by Watts Martin
The road runs down the center of a valley; technically, this valley runs all three thousand, seven hundred kilometers of the Ring, but not all the space is terraformed. The streets and the city aren’t perfectly level, but the hills are small, gentle. To either side lie bigger hills, forests in the distance. A block away there’s an urban park, a pond she remembers feeding fish in. A few blocks in the other direction the buildings become set even more widely apart, shifting to a more residential area, and there’s a wildflower meadow creeping up a much steeper hill.
After several seconds of open staring, Squarejaw folds his arms. “I confess this doesn’t match the image of New Coyoacán that you two painted for me.”
Ansel makes a displeased noise. “It’s beautiful but it’s creepy. All—all the edges and curves are hidden. Is this what being on an actual planet is like?”
“It’s closer than anywhere else I’ve been out here.”
While they speak she calls up local information guides, information bubbles overlaying across her vision to show accommodations. “There’s a hostel about two blocks away.”
Squarejaw shakes his head. “We need more secure accommodations than that. If we’re allowed private rooms, we should take them.”
“‘Allowed?’ Look, stop listening to Ansel. We’re ‘allowed’ whatever we pay for, just like everywhere else. If you want to spend the money on private rooms, let’s do it.”
“Then let’s take the riverside hotel.”
She grits her teeth. “It’s going to be fairly far out of town.” She adjusts the search parameters of her display, looking around, then sees the proper tag. She points. “That way, about a kilometer and a half.”
“About a twenty minute walk? I’m willing if you are.”
“Fine.”
Ansel glowers.
As they walk, Gail remembers a word she learned from the inner system: rural. The Ceres Ring looks—she thinks—rural. Geographically New Coyoacán’s borders encompass almost a million people, but less than half live in what she would call “the city.” And even in that city core, the lack of density she grew up with and thought of as normal for her first two decades seems shocking now. Pedestrian traffic flows in leisurely clumps instead of hurried streams, and vehicles are fewer but larger, designed for longer distances.
The agent checks his viewcard every so often, occasionally tapping on it. Looking up references? Playing tourist? Even though retina implants have been around for decades, few people get them. She can’t imagine why more people don’t at least use display eyewear, though.
Soon the street turns more residential, and Squarejaw puts away the card. He gestures at one of the buildings to the right, a house at the top of a hill a good five meters over the street level. “I’m still trying to understand property here. Does the state own that house?”
“Yes,” Ansel says, looking at Gail for confirmation.
She shakes her head. “No. Well, sort of. The Ring Collective owns all the land, which is what they mean by ‘property.’ And legally we’re all the Collective. Anyone who builds a house gets homesteading rights.”
“But they could still kick you out if they wanted.”
She shrugs at Ansel. “Maintenance crews on every platform have the authority to kick people out of buildings. I know philosophically that’s not the same, but I’ve seen that happen on Panorica. Never seen anyone lose a house here.”
Squarejaw nods thoughtfully. “It’s just interesting, given how fiercely anti-state so much of the Cerelia River is.”
“But that’s still true here, too. The Collective isn’t a state, right? The argument against private property is that there’s no way to create it without state coercion. If you go back far enough in any piece of land’s history, you’ll find a claim built on either force or the threat of it.” She grimaces inwardly. She sounds like her mother all of a sudden, right down to the cadence.
“On Earth, maybe. If there’s any piece of land that couldn’t be applied to, it’d be land that literally was created.” He waves a hand around.
Ansel grunts. “You’d think.”
“I guess they wanted to be consistent. Anyway, it’s pretty much that philosophy that made them the best for running the Ring. The River can’t exist without the mining and water extraction, and giving the bid to the one group that’d run it as a non-profit was a way to head off fights about profiteering.”
“It wasn’t a bid!” Ansel throws his hands in the air. “It’s like—like—everyone wrote political philosophy term papers and a committee awarded the Ring to the group with the highest grade.”
Squarejaw makes a thoughtful noise. “The River’s grown much faster than even its initial supporters thought it would, though, so it clearly worked.”
“But did it work because of this model, or in spite of it?”
She grins. “Always the principle with Ansel.”
The surroundings grow still more residential, still more open. A bird cries in a nearby tree and receives a distant answer. After a quick double-check of the directions, she points at a gravel path to the right, leading down into a forest. “That way.”
Ansel groans, hefting his own bag as if it were full of lead bricks. “This is going to kill my paws.”
She points at her sandaled feet. “Sandals, Ansel. Wear sandals.”
“I hate footwear.”
“At risk of asking a gauche question, is that a totemic custom? About half of the ones I’ve met are barefoot—barepawed?—and I’ve never seen one wearing full shoes.”
Ansel sniffs. “We don’t need shoes.”
“Says the fox bitching about walking on gravel.” Gail chuckles. “I think some of it’s kind of aesthetic, but some of it’s practical. Shoes and fur aren’t a comfortable combination.”
