Ty caught Kath Two looking, then shook his head and snorted.
“I hope I didn’t overdress,” Bard remarked, after he and Beled had finally let go of each other without incident. “I sometimes overcompensate when I come to Cradle.”
“Is that often?” Ty asked.
Kath Two understood that Bard’s remark had been a conversational gambit and not just a bald assertion. Ty, with the social reflexes of a Dinan bartender, had recognized it as such and was already following up.
“It’s actually surprising that you and I have never crossed paths before,” Bard said, addressing Ty but watching Kath Two out of the corner of his eye. Only after she had sat down in one of the available chairs did he resume his seat. He picked up the empty glass. “I noted on your drinks list that you cellar some surface produce. Thank you for the beer, by the way.”
“You’re most welcome,” Ty said.
“I have spent most of my life on the surface,” Bard explained, “where some members of my clan grow grapes. We produce wine. Our primary market is restaurants in Cradle, though we do ship a few cases up to private cellars on the Great Chain.”
“Well then, that’s one explanation for our not having met,” Ty said.
Kath Two interpreted this to mean The Crow’s Nest generally doesn’t stock such high-end wine, but Bard got a sly look on his face and, after a moment, returned, “Did you have another possible explanation in mind, Ty?”
“Where is your clan’s vineyard?” Beled demanded. Then, in a belated attempt to soften it, he added, “If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, it’s not a secret,” Bard said. “Antimer. Just near the line of demarcation.”
She didn’t know much about the place but she could visualize it: a crescent-shaped archipelago in the middle latitudes between the Aleutians and Hawaii. It was the rim of a huge impact crater. Some of the islands were fairly large. The largest of them straddled the antimeridian—180 degrees east or west of Greenwich—which was the origin of the name. But most of the archipelago lay to the east of there, stretching all the way across the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west. That was the location of one of the two turnpikes that the Aïdans had built across the ring. It was as far west as the Eye could travel, and so it served as a border between Red and Blue. Since it was in the middle of the Pacific, which, notwithstanding the best efforts of the Hard Rain, was still largely an empty expanse of water, there wasn’t much of a land border. 166 Thirty did cross through Beringia: the union of Alaska with the easternmost part of Siberia. A land border did, therefore, exist in that place as well as in the somewhat more climatically benign part of Antimer lying a few thousand kilometers due south. This was the “line of demarcation” that Bard had alluded to, carefully omitting mention of on which side of it the vineyard was actually located. The border was fuzzy. There was no need to bother with strict enforcement on a world so thinly populated. The much longer land border at ninety degrees east, above Dhaka, wandered all over the place as it rambled north across the broadest part of Asia, squirming this way and that to circumvent craters, Himalayas, and other complications.
The general picture that Bard had therefore conveyed, in just a few words, was something like this. His “clan”—whatever that meant—of Neoanders had gone down to the surface as soon as it had become livable. They might have been Sooners (which was what Kath Two had been assuming of Tyuratam Lake) but, given their race, it was more probable that they had been military, sent down to Antimer—which was a fairly inviting piece of real estate—to secure it. For most of the Antimer chain lay on the Red side of the line of demarcation and constituted a valuable possession. But it had this troublesome extension onto the other side where Blue could, if it chose, establish a beachhead. From there, military incursions might be made westward in the event that the treaty failed. All of these things had come to pass during the War in the Woods. During the treaty negotiations that had concluded it, Red had made efforts to claim all of Antimer for itself—effectively defining a little eastward excursion in the Line of Demarcation that would rid it of this particular thorn in its side. No agreement had been reached on that item, so it remained in dispute. Had more people been living there, there might have been a demilitarized zone, a no-man’s-land, and all the other apparatus of disputed Cold War boundaries. As it was, things were just fuzzy. A tacit agreement was in place not to stir up trouble. But on both sides it was heavily populated with military settlements, and/or Survey installations, just to keep an eye on things. The obvious explanation for a lot of Neoanders living there was that they’d been sent down as a military force and brought their families with them. Upon the expiration of their term of service, they had declined the invitation to return to whatever crowded space habitat had been their place of origin and had dispersed into the countryside, which was said to be a very nice place to live. This was technically illegal but Red authorities had probably looked the other way, figuring that seeding the place with Neoanders could only strengthen their hold on it.
Their Neanderthal heritage had been fabricated out of whole cloth, yet it was taken more or less seriously by everyone—it was a sort of consensual historical hallucination. Aïda and some of her more bloody-minded descendants might have hoped it would instill fear of, or at least respect for, the fighting prowess of this subrace. Some Neoanders reveled in that. Many of them, however, preferred a revisionist view of Neanderthal history that painted them as highly intelligent (their brains were larger than those of “modern” humans), artistically gifted, and essentially peaceful proto-Europeans. Neoanders of a more intellectual bent held seminars about it. More practical-minded ones tried to live it. There was no better place to live it, Kath Two had to admit, than Antimer, which had a temperate European-style climate. And so it was entirely plausible that a group of Neoanders who had been sent down by Red as shock troops would, within a generation or two, end up running vineyards in that fuzzily defined border zone near the line of demarcation and, once the vines had reached maturity, trying to sell wine on the ring. The early market would be high-end connoisseurs and restaurants and so they would need a member of the clan who cleaned up well, had good manners, and knew how to wear clothes, to establish commercial contacts in places like Cradle.
This entire picture, or something close to it, was summoned up in the minds of Kath Two and, presumably, Ty and Beled and the others as soon as the words were spoken. But Ty’s remark—That’s one explanation for our not having met—and Bard’s nonanswer—Did you have another possible explanation in mind?—were still lodged there awkwardly. Was Ty meaning to question Bard’s story? The look on Ariane’s face, as she regarded the Neoander, was not what you would call warm. But of course the Julian would be suspicious, would look for other explanations than what lay on the surface.
Ty seemed to have noticed this too; his eyes were jumping back and forth between Ariane and Bard.
Bard looked up at Ty and smiled, his huge upper lip pulling back to expose the row of yellowish enamel boulders planted in his upper jaw. “I’ll bet that as our Seven spends time together, Tyuratam and I will have all sorts of opportunities to tell colorful stories about what our families have gotten up to during their decades on the surface.”
Which didn’t answer the question. But it was charming, and it deflected the issue by making the point that Tyuratam Lake’s background, should he choose to discuss it with them, was likely to be at least as complicated as that of Langobard. Perhaps a bit of guilt-tripping there too, implicitly asking them why they were so curious about the Neoander when other members of the Seven might be worthy of some scrutiny too.
Ariane sat back in her chair and pretended to look at her fingernails. She was not the least bit satisfied. Trying for a minute to think like a Julian, Kath Two imagined how it must look to her: a creature selectively bred by crazy people to be capable of killing with his bare hands, who at the same time was extraordinarily crafty in his social interactions.
“I am what I am,” Ty
said.
“And what is that?” Ariane asked.
“A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances.” He nodded at Bard. “Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?”
No one admitted to being thirsty.
“For beverages, I meant,” Ty added. “I’m sure we are all thirsty for knowledge.”
Doc liked that. “Knowledge in general, Tyuratam?”
“Oh, I’d be living on Stromness if I were a knowledge-in-general man,” Ty said. “A collector of facts. No, I take a more utilitarian stance.”
“Meaning that you would like to know why we are here,” Doc said.
Ty seemed to find the question overly blunt, and raised the ridge of scar tissue that had once been a honey-colored eyebrow. “If you’d enjoy saying something about it, I’d enjoy listening,” he admitted. “If not, well, I’m willing to come along for the ride—up to a point.”
Doc now looked across the table toward Ariane, in a way that made tumblers click inside of Kath Two’s head. He was handing control of the meeting to Ariane. It might be going too far to say that she was in charge, but she was probably in communication with whoever was.
“Most of our operations will be on the surface,” she said. “You might have inferred as much from the fact that we have gone out of our way to involve Indigens”—she glanced at Ty and Bard—“and Survey personnel.” She nodded at Kath Two and at Beled. The last gesture elicited another one of those sardonic snorts from Ty—pointing out, apparently, just how implausible it was that a man fitting the profile of Lieutenant Tomov could possibly be taken seriously as a member of Survey. Ariane gave Ty a cool look, as if to say Don’t start, then continued: “And I need hardly belabor the longstanding connection with the surface embodied by Doc and Memmie.”
Conspicuously absent from the list, now, was Ariane herself, but if she was aware of the omission, she didn’t show it. Everyone was left to make what guesses and assumptions they might about how her career—whatever it might be—was connected with the surface.
“Discretion is important,” Ariane continued, “which is why we will tend to operate out of Cradle and use atmospheric or surface transportation.” Meaning airplanes and things that crawled on the surface of New Earth as opposed to rocket ships, bolos, and Aitken-Kucharski devices like giant whips. “Whenever possible, we will enter and exit Cradle on foot—via the subterranean passages that are afforded by sockets.”
“When’s the next—” Kath Two started to ask.
“Cayambe,” Ariane said. “Two days from now.”
“We are going to travel from Cayambe to Beringia on the surface?” Kath Two asked.
Ty and Bard both looked at her curiously.
“I haven’t said anything about Beringia,” Ariane pointed out.
“But it’s obviously where we’re going,” Kath Two said. “It’s where Beled and I—and a lot of other people—were sent on Survey. It’s where I saw what I saw, and told Beled about it. This whole thing was precipitated by that, wasn’t it?”
