She moved into the sun whenever she could. That was the direct
radiation of Sol, slamming into her naked skin. It was amazing to stand in the light of the sun without dying of it. This was the only place in the solar system where that could happen; the bioshell surrounding a star was as thin as a soap bubble. Thickening the life bubble—maybe that was the human project. That they had pulled the bubble out around Mars was a remarkable thing. If they pulled it inward to Venus, even more so. This, however, would always be the sweet spot. No wonder the mystics of this old world, stunned by all life’s changes. Metamorphosis suited Earth, and never stopped. The great flood had become a fortunate fall, had brought on an exfoliation into a higher state. The world had been watered. Flowers popping out of the leafy branch. She was back.
T
he Mercury House was down by the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the museum’s paintings were now on Mercury, only copies left behind, and in an unusual gesture, a room here was devoted to Mercurial art. The Group of Nine was prominently displayed, of course. It was a little too much sun and rock for Swan. And she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper? It was peculiar, but as a result perhaps interesting as well. Alex and Mqaret had held a reception for the Nine once, and Swan had met many of them and enjoyed talking to them.
Up on the roof patio of the Mercury House building, maybe thirty stories above the water, she found a number of Mercurials gathered at the bar. Most of them wore exoskeletons or body bras, which, whether hidden by clothing or not, were evident to Swan by the way the people wearing them stood, resting comfortably slightly off true, as if in water. The ones without were more or less heroically erect, holding off the weight of the Earth with a strained look. Swan felt a little that way herself. No matter what you did, one g imposed itself on your attention for a while.
Their New York office was headed by an ancient Terran named Milan, who had a sweet smile for everyone. “Swan, darling, so good of you to come.”
“Oh my pleasure, I
love
New York.”
“Well, bless your ignorance, child. I’m glad you like it. And I’m glad you’re here. Come meet some of my new people.”
So Swan met some of the local team and endured their condolences about Alex, and gave them a brief inaccurate account of her trip to Jupiter. They had ideas about the Mondragon above and beyonds that they shared with her.
When they were done, Swan said to Milan, “Is Zasha still around?”
“Zasha will never leave this town,” Milan said. “You must know that. Haven’t you been to Z’s latest scheme? It’s on one of the Hudson piers.”
S
o Swan took the ferry back up Eighth Avenue, got off, and climbed stairs until she reached a catwalk she could take west.
With all the old piers eleven meters underwater, a new set had had to be built. Some were old ones salvaged and stilted; others had been built anew, sometimes using the drowned ones as foundations. Smaller floating docks filled gaps and were attached to piers or nearby buildings at what used to be their fourth floors. Some of these docks were mobile and became like barges as they moved around. It was a tricky shoreline.
Some of the submerged docks now held aquaculture pens, and Swan’s old partner Zasha apparently now ran a pharm on one of these piers, growing various piscean drugs and bioceramics while also doing things for the Mercury House—and for Alex.
Swan had called ahead, and Zasha appeared at the fence that cut a floating dock off from the big plaza complex west of Gansevoort Street, at the south end of the High Line. After a brief hug, Z led her to the end of the dock and then out on the Hudson River in a boat, a smooth little hummer that soon had them midriver.
Everything on the water moved at a watery pace, including the water itself. The Hudson River here was wide; the entire city of Terminator would have fit in New York Harbor. Bridges were visible all over the place, including one on the distant southern horizon. There was so much water Swan could hardly believe it; even the open sea did not seem to have so much; and yet it was not even a very big river, compared to the really big ones. Earth!
Zasha was observing the scene with a contented expression. Banks of windows at the tops of the highest skyscrapers blazed with reflected sunlight, and all the buildings glowed. Skyscraper island: it was the classic Manhattan look, unlikely and superb.
“How are things with you?” Swan asked.
“I like this river,” Zasha said, as if it were a reply. “I motor up to the top of the island, or even to the Palisades, and then just float on down. Throw a line over. Hook the most amazing stuff sometimes.”
“And at Mercury House?”
Zasha frowned. “Spacers are getting blamed for a lot these days. The people down here are resentful. The more we help, the more resentful they get. However, their capital funds keep on investing in us.”
