The template, and the general set of expectations, for communities of this type had been set beginning around five hundred years after Zero, when Cradle had become sufficiently crowded that there had simply been no choice but to spread outward from it. The first outlying habitats had been only a few kilometers away on Cleft. In fact, nearly all settlement had been confined to Cleft until early in the Second Millennium, when the industrial base had developed to the point where other rocks could be colonized. Many more such communities had been depicted in fictional entertainments than had actually existed. This didn’t matter, though. As the almost totally factitious and romanticized Old West had been to American culture of the twentieth century, so those yarns were to the people of the habitat ring. So in the rare cases when actual settlements of that type were constructed de novo, as here, they tended to be built so as to meet the expectations of people who their whole lives had been watching fiction serials about their Second Millennium precursors.
Even so, there were some surprises. Not so much the fact that it was female-owned. That wasn’t uncommon in the adult entertainment industry, and anyway some selection bias was at work—they had chosen to sit down in this place because it didn’t feel as creepy to Kath Two and Ariane as some of the others. More unexpected was the fact that as many as half of the people in there were Indigens. Those who weren’t—ones who had come across the water from the ice slab floating offshore—were identifiable by haircut, clothing, and bearing. But their numbers were matched by shaggier and more colorful characters whose professions and reasons for being in Qayaq could only be guessed at. It was safe to assume that many of these had come up the coast from a RIZ about twenty kilometers away to engage in trade or other forms of intercourse. But Qayaq itself was bigger and more crowded than they had expected, suggesting growth in population and commerce exceeding the limits set by Treaty. Sheltered by mountains and hidden most of the time under dense clouds, an illicit city was growing up here. If it was happening here, it was happening elsewhere in the Blue part of the world. Red had to know about it. Cloud cover alone couldn’t keep such a place secret. Why did Red not file diplomatic protests, then? Because Red was probably doing the same thing, perhaps on an even larger scale, and Red and Blue had come to a tacit agreement not to make trouble.
How many humans lived on the surface? The official numbers for the Blue part of it were about a million, mostly concentrated around Cradle sockets. Maybe the real numbers were much greater.
When they were finally approached, it was by a young Ivyn man with long hair and a wispy beard. Had he been spotted in the same location five thousand or, for that matter, ten thousand years ago, he would have passed for one whose ancestors had crossed from Asia over the original Beringia and flooded into North and South America. He had the wit to understand that the visitors were looking at him warily but the grit to walk to them anyway. He kept his hands casually down to his sides, palms slightly out, as if he had caught himself in the instant before throwing them up and exclaiming “What the fuck are you people doing here?” He was alert and mildly amused. As he drew closer it became clear that he was taller than he’d seemed at first; they’d been misled by his slight build and his stooped posture.
They might have asked the same question—what the fuck are you doing here?—of this young Ivyn. Judging from his clothes—five-year-old fashions from Chainhattan customized with bits of fur, bone, and animal skin—he was an Indigen with commercial links to Qayaq. Maybe the smartest kid in his RIZ, the child of eccentric Ivyn dreamers, looking for things to do with his brain. He’d been hanging out at the bar with some Dinan chums, but all of them had seemed more embarrassed than stimulated by the nude dancers.
“You guys headed over the mountains?” he asked. He had noted their clothing: brand new, high quality, extremely warm.
It seemed like a simple icebreaker to everyone except Ty, who said, “We don’t need a guide,” before any of the others could answer.
That set the kid back just a little. “A guide,” he repeated, as if Ty had just brought a peculiar but somewhat interesting idea into the conversation. “No, I didn’t really take you for people who would hire a guide.” Meaning adventurous—and, by Treaty, illegal—tourists from the ring.
This left open the question of what he did take them for, and so it was a little awkward until he went on: “If you’re going to the other side of the mountains, I could show you something.”
“Something special? One of a kind? Something you show to people all the time?” Ty asked.
The kid looked shy. “I have been there twice before. It’s interesting.”
“Been there with paying customers?” Ty asked. “Because—” but he was interrupted by a hand on his arm from Ariane.
“He called it interesting,” she said. “He is not motivated by money.”
“Very well,” Ty said.
“What is your name?” Ariane asked him.
The kid put up his deflector screens and said, “Einstein.”
Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.
“What makes this thing so interesting?”
“It’s a fact,” Einstein said.
“I don’t understand,” Kath Two said. “It’s a fact that it’s interesting or—” but then she stopped, because she had figured it out. An apostrophe belonged before that word. He meant that it was an artifact. A surviving object from the pre-Zero world.
“I would go see that,” Ty allowed.