“Casseia Majumdar, of Mars, this is Shrug. He’s studied law. He has almost as many enhancements as I do.”
Shrug dipped on one knee as I stood. I barely reached his chin when he kneeled.
“Charmed,” he said, kissing my hand.
“Stop that,” Orianna said. “She’s my partner.”
“You don’t curve,” Shrug said.
“We’re sisters of sim,” Orianna said.
“Oh, dear, such an arc!” Kite said, smiling.
I don’t think I understand a third of what was said the whole time I spent in New York .
Back on the streets, holding hands with Shrug and Orianna, and then with Orianna and Kite, I let myself be taken somewhere, anywhere. Kite was really very attractive and did not seem averse to flirting, though more to aggravate Orianna, I thought, than to impress me. My slate recorded streets and directions in case I needed to find my way back to Penn Station; it also contained full-scale maps of the city, all cities on the Earth, in fact. I could hardly get lost unless someone took my slate… and Orianna assured me that New York was virtually free of thieves. “Too bad,” I said, in a puckish mood.
“Yeah,” Orianna said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no risk. It’s risk we choose that we should beware.”
“I choose lunch,” Kite said. “There’s a great old delicatessen here. Total goback.”
My expression of surprise caught his eye. “Goback. Means retro, atavistic, historic. All are good drive words now, no negs.”
“It means something else on Mars,” I said.
“Folks who want to keep BM rule are called Gobacks,” Orianna said.
“Are you a Goback?” Shrug asked me.
“I’m neutral,” I said. “My family has strong links to BM autonomy. I’m still learning.”
Echoing the theme, we passed a family of Chasids dressed in black. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and styled their hair in long thin locks around their temples. The women wore long simple dresses in natural fabrics. The children skipped and danced happily, dressed in black and white.
“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Orianna said, glancing over her shoulder at the family. ‘Total goback! No enhancements, no therapy, neg the drive.“
“ New York is great for that sort of thing,” Kite said.
We passed three women in red chadors; a woman herding five blue dogs, followed by an arbeiter carrying a waste can; five men in single file, nude, not that it mattered — their bodies were completely smooth, with featureless tan skin; a male centaur with a half-size horse body, perfectly at home cantering along the sidewalk, man’s portion clothed in formal Edwardian English wool suit and bowler; jaguar-pelted women, furry, not in furs; two young girls, perhaps ten Earth years, dressed in white ballet gowns with fairy wings growing from their backs (temp or permanent? I couldn’t tell); a gaggle of school-children dressed in red coats and black shorts, escorted by men in black cassocks (“Papal Catholics,” Kite said); more of the mineral-patterned designer bodies; a great many people who might have fit in without notice on Mars; and of course the mechaniques, who replaced major portions of their bodies with metal shells filled with biorep nano. That, I had heard, was very expensive as an elective. Complete body replacement was much cheaper. Neither could be done legally unless one could prove major problems in birth genotype; it spun too much of the Eloi and Ten Cubed.
“After lunch, we’re going to Central Park ,” Orianna said. “And then…”
Kite laughed. “Orianna has connections. She wants to show you something you just don’t have on Mars.”
“An Omphalos!” Orianna said. “Father owns shares.”
We ate in the delicatessen and it smelled of cooked meat, which I had never smelled before, and which offended me all the same, whether or not meat was actually being cooked. Customers- — chiefly drive folks, a high proportion of transforms — lined up before glass cases filled with what appeared to be sliced processed animals. Plastic labels on metal skewers pronounced the shapes to be Ham, that is, smoked pig legs, Beef (cows) corned (though having nothing to do with corn) and otherwise, something called Pastrami which was another type of cow covered with pepper, smoked fish, fish in fermented dairy products, vegetables in brine and vinegar, pig feet in jars, and other things that, had they been real, would have caused a true uproar even on Earth.
We stood at the counter until the clerk took our order, then found a table. Martian reserve kept me from expressing my distaste to Orianna. She ordered for me — potato salad, smoked salmon, a bagel, and cream cheese.
“The stuff here is the best in town,” she said. “It was set up by New York Preserve. History scholars. They have a nano artist design the food — he’s orthodox Gathering of Abraham. They have state dispensation to eat meat, for religious reasons. He quit eating meat ten years ago, but he remembers what it tastes like.”
Our food arrived. The salmon appeared raw, felt slimy-soft, and tasted salty and offensive.
“You have imitation meat on Mars, don’t you?” Kite asked.
“It isn’t so authentic,” I said. “It doesn’t smell like this.”
“Blame the drive for history,” Shrug said. “Nothing immoral about imitation. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t waste, it teaches us what New York used to be like…”
“I don’t think Casseia’s enjoying her lox,” Kite said, smiling sympathetically. My heart sank in hopeless attraction, simply looking at his face.
“Maybe it’s turned,” I said.
“It does taste rank,” Kite said. “Maybe it’s the fake preservatives. Things don’t turn any more.”
“Right,” I said, embarrassed at my inability to enjoy the treat. “Tailored bacteria. Eat only what they’re meant to.”
“The Earth,” Shrug said portentously, “is a vast zoo.”
They fell to discussing whether “zoo” was the right word. They settled on “garden.”
“Do you have many murders on Mars?” Shrug asked.
“A few. Not a lot,” I answered.
“Shrug’s fascinated by violent crime,” Orianna said.
“I’d love to defend a genuine murderer. They’re so rare now… Ten murders in New York last year.”
“Among fifty million citizens,” Kite said, shaking his head. “That’s what therapy has done to us. Maybe we don’t care enough to kill any more.”
Orianna made a tight-lipped blat.
“No, really,” Kite said. “Shrug says he’d love to defend a murder case. A real one. But he’ll probably never see one. A murder. It chills the blood just to say the word.”
“So what’s passion like on Mars?” Shrug asked. “Murderous?”
I laughed. “The last murder I heard about, a wife killed her husband on an isolated station. Their family — their Binding Multiple — had suffered pernicious exhaustion — ”
“Love the words!” Shrug said.
“Of funds. They were left alone at the station without a status inquiry for a year. The BM was fined, but couldn’t pay its fine. It’s pretty unusual,” I concluded. ‘’We therapy disturbed people, too.“
“Ah, but is murder a disturbance!” Kite asked, straining to be provocative.
“You’d think so if you were the victim,” I said.
“Too much health, too much vigor — too few dark corners,” Kite said sadly. “What is there left to write about? Our best LitVids and sims use untherapied characters. But how do we write about our real lives, what we know? I’d like to make sims, but sanity is really limiting.”
“He’s opening his soul to you,” Orianna said. “He doesn’t tell people that unless he likes them.”
“There’s plenty of story in conflicts between healthy folks,” I suggested. “Political disagreements. Planning decisions.”
Kite shook his head sadly. “Hardly takes us to the meaning of existence. Hardly stretches us to the breaking point. You want to live that kind of life?”