“As always,” Swan said.
“Yes, well, perpetual growth. But nothing lasts forever. The solar system is just as finite as Earth.”
“Do you think it’s filling up? Hitting carrying capacity?”
“More like investment return peak. But people may be feeling pinched by it. Anyway, they’re acting like they’re pinched.”
Zasha’s boat drifted in the ebb tide until it passed the Battery, and the view to the Brooklyn shore opened up. The skyscrapers at the foot of Manhattan looked like a cluster of giant swimmers, gathered knee-deep to charge into cold water. Between buildings the water sheeted like glass, and the canals were filled with little boats; the harbor bay too, although not as densely. At any given moment hundreds of watercraft were visible. They could see up
both rivers, the Hudson and the East, and between those ran the smaller, straighter rivers of the streets, all under a cloudy sky. A Canaletto vision. Cloud reflections whitened the bay’s watery sheen. It was so beautiful that Swan felt like she had been cast into a dream, and she reeled a little with the boat’s rocking.
“Feeling the g?” Zasha asked.
“I am kind of.”
“Want to spend the night at my place? I’m getting kind of hungry.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Zasha piloted the boat west across the river to a channel on the Jersey side that led west. It was hard to tell if it was a canal or a creek. Inland the waterway opened up to the north, and Zasha turned up that way and docked at a wooden pier sticking into what looked like a shallow lake. Whole neighborhoods sloped right down into water. The east side of North America had always been a drowned coastline, but now more than ever.
A walk up a rise under a violent sunset sky, which was tastelessly mashing orange and pink together. At times like these it was the eastern sky that really put on a show, subtler but more glorious. But no one looked that way.
Zasha’s place was a tiny squat next to a line of trees, as handmade and run-down as any favela or shantytown Swan had ever seen.
“What is this place?”
“Part of the Meadowlands.”
“And you’re free to make your own home here?”
“As if! Actually my rent is stupendous, but Mercury House gives me a little supplement to keep me out here away from them.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Anyway, it’s fine. I like my commute.”
Swan sat gratefully in a beat-up armchair and watched her old partner putter about in the gloom. It had been a long time since they had banged around the solar system, building terraria and
raising Zephyr; it had even been a long time since Zephyr had died. And they had never gotten along very well, separating soon after Zephyr went off. Still, Swan recognized the way Zasha hovered over the stove, waiting for the teapot to boil, harboring a secretive knowing look she also recognized.
She said, “So did you work with Alex?”
“Well, sure,” Zasha replied, glancing at her briefly. “She was my boss. So you know how that goes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she loved you and took care of you, and you did exactly what she wanted you to.”
Swan had to laugh. “Well, yes.” She thought it over, ignoring the pain. “Somehow she conformed herself to what you needed. Helped you to get what you needed.”
“Uh-huh. I know what you mean.”
“But listen—now she’s gone, and she left me a message. Basically she used me as a courier to Wang, on Io, and also dumped something into Pauline. It was all in case something happened to her, she said.”
“What do you mean?”
Swan described the visitation from Alex’s ghost—the envelopes—her trip out to Jupiter, and the interloper on Io.
Zasha said, “I heard about that. I didn’t know you were there,” frowning at the teapot, face blue in the stove top glow.
“What were you and Alex working on?” Swan asked. “And why didn’t she tell me about it in this message she left? She—it’s like I was just a courier for her, and Pauline some kind of safe-deposit box.”
Zasha didn’t reply.
“Come on, tell me,” Swan said. “You can tell me. I can take it from you. I’m used to you telling me how bad I am.”
Zasha expelled a breath, poured two cups of tea. Steam in gloom, catching light from somewhere. Z handed her one, then
sat down on a kitchen chair across from her. Swan warmed her hands on her cup.
“There’s stuff I can’t talk about—”
“Oh come on!”
“—
and
stuff I can. She got me involved in a group that is hunting down some odd qubes. That’s been interesting. But it was something she wanted kept confidential, along with some other things she had going. So, maybe she thought that you aren’t very good at keeping things confidential.”
