Both of the men had the smoothness of motion that indicated a human past 100, but Smith must have been nearly that old himself; and while he was no Hero, compared to a low-gee build he looked like a Jinxian. One was whispering frantically in the other's ear; Ginger was able to catch the phrase "ARM Commando," this being one of the first terms he'd learned in Flatlander. The one being spoken to was shorter and solider, but not in Smith's shape.
That human looked at Ginger, then at his own companion; then he said, "Uh, pass, friend."
As they went by, Ginger thought to hear a suit's recycler start up. He didn't look-he was pretty certain whose it was, anyway.
They were in a broad inner space, like a courtyard, only with no gun turrets. Smith led them through it, past unlabeled pressure doors, to a door just like the others, and started it opening. Perpetua, who was just getting the idea that she'd come very close to being held by the UN as principal witness, started up an innocuous subject: "How did this settlement get started?"
"After the Blowout one of the old lifers talked people into gathering everything up and bringing it here. More air and water. They stayed up here because it wasn't stable down lower. Still isn't. Once a habitat was set up, they formed a government and petitioned the UN for membership before the ARM thought of jamming them. The ARMs try to keep people from hearing more than absolutely necessary about this place, but it's really popular with smugglers since the ARM moved in on Luna," he said.
"What was this lifer's name?" Ginger said, impressed-he was picturing what the weather must have been like for the migration.
"He didn't know. He dated to brainwipe days," said Smith. They entered the door, and he closed it; abruptly the floor began to descend. "There are stories that he was actually Raymond Sinclair, but I checked ARM records, and Sinclair was murdered years before the Founder arrived. He seems to have been something of an invisible man-the Founder, that is. Have you ever heard of the Tehuantepec Canal?" They hadn't. "Okay. On Earth there's an ocean bordered by two continents, and one of the two is kept from freezing solid by an ocean current from the other. Now, the sun has been abnormally cool for thousands of years, and keeps getting worse by stages. The warm current started to give up most of its heat in hurricanes as a result. Sharper gradient, see? What the Founder appears to have done, to get arrested and brainwiped, was make secret arrangements with local officials and investors to blast open a sea-level trench at a place called Tehuantepec, where two oceans weren't separated very far. The ocean to the east was the one with the current, and the one to the west was cooler, with a higher sea level. Water washed out the trench, and mixed with the warm water, so it got stirred up and wouldn't stay put long enough to let hurricanes form. They need still, saturated air. The ocean current wound up transporting more heat than it had in a thousand years, so everybody was saved. But the man responsible had already been brainwiped, so the ARM made his records vanish and claimed it was their own project. The Founder turned out to be one of those people who does really well in low gravity, so he was still here a couple of centuries later for the Blowout." The elevator stopped. Another door was now visible.
Perpetua began, "That is the filthiest-"
"Who goes there?" said a speaker over the door.
"A true believer," said Smith.
"What do you want?" said the speaker.
"To do one thing."
The door began opening. "Surely they didn't call him Founder all the time," Ginger said, and stopped to gape.
The cavern before them had to be artificial, its lining fused dust; but it looked like an enormous natural cave, bigger than the dome they'd landed by. There were gardens, with trees, and light sources in the roof that made it about twice as bright as on the surface. In the center of the cavity floor, hundreds of meters away, was what looked like a big rock formation with its own cave opening; a waterfall trickled down one side over a couple of pretty good bonsai. There was a sign above the cave opening: odd john's toxic dump
"No," said Smith. "They called him John Smith."
"Your ancestor?" Ginger said.
"Who knows? Lots of people on Mars took the name Smith after the Blowout. Classical allusion. In his case, though, it was just a standard label for someone whose name was unknown." He led them toward the rocks.
" 'Toxic dump'?" Perpetua said, alarmed at the unfamiliar term.
"Another ancient reference. People didn't use to reduce sewage and garbage to simple organics with superheated steam. They just left things in pits."
"How did they make plastics?" wondered Ginger.
"The raw materials originally came from underground." Smith paused to look at Ginger. "Your homeworld hasn't had petroleum for about ten thousand years, has it?"
"Wunderland has petroleum," Ginger said, surprised.
"He means Kzinhome," Perpetua said. "Like his is Earth."
Smith scowled, and Ginger snorted amusement. "I see. Probably not. What did people do about the smell?"
"Lived somewhere else," Smith said.
"The fellow who first began mining those pits must have gotten awfully rich," Ginger speculated as they got to the entrance. There was a door a little ways in.
"No, on Earth it's a branch of government. There's still some garbage fortunes in the Belt, though," said Smith, lifting a sign that said scoppy fever and tapping the keypad underneath. The door opened, and he went in first.
They heard, "What the hell do you-Waldo!"
"Hilda!" Smith replied as they moved into better lighting than the entryway's.
After a short silence the woman said, "Theo. Good to see you. What do-Theo, there's a kzin behind you."
"Yes, he keeps me out of trouble. I gather Larch is still mooching off his mother."
The shop was something out of Davidson, with counters and racks and display cases crammed with unrelated oddities. There was actually a stuffed crocodile up by the ceiling; it must have been ruinously expensive. The woman behind the sales counter was very tall, like most other locals, and beige, but with hair going gray and lines at the corners of her eyes. "Yes," she said, watching Ginger. Then she pointed at him and said, "Don't think you can try your telepathy for a better price. I'm a junk dealer, the only thing that works on me is money."
Smith held up a hand in front of Ginger-unnecessarily, as Ginger was too astonished and offended to speak-and stepped forward to tell her in a very low voice, "Mom, first of all, it was the Slavers who used telepathy to control minds; second, damn few kzinti are telepaths; third, none of those have Names, which he does, indicating high social value; and fourth, telepaths are all addicted to a drug that enhances the facility and destroys their health, so you've just done the equivalent of greeting a total stranger by calling him a wirehead."
She opened her eyes wide, then closed them and kept them shut for a bit. She hunched down about a handspan-human handspan-and her face changed color, getting lighter in some places and darker in others. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said in a low voice, "Sir, I apologize. Please feel welcome."
"Thank you," said Ginger.
There was a moment of awkward silence. Perpetua broke it by saying, "Was Larch the short one?"
Smith gave her a stare, then apparently realized that she was shorter than every person they'd met except one, and said, "Yeah. Hey Mom, you should have heard Ginger. Managed to convey the idea that I was some kind of trained killer."
"You are a trained killer," said his mother.
"I don't go around single-handedly massacring groups of kzinti when I get offended, which is what he implied."
"Of course, you couldn't talk about it if you did," she observed with a straight face.
Smith sighed heavily, then said, "How quickly I recall why I don't drop by more often. We need two hyperdrives."