She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver called Jesus Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and began to dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly over her, and she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal velocity. Passing the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as the cliff was, at full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap in the face, and it took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and skill and nerve, and the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and popped her wings, and felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous pressure even though the suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing precen-tage of the load. Tail feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then she was jinking across the chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse off it.
She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into developing high clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing pleasure to tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.
She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward Overlook, feeling tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of fliers, if there was a bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely than birders had ever before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and flutter to try to learn the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this cliff would be innocently wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of fliers would be above it following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.
Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the placement of the wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that she craved but could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing clouds, indigo sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms when she peeled over into a stoop … eternal moments of no-mind. The best, cleanest use of human time.
But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the hawk to its day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail her landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if she had never left.
The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside, and it was a mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by fliers, and tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and roving and talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the night. And there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and Ella and Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and delighted to see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to celebrate the reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail catching up on gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making ribald commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends spotted in the crowd.
Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the crowds of Topside, and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the bathhouses. They piled into the changing room and took off their clothes, and wandered naked through the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep, ankle-deep, chest-deep — hot, cold, lukewarm — splitting up, finding each other later, having sex with scarcely visible strangers, Zo working slowly through several partners to her own orgasm, purring happily as her body clamped down on itself and her mind went away. Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at the sight of the stars in the skylight overhead, at the feel of warm water and of some boy who came in her and stayed in her, nearly hard, and three minutes later stiffened and started humping again, laughing at the approach of another bright orgasm. After that she sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar and found the others there, Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was usually the best, with an exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a good bit of semen left to ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an effort, you have to be wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third anyway.” Zo and Rose and the rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many other ways, being female was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely had several wonderful orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the status orgasmus, a kind of running continuous orgasm that could last half an hour if one were lucky and one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this that they studied assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they all agreed: one had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd … lately they had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily Zo demanded proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her and the rest down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep lay on his back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted up by the others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an un-differentiated mass of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they all kept going, more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then she was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going, until she cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and kept her going until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled violently off Imhotep and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even stand. Someone said they had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like two, or eternity. All her abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt. “Cold bath,” she said, and crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.
But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that could appeal. Any more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and Xerxes, and then a thin woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored. Flesh flesh flesh. Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further into it; other times it became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and outsides, who cared.
She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was morning, the sun bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the empty streets to her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big breakfast, fall into bed, delicious sleep.
But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our Zoya.” She had always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.
Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”
Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you check in when you got back?”
“I wanted to fly.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I didn’t mean it as one.”
Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re looking good.”
Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sunburned and therefore wrinkled — younger but somehow preserved, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as spirit — a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic struggle, i
t had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained — and she was still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.
Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.
Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo straightened up.
“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”
Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”
“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”
“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate what they need, now.”
“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”
“That’s right.”
“But what do they want for them?”
“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”
“It isn’t domination.”
“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know — ”
“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re big too.”
“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.
Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a difference.
“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter much.”
Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation were the work of a child — as if there were hidden sources of political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not show her irritation.
Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.
There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had — that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual pleasure, on life itself — these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridectomy, foot binding and so on — ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, certainly — but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.
“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”
“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a front.”
After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.
Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”
“Okay.”
Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.
Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”
Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The coop was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chlbroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get biomes through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.
The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.
Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites.
The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and greenhouse-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very
satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.
One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.
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