Over a series of meals and drinks since the initial meeting of the Seven, Ty had been able to piece together a vague picture of the mission that Kath Two and Beled had recently completed in Beringia. Apparently, Beled had been trying to maintain some kind of threadbare cover story about being Survey. Fortunately, this had now been dispensed with and Doc was openly addressing him as Lieutenant Tomov.
Military were divided into three broad groups generally known as Button Pushers, Ground Pounders, and Snake Eaters. Beled clearly was no Button Pusher. That was the only branch of the service where Ivyns, and even Camites, were present in any numbers. That narrowed it down to Ground Pounder or Snake Eater. He seemed too elite to be a Ground Pounder: the sort of regular troops who would be deployed in large formations along borders on the surface. Oh, it wasn’t out of the question. He might simply have been an unusually big and strong GP. But more likely he was a Snake Eater, which was to say a former GP who had been promoted into one of a few special-purpose branches. Those had informal names too: Queeds (Quarantine Enforcement and Detention), Feelies (Forward Intelligence), and Zerks (a contraction of Berserkers). Queeds had by far the lowest status. They were looked at somewhat askance because of their status as what amounted to riot police, called in to quell domestic disturbances but more often just posted near gates to remind people not to make trouble. Popular estimates of their intelligence and moral fiber were none too generous. Ty could not see why such a person would have been chosen for the Seven, and so he deemed it unlikely. Forward Intelligence was a better fit, and an obvious guess since Ty already knew that Beled had very recently been called back from the surface, where he had been moving about on what sounded like a classic Feely kind of mission. Reference had been made to the fact that Beled had passed near at least one RIZ and observed its inhabitants without himself being seen, which was just the sort of thing Feelies were supposed to be good at. The only thing that prevented Ty from simply pigeonholing Beled as a classic Feely was his physique. Because of that, he must allow for the outside chance that Beled Tomov was a Zerk. But only an outside chance, because, contrary to their image in popular entertainment, Zerks were not all huge and muscular. Most of them looked reasonably normal, if unusually fit. The Zerks were not a single unitary force but a mosaic of small units, each of which was trained and equipped for a special type of activity such as fighting in space suits in zero gee, fighting underwater, being dropped from the sky in pods, or cloak-and-dagger urban shenanigans. Thus far Beled Tomov had not shown any clear signs of such specialization. The steps he was taking to avoid motion sickness suggested that he was not accustomed to airborne work. If Ty had to guess, he’d say that this man had started out as a Ground Pounder, spent a lot of time on the surface in a border zone, distinguished himself, been promoted from the ranks, and ended up in some kind of tiny Zerk unit that specialized in sneaking around on the surface.
The only one showing signs of life was Langobard. This stood to reason, since he had been confined to quarters for a few days. Ty moved back, sat next to him, and asked him about his clan’s vineyard in Antimer. It was a wholly reasonable line of inquiry from a Cradle bartender, but both men probably understood that it was just an icebreaker. Bard was more than happy to play along, and talked for a while about the volcanic soil of his homeland, how the TerReForm had converted it, in the last few centuries, from a dead mineral rubble to an ecosystem, and how his grandparents had smuggled grapevines down from various botanical gardens in both Blue and Red and suffered through various misadventures on their way to figuring out that certain soil amendments were needed to make it work. Implicit in that story was that they must have been working with some people who weren’t Neoanders. Smuggling unauthorized plant species down to the surface would have been dicey enough, for members of that race, if done entirely within Red. On the Blue side of things, Neoanders would have been absurdly conspicuous, liable to being detained and searched by the Q even when they weren’t engaged in illegal activity. When Ty pointed that out, Bard said yes while shaking his head no, as if to say, But of course, what you are saying is obvious. He went on to explain that his people, stationed for over a decade along a border that was entirely peaceful, had over time established cordial relationships with their opposite numbers on the Blue side of the line, which had begun with swapping supplies to enliven their respective diets and progressed to picnics, athletic competitions, and other ways of relieving the boredom. The Teklans (he reported with a glance toward the slumbering Beled) had been standoffish—but his people had always had good relations with Dinans.
