Exceptions had to be made for cases like this one, where they had to work with the five other members of the Seven. Some, but not all, of these might have made their way onto Remembrance’s list. He had tried to select people such as Kath Two whom he enjoyed talking to, but the others were strangers to him. Ariane Casablancova showed amusing pretention in sitting next to him whenever she could, acting as a gatekeeper between Doc and the remaining four. She took at face value Remembrance’s cover story. Had Remembrance not been a Camite, she might have taken it wrong, seeing it as an usurpation of her prerogatives. But that plus the fact that she had lifetime tenure—a sort of platonic marriage to Doc—made Ariane’s behavior at most a source of dry amusement.
The system worked beautifully at times such as this one, when a delegation of senior TerReFormers had gathered outside the door of Doc’s glider to belabor him with a welcome. It wasn’t that they were insincere, just that their quite genuine desire to greet him was all mixed up with other hopes and needs. One might want to get a photograph with him, but be bashful and tediously indirect about making the request. Another might feel that her life work had been unfairly slighted by her peers and would desire some sign of affirmation from Doc. Yet another might be embroiled in some internal political drama of TerReForm and would hope to gain some currency by being seen on Doc’s arm. None of it was wrong or unreasonable, but all of it was a waste of time where he was concerned, just further examples of that tax he didn’t want to pay anymore. Knowing this without being told, Remembrance exited the glider first. Doc watched out the window as the delegation huddled around her, leaning in close to hear her quiet voice, and furrowed their brows and made exaggerated nods as she explained to them just how exhausted Doc was. At some point she gestured back toward the glider and all of them looked up in unison and saw Doc’s face framed in the window. He made the faintest of waves and they all showed their teeth and saluted him in the various styles of their races: mostly Ivyn and Moiran. Once that was seen to, Doc “sprang to his feet” with a tug on the handle of his grabb, made his way to the door, stood framed there for a few moments so that they could take their pictures, and then made a great show of descending the stair that had folded down from the vehicle’s fuselage. The delegation tracked him across the apron of the airstrip, surrounding him in a great loose cloud but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction. Ariane was right behind and the remaining four trailed at a distance, completely ignored. Ariane had gotten that right, at least: to the kinds of people who lived here, Doc’s arrival on Magdalena was such a sensation that even a Neoander went unnoticed.
After Remembrance had turned aside all invitations and offers of hospitality, he dined in his room with Ariane, who reveled in the attention. Tomorrow things would be different and she would have to begin adjusting. In the darkest part of that adjustment—which for a Julian could get very dark indeed—she would look back on this meal and understand it for what it really was: a gesture of respect from Doc that could not be gainsaid by any of the voices muttering away between her ears.
Doc asked her about her upbringing on Astrakhan, which was a smallish, almost pure Julian habitat at forty-eight degrees six minutes east, near the center of the Dinan part of the ring. This anomaly had come about as the result of a vision—in both the literal and figurative senses of that word—of a Julian man named Tomac, who had raised funds and established it as a quasi-religious outpost very early in the history of the ring. In those days, being three degrees and six minutes away from a capital such as Baghdad made it seem like a remote frontier outpost. Since then, of course, the Dinan segment had filled in around it, crowding it between much larger and more modern habitats. But Astrakhan, with a few modern improvements, continued to support some tens of thousands of souls, and was often alluded to by Julians as evidence that their race, though lacking in numbers, was as well established in Blue as any of the Four. It was frequently visited by scholars in the field of Amistics: the study of the choices made by different cultures as to which technologies they would embrace or spurn. This was because Tomac, who’d had peculiar ideas about everything, had made some unusual and instructive choices as far as that went. The isolation of Astrakhan made it a useful test case. For her part Ariane laughed off many of the quasi-religious aspects of the culture in which she had been raised, but Doc sensed that she was doing so because it was expected of her.
Later, as Remembrance was helping him into bed and getting him tuned up for the night, he told her that tomorrow he would begin getting to know the other four members of the Seven a little better, and that he would politely decline Ariane’s assistance in doing so. Ariane would have gloried in the opportunity to furnish Doc with dossiers full of statistics, and hours of personal gossip, about Beled, Kath Two, Tyuratam, and Langobard. But Hu Noah had always felt uncomfortable with such disclosures because they raised the obvious question of what was being disclosed, by the same person, to other curious minds, about Doc.
At five o’clock the next morning, Doc was in the recreation center, walking very slowly on a treadmill, when Beled Tomov came in for his daily workout. Beled’s double take was so amusing that even Doc, who had made an art form of appearing not to know what was going on, was hard-pressed not to laugh at the poor fellow’s expense. Even Remembrance, sitting nearby and reading, felt it best to interpose her book between her face and Beled’s startled gaze for a few moments.
“Lieutenant Tomov,” Doc said, “I thought you’d never drag yourself out of bed.”
Beled remembered his manners and saluted.
