That segment was marked off, on the plot, by two red lines drawn athwart the ring. One was located at the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west, above the former Pacific island of Kiribati. This placed it near the eastern end of the Julian segment. The other was at precisely 90 degrees east, running through the habitat called Dhaka, in the exact center of the Camites’ arc. The lines were borders: not just imaginary frontiers but literal barriers that had been constructed, like turnpikes, across the ring. The warm-colored arc of habitats stretching between them, incorporating most of the Julian segment, all of the Aïdan segment, and exactly half of the Camite segment, was, to Kath Two and the others aboard this flivver, another country. The relationship between it and the larger, cool-colored segment where they lived could be described in many possible ways, of which the most succinct was war.
THE TEKLAN, SEEING THAT KATH TWO HAD LIFTED HER HEAD FROM the rest and thereby joined the temporary society of the flivver, turned toward her. He stuck his right elbow out to the side, made a blade of his hand, palm down, and snapped it in until his thumbnail was touching the point of his chin, then, after a moment’s pause, elevated it to the level of his forehead. “Beled Tomov,” he said. But Kath Two had already known this, since it was stenciled on the outside of his suit.
Kath Two made a similar gesture, though in the style of her race she used her left hand and kept the palm toward her, fingers curled into a loose fist. “Kath Amalthova, Two.”
Both of them looked toward the Dinan. During the previous moments he had kept his gaze averted in a way that, as everyone understood, meant that he had been taking a leak into his suit’s urine collection system and wanted privacy. But now he looked up and performed the gesture, also left-armed, with a slight variation in the attitude of the hand, beginning with his palm toward him but flipping it over to face outward as he brought it to his forehead. “Rhys Alaskov.”
This style of greeting was a throwback to the early days of the Cloud Ark and the first generations spawned on Cleft by the Seven Eves. People then had spent a lot of time in space suits equipped with outer visors that could be flipped up or down to compensate for sunlight. When the visor was pulled down, it concealed the wearer’s face behind a reflective metallized screen. When it was pushed up, the face could be seen. In the crowded environments of those days, the upward movement of the hand had become a signal meaning “Hello, I am available for social interaction,” and its reverse had come to mean “Goodbye” or “I wish for privacy now.” These gestures’ practical necessity had withered away as the human races had spread out into habitats where they could get privacy whenever they desired it. They lived on, however, as salutes. Beled Tomov had opted for a military style, using the right hand, the subtext being “I am not going to kill you with a concealed weapon.” In gravity, the next move might then have been to reach out for a handshake. In zero gee this usually wasn’t practical and so was rarely done. The left-handed version suggested a nonmilitary vocation, implying that the saluter’s right hand was busy doing something useful. The variations in hand position were racial and their origins were the subject of folkloric research. All agreed, however, that they were useful for signaling one’s race when far away, or when obscured in a space suit. The cues in size, shape, posture, and bearing that distinguished the races could be subtle, particularly when it was not possible to see facial features and hair color. Rhys Alaskov had the honey hair and freckled skin typical of a Dinan. Teklans too were fair. But where Rhys had an open, appealing face and an engaging manner, Beled was all cheek- and jawbones, sleek and bony at the same time, eyes so blue they were nearly white, hair like fiber-optic glass, cropped close to his skull. His affect matched his look. Kath Two was dark brown, with green eyes and woolly black hair. Close, in other words, to the way Eve Moira had looked. Among the three in this flivver, the largest contrast was therefore between her and Beled. And yet five thousand years of acculturation shaped the way they would interact. If some crisis were to arise, Kath Two and Beled would likely find themselves back to back, each instinctively seeking qualities wanted in the other. And in the absence of a crisis, they might find themselves front to front. A similar complementary relationship obtained between Dinans and Ivyns, but as it happened Rhys Alaskov was without an opposite number at the moment—that empty fourth couch.
All of which, and more, was just subtext, passed over in a fraction of a second. Rhys pushed off gently and floated toward the nest of displays that served as the flivver’s control panel. The same functions, of course, might have been served within his varp, but it was considered desirable to make the ship’s status clearly visible to everyone in the cabin, and so that kind of information tended to be splashed up on large screens.
Rhys was going to establish contact with whatever habitat was at their apogee, chat up whoever was “answering the phone” on the other end, and smooth the way in general. While he was floating slowly across the cabin, he said, “I trust you both had good surveys?”
“Nominal,” Beled announced.
Kath Two was about to make a remark in the same vein when she remembered the Indigen, or whoever it was, watching her glider from the shelter of the trees by the lake. The impression had been so fleeting. Had she imagined it? She was certain she hadn’t. But memory could play funny tricks.
“Mine was fascinating,” Rhys said, when Kath Two failed to take the bait for a while.
“Any irregularities?” asked Beled, just as Kath Two was saying, “What was so interesting?”
Sensing Beled’s gaze on her, Kath Two turned his way and understood that his question had been aimed as much at her as at Rhys.
It was in Rhys’s nature as a Dinan, however, to assume that the question was all for him. His eyes flicked between Kath Two and Beled. Knowing he was the odd man out here, he responded with a grin that was, of course, charming. “I think I can answer both questions at once.” He had reached the chair centered in the cockpit. “The canids are going epi in a huge way. They’ve become nearly unrecognizable.” He brought the controls to life with a few sweeps of his fingers, and the screens lit up all around him.
A canid was a thing like a dog, wolf, or coyote. Rather than trying to bring back individual species, Doc—Dr. Hu Noah—had drawn inspiration from research that had emerged in Old Earth scientific journals shortly before Zero, suggesting that the boundaries among those commonly recognized species were so muddy as to be meaningless. They all could and did mate with each other and produce hybrid offspring. For various reasons these tended to group by size and shape in a way that human observers saw as being distinct species. But when humans weren’t looking, or when the environment shifted, all manner of coy-dogs and coy-wolves and wolf-dogs appeared. Coyotes began hunting in packs like wolves, or wolves went solo like coyotes. Creatures that had avoided, or eaten, humans struck up partnerships with them; family pets went feral.
Hu Noah was 120 years old. As a young man he had been one of many scientists who had rebelled against a tradition of TerReForm thought that had passed as gospel for hundreds of years previously. Thanks in part to the young Turks’ propagandizing, this older approach had become hidebound and stereotyped as the TOT, or Take Our Time, school. The premise of TOT was that ecosystems—which on Old Earth had evolved over hundreds of millions of years—would have to be rebuilt slowly, through a sort of handcrafting process. Which was fine, since living in habitats was safer and more comfortable anyway than the unpredictable surface of a planet. The human races could enjoy thousands of years of safe, secure habitat life while slowly re-creating ecosystems down below that would resemble those of Old Earth. The planet would become a sort of ecological preserve. Africa, whose outlines were still vaguely recognizable, though heavily reshaped by the Hard Rain, would have giraffes and lions sequenced from the ones and zeroes dating all the way back to the thumb drive around Eve Moira’s neck. Likewise with the other battered and reforged continents.