Ty saw no reason to doubt the historical truth of this remark, but he understood that Bard meant it on another level as well: as an overture to Ty, which might lead to friendship. Certainly there were grounds, other than that, for the Dinan and the Neoander to understand each other. Both were Indigens who had found lives in the more sophisticated environment of Cradle but still maintained connections to the surface: connections that were second nature to them, but, in the context of the habitat ring at large, were fantastically unusual.
“Well, that’s good,” Ty said. “I was raised to be scared to death of your lot.”
“Of course you were. How far from the border did you grow up?”
By this, Bard meant the place where 166 Thirty cut across Beringia: a boundary zone similar to that farther south in Antimer. The west or Red side of it corresponded roughly to what had once been Siberia and the east or Blue side to Alaska. The irony being that the two continents had been rejoined by the Hard Rain but then sundered by an imaginary line.
“Oh, we moved about,” Ty said. “Remember, unlike your folk, we lacked a legitimate excuse for being there.”
The Neoander’s huge, highly expressive features reflected a bit of disappointment that his question hadn’t really been answered.
“Too close to the line, and we were at risk of being arrested by the Blues stationed there—or being cooked and eaten by Neoander raiding parties,” Ty cracked.
It was one of those jokes that was in such exceedingly poor taste that it could go either way: make Bard an enemy for life, or convince him that Ty really did understand. As a conversational gambit it was somewhat risky. But, on the other hand, Ty was cooped up on a glider with six strangers en route to a mission that hadn’t been explained yet. The cargo hold had been preloaded with unmarked cases, some of which obviously contained weapons. At least three of the Seven—Beled, Langobard, and Tyuratam—knew how to use them, and Kath Two’s Survey training had included a short course on how to use a kat in a pinch. It was not the time or the place for the sorts of elaborate conversational niceties and courtship dances that might be expected in, say, an old private club on Cradle. More important was to get things sorted in a hurry.
Bard laughed and shook his head. “Why not move farther east then?” he asked. “Get away from those threats altogether.”
“Because the early Sooner toeholds weren’t really sustainable and we had to trade with Blues for vitamins.”
“Under the table, I presume.”
“Of course.”
“What did you give them in return? Your women?”
It was fair payback for the “cooked and eaten” joke: Bard testing him in return. Ty took it in stride. “They were scared of our women.”
“Happy Dinahsday, by the way.”
“Is it Dinahsday? I’ve lost track.”
But it didn’t matter. Having made a crack about Dinan women, Bard had to pay respect to their Eve.
“No,” Ty continued, “to answer your question, it’s the same thing that led your ancestors to trade victuals across the line.”
“A craving for greater variety in the diet,” Bard said. “More powerful in the end than sex.”
“Yes. Early on we had nothing more to offer them than fresh vegetables.”
“Up there?!”
“Summer days are long—you can grow a lot in a crude plastic greenhouse. Later, as the ecosystem spun up, it was meat from sma
ll animals, berries, and a few luxury goods like furs.”
A thought occurred to Bard. “And how far would your people range in search for those things?”
He was referring, as Ty understood, to Kath Two’s story about the camouflaged Indigen in the trees. For she had by now shared this with the others.
“Not that far,” Ty said.
