It was an artificial atmosphere. The human races had bombarded the parched and dead surface of the planet with comet cores for hundreds of years just to bring the sea level up to where they wanted it. Then they had infected that water with organisms genetically engineered to produce the balance of gases needed to support life—and, having done that, to commit suicide, so that their biomass could be used as nutrients for the next wave of atmosphere-building creatures.
According to their measurements, the result was a nearly perfect reproduction of Old Earth’s atmosphere. No one who breathed it after a lifetime spent in habitats needed scientific data to back that up. Its smell penetrated to some ancient part of the brain, triggering instincts that must go all the way back to hominid ancestors living on the shores of Africa millions of years ago. As she knew from having traveled to Earth many times, it was a kind of intoxicant. It was the best drug in the universe. It made people want to be on Earth more than anything. It was the reason that Cradle—which was bathed in that air, being dragged through it all the time on the end of its thirty-six-thousand-kilometer string—was the most exclusive community in existence. And it was the reason that Red and Blue had twice gone to war over the right to live on the surface.
Cradle was hung from the end of the tether by a sort of bucket handle that arched high above the middle of the city. The bucket handle was hollow, accommodating a surprisingly ramshackle elevator system that took Kath Two and some other passengers down to a platform embedded in the city’s bedrock, or “bedmetal,” along its northern limb. From there a ramp took them up into the streets of the city itself.
The tops of the walls all around the exit were white with crow shit. Hundreds of birds were perched where they could view the faces of those emerging into the light and swoop down to deliver messages to ones they had recognized. Other new arrivals stretched their hands out to offer little snacks. A well-dressed Ivyn man, bustling along ahead of Kath Two, quickly attracted a grizzled crow by that strategy. With his other hand he held out a little tablet that, as Kath Two knew, must be showing someone’s photograph. “Coffee at the Change, dot seventeen,” the man said. The crow gulped the snack down in a move that looked almost like vomiting in reverse, then flapped away screaming the same words into the ether. Other grizzled crows, not hungry or not currently on errands, were keeping up a raucous murmur that, if you listened to it, might give you clues as to what was going on in the equities market or the political world.
At first the new arrivals moved together in a pack, visibly distinct from the ordinary foot traffic of the place, but within a few hundred meters this had dispersed, and Kath Two found herself alone, no different from anyone else.
She knew the general layout from schoolbooks. She had arrived on the north side—Change Hill. Perhaps a native would have known as much just from the attire of the people, the way they walked. These were comersants, working by day in subterranean offices, ascending to the surface for meals, recreation, and other means of enjoying their wealth. Commerce was, of course, spread all about the habitat ring, and the old centers of Greenwich, Rio, Baghdad, et al. had financial hubs that rivaled, and in some ways eclipsed, Change Hill. But nothing could ever compete with this place for prestige. The wealthiest and most powerful financiers, the up-and-coming traders in places like Greenwich, no matter how well they were doing for themselves, were forever haunted by the thought that they might be missing something on Cradle.