“I’m still trying to get a sense of what animal characteristics totemics have adapted and why. I can read your emotions through your ears. And tails. But I’m presuming that while Ansel has better hearing and smell than I do, he has full color vision, isn’t allergic to chocolate, and doesn’t have any other drawbacks from canine/vulpine genetics mixed in.”
Ansel grins. “That’s an advantage to being able to mix and match genes. On the flip side, cisform humans can wear clothes that fur makes impractical. And they don’t get fleas, mange, or other furry problems that can’t be addressed by flipping a genetic switch.”
“Hmm.” He nods again.
“Are there many totemics left on Earth? I always thought most of them moved out here.”
“That was generations ago. There’s at least two million there now. Most Earth countries have stronger legal protections for totemics now than I think it’s possible to have out here. Your system doesn’t have the tools for anti-discrimination laws.”
The fox grunts. “Our systems, plural, rarely do, true. But they also don’t have the unintended consequences of those laws. Your cures are frequently worse than the diseases.”
“I’m not convinced of that.” Squarejaw glances at Gail.
Her ears lower. She knows exactly what he’s thinking. “I can’t see how anti-discrimination laws would have stopped someone from bombing my mother’s speech.”
“They wouldn’t have.” He leaves the but unspoken; her brain fills it in anyway. But they wouldn’t have been allowed to turn her away from the hospital. They wouldn’t have been allowed to let her die.
Thomas speaks again after a few seconds. “I’m enjoying the walk. I could almost mistake this for an undeveloped area near where I used to live.”
“There are parks like this on Panorica.”
He shakes his head to Ansel. “There’s a few spots carefully maintained to look wild. Here, you can tell they built it and just let it go.”
“This is what a lot of Earth is like, then, isn’t it?”
“Some parts. I’m not sure I’d say a lot.”
It takes another three or four minutes of walking before the forest gives way to a meadow. The gravel path meets a paved r
oad after one more minute’s walk. The road follows the bank of the Sonora River.
Squarejaw comes to a full stop this time, staring at the water. They can hear it from here. “It looks completely natural.”
“It is.” She waves a hand. “I mean, obviously they decided to put in a river when they were building the Ring, but they let the water seek out its own channel.”
The river’s over a hundred meters wide here. A dozen or so buildings sit facing them on the far shore, a handful of skiffs tied up to a long pier running along the shore. Her dad sometimes used to take her out on the water. She’d loved swimming and diving, and he’d joked that rats were just better swimmers than humans. He almost never said transform or cisform—he’d say the animal name and human. She knew that was one of the things he and mom argued about. Back when he still took Gail out in the boat they were only arguments. Later they became screaming fits.
God, she’s been here an hour and she’s opening doors in her mind she keeps closed for a reason. She loved living here. She hates being here.
The road follows the bank for another half a kilometer, then pulls away as it reaches a cluster of waterfront buildings. A boardwalk continues on right over the river bank. She points ahead. “The inn’s one of those.”
Her memories of the river as gentle and clear are true to the reality; you can see into it nearly a full meter. Piers jut off the boardwalk, the wood weathered by water and wheels and feet. The boardwalk takes them in front of a riverfront café. Wrought iron tables and chairs sit on a tiled patio between the boardwalk and the building proper. Again, nearly all the patrons are totemic. After more than a decade away, that seems unnatural.
Ansel’s looking down at the water with a dubious expression, holding onto his cap as if it’s in danger of falling in. He was born on Arelia, the next largest arcology behind Panorica, and he’s lived on Panorica since college and transformation—nothing in his experience matches this. She looks to Thomas curiously. “How close is this to a river on Earth?”
“Remarkably. Incredibly.” He hesitates. “Inefficiently. Panorica feels like a dense, lived-in metropolis—it has that sense of changing over time in a way I don’t think most of the other platforms out here have the physical leeway to do. But they still manage resources there down to the milliliter.”
“It’s big enough that this is the most efficient way to manage our—their—resources. Instead of algae farms and scrubbers, they use fields and forests. And rivers.”
“It’s too open.” Ansel looks up at the sky, squinting at the brightness, then blinks furiously as he looks away. “And I think the design is a philosophical statement, in line with a lot of Mara’s original thoughts about totemics. Merging technology and nature.”
Gail waves a hand. “This thing took five countries, a dozen corporations and a half a century to build. It ain’t all about philosophy.”
Squarejaw laughs. “No, but you know there’s still fierce arguments over whether these projects ever paid off, economically. The consensus is they didn’t.”
“Your consensus,” Ansel sniffs.
“An inner system one, yes. But maybe it succeeded on a philosophical level, by creating a new frontier. And it surely did that. It’s impossible to tell we’re on a ring circling a planet.” He looks down at the river. “The water flow seems just a little unusual, though. Is that from the spin?”
“I don’t see anything odd.”
“You grew up with it.”
She frowns, and walks on in silence.