“Why would she think
that
?”
But even Zasha knew of three or four examples of Swan’s being indiscreet, and Swan herself knew of several more.
“Those were accidents,” Swan finally added. “And not very big accidents either.”
Zasha sipped the tea cautiously. “Well, but maybe they seemed to be becoming more frequent. You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations—”
“I have not!”
“Well, four or five. I didn’t like it right from the beginning. When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.”
“Oh come on, Z. I’m the same as I always was. And everything you do can damage you! You can’t let that stop you. Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being
post
human, it’s being
fully
human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be
anti
human.”
“Well,” Zasha said, “you did those things and you immediately stopped designing terraria.”
“I was done! We were past the design phase anyway; they were just going to build more of the same. And a lot of what we did was stupid anyway. We shouldn’t have been making Ascensions at that point, we needed to get the traditional biomes past the extinction. We still need that! I don’t know what we were thinking, frankly.”
Zasha was surprised at this. “I like the Ascensions. They help genetic dispersion.”
“Too much so. Anyway that’s not the point. The point is I wanted to try different things, and I did.”
“You became an artist.”
“I was always an artist. I just changed media. And hardly even that. Just a focusing in. It was what I wanted. Come on, Zasha. I’m just living a human life. You refuse these opportunities, that doesn’t make you more human, it just makes you regressive. I don’t go anywhere near as far as some people. I don’t have a third eye and I don’t break my ribs when I have an orgasm. I just…”
“Just what?”
“I don’t know. Try things that sound good.”
“And have they all worked out for you?”
Swan sat there in the gloom, somewhere in New Jersey. Outside was the open air of Earth. “No.” Long pause. “In fact I’ve done worse things than what you know about, if you want to know the truth.”
Zasha stared at her. “I’m not sure I do.”
“Ha-ha. And Alex knew about it too, now that I think of it, because I told Mqaret about it.”
“He wouldn’t automatically tell her.”
“I didn’t ask him not to.”
“Well,” Zasha said. “So maybe she knew. Something worse than animal brains? Something worse than a qube in your skull? Never mind, I
don’t
want to know. But maybe Alex did, and maybe she had stuff that she…”
“That she didn’t trust me with.”
“That she needed to keep to herself. And here you are, kind of a mess.”
“I am not a mess!” Though her rib did hurt, squeezed by her indignation. And she was full of grief for Alex—and now a little angry at her too.
“Seems like you’re saying you are messed up,” Z observed. “You’ve had five or six or seven brain tweaks over the years, a qube in your head—in fact, whatever was fashionable at the time.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Well think about it!”
Swan put her teacup on the table. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”
“Good. Don’t get lost. I’ll cook up something while you’re out, say about forty-five minutes.”
Swan left the hut.
O
utside the door she took her slippers off and stuffed them into her pocket, dug her toes into the dirt and wriggled them around. Leaned over from the waist like a dancer and dug her fingers in, put hands to face and breathed. Dirt, the ultimate ambrosia. Tasted like muddy mushrooms.
It was after sunset. There was an asphalt road running next to a marsh, green and yellow, the wind bouncing the reeds out there. She walked on the dirt by the side of the road and looked at the marsh and the sky. On the other side of the road some old buildings were nestled under a stand of trees. Rows of old apartment blocks beyond. Croak of frog. She sat on the edge of the marsh and saw the black dots half in and half out of the water under her. A chorus of frogs, croaking. She listened for a while, watching the marsh in the wind, and heard suddenly that they were performing a call-and-response. If one frog said “ribbit,” then all the others would repeat it for a while, up and down the road for as far as she could hear, until in a momentary pause one croaked “robot,” and
they would all repeat that for a while. Then it changed to “limit,” and off the others went, as if speaking to her like some Greek chorus, transmogrified to frogs. So many limits! So many robots. The lump nearest her contributed only once in a while, puffing under his chin briefly, then croaking. Otherwise it was perfectly still, except for a little shift of the eyeballs she could see in the dusk, a liquid blink, always alert. “Romper!” it croaked in a pause, and Swan exclaimed, “Good for you!” and said it with them for a while.