The staff were almost all Moirans, with a sprinkling of Camites and one visiting scientist who looked like a Dinan/Ivyn breed. Obvious to Kath Two, and probably to the others as well, was that her kin had slept long and hard after coming to this place, where they were cut off from the rest of their race while continually exposed to the pheromones, smells, calls, and behaviors of those animals and plants. Resulting epigenetic shifts had rendered them well qualified to do this kind of work, to do it all day long, and to live here indefinitely. This truly was the back of beyond—even more isolated than certain boneyard habitats that had become proverbial for remoteness—and the Moirans here all shared a kind of thousand-yard stare that was only intensified by the fact that they were predominantly green-eyed. They moved slowly, they appeared to think slowly, and they were always reacting to stimuli—auditory? olfactory? imaginary?—that Kath Two could not even detect.
The existence of seven distinct human races, as well as various A?dan subraces, provided modern society with a rich fund of opportunities for socially awkward happenings. The few hours they spent on the beach at Mokupuku, watching the locals unload samples from the vehicle and hose the shit out of it with pressurized seawater, were long ones for Kath Two as she sensed other members of the Seven glancing back and forth between her and these, and wondering how long it would take Kath Two to go that way if she extended her stay. These people had created, and were self-aware and self-proud of having created, an original culture around the place where they lived. Which for all practical purposes was synonymous with the ecosystem that they were installing in it. Not for them scientific detachment. Was it really wise to station Moirans in a place where they could live as closely with epigenetic animal species as medieval Europeans had with their swine and their fowl? Were these animals scientific specimens, livestock, or pets to them? Kath Two watched their uncomfortably familiar interactions with those animals and they watched her watching them. They had woven into their dreadlocks the bright feathers of birds that on Old Earth would have been called exotic: a word that was useless here, since humans had made them, patterning them after the parrots, toucans, and cockatoos of long-extinct jungles on the theory that if colorful plumage had been useful to birds there, it would be useful to them here. “Inotic”? “Anthro?tic”? Anyway, they were weird people, and they were lifers in the sense that no conceivable home could be found for them on the ring. Not unless they went back to sleep for a while and tried to roll back the changes that their environment had bent on them. But that was no easy thing. As long as a Moiran kept changing, she could keep changing, but if she stayed one way for too long she would “take a set,” as the expression went, and find it hard to change back. These, Kath Two suspected, had definitely taken a set. They were obviously interbreeding with the Camite staff, who in racially characteristic fashion had adapted to the place where they had found themselves and were looking for ways to make it work for the people surrounding them.
There was nothing wrong with that. So people on the ring kept saying, because it was the polite thing to say. Nothing wrong with breeds. But the truth of it was that breeds, like weeds, tended to be found in disturbed areas. A sprinkling was nice, especially in sophisticated places like Chainhattan, but seeing a lot of them in one community was a sign that everyone on the ring knew how to read, even if they knew it was impolite to say what they were thinking. The behaviors that these Moirans had invented around everyday things like the sunrise, mealtime, and the interpretation of dreams had a ritualistic quality that to Ariane was obviously fascinating and to Kath Two was a little mortifying. For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on. It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion.