a T-shirt with the Helios winged-sun logo printed on the back. With scarcely a purr, the buses eased from the walled compound out onto the street.
Nazca City reminded Ali of Beijing, with its hordes of bicyclists. At rush hour in a boomtown with streets so narrow, the bikes were faster than their buses. They had jobs to get to. Through her window, Ali took in their faces, their Pacific Rim races, their humanity. What a feast of souls!
Declassified maps showed boom cities like Nazca as veritable nerve cells reaching tendrils out into the surrounding space. The attractions were simple: cheap land, mother lodes of precious minerals and petroleum, freedom from authority, a chance to start over. Ali had come expecting glum fugitives and desperadoes with no other place to go. But these were the faces of college-educated office workers, bankers, entrepreneurs, a motivated service sector. As a port city of the future, Nazca City was said to have the potential of San Francisco or Singapore. In four years it had become the major link between the equatorial subplanet and coastal cities up and down the western side of the Americas.
Ali was relieved to see that the people of Nazca City looked normal and healthy. Indeed, because the subplanet attracted younger, stronger workers, the population abounded in good health. Most of the station cities like Nazca had been retrofitted with lamps that simulated sunlight, and so these bicyclists were as tan as beachcombers. Practically everyone had seen soldiers or workers who had returned to the surface several years ago suffering bone growths and enlarged eyes or strange cancers, even vestigial tails. For a while, religious groups had blamed hell itself for the physical spoliation, calling it proof of God's plan, a vast gulag where contact meant punishment. But as she looked around, it seemed the research labs and drag companies really had mastered the prophylaxis for hell. Certainly these people exhibited no deformities. Ali realized that her subconscious fears of turning into a toad, monkey, or goat had been for nothing.
The city was a vast indoor mall with potted trees and flowering bushes, clean, with the latest brand names. There were restaurants and coffee bars, along with brightly lit stores selling everything from work clothes and plumbing supplies to assault rifles. The neatness was slightly marred by beggars missing limbs and sidewalk merchants hawking contraband.
At one intersection an old Asian woman was selling miserable puppies lashed alive to sticks. 'Stew meat,' one of the scientists told Ali. 'They sell it by the catty, 500 grams, a little more than a pound. Beef, chicken, pork, dog.'
'Thanks,' said Ali.
Obviously it intrigued him. 'I went exploring yesterday. Anything that moves goes into the pot. Crickets, worms, slugs. They even eat dragons, xiao long, their snakes.' Ali peered out. A long gossamer sausage stretched beside the road, twenty feet high, a football field in length. The plastic had bold hangul lettering along the front. Ali didn't read Korean, but knew a greenhouse when she saw one. There were more, lying end to end like gigantic plump pupae. Through their opaque walls she saw fieldworkers tending crops, climbing little ladders propped in orchards. Parrots and macaws soared alongside the convoy of buses. A monkey scampered past. The subsere – the secondary population of invader species – was thriving down here.
In the far distance a detonation rumbled gently. She'd felt similar vibrations through her bedsprings all night. The incessant construction work was evident everywhere. It didn't take long to detect the man-made edges of this place. The neat right angles abutted raw rock. Pressure fissures spiderwebbed the asphalt. A patch of moss had grown heavy and peeled from the ceiling, exposing mesh and barbed wire and surging lasers overhead.
They reached a newly cut ring road girdling the city, and left behind the traffic jam of cyclists and workers. Picking up speed, they gained a view of the enormous hollow salt dome containing the colony. It was life in a bell jar here. The entire vault, measuring three miles across and probably a thousand feet high, was brightly lit. Up in the World, it would be approaching sunset. Down here, night never came. Nazca City's artificial sunlight burned twenty-four hours a day, Prometheus on a caffeine jag. Except for a catnap, sleep had been impossible last night. The group's collective excitement verged on the childlike, and she was caught up in their spirit of adventure. This morning, exhausted with their imagining, they were ready for the real thing.
Ali found her fellow travelers' last-minute preparations touching. She watched one rough-and-ready fellow across the aisle bent over his fingernails, clipping them just so, as if his mortal being depended on it. Last night, several of the youngest women, meeting for the first time, had spent the wee hours of the morning fixing one another's hair. A little enviously, Ali had listened to people placing calls to their spouses or lovers or parents, assuring them the subplanet was safe. Ali said a silent prayer for them all.
The buses stopped near a train platform and the passengers disembarked. If it hadn't been brand new, the train would have seemed old-fashioned. There was a boarding platform trimmed with iron rails painted black and teal. Farther along the track, the train was mostly freight and ore cars. Heavily armed soldiers patrolled the landings while workers loaded supplies onto flatcars at the rear.
The three front cars were elegant sleepers with aluminum panels on the outside and simulated cherrywood and oak in the hallways. Ali was surprised again at how much money was being plowed into development down here. Just five or six years ago, this had presumably been hadal grounds. The sleeper cars, on glistening tracks, declared how confident the corporate boards were of human occupation.
'Where are they taking us now?' someone grumbled publicly. He wasn't the only one. People had begun complaining that Helios was cloaking each stage of their journey in unnecessary mystery. No one could say where their science station lay.
'Point Z-3,' answered Montgomery Shoat.
'I've never heard of that,' a woman said. One of the planetologists, Ali placed her.
'It's a Helios holding,' Shoat replied. 'On the outskirts of things.'
A geologist started to unfold a survey map to locate Point Z-3. 'You won't find it on any maps,' Shoat added with a helpful smile. 'But you'll see, that really doesn't matter.' His nonchalance drew mutters, which he ignored.
Last evening, at a catered Helios banquet for the freshly arrived scientists, Shoat had been introduced as their expedition leader. He was a superbly fit character with bulging arm veins and great social energy, but he was curiously off-putting. It was more than the unfortunate face, pinched with ambition and spoiled with unruly teeth. It was a manner, Ali thought. A disregard. He traded on a thin repertoire of charm, yet didn't care if you were charmed. According to gossip Ali heard afterward, he was the stepson of C.C. Cooper, the Helios magnate. There was another son by blood, a legitimate heir to the Cooper fortunes, and that seemed to leave Shoat to take on more hazardous duties such as escorting scientists to places at the remote edges of the Helios empire. It sounded almost Shakespearean.
'This is our venue for the next three days,' he announced to them. 'Brand-new cars. Maiden voyage. Take your pick, any room. Single occupancy if you like. There's plenty of room.' He had the magnanimity of a man used to sharing with friends a house not really his. 'Spread out. Shower, take a nap, relax. Dinner is up to you. There's a dining car one back. Or you can order room service and catch a flick. We've spared no expense. Helios's way of wishing you – and me – bon voyage.'
No one pressed the issue of their destination any further. At 1730 a pleasant chime announced their departure. As if casting loose on a raft upon a gentle stream, the Helios expedition soundlessly coasted into the depths. The track looked level but was not, sloping almost secretly downward. As it turned out, gravity was the workhorse. Their engine was attached to the rear and would only be used to pull the cars back to this station. One by one, drawn by the earth itself, the cars left behind the sparkling lights of Nazca City.
They approached a portal titled Route 6. An extra, nostalgic 6 had been added with Magic Marker. In a different ink, someone else had attached a third 6. At the last minute a young biologist hopped down from the train and took a final quick snapshot, then ran to catch up again while the others cheered him. That made them all feel well launched. The train slid through a brief wall of forced air, a climate lock, and they passed inside.
Immediately the temperature and humidity dropped. Nazca City's tropical environment vanished. It was ten degrees colder in the rail tunnel, and the air was as dry as a desert. At last, Ali