“It has been brewing for longer. Years,” Ariane said. “But you’re not wrong.”
“Ty’s from that part of the world—I can tell by his accent. Bard is from south of there, on Antimer,” Kath Two went on.
“We will head north from the Cayambe Socket, yes,” Ariane said.
“North a hell of a long way,” Ty pointed out.
“We are not prevented from using air transport,” Ariane reminded him.
“If we can get a big enough glider,” Kath Two put in, “the mountain wave will take us right up the Andes, the Sierras, and the Cascades in a day or two.”
“I am fairly confident,” Ariane said, “that we can get a big enough glider.”
THE UNDERSURFACE OF CRADLE, ONLY VISIBLE TO PEOPLE STANDING on the ground—more specifically, on the equator—looking up at it, was flat and generally egg-shaped, elongated in the direction of its east-west movement. On closer inspection its mostly smooth surface was interrupted from place to place by small hatches, carefully engineered protrusions, orifices, and other details. These were distributed around that otherwise featureless surface in a way that suggested orderly minds at work, addressing complications posed by the asymmetries of the city above.
In several places along the equator of New Earth, ground had been cleared and flattened, and reinforced concrete pads laid. These had the same size and shape as Cradle’s undersurface, and were equipped with their own hatches and orifices matching those on Cradle. Cradle could be neatly set down into one of these sockets whenever the Eye happened to be directly overhead. There it might reside for hours or days, taking on or discharging supplies, and otherwise communing with the surroundings. But it never stayed for long, since it had to follow the movements of the Eye, which always had urgent business elsewhere on the ring.
At such times, a traveler who knew nothing of orbiting tethers and the like, emerging from the woods or cresting some nearby hill, and coming into view of Cradle, would perceive it as a normal, which was to say stationary, city. The bucket handle arching high over its top was a heavy hint that something was a bit odd about it. Other than that, however, it would look, in that context, like a somewhat isolated hill fort.
Some of the more well-established sockets had begun to accumulate suburbs: ring-shaped towns that would come to life whenever Cradle was in residence. Most of them had the feel, and shared the purposes, of military bases, scientific installations, and frontier outposts. It had always been envisioned that many such would be built in time, creating a ring around the equator to match the habitat ring far above it, and that once New Earth was opened for general settlement they would grow into important cities. To visit one now, centuries before its glorious peak, was something of an acquired taste—a little like walking around a building site after foundations have been laid and a few walls framed. Builders, dreamers, and people of imagination enjoyed such places; others saw nothing.
Cayambe and Kenya had been the first two sockets, built in the most likely sites on South America and Africa respectively. Each numbered around ten thousand souls.
Cayambe’s namesake was a volcano at the intersection of the Andes and the equator, in what had once been the country of Ecuador. It had, of course, taken a beating during the Hard Rain, and resumed erupting for a while, but had now been dormant for about seven hundred years. In any case the Cayambe Socket had been built well clear of its most active vents, placing the volcano’s summit, which was once again snow covered, far enough away that it could be admired from any windows on Cradle that happened to be aimed in the right direction.
The Crow’s Nest’s tower afforded views in almost all directions, and so Tyuratam Lake, standing behind his bar two days later, polishing a glass with a towel, was able to look up between two tap handles and see the summit glide into view and then seemingly rise upward from the horizon as Cradle was lowered gingerly into its socket. Klaxons sounded all over Cradle and across the earthbound ring city that was now coming into view beyond its windscreens. Out of habit Ty stuffed the towel into the pocket of his trousers, letting it dangle down his leg, and reached out to steady himself against the bar. The underside of Cradle and the matching surface below it had been designed so that a disk of air would be trapped between them during the final meter of the descent, and act as a cushion. This was allowed to escape through a picket fence of vents, aimed upward around the periphery of Cradle, and so final docking was, as usual, signaled by a roar of escaping air and plumes of condensed humidity jetting upward into the blue sky over the Andes. The mildest of lurches caused stored glasses and tableware to clink together in cabinets all over the bar.
The klaxons and the vents went silent at the same time. Through the bar’s windows, which Ty had left cracked open, he could hear the customary smattering of applause rising up from the stony streets of Capitol Hill. He checked his timepiece. A few politicians and generals, who had leaned back from their breakfasts to observe the docking and admire the profile
of Cayambe Volcano, bent forward again, picked up their forks, and resumed their conversations. Cradle had just become the largest city on New Earth, and was scheduled to remain so for twenty-four hours. Its system of windscreens, built to shield the city from the blast created by its movement through the atmosphere, now seemed more like a barbican, thrown up in some past age to defend an old city, but now merely a historical curiosity and a dividing line between neighborhoods.
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