“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 A?dans 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.