After another dozen storefronts—coffee shop, candy store, more than one art studio—they reach the Sonora Inn. Three stories high, floor to ceiling glass windows everywhere, stone walls and wide, rough-hewn wooden beams jutting out. It’s all straight lines and right angles. Squarejaw studies it with his typical fascination. “They’re using cantilever construction. What was this called? The Prairie School. It’s beautiful, although it’s quite a shift from the Spanish influence in the city. I’d expected that, but not this.”
She tilts her head. “The city looks Spanish?”
“Just touches. But the names are geographic references. Sonora. Coyoacán.”
Ansel laughs. “There’s a platform out here called ‘Amsterdam Mission’ and another one called ‘New Mumbai.’ It doesn’t mean much in practice.”
“It meant a lot to someone. The murals we passed by in the port were in Diego Rivera’s style, and I can’t imagine that’s mere coincidence.”
The fox gives Squarejaw the furrowed brow look of someone who’s suddenly lost. She isn’t, but explaining that New Coyoacán’s name was inspired by radical leftist artists will just provoke a new rant. “It’s not,” she says. “But I don’t think the city has much more of a Latino population than anywhere else on the River.” Despite her grandmother’s ancestry, she feels about as much connection to Mexico as she does to Mars. She never met her grandmother, anyway.
Thomas reaches the entrance to the building ahead of her and Ansel, but takes a moment to realize the door’s not automatic. Ansel’s looking at the door handle like it’s an ancient artifact of evil. Right, the guy with the analog wall clock can’t deal with a door that doesn’t go whoosh for you.
They step into a long hallway delineated by low half-walls on either side, an upscale restaurant to the left and a lounge to the right. The whole place has the same squared-off but warm look: wooden floors and ceiling, stone walls, predominant colors brown, tan and black. It smells like…ash? She sniffs, whiskers twitching. A fire? No, a fireplace.
Squarejaw comes to a stop in front of it, staring. “That’s not burning real wood.”
She watches the flames flicker and listens to the cinders pop, and dredges through her memory rather than looking it up. “Kinda, yeah. Compressed wood. The ash gets reprocessed into something, too, but I don’t know what.” Other scents lie under the ash: whisky and citrus from the bar, spices from the restaurant kitchen, a faint cedar perfume she suspects they’ve added to the air conditioning.
Two people stand behind the desk, both full transform, one fox and one squirrel. She doesn’t see many squirrel totemics on Panorica. Not many rats there, either. You see the less common species choices when you’re living around thousands of others, and sure, there are thousands of totemics on Panorica, but…it’s different. There are totemic neighborhoods there, like there are on Carmona and Kingston, but here everything’s—God, wait, there might be cisform neighborhoods in New Coyoacán, mightn’t there? She doesn’t remember it that way, but she was so young.
“Welcome to the Sonora Inn.” The squirrel’s stepped up to greet them, beaming a huge square-toothed smile. “How can I help you, Mr. Thomas?” Her eyes flick down momentarily to read his name off her display.
“Thank you. I’m looking for a room or suite with three separate beds.” He gestures to Ansel and her.
Tufted ears flick, and she glances down at a display in the counter, swiping finger pads across it. “All right, sir. There’s a junior suite available, or two separate rooms, although it doesn’t look like we have two adjoining rooms available. The suite will be less expensive.”
“Let’s go with that, then.”
“And for how many nights?”
He hesitates for a second. “Three.”
“Your preferred currency is the North American dollar?”
He nods.
“Very good.” Another swipe, a few taps. “The junior suite is five thousand eight hundred per night, with a ten percent manager’s discount. So the total will be fifteen thousand, six hundred sixty dollars.”
Gail watches Squarejaw’s expression move from that’s a bargain at the first number to or not at the “per night.” Well, hell, Interpol can afford to send him halfway across the solar system, they can afford a damn hotel suite, right?
“How nice there’s a discount.” His tone’s drier than normal. “Let me set up the payment.” He pulls out his viewcard and fiddles with it.
“Excellent. Thank y
ou, Mr. Thomas.” A section of the counter in front of them lights up with the charges. “Could all three of you confirm the room rental so we can key the room for you?”
“Yes.” They all touch the display; it flashes green when Ansel touches it last.
“You’ll be in room nineteen, just down the hallway.” The squirrel points. “The bar opens at fifteen o’clock, and the restaurant serves dinner between seventeen and twenty-one. It’s open for breakfast between six and ten.” She glances down at her display and her eyes widen for just a split-second, but she recovers nicely. “I hope you enjoy your stays in New Coyoacán, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Santara.” When she looks to Gail it’s with an expression a touch too close to reverence. “And it’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Simmons.”
“Thank you.” She tries to keep from sounding too guarded. The nebulously-named “manager’s discount” might be a “we recognized your name” discount. But they couldn’t have already known—
“When Bright Sky arrives, should I send her to your suite, or will you meet in the lounge?”
—unless they were told in advance. “She’s left a message?”
Squarejaw waves his card. “I’ve been handling coordination with her, as requested.”
Gail’s ears lower. “That’s great. Thanks.”
He gives her a steady look. “You’re welcome.”
