“Don’t stick on the names,” Orianna said, shaping the living room into more Regency. “All my friends are into Vernoring. They work and play with fake names. I don’t know their true ones. Not even their parents know.”

“Why?”

“It’s a game. Two rules — nobody knows what you’re doing, and you do nothing illegal.”

“Doesn’t that take the fun out of doing crypto?” I asked.

“Wow — crypto! Hide in the tomb. Sorry. I shy from two-edged words. We call it Vernoring.”

“Doesn’t it?” I persisted.

“No,” Orianna said thoughtfully. “Illegal is harm. Harm is stupid. Stupid is its own game, and none of my friends play it. Here’s Kite.”

Kite came through a double door dressed in faded denim shirt and pants. He stood two meters high, minus a few centimeters, and carried a green-and-white mottled sun kitten.

Orianna introduced us. Kite smiled and performed a shallow bow, then offered his free hand. He seemed natural enough — handsome but not excessively so, manner a little shy. He squatted cross-legged on the oriental carpet and the sun kitten played within a Persian garden design. A light switched on overhead and bathed the animal in a spot of brightness. It mewed appreciatively and stretched on its back.

“We’re going out tonight,” Orianna said. “Where is Shrug?”

“Asleep, I think. He’s spent the last three days working a commission.”

“Well, wake him up!”

“You do it,” Kite said.

“Pleasure’s mine.” Orianna leaped from the chair and returned to the hall. We heard her banging on doors.

“She could just buzz him,” Kite said ruefully, shaking his head. “She pretends she’s a storm, sometimes.”

I murmured assent.

“But she’s really sweet. You must know that.”

“I like her a lot,” I said.

“She’s an only and that makes a difference,” Kite added. “I have a brother and sister. You?”

“A brother,” I said. “And lots of blood relations.”

Kite smiled. The smile rendered his face transcendentally beautiful. I blinked and looked away.

“Is it rough, having everyone vid you?”

“I’m getting tired of it.”

“You know, you should watch whom you touch… Shake hands with. That sort of thing. Some of the LitVids are casual about privacy. They could plant watchers on you.” He held up pinched fingers and peered through a tiny gap. “Some are micro. Hide anywhere.”

“Isn’t that against the law?”

“If you haven’t filed for privacy rights, they could argue you’re common-law open. Then you’d only be protected in surveillance negative areas. The watchers would turn off… Most of the time.”

“That’s bolsh,” said a deep, lion-like voice. I turned to see Orianna dragging into the room by one hand a very large, blocky man with a very young face. “Nobody’s planted a watcher without permission in four years,” the young-faced man said. “Not since Wayne vs. LA PubEye.”

“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.