IN THE VAST AND ANCIENT UNDERTAKING CALLED THE TERREFORM, Survey was a small department, sometimes viewed as a receptacle for eccentric or troublesome personnel. Its outposts were small and, because they needed to be sited along rapidly changing frontiers, makeshift and temporary. TerReForm bases, by contrast, tended to be much larger and more permanent. As a rule they were sited on islands off the coasts of continents. There was a logical scientific reason for doing it thus, but as Doc himself freely admitted, the real reason was more aesthetic and symbolic. Most of the sophisticated genetic sequencing laboratories, and the staff needed to make them work, were up in the ring, where space was tight but brains were plentiful. TerReForm installations on the surface were of a more practical character, and they sprawled over territory in a way that looked extravagant and unruly to habitat dwellers. They combined the functions of botanical garden, experimental farm, arboretum, zoo, and microbiology lab. Small samples, cuttings, or populations of bugs, plants, or beasts that had been developed and nurtured on the ring were dropped in such places to be propagated and observed before being shipped in quantity to the biomes where they would be allowed to run wild. Placing the bases on islands was a simple method for limiting the spread of plants and animals that had escaped from their assigned habitats. It was very far from being foolproof, but it was simple, easy, and fairly effective: an easy fit, in other words, for the Get It Done school.
The TerReForm base for the Central American isthmus was Magdalena. This was a large island in about the same place as the former Islas Marías. Pre-Zero, this had been an archipelago off the west coast of Mexico, somewhat south of the tip of Baja California. The Hard Rain had reforged it into a single island with a few rocks and reefs scattered around, useful for propagating life that was designed to occupy shallow water and tidal zones. The lack of a moon meant that New Earth’s tides were caused entirely by the gravity of the sun, which made them weaker and more closely synchronized with the cycle of night and day. Because tidal zones were thought to have disproportionate importance to the ecosystems of land and sea alike, much TerReForm brainpower had been focused on them, and the low-lying banks of wave-washed rubble around Magdalena had become spawning grounds, not just for fish and birds and crustaceans, but for researchers with advanced degrees. Doc himself had spent ten years of his life here, sloshing through tide pools with buckets and shovels.
Ty would not have thought it possible, but Kath Two got them there with a little bit of daylight to spare, in a single day’s flying. Around midday she mumbled something about a noteworthy jet stream perturbation, and the possibility (which to her was apparently quite enticing) of catching a stratospheric wave. To Ty it might as well have been “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.” Her next words, though, had been admirably clear: “Hang on.” Drinks were spilled and barf bags reached for all around the cabin. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as the glider shot up through the tropopause, and the fuselage creaked and keened as Kath Two trimmed it to peel energy from some kind of fascinating upper-atmosphere anomaly. Several hours later, when, after another understated warning, she banked it nearly upside down and let it dive toward the faintly wrinkled blue water of the Pacific, they had covered many hundreds of kilometers beyond their original flight plan, and their only real problem was dumping energy so that they could make a landing, as opposed to a crater, on Magdalena. The place had a flynk barn, but the loop wasn’t operating at the moment, and anyway there was no reason to attempt a midair rendezvous with a flying chain when a simple airstrip was available nearby. An impressive whine sounded through the airframe as Kath Two turned on a pair of turbines in its belly that took in air through scoops and converted its energy to electrical power that was then stored. The next time the glider took off, the whole system could be run backward, driving the turbines as jets to provide some initial energy boost. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a way to slow the glider down, and it was a courtesy for the next pilot. Owing to some low banks of clouds, not much about the last phase of the flight made sense to its passengers, but at length the glider shot out the bottom of that weather system and suddenly Magdalena was below them, lit up on its west side by the last of the setting sun. On the purple skin of the sea, thin arcs of foam materialized as incoming wave fronts sensed the bottom or wrapped around submerged reefs. Doc had moved to a window seat so that he could peer down at his old stomping grounds, and in the suddenly quiet cabin Ty was able to hear him remarking on various installations along the shore. Most of these just looked to Ty like picket lines of pilings and ragged shanties of fishnet and plastic. But as Ty had been explaining to Langobard earlier, his Sooner ancestors had made a living from meaner tech than that, and so he did not think less of the scientists who had built them. The wildlife habitats, arboretums, and gardens tiling Magdalena’s western slopes looked a little closer to what a member of the general public might expect from a major TerReForm base, and the buildings clustered at the end of the airstrip were as respectable a town as it was possible to find anywhere on the surface. Ramps, stairs, and a long zigzagging road connected it to a harbor a couple of hundred meters below, where, at a glance, perhaps eight significant vessels, a giant flying boat called an ark, and many smaller boats were moored. They enjoyed a brief panorama of the waterfront before the final bank-around and approach took them out of view behind some hills. After the excitements of the flight, the landing was dull, and Ty suspected that Kath Two had just turned it over to an algorithm. The glider touched down on the single wheel that peeked out from the underside of its fuselage. Before it had slowed to the point where it might teeter sideways, a couple of specialized high-speed grabbs had caught up with it, moving in the somewhat disturbing prancing/scuttling gait that they used at such times, and caught hold of the wingtips. They escorted it to a field of tie-downs off to the side of the airstrip. Kath Two, relieved of responsibility, rolled over onto her back, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Ty was eager to disembark, but he knew that Doc would be the first out the door. He knew this because he could see a considerable welcoming party walk-jogging toward them.
