I lost my battle with a second growing impulse and started to giggle. “It’s, I mean, you look—” Giggling dissolved into helpless laughter.
The woman’s face went smooth and still, all warmth frozen away.
I held up my hands, struggling to get a handle on myself. “Sorry,” I gasped. “It’s just that—” I wheezed for breath. “It’s just that you look like a really badly dubbed movie.”
Her expression thawed. “Oh, that.” Her voice began to synch with the movements of her mouth. “Better? I was speaking Chinese—bad Mandarin to be exact—until you popped up. Our hosts provide the translation.”
“Hosts? You mean the Bugs?”
Her gaze was cool, and more than a little intimidating. Then she gave a slight shake of her head, as if deciding to let something go, turning her back to me. “Help me get this stuff off, will you?”
There were wooden clasps holding the back of the armor shut. I started working on them. All around us the other warriors were helping each other shed their armor. “So what was the battle about?” I asked.
“Exercise. Blowing off steam. Fun.”
It hadn’t looked like fun to me. “The Bugs don’t mind you fighting wars?”
“This wasn’t a war, just violent choreography. Dance for non-sissies.”
Which presumably meant me, who had somehow ended up playing lady in waiting. I got the last clasp loose, stepped back. “There you go.” She shucked off the armored top, began removing the stuff protecting her legs. When she turned back to face me I was staring again.
I pegged her age at somewhere in her late thirties. Her body was that of an athlete, trim and muscular. In great shape. Except that her left arm beyond her elbow was clearly artificial, one of the newer generation of smart prosthetics. Her left leg was also tan nanolastic from the knee on down. The tight black tee and baggy gray shorts she wore did nothing to hide any of that, or more scars, mostly on her left side. On her feet, both of them, were sturdy hiking boots.
“You just out?” she said.
I tried to pretend I hadn’t been gaping like an Iowa tourist in Times Square. “Uh, from Earth?”
She cocked her head quizzically. “Is there someplace else to come out from I should know about?”
“Any—” I shook my head. Managed an unconvincing smile. “Sorry. I’m still a little, you know, disoriented.”
She smiled back as if she believed me, but her smile looked slightly forced and wore a shadowing of tiredness. Like I presented a problem she would have preferred to duck.
I felt like I should apologize—though I wasn’t sure what for. Before I could think of something to say she clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough to make me stagger.
“Okay, kid, let’s get your ass oriented. You got a name?”
“Glyph.” I bit back the urge to tell her not to call me kid.
“Posto handle?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Cute. You can call me Trub.”
The door had dumped me in an open field surrounded by low vegetation on two sides, jungle on the others, grass underfoot, and the air clean and fresh. In the distance I could see several widely scattered clusters of low broad white cylinders, some with thatched roofs. People moved between the buildings. There were trees and birds and a gaggle of kids running around. It was like something out of a movie shot somewhere oriental and rural.
Except that the sky was white instead of blue, and it seemed to be only a mile overhead. Way off I could see curving white walls that swept up to become sky. Ahead and behind the world seemed to curve down and away, like now I was inside a terrarium under an overturned bathtub.
And it was warm, far warmer than it had been back in New York. But I was reluctant to take my coat off. Several of my things, and consequently several parts of my identity, were in its pockets. I felt a powerful need to hold on to that. The decidedly non-urban surroundings weren’t in my comfort zone. When you feel out of place it helps to at least feel like you’re ready to bug out at a moment’s notice.
Several of the warriors had gone to hang their armor on wooden racks along one side of the field, then begun drifting away on a path leading into a cluster of heavier vegetation. Trub told me to follow her as she parked her own armor, then led us onto that same path. It wound through the trees as aimlessly as I felt tagging along, listening to Trub talk to one of the male warriors about some obscure technique used in their battle.
We emerged into another clearing. What looked like a mutant Tiki bar stood at one end, and there were wood and bamboo tables and chairs scattered about, several already in use.
Trub lifted an arm, catching the eye of the happily busy Japanese man behind the counter. She held up two fingers. He nodded and shouted, “Hai!”
She claimed an unoccupied table. “Take a load off, kid,” she said, dropping heavily into one chair. I sat down more cautiously, checking out the surroundings. I smelled hot grease and food, saw men and women gabbing as they ate and drank. So they had diners on Venus. I guessed that made sense.
A young Korean boy hustled over to our table, balancing an overloaded tray. Smiling shyly, he put down two big ceramic mugs and a leaf-covered bamboo platter heaped high with what looked like deep-fried rice balls. They smelled good enough to start my mouth watering, making me realize I hadn’t eaten in hours.
“Thanks, Kim,” Trub said as the boy bowed, then hurried off to serve other customers. She pushed one of the mugs in front of me, keeping the other for herself.
“What is it?” I said, watching her take a slug and then peering into my mug.
Trub wiped her mouth with the back of her artificial hand. “Rice beer. Brewed right here in Rice City.”
I took a cautious sip. It tasted weird, like a mix of ginger ale and sake. “Rice City is what, a village? I mean, be real, this doesn’t look like much of a city.”
This seemed to amuse Trub. “Oh, so you’re in charge of defining what a city is?” She popped a rice ball in her mouth, her one good eye hooding in pleasure as she chewed.
“I just meant, you know, there aren’t any big buildings. No concrete. Not that many people.”
She swallowed, took another sip of beer. “Tell you what, kid. You’re new here, so let me give you the basics. Venus 101. Then you can ask questions and I’ll try to answer them. That work for you?”
I shrugged. “Sure. I guess.” I didn’t like being treated like a gomer, but as far as this place was concerned, I was one.
“Then eat and listen. But watch for the red balls. Don’t try them unless you got balls. Now, Venus is a planet. A globe. You know latitude from longitude?”
There were three kinds of rice balls, the size of doughnut holes, each with a different colored dot on it. Red, green, and black. “Doesn’t everybody? Longitude lines run from pole to pole. Latitude is around the globe, like the equator.”
“You got it. Now imagine two latitudinal lines, one per hemisphere, each one a few degrees away from the equator. With me so far?”
“I’m trying to keep up.” I picked out one of the red-marked rice balls. I had balls, after all.
“Now imagine those lines as actual artifacts, shaped like bicycle inner tubes or hula hoops. Each one a hollow torus about five klicks across and roughly 30,000 klicks in circumference.”
I scowled at her. “Wait a minute, you’re telling me each tube is, uh, around two miles across, and, um, nearly nineteen thousand miles long?” I popped the rice ball in my mouth, then froze mid-chew as nuclear heat exploded on my tongue.
Trub grinned. “More or less. Drink some beer. The reds are kinda spicy. Black and green are milder.”
“No fuckin’ way,” I croaked, spitting the burning coal out before it could melt my teeth.