Breathless, standing on the walkway around the bow’s boom connector, we rested for a moment. “So correct me,” I said, gasping.
“You still say ‘trop shink’ on Mars. That’s abso neg, mid twenty-one. Sounds like Chaucer to Terries. If you don’t drive multilingual, and you’d better not try unless you wear an enhancement, best to speak straight early twenty-two. Everyone understands early twenty-two, unless you’re glued to French or German or Dutch. They ridge on anything about twenty years old for drive standard. Chinese love about eight kinds of Europidgin, but hit them in patrie, and they revert to twenty Putonghua. Russian — ”
“I’ll stick with English.”
“Still safe,” she said.
The fusion drives shut off and weightlessness returned. The time had come to separate the cylinders from the hull and begin rotation. Tuamotu carefully spun her long booms between central hull and outboard cylinders. The booms were attached to a rotor on the hull, and the cylinders used their own small methane kickers to set up spin.
When extended, the cylinders pointed perpendicular to the hull; just as when we had experienced ship acceleration, to move from deck to deck one had to climb up or down, or take the elevator. The centrifugal force created about one-fourth g in the observation lounge, the outboard or “lowest” deck.
When the cylinders had cycled to maximum, the warm sleepers retired to their cubicles. A little party was given for them. In our cylinder, we were now down to twenty-three active passengers, and seven months to go…
Orianna had filled her cabin with projected picts, each leading to a sim or LitVid put on hold; twenty or more, hanging in the air like tiny sculptures, some pulsing, some singing faintly. She laughed. “Silly, isn’t it?” she said. “I’ll turn them off…” She waved and the icons disappeared, allowing me to see the rest of her cabin. It was tidy but busy. A sweater lay in one corner, or at least half of a sweater. Little sticks poked out of it, and a ball of what must have been thread — yarn, I remembered — lay beside it. “Knitting?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sometimes I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing, and knitting or crocheting brings me back. It’s the drive in Paris, where my father lives.”
“Your mother lives with your father?”
“Sometimes. They bond loose. I live with my father most of the year. Sometimes I go to Ethiopia to live with my mother. She’s a merchandising agent for Iskander Resources. They temp for skilled labor all over the world.”
“And your father?”
“He’s a mining engineer for European Waters Conservancy. He spends lots of time in submarines. I have a great North Sea sim — like to see it?”
“Not right now. Wouldn’t you like to live in just one place?” I asked.
Orianna held out her hands. “Why?”
“To get a feeling of belonging. Knowing where you are.”
She smiled brightly. “I know the entire Earth. Not just in sims, either. I’ve been all over, with and without my parents. I can fly a shocker from Djibouti to Seattle in four hours. Weather change is great. Really sweeps the sugars.”
“Have you ever gone slow?” I asked.
“You mean…” She smoothed her hand along the bed cover. “Ground speed? Double-digit kiphs?”
“Single digit.”
“Sure. I bicycled across France two years ago with some Kenyans. Campfires, night skies, grape harvest in Alsace . You’re really jammed on this, aren’t you?”
“If you mean, stuck in a rut, obviously.”
“Earth isn’t decadent, Casseia. It really isn’t. I’m not a poor little rich girl, any more than you are.”
“Maybe I’m just jealous.”
“I’d call it shy,” Orianna said. “But if you want to ask me about Earth, realtime, oral history and culture, that’s fine with me. We have months left, and I don’t want to spend it all jogging and simming.”
My Earth studies and conversations with Alice had left me with the impression of a flawless society, cool and efficient. But what I heard in conversation with Orianna seemed to contradict this. There were great disagreements between Terries; nations within GEWA and its southern equivalent, GSHA, arguing endlessly, clashing morality systems as populations from one country traded places with others — a popular activity in the late 70s. Some populations — Islam Fatimites, Green Idaho Christians, Mormons, Wahabi Saudis, and others — maintained stances that would be conservative even on Mars, clinging stubbornly to their cultural identities in the face of Earth-wide criticism.
Paleo-Christians in Green Idaho, practically a nation unto itself within the United States , had declared the rights of women to be less than those of men. Women fought to have their legal powers and rights reduced, despite opposition from all other states. On the reverse, in Fatimite Morocco and Egypt , men sought to glorify the image of women, whom they regarded as Chalices of Mohammed. In Greater Albion, formerly the United Kingdom , adult transforms who had regressed in apparent age to children were forbidden to hold political office, creating a furor I could hardly begin to untangle. And in Florida , defying regulations, some humans transformed themselves into shapes similar to marine mammals… And to pay for it, organized Sex in the Sea exhibits for tourists.
In language, the greatest craze of the 60s and 70s was invented language. Mixing old tongues, inventing new, mixing music and words electronically so that one could not tell where tones left off and phonemes began, creating visual languages that wrapped speakers in projected, complex symbols, all seemed designed to separate and not bring together. Yet enhancements were available that were tuned to the New Lingua Nets or NLN. Installing the NLN enhancements through nano surgery, one could understand virtually any language, natural or invented, and even think in their vernacular.
The visual languages seemed especially drive in the 70s. In GEWA alone, seventy visual languages had been created. The most popular was used by more than four and a half billion people.
Despite what Alice had said, it didn’t sound at all integrated to me. To a Martian, even to a native like Orianna, Earth seemed diverse, bewildering, crazy.
But to Alice , Earth was entering the early stages of a new kind of history.
Six weeks into the flight, Bithras called me to his cabin. I girded myself for battle, palmed his door port. The door opened and I stepped in at the wave of his hand. He wore long pants and a cotton long-sleeved shirt, again in white, and he muttered to himself for a few minutes, searching for memory cubes, as if I had not yet arrived. “Yes,” he said finally, locating the lost cubes and turning to face me. “I hope your trip has not been too dull.”
I shook my head. “I’ve spent most of the time researching and exercising,” I said.
“And talking to Alice .”
“Yes.”
“ Alice is brilliant, but she has some of the naivete found in all thinkers,” Bithras said. “They cannot judge humans harshly enough. I have no such illusions. My dear, the time has come for us to do some work, and it involves your past… If you are willing.”
I stared at him and gave the faintest nod.
“What do you know about Martian scientists and Bell Continuum theory?”
“I don’t think I know anything about Bell Continuum theory,” I said.
“Majumdar BM has been speaking with Cailetet Mars about sponsoring new research. There is a request for so-called Quantum Logic thinkers in the works. Earth is exporting such thinkers, but they are incredibly expensive… thirty-nine million dollars, shipped endo and inactive. We must build our own personalities for them, and that might take months, even years.”
I still volunteered nothing, though I could feel where he was heading.
“You once knew Charles Franklin, promising student from Klein BM, correct?”
“Yes.”