Ariane was looking at the same thing. Ty did not understand why she would be so secretive on Cradle and in Cayambe, only to land them in the one location on the surface where Doc was most famous. He guessed she had her reasons, worked out in painstaking detail and never to be shared with the likes of Ty. They had to land somewhere en route to whatever their final destination was, and perhaps TerReForm was enough of a closed community that the buzz Doc would create by landing here would not extend much beyond Magdalena.
ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO—AROUND THE TIME OF HIS HUNDREDTH birthday—Dr. Hu Noah (like all Ivyns, he put his family name first, because it was somehow supposed to be more logical) had made a conscious decision to give up on trying to explain to younger people just how little he had actually changed with age. It didn’t really matter that these people were making all sorts of wrong assumptions about how his mind and his body were changing. What mattered to them, he had finally come to realize, was that they believed such things to be true. It was more important to them to believe it than it was for him to explain the facts of the situation, and so he had decided to let them think what they thought and to try to find constructive ways to use it. Sometimes this meant sitting so quietly that they forgot he was there and began speaking of him in the third person, using Remembrance as a sort of interpreter. Sometimes he could astonish by speaking up, making it clear that he had been following the conversation all along. Or he would stand up—an action that was always described later, by witnesses, as “springing to his feet” even though it was nothing of the s
ort—and begin to move about under his own power, which many who didn’t know him well seemed to consider miraculous. Because Remembrance was always by his side, and his grabb was always scuttling along beside him, giving him a sort of universal banister and grab-rail, people assumed he was more unsteady than was really the case. In fact, this support system was nothing more than a simple way of playing the odds. A fall could cripple or kill him; why not have the grabb handy? And Remembrance, though she was assumed by most to be a health care worker, was really more of a general-purpose aide de camp and, to put it crudely, a cowcatcher for turning human obstacles out of his path.
He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose. Remembrance carried in her head a list of all the people whom Doc might actually care to have a conversation with, and knew how to turn the others aside, typically by playing the age card. The list changed slowly over time, and certain people, some of whom were quite important, were occasionally discomfited to find that they were no longer on it. The list had been written down only once, twenty years ago, when Doc and Remembrance had established their relationship. She had committed it to memory and destroyed it. It now existed only in her—not Doc’s—head. Perhaps 10 percent of the original names remained. Many of them had died. The others had been crossed off, almost always without any volition from Doc. Remembrance stayed off to one side during his conversations, on the pretext that she might be needed to intervene medically. But what she was really doing was following the dialogue and monitoring Doc for signs, not that his heart was failing or his medication wearing off, but that he was bored. Sometimes, during their first decade together, he had gone so far as to glance in her direction and catch her eye for a moment while his interlocutor wasn’t looking, and this had been enough to eliminate that person from the list, but since then it had no longer been necessary. In many cases Remembrance had made what Doc had, at the time, considered to be mistakes in her performance of this duty, but on further consideration he had seen what she had seen quicker, and come to agree with her.
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