, when Cradle had become sufficiently crowded that there had simply been no choice but to spread outward from it. The first outlying habitats had been only a few kilometers away on Cleft. In fact, nearly all settlement had been confined to Cleft until early in the Second Millennium, when the industrial base had developed to the point where other rocks could be colonized. Many more such communities had been depicted in fictional entertainments than had actually existed. This didn’t matter, though. As the almost totally factitious and romanticized Old West had been to American culture of the twentieth century, so those yarns were to the people of the habitat ring. So in the rare cases when actual settlements of that type were constructed de novo, as here, they tended to be built so as to meet the expectations of people who their whole lives had been watching fiction serials about their Second Millennium precursors.
Even so, there were some surprises. Not so much the fact that it was female-owned. That wasn’t uncommon in the adult entertainment industry, and anyway some selection bias was at work—they had chosen to sit down in this place because it didn’t feel as creepy to Kath Two and Ariane as some of the others. More unexpected was the fact that as many as half of the people in there were Indigens. Those who weren’t—ones who had come across the water from the ice slab floating offshore—were identifiable by haircut, clothing, and bearing. But their numbers were matched by shaggier and more colorful characters whose professions and reasons for being in Qayaq could only be guessed at. It was safe to assume that many of these had come up the coast from a RIZ about twenty kilometers away to engage in trade or other forms of intercourse. But Qayaq itself was bigger and more crowded than they had expected, suggesting growth in population and commerce exceeding the limits set by Treaty. Sheltered by mountains and hidden most of the time under dense clouds, an illicit city was growing up here. If it was happening here, it was happening elsewhere in the Blue part of the world. Red had to know about it. Cloud cover alone couldn’t keep such a place secret. Why did Red not file diplomatic protests, then? Because Red was probably doing the same thing, perhaps on an even larger scale, and Red and Blue had come to a tacit agreement not to make trouble.
How many humans lived on the surface? The official numbers for the Blue part of it were about a million, mostly concentrated around Cradle sockets. Maybe the real numbers were much greater.
When they were finally approached, it was by a young Ivyn man with long hair and a wispy beard. Had he been spotted in the same location five thousand or, for that matter, ten thousand years ago, he would have passed for one whose ancestors had crossed from Asia over the original Beringia and flooded into North and South America. He had the wit to understand that the visitors were looking at him warily but the grit to walk to them anyway. He kept his hands casually down to his sides, palms slightly out, as if he had caught himself in the instant before throwing them up and exclaiming “What the fuck are you people doing here?” He was alert and mildly amused. As he drew closer it became clear that he was taller than he’d seemed at first; they’d been misled by his slight build and his stooped posture.
They might have asked the same question—what the fuck are you doing here?—of this young Ivyn. Judging from his clothes—five-year-old fashions from Chainhattan customized with bits of fur, bone, and animal skin—he was an Indigen with commercial links to Qayaq. Maybe the smartest kid in his RIZ, the child of eccentric Ivyn dreamers, looking for things to do with his brain. He’d been hanging out at the bar
with some Dinan chums, but all of them had seemed more embarrassed than stimulated by the nude dancers.
“You guys headed over the mountains?” he asked. He had noted their clothing: brand new, high quality, extremely warm.
It seemed like a simple icebreaker to everyone except Ty, who said, “We don’t need a guide,” before any of the others could answer.
That set the kid back just a little. “A guide,” he repeated, as if Ty had just brought a peculiar but somewhat interesting idea into the conversation. “No, I didn’t really take you for people who would hire a guide.” Meaning adventurous—and, by Treaty, illegal—tourists from the ring.
This left open the question of what he did take them for, and so it was a little awkward until he went on: “If you’re going to the other side of the mountains, I could show you something.”
“Something special? One of a kind? Something you show to people all the time?” Ty asked.
The kid looked shy. “I have been there twice before. It’s interesting.”
“Been there with paying customers?” Ty asked. “Because—” but he was interrupted by a hand on his arm from Ariane.
“He called it interesting,” she said. “He is not motivated by money.”
“Very well,” Ty said.
“What is your name?” Ariane asked him.