“At least there’s no question of getting lost,” Kath Two remarked. She ducked her head low so that she could peer out the window and get a look at the northern sky beyond the city. The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. She didn’t have the crazy yellow cat-eyes of some Moirans, but there was a bit of that in her ancestral tree. She knew Ty was looking at her but she didn’t let on to being self-conscious, which he approved of. She was looking, of course, at the Aitken loop that was their immediate destination. Assuming that it was still operating—and she’d have reacted differently had it gone down—it was rising up out of a mostly subterranean flynk barn on the town’s outskirts, surrounded by hangars and maintenance facilities for aircraft that ranged up and down the length of the Andes.
“You have everything you need?” Ty asked. “It’ll be a long day for you.”
“It’ll go by in no time,” Kath Two demurred, “because I’ll be busy. It’ll be long for you because you’ll be bored. Did you bring a book?”
“People are my books,” Ty said. “But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.”
It was meant as a light joke but he saw her face snag on it, wondering if he was trying to make a racial crack about Moirans. “An annoying habit that many people seem to have,” he added.
Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane’s anxieties, and so the one carrying Beled and the one carrying Ty and Kath Two departed in tandem and began to work their way through streets crowded with pedestrians. They could have done the first part of it more quickly on foot, but when they passed out through the vehicular gate and into the streets of Cayambe, things opened up quite a bit and they were able to use streets that had been designed specifically for four-wheelers. The place seemed dustier than Ty remembered, or maybe he was just seeing it through visitors’ eyes. Cradle sophisticates would see its menagerie of robots as comically oversized and ramshackle, its people as a lot of jumped-up backwoodsmen. Ty’s kind of people, in other words. The sort of person whose ancestors had stayed in the habitat ring and played by the rules, patiently awaiting the moment when Doc, or some successor of his, would cut the ribbon on New Earth and allow settlers to flood in, had complicated feelings about Sooners and Indigens. On the one hand they were viewed as sharp operators. Tricksters. At the same time they were isolated bumpkins. Ty had learned early how to play both sides of the image. A stranger from the ring who took you for a wide-eyed rube would spill a lot of information before he came to understand the truth, and one who expected you to play tricks on him would let down his guard at the first show of honesty and plain dealings.
IF YOU TOOK A LARGE NUMBER OF FLYNKS—FLYING, AUTONOMOUS chain links—and joined them together into a long chain, and connected its ends to make it into a continuous loop, and then got the whole loop moving through the air like a train composed of little airplanes, each using its stubby winglets to generate its share of the lift, then you had a thing known as an “aitrain,” pronounced the way a resident of Old New York would have said “A train.” The concept was old enough that its etymology had been obscured by time. It might have been “air train” with the first r elided, or a contraction of “Aitken train.” Sometimes, as here, it was a captive aitrain, passing continuously through a fixed installation on the ground and rising from there to a considerable altitude before reversing direction and plunging back down for another circuit. But aitrains could also fly freely in the air: a technology crazy enough that it had become associated with the A?dan big-brains known as Jinns, or Ghenis, and tended to be used only by Red.