No reply. My vision fades to black.
“Lindy?” I ask.
There is a pause. Then a strange male voice in my ears says: “Thank you for traveling with Astradyne Tours. Your journey is now at an end, and flight-support services are terminating. You will shortly arrive in the inbound reception area at Cinnabar City trackside terminus. To disembark safely, please wait until you see a steady green light above your disposable pod and the pod peels open—”
“Lindy?” I ask again. But she doesn’t reply. And I realize soon enough that she never will. I’m on my own again.
Silent Movie
MERCURY, UNIQUELY AMONG the planets, is locked in a spin/orbit resonance with the sun; it revolves on its axis and has days and nights, but it takes three of its days to orbit the sun twice. At noon, things get a little hot on the surface — even hotter than down among the half-melted valleys of Venus. At midnight it’s as cold as Pluto or Eris. They build power plants here, vast beampower stations that fly in solar orbit, exporting infrared power to the shipyards of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune. To build and launch those power plants, they need heavy elements — mined locally. And guess what? Someone needs to run those mines.
To avoid the extremes of temperature, the city of Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn. Thermocouples on the rails drain the heat of daylight into the chill of the wintry night, extracting power to propel the city at a fast walking pace, year in and year out. There are other nomad cities on Mercury, but I believe Cinnabar is the largest, and by extension the largest railway train in the solar system. But it’s no express.
Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency — a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continuous megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long. The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach. I slide along the maglev track, a prisoner sewn up inside Lindy’s corpse, closing feetfirst with the shadows of the city until I coast up a ramp and come to a standstill beneath the arching ice-rimed shadow of Cinnabar’s vast arrival hall, with a last gentle bump. “Good-bye, Lindy,” I whisper, as the triple-jointed arms swing down out of the darkness above and unfold their cutting blades, slicing me free of her mortal husk.
It takes me little time to clear the immigration protocols. They’re mostly concerned with monitoring for pink goo — there have been a spate of outbreaks on Venusian floaters recently — but my steerage status reassures them. (Lindy’s packing foam is riddled with digestive parazymes: If one of our Creators tried to travel that way, they’d have arrived as a deeply eroded skeleton.) “Enjoy your stay,” the shakedown captain advises me, as I pass him one of my precious reserve of Reals. “Try to stay out of the darkside, nu?”
Darkside? I smile and nod as I step through the doorway into air and light. I’d follow it up, but I’m not on the local grid yet. I look around the concourse. Mercury is famously metal-rich, so the signs of evident wealth are misleading: They pave their streets with gold for its thermal properties and corrosion resistance. The buildings are close-fronted, windowless, and forbidding. Above my head, a partially transparent roof blocks the starlight and filters the long shadows of the towers. There are a plethora of body plans on display, but as is usual away from Earth, I’m still the outsize freak. I find a public grid terminal near one exit, and I squat next to it and guide its fibrous leech into the empty socket under my hairline. “Can’t you reduce your height?” it complains querulously. “You’ll damage me if you stretch!”
“I’ll try. Comfortable?”
It misses my sharp tone. “That is an improvement. Let me see. Twenty centimes, please?” I release my wallet and lean back. My vision flickers, then returns. “Your keys, now.” I let my wallet open farther and exchange keys with the terminal over the secure channel. “Good, you are now configured, Person Freya. Your mail will be forwarded. You may disconnect now.”
I stand up, relieved that I don’t have to deal any further with the little bigot. “Bye,” I say, and run my fingers through my hair as I try to decide what to do next. New planet, first call: I’ve done this before. My weight is the first clue. I’m heavier than on Mars, but much lighter than Venus or Earth. It puts a spring in my toes even before I extend my heels. “A hotel,” an echo of one of my sibs whispers through my lips. “You need to find a hotel and install a sister who’s been here before. And you need to deepsleep.”
She’s right. I need a local guide, however out of date. Plus, a hotel sounds like a good idea on general principles. I feel like shit. That’s not surprising, given what I’ve just been through; ionizing radiation doesn’t cause the same kind of damage in us that it causes in old-fashioned biological organisms, but most of my nonrigid tissues are mechanocytes, and high-energy particles can disrupt their internal control systems. Mechanocytes may be more robust than biological life, but they don’t have the magic replicative and repair abilities of pink goo; if you off-line enough of them, the superorganism has a problem. I can repair a handful of faults myself, but right now I’m down about 4 percent below normal — which will take time to fix — and if I let it slide below 10 percent I’ll have to look for medical help. (And won’t that be fun, with my depleted savings?)
So. A hotel it is.
I don’t ask for much — privacy, a door I can lock, molten water on tap, pressure, and oxygen. But swift-footed Mercury is at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, eleven kilometers per second below even rosy-cheeked Venus, and not many people come to visit. Those who do are evidently rich, or they’re indentured miners, and there’s barely anything between the swank and swag of the Cinnabar Paris and an unpressurized bag hanging from the underside of a conveyor feedline. In the end I check my schedule and discover that the gap between my arrival and the departure time Ichiban mentioned is only about six days (Earth, not local), so I bite the numb patch that’s appeared on my lower lip and go wheedle my way into the cheapest the Paris has to offer.
The huge vaulted dome and polished olivine floor notwithstanding, the Paris is a recent construct; it’s oriented around the needs of aristos and mercantiles, heavy-element brokers and jewelers. “We have a room for madame,” insinuates the front desk, “but alas, it is not cheap.”
“How not cheap?” I ask, leaning close to his plinth. He’s just a disembodied head on a box — the hotel is his body — but he’s a handsome head, properly proportioned, and his elusive smile is quite charming.
“Nine Reals.” That would cover the rent on my little room for a month. “That’s per twenty-four hours,” he adds.
“Can you do any better than that?” I ask, raising an eyebrow and trying not to look desperate. If Ichiban’s friends are paying me, I can afford it, I speculate. But if they aren’t, I’ll be in hock up to my tits, and that’ll mean indenturing myself or borrowing from my sisters, and I really don’t want to do that. I may be poor, but at least I own all my own assets. “For five days?”
“You’re one of Rhea’s line, aren’t you?” He positively purrs. “One of your sibs stayed with us a few years ago. A lovely guest, delightful company. If you can find her memories, perhaps I could lose your bill?”