“I hope you won’t think me rude if I don’t reciprocate,” Doc said, and nodded down at the treadmill’s handlebars. “I have a death grip on these.”
Beled was looking around for Ariane. Doc decided not to make any comment. “Is it your practice to warm up first?” he asked.
“It is not considered necessary,” Beled answered.
“Ah, too bad, I was thinking we might go for a stroll together,” Doc said, nodding at the empty treadmill next to him.
“That can be done,” Beled allowed, “if I may stroll at a different pace.”
“Suit yourself!” Doc said. “There is a reason I did not attempt this in the wild.”
Within a few minutes the Teklan, now stripped to nothing but a pair of briefs, was running flat-out on the treadmill next to Doc’s, his hands blades, his arms scissoring, the soles of his bare feet skimming across the textured belt of the treadmill rather than pounding it. Engineered and bred to be a match for Neoanders, Teklans were at a genetic disadvantage because they were built like modern humans and did not partake of Neanderthal DNA. Bard could sleep in, eat and drink whatever he wanted, and still be as strong as the much larger Teklan. This was all perfectly academic, since no one seriously expected Beled and Bard to get into a fight, but it was a cultural habit of long standing that Teklans measured themselves against Neoanders, and used the comparison to spur themselves to even greater diligence than would have been their habit anyway.
In a calm and level tone of voice, as though he were sitting on a couch sipping tea, Beled said, “I never thanked you for sending me on the mission just completed. I assume it was your doing. But I had no way to reach you. I thank you now.”
Doc’s eyes strayed to a regularly spaced line of scars wrapping around the small of Beled’s back, some forming deep craters in the twin pilasters of muscle bracketing his spine. Bisecting that formation was a long vertical scar running right over the lumbar vertebrae, where surgeons had gone in and done something—Doc didn’t know the details—to repair damage to the spinal column and, he supposed, add some hardware or bone grafts.
“It was the least I could do,” Doc said. “And given what happened in Tibet, I thought you might be better qualified than most to address certain . . . plausible complications that might arise.”
“So we will be operating near the border,” Beled replied. His tone said that he had long ago surmised this and only wanted
final confirmation.
“We will go where the investigation takes us,” Doc said.
This surprised Beled slightly, producing a hiccup in his gait, which he spent a few moments resolving.
“These wanderers,” Doc went on, “do not seem to be great respecters of borders, or of anything to do with Treaty, and so I thought it best to construct the Seven of persons of like mind.”
“Is it to be Beringia, then? Or Antimer?”
“Probably both. Antimer, of course, is closer—a short hop from Hawaii, which is today’s destination. But as the trail is warmer in Beringia, I think we shall go there first.”
HAWAII THEY REACHED BEFORE NIGHTFALL, TRAVELING AS PASSENGERS on a colossal TerReForm vehicle, not really an airplane and not really a boat, that skimmed over the surface at an altitude of no more than four meters. Ground effect vehicles of this class were called arks. They had been designed to deliver massive quantities of plant and animal biomass, nurtured at big offshore TerReForm bases such as Magdalena, to littoral destinations, where they could be slammed down into their new homes or else transferred to other vehicles for shipment inland. Only ten of them had ever been built and only six remained in service. This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.
If their theme was to travel unobtrusively, then Ark Madiba was certainly the vehicle for it, being a cavernous, reeking warren of animal pens, fish tanks, bug boxes, and racked peat pots in which exotic plants were growing in stews of manure. A ship making the same run—five thousand kilometers due west—would have taken several days. Provisions would have been needed to feed the beasts, clean the cages, and water the plants. This howling, hammering monstrosity did it in twelve hours, a span brief enough that just about any living thing could survive it without victuals beyond water and perhaps a bit of a snack. In it, the Seven basically disappeared. As the ark’s dozens of turbofans roared into life and it began to chunder across Magdalena’s harbor, the noise level rose to the point where they could do nothing but insert the earplugs they’d been issued and distribute themselves around the cargo hold in places where the stink wasn’t too bad. Doc and Memmie were given special dispensation to enjoy the journey in a tiny capsule near the cockpit, where members of the flight crew could sleep and recreate during multiday flights. The rest of them just tried to make themselves as comfortable as they could and waited for it to be over.
TerReForm had come late to Hawaii. The place was small, idiosyncratic, far away, and complicated—best left for last, after major continents had been booted up. The Hard Rain had loosened the lid on the geological hot spot that had built the islands, reawakening dormant volcanoes on existing islands while causing a seamount southeast of the Big Island to develop, ahead of schedule, into a Bigger Island. This had merged, a thousand years ago, with the former to make a Bigger Island Yet, most of which was still too hot and toxic for TerReForm to bother with. But there was a cove on its north coast, called Mokupuku after a tiny island that had once stood approximately in the same place, around which things were cool and quiet enough to be worth seeding. There, around sunset, Ark Madiba effected a sort of controlled crash landing, skidding to a halt offshore of a small TerReForm installation of the sort that were now scattered all over New Earth.
