Dyeva watched the earth revolve beneath her, vanish into banks of icy cirrus, then emerge as a patchwork of blue sea and immobile, shining cumuli.
Bits of continents poked through the gaps as the airpacket swung out on a hyperbolic curve. She had a glimpse of North America, with the Appalachian Islands trailing into the Atlantic and the Inland Sea glimmering under the hot March sun. Then the sixty-one passengers were shrouded in the lower cloud layer and reading lights winked briefly on before they emerged again to flit like the shadow of a storm over the broad Pacific.
A light meal was served, and during dessert the glint of Fujiyama Island on the right with its attendant green islets announced that they were nearing the World-city. They flashed into the dark red sun and the vast forest of China leaped out of the glittering wavelets of the Yellow Sea. Fifty-five hundred clicks was now too fast and one, two, three times the airpacket quivered as the retros slowed it to a sedate thousand.
They were speeding over the green savannahs of the Gobi, famous for its herds of wild animals. Of course they were too high and moving too fast to see the herds, but a mashina in the forward wall of the cabin darkened, glittered briefly with pinpoints of light, and filled with solid-seeming images of wapiti, elephants, haknim, sfosura- animals native and imported from other worlds-shambling over pool-dotted green plains where the immortal Khan once ruled.
Dyeva’s pale, high-cheekboned face concentrated and her unblinking dark eyes glinted with reflected images. Nine-tenths of the Earth-humanity’s first home-was now a world of beasts. The ultimate achievement of the man called Minister Destruction. Was it for this that twelve billion people had died?
In the sunset glow of Ulanor the Worldcity, Stef sprawled on his balcony wearing a spotty robe and listening to the cries of vendors and the creak of wheels in Golden Horde Street. He loved to loll here smoking kif in the last light during all seasons except the brief, nasty Siberian winter.
A commotion in the street made him swing his bony legs off the battered lounge chair. He tucked the mouthpiece of his pipe into a loop of hose from the censer and shuffled in broken-strap sandals to the railing.
Down below, vendors’ carts had pulled against the walls and a long line of prisoners (blue pajamas, short hair, wrists and necks imprisoned in black plastic kangs) shuffled past like a column of ants. Guards in wide-brimmed duroplast helmets strode along the line at intervals, swinging short whips against the legs of laggards to hurry them on. The prisoners groaned and somebody started to sing a prison song in Alspeke, the only language that all humans knew:Smerta, smerta mi kalla/Ya nur trubna haf syegda…
Death, death, call me, I have nothing but trouble always. Picking up the rhythm, even the laggards began moving so quickly that the guards no longer had an excuse to strike.
A good song, thought Stef, lying down again, because it goes in two opposite directions, endurance and despair. Those are the poles of life, right? Of his life, anyway. Except for kif, which was close to being his religion, filling him during these evening hours with a distant cool melancholy, with what the Old Believers called Holy Indifference-meaning that what happened happened and you didn’t try to fuck with God.
And, of course, there was Dzhun. She meant a little more than lust, a good deal less than love. He whispered her name, which meant summertime in Alspeke, with its original English intonation and meaning: June.
Then frowned. He was, as usual, out of cash. Kif cost money. Then how was he supposed to afford Dzhun? He brooded, puffing slowly, letting the aromatic smoke leak from his nose and mouth. He needed a case. He needed a job. He needed money to fall on him out of the sky.
Even blase passengers who had seen Ulanor many times, perhaps even had grown up there, joined the newcomers in staring through the ports at the capital of the human race.
More than a million people! Dyeva thought. Who could believe a city so vast? Of course, compared to the world-cities of the twenty-first century, Ulanor was hardly a suburb. But this could at least give her a glimmering of the wonders that had been lost-a revelation of the once (and future?) world before the Time of Troubles had changed everything.
The shuttle was drifting along now, joining the traffic at the fifth level on the outermost ring, swinging around so that the city with its spoked avenues and glittering squares seemed to be turning. The copilot (a blackbox, of course) began speaking in a firm atonal voice, pointing out such wonders as Genghis Khan Allee, Yellow Emperor Place where the various sector controllers had their palaces, and Government of the Universe Place, where the President’s Palace faced the Senate of the Worlds.
“And then the Clouds and Rain District,” said a man’s voice, and the native Earthlings all broke into guffaws.
The blackbox paused politely while the disturbance quieted, then resumed its spiel. Dyeva had turned a delicate pink. The brothel district (named for a poetic Chinese description of intercourse, the “play of clouds and rain”) had been denounced in Old Believer churches ever since she could remember. And while she no longer was a believer herself, she retained a lively sense of the degradation endured by the women and men (and even children) who worked there.
She reflected that such exploitation formed the darkreverse of the civilization she loved and hoped to restore. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for the near-empty Earth of today. Then, impatiently, Dyeva shook the thought out of her head. This was no time for doubt. Not now. Notnow.
Stef was still frowning, with the mouthpiece between his lips, when his mashina chimed inside the apartment. Irritated because somebody was calling during his relaxing hour, he padded inside, evading the shadows of junk furniture, stepping over piles of unwashed clothing. He told the mashina, “Say,” and it flickered into life. Inside the box hovered the glowing head of Colonel Yamashita of the Security Forces.
“Hai, Korul Yama.”
“I need something private done. Come see me now, Gate 43.”
No waste words there. The image expired into a glowing dot. Sighing, Stef dropped his robe among the other castoffs on the floor and plowed into a musty closet, looking for something clean.
On the roof of the old building a hovercab with the usual blackbox for a driver nosed up when Stef pushed a call button. He climbed in and gave orders for the Lion House; Gate 43.
“Gratizor,”said the blackbox. Thank you, sir. Why were black boxes always more polite than people?
As they zipped down Genghis Khan Allee, Stef viewed the floodlit facades of Government of the Universe Place without much interest. He had long ago realized that they were a stage set and that all the action was behind the scenes. Bronze statues honored the Yellow Emperor, Augustus Caesar, Jesus, Buddha, Alexander the Great, and of course the ubiquitous Genghis Khan. All of them Great Unifiers of Humankind. Forerunners of the Worldcity and its denizens.
Genghis even had a pompous tomb set amid the floodlights-not that his bones were in it; nobody had ever found them. But yokels from the off worlds visited Ulanor specifically to gaze upon the grave of this greatest (and bloodiest) Unifier of them all.
Near the tomb foreshortened vendors were selling roasted nuts, noodles wrapped in paper, tiny bundles of kif, seaweed, bowls of miso and kimshi, and babaku chicken with texasauce. The scene was orderly; people strolled and ate at all hours and never feared crime. Breaking the law led to the Palace of Justice off Government of the Universe Place and the warren of tiled cells beneath that were called collectively the White Chamber. The formidable Kathmann, head of Earth Security, ruled the White Chamber, and his reputation alone was enough to keep Ulanor law-abiding.
The cab turned off the main drag, zipped down backalleys at a level twenty meters above the street, and drew up at a deep niche in a blankwhite slab of a building. Stef flashed his ID at the black box and a flicker of light acknowledged payment. He stepped into the foyer and a bored guard in a kiosk looked up.
