SOUTH CRADLE
She pushed the door open and entered. The first thing that came into her view was a semicircular bar of old copper, a row of tap handles, a window behind looking into a busy kitchen. Music came out of a back room, not so loud as to interfere with conversation, but enough to make her nod her head slightly with its beat. She didn’t recognize the style, but she knew the type: something that had been cooked up by people isolated in a mining colony or an early habitat, people who knew how to dance.
Tending bar was a healthy-looking Dinan man in his forties. He seemed not to know that he was quite handsome. He was polishing a glass while scanning a piece of paper with handwritten numbers on it—a bar tab. Standing there alone, facing outward at the sweep of windows with its astonishing view of Cradle, he looked like the captain of an Old Earth ship.
A few moments after she had entered—neither so soon as to make her feel conspicuous nor so late as to make her feel neglected—he looked up at her and raised his eyebrows slightly. Or perhaps “eyebrow” was better since, as she now saw, one side of his face had taken serious damage.
“What are you drinking, Kath Amalthova Two?”
THE ORIGINAL NATS HAD BEEN DEVELOPED IN THE WORKSHOPS OF Arjuna Expeditions in Seattle and launched into space shortly before Zero, where they had crawled around on the surface of Amalthea under the eye of Eve Dinah. Later, during the first two years of the Epic, the original design had been modified to work on, and in, ice. Every child knew the story of how such nats had been used, first to bring Ymir to rendezvous with Izzy, then to merge those two objects into Endurance. As such, nats resonated more strongly in Blue culture than in Red, but they were used on both sides of the turnpikes. Or to be more precise, both cultures used a vast family tree of species and subspecies of nat, all descended from the first Arjuna model and all sharing, to a greater or lesser degree, the code base originally created by programmers like Larz Hoedemaeker and Eve Dinah. The number of different uses to which nats, and swarms thereof, had been put over the millennia was uncountable. They were as ubiquitous and as various as hammers and knives had been pre-Zero.
Like hammers and knives, they could be used for constructive or destructive purposes. In the latter category was a whole taxonomy of nats designed to be projected at high speed out of gunlike devices. Most of these were designed to fold up into a compact form, like a dart or bullet, so that they could be accommodated in magazines, bandoliers, and the like, and fed into the breeches of firing mechanisms.