Such as these were the epicenters of the ecological earthquakes that the human races had, for about three centuries, been unleashing on the surface. Sometimes they got their deliveries straight from the sky, other times, as in this case, from arks dispatched out of the larger surface installations. Older ones were clusters of hemispherical domes because they had been constructed before New Earth even had a breathable atmosphere. Newer ones, like this, had a somewhat more welcoming appearance. But their basic purpose was to work with beasts, bugs, and plants, and so their fragrance and the overall style of their operations lay somewhere on a continuum between farm and zoo, with the odd dash of science lab. None of it would have seemed remarkable, at least on an olfactory level, to the vast majority of human beings who had lived on Old Earth in the millennia leading up to the scientific revolution, but the people who endured that voyage in the cargo hold of the great plane/boat were fortunate that the fuselage wasn’t pressurized and that ocean air could therefore filter through it.
The staff were almost all Moirans, with a sprinkling of Camites and one visiting scientist who looked like a Dinan/Ivyn breed. Obvious to Kath Two, and probably to the others as well, was that her kin had slept long and hard after coming to this place, where they were cut off from the rest of their race while continually exposed to the pheromones, smells, calls, and behaviors of those animals and plants. Resulting epigenetic shifts had rendered them well qualified to do this kind of work, to do it all day long, and to live here indefinitely. This truly was the back of beyond—even more isolated than certain boneyard habitats that had become proverbial for remoteness—and the Moirans here all shared a kind of thousand-yard stare that was only intensified by the fact that they were predominantly green-eyed. They moved slowly, they appeared to think slowly, and they were always reacting to stimuli—auditory? olfactory? imaginary?—that Kath Two could not even detect.
The existence of seven distinct human races, as well as various Aïdan subraces, provided modern society with a rich fund of opportunities for socially awkward happenings. The few hours they spent on the beach at Mokupuku, watching the locals unload samples from the vehicle and hose the shit out of it with pressurized seawater, were long ones for Kath Two as she sensed other members of the Seven glancing back and forth between her and these, and wondering how long it would take Kath Two to go that way if she extended her stay. These people had created, and were self-aware and self-proud of having created, an original culture around the place where they lived. Which for all practical purposes was synonymous with the ecosystem that they were installing in it. Not for them scientific detachment. Was it really wise to station Moirans in a place where they could live as closely with epigenetic animal species as medieval Europeans had with their swine and their fowl? Were these animals scientific specimens, livestock, or pets to them? Kath Two watched their uncomfortably familiar interactions with those animals and they watched her watching them. They had woven into their dreadlocks the bright feathers of birds that on Old Earth would have been called exotic: a word that was useless here, since humans had made them, patterning them after the parrots, toucans, and cockatoos of long-extinct jungles on the theory that if colorful plumage had been useful to birds there, it would be useful to them here. “Inotic”? “Anthroötic”? Anyway, they were weird people, and they were lifers in the sense that no conceivable home could be found for them on the ring. Not unless they went back to sleep for a while and tried to roll back the changes that their environment had bent on them. But that was no easy thing. As long as a Moiran kept changing, she could keep changing, but if she stayed one way for too long she would “take a set,” as the expression went, and find it hard to change back. These, Kath Two suspected, had definitely taken a set. They were obviously interbreeding with the Camite staff, who in racially characteristic fashion had adapted to the place where they had found themselves and were looking for ways to make it work for the people surrounding them.
There was nothing wrong with that. So people on the ring kept saying, because it was the polite thing to say. Nothing wrong with breeds. But the truth of it was that breeds, like weeds, tended to be found in disturbed areas. A sprinkling was nice, especially in sophisticated places like Chainhattan, but seeing a lot of them in one community was a sign that everyone on the ring knew how to read, even if they knew it was impolite to say what they were thinking. The behaviors that these Moirans had invented around everyday things like the sunrise, mealtime, and the interpretation of dreams had a ritualistic quality that to Ariane was obviously fascinating and to Kath Two was a little mortifying. For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the su
rvival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on. It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion.
Presently her Survey mind kicked in and subsumed all under the scientific method. Here they were at a TerReForm outpost. Many thousands of these existed. Some were huddles of tents presaging more permanent works. Some, like this one, had been around for decades, others for centuries. Some were now abandoned, having served their purpose, and others had become nuclei of RIZes, campuses for gimmicky schools, prison camps, or scientific foundations. A weird culture, utterly nontransferable to the ring, had formed at this one. If it had happened here, something like it must have happened at others. How many? Was New Earth infested with bizarre cultural outliers centered on TerReForm installations? Could you go to what used to be Uzbekistan and find a miniature colony of Ivyn performance artists, developing their own idiosyncratic lichen-based cuisine on the rim of an impact crater the size of Ireland? To what was left of the Iberian Peninsula and visit a colony of Teklan juggernauts making babies with Julian mystics? How far could this go?
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