Rebel was looking through the forward wraparound when light brightened to one side. She turned and flinched back from the unexpected phantom of an old woman in treehanger heavies sitting beside her. “Aha!”
the creature said. “I thought it might be you. Changed your name on your passport, I see. What the fuck.”
“You startled me!” Rebel said. Then, somewhat stiffly,
“Hello, Mother.”
The holo grimaced. “I’m not your mother. Call me Mud.
I’m only an ALI, but I have my dignity. You do know what an ALI is, don’t you? That’s Artificial Limited—”
“I know, I know. You haven’t much time, so you’d appreciate me speaking up briskly.”
Mud cackled. It sounded like a rusty tin can being crumpled between two hands. “Take your time. Hundred years from now, what the fuck difference will it make?
Anyway, my memories are all recorded and made available to the next ALI down the line. So I have a kind of serial immortality. Not terrifically legal, though. If I weren’t safely ensconced inside a Corporate Trade Zone, they’d have me wiped. You can get away with murder in a CTZ. What were we talking about, anyway?”
“Jesus,” Rebel said, impressed. She looked more closely at the withered image, at that flushed face, those watery, pink-rimmed eyes. “You’re drunk!”
“Hey, right the first time. It was Mom’s idea. She liked the thought of having some say over how this place is run, but she didn’t want to get too serious about it. Said she’d always wanted to spend a lifetime drunk. I don’t have much real authority here, mostly I just pop up to look over anything interesting. So how’s with you, sis?”
“Me?” She could see the station’s narrow outer sleeve now, as stationary as the hub, where the cable car dock was located. “Oh, I’m okay, I guess.”
“Just okay? Hey, you tap in with a line of credit as close to unlimited as anything Records has ever seen, booked through to Tirnannog, and Mom calling in every few days to see if you’ve gone through yet… shit, that’s going to be one fascinating meeting! So what do you want, anyway?
Egg in your beer?”
The holographic traffic markings were coming into focus now. A clutter of grimy craft waited outside the hourglass grid marking the active lanes. The grid’s waist threaded the transit ring, and its ends flared, restricting a flashy amount of local space. “Well, the money’s not exactly mine,” Rebel said. “Not anymore. But yeah, you’re right.
I’m going home, I’m happy about that.”
“Yeah, and you look it too,” the ALI said sardonically.
“All hangdog and guilty-faced as sin. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, sis, but you’d better cut it out. Lighten up! Life is too short for this kind of crap!”
“That’s easy enough for you to—” Rebel flared. Shestopped. “Um. Hey, look, I’m sorry. I forgot that you’re…”
“Temporary?” The old woman shook her head. “You’ve got the dog by the wrong end, sugarcakes. Everybody is mortal—what’s the alternative? Me, I like being alive, and if I only get a few minutes of it, I’m going to spend those few minutes just enjoying hell out of it.” The image wavered. “Just enjoying hell out of it. Whoops! The Reaper calls. Look, do me a favor, will you, kid? Try to keep your pecker up.”
Rebel smiled weakly. “Yeah. Sure.”
Mud faded away in midlaugh, in midwink.
The cable car slammed into the dock and rang like a bell.
A second later, the cable car was scooped up by a passing rampway and smoothly lifted and accelerated into the outermost ring. It came to rest, and Rebel stepped out.
The car’s cybersystems began loading her baggage onto a trundle cart.
A thin young man with golden skin and a little black mustache was waiting for her. He bowed and said,
“Welcome to Hummingbird Station. My name is Curlew, and I am your escort.” Cute little piece of action, dressed like he was just in from the archipelago. From Avalon, perhaps, or P’eng-Lai. His eyes twinkled mischievously.
“This way.”
He waved a hand, and the baggage cart scuttled after them.
“The out stations are Elizabeth Charm Mudlark’s legacy to the System, the visible structure of the Mudlark Trust, and a pipeline from the Klusters directly into the Oort Cloud,” Curlew recited. “Thanks to our patron’s generosity, the transit rings have cut the years of voyaging previously needed to reach the archipelagoes down to a matter of days. The Trust also endowed the corresponding in stations within the archipelagoes and the Titan-classrings which will accelerate selected dyson worlds toward nearby stars. This unimaginably expensive project cost her the entirety of a fortune that no ordinary mortal could simply have given away. But then, Ms. Mudlark is no ordinary mortal.” Curlew coughed, and in a more natural tone of voice said, “She’s very old. What else did she have to spend it on? You must have met her ALI—weird old bat, isn’t she?”
“Uh…”
They were passing through a long hallway decorated with enormous holoflats of the extrasolar planets. There were detailed shots of Dainichi, Susa-no-o, Inari with its bright moon Ukemochi, the Izanagi-Izanami system, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and Yate-cutli, as well as more speculative images of Morrigan and the horned giant Cernunnos. The hallway emptied into a mall busy with shops and financial offices. Deutsche Nakasone had a branch right next to her own corporation’s local.
Rebel tried hard not to look at either.
“Doubtless you have already noticed how many concerns here have no direct relationship with Hummingbird’s transit ring functions, or even trade with the dyson worlds.” They stepped around a man sitting lotus on the floor, sticking long needles through his flesh to demonstrate a new line of yogic wetware. “They are here because Hummingbird Station was established as a Corporate Trade Zone. Here, away from intrusive government restrictions, private business can operate in a free and competitive atmosphere.” He winked. “They’ve all bought so much protective legislation in their home Klusters that they’re almost paralyzed with armor. On the bright side, as long as Hummingbird serves their purposes, the corporations won’t be so eager to gut the Trust.”
They strolled through a shop selling comet-grown blossoms twice Rebel’s height. “Don’t buy any,” Curlew advised. “They don’t last.” But there were also small blackcigars, and Rebel paused long enough to buy one last one.
It was a habit she was going to miss.
A moving rampway scooped them up, and in quick succession they rose through three levels to the inmost ring. Vast expanses of open space, impassive people hurrying by. The air carried a surf of murmured voices, distant cries, nearby coughs. A carefully-calculated snowfall drifted through the warm air, flakes melting just as they hit the porous floor.
With a grand wave of the hand, Curlew said, “These are the pioneers of a new age. Dyson worlds, it has been said, attract a special kind of emigrant, adventurers who like their comfort, starfarers willing to spend a lifetime in the traveling. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Also tourists.”
A wave of incoming treehangers flowed by, several in life-support chairs, their gravity adaptations not yet complete. A teenager turned quickly to gawk at Rebel’s breasts, and she blew cigar smoke in his face.
“We are now in the midst of the last-hour rush as the final shuttles arrive from and depart to the archipelagoes.
Since Hummingbird Station is so close to the Sun—relatively speaking—it is inevitable that as it moves in its orbit it will slide out of position to serve as a transit terminus. However, Jackdaw Station’s launch window is designed to exactly overlap Hummingbird’s, to prevent a disruption of service.” He grinned meanly. “Of course, it’s not completely built yet. So there’ll be a hiatus of a few months before Plover moves into place. That’s typical for this operation. None of the shuttles they ordered when Hummingbird was designed have been delivered either.
They’re using converted local liners. Have you seen them yet?”
“Only a glimpse from the cable car.”
“Decrepit things.” He wrinkled his nose. “They’re cramped and they smell bad. Sort of a mixture of stale sweat, cottage cheese, and oil. Most people prefer to gocoldpacked.” He put an arm around her waist and said,