Click. “Oh shit.” For a moment she thought she was going to be all right, but then her stomach twisted. She barely made it to the bathroom in time, holding back the dry heaves until she was over the toilet bowl. Why me? How did I end up in this mess? she asked the mirror, sniffing and trying to dry her eyes. It’s like some kind of curse!
Fifty minutes later, it was a shaken but more composed Wednesday who climbed the two steps down from the space elevator capsule into a concrete-and-steel arrivals hall, presented her passport to the immigration official, and staggered blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight on New Dresden.
“Wow,” she said softly.
Her rings vibrated for attention. She sighed. “Cancel block.”
“Are you feeling less stressed?” asked Herman, as if nothing had happened.
“I think so.”
“Good. Now please pay attention to where we are going. I am adding your destination to the public geotracking system. Follow the green dot.”
“Green dot — okay.” A green dot appeared on the floor, and Wednesday followed it passively, feeling drained and depressed. She’d almost psyched herself into looking forward to the reception, but Herman’s news had unhinged her again, bringing her tenuous optimism crashing down. Maybe Frank would be able to cheer her up, but just then she wanted only to go back to her luxury suite and lock the door and get stinking drunk.
It took another three hours of boredom, dozing in the seats of a maglev capsule hurtling at thousands of kilometers per hour through an evacuated tunnel buried deep under oceans and continents, before she arrived in the capital. Typical, why couldn’t they build the beanstalk closer to the main city? Or move the city? she sniffed to herself. Getting around on a planet seemed to take a very long time, for no obvious reason.
Sarajevo was old, with lots of stone buildings and steel-and-glass skyscrapers.
It was badly air-conditioned, with strange eddying breezes and air currents and a really disorienting, upsetting blue-and-white fractal plasma image in place of a decent ceiling. It was also full of strange-looking people in weird clothes moving fast and doing incomprehensible things. She passed three women in fake peasant costume — New Dresden had never been backward enough to have a real peasantry — waving credit terminals. A bunch of people in rainbow-colored luminous plastic gowns roller-bladed past, surrounded by compact remotes buzzing around at ear level. Cars, silent and melted-looking, slunk through the streets. A fellow in grimy ripped technical mountaineering gear, bubble tent folded at his feet, seemed to be offering her an empty ceramic coffee cup. People in glowing glasses gesticulated at invisible interfaces; laser dots all over the place danced ahead of people who needed guidance. It wasn’t like Septagon, it was like -
It’s like home. If home had been bigger and brasher and more developed, she realized, tenuously making a connection to her memories of their last family visit to Grandma’s house.
One thing pricked her attention: it was the lack of difference. She’d been worried at first about going down-well wearing a party costume she’d have been comfortable with back home. “Don’t worry,” Herman told her. “Moscow and Dresden are both McWorlds — the original colonists had similar backgrounds and aspirations. The culture will feel familiar to you. You can thank media diffusion for that; it will not be like the New Republic, or Turku, or even as different as Septagon.” And indeed, it wasn’t. Even the street signs looked the same.
“And we were nearly at war with these people?” she asked.
“The usual stupid reasons. Competitive trade advantage, immigration policy, political insecurity, cheap slow transport — cheap enough to facilitate trade, too expensive to facilitate federalization or the other adjustments human nations make to minimize the risk of war. The McWorlds all took something from the dominant terrestrial globalized culture with them when they were settled, but they have diverged since then — in some cases, radically. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can discuss politics or actions of the government safely here.”
“As if I would.” Wednesday followed her green dot round a corner and up a spiraling ramp onto a road-spanning walkway, then into a roofed-over mall. “Where am I supposed to be meeting Frank?”
“He should be waiting for you. Along this road. There.”
He was sitting on a bench in front of an abstract bronze sculpture, rattling away on his antique keyboard. Killing time. “Frank, are you okay?”
He looked up at her and pulled a face — a grimace that might have been intended as a smile but succeeded in doing nothing to reassure her. His eyes were red-rimmed and had bags under them, and his clothing looked as if he’d been living in it for a couple of days. “I, I think so.” He shook his head. “Brr.” He yawned widely. “Haven’t slept for a long, uh…” He trailed off.
Party overload, she thought dispassionately. She reached out and took his hand, tugging. “Come on!”
Frank lurched to his feet and caught his balance. The keyboard concertinaed away into a pocket. He yawned again. “Are we in time?”
She blinked, checking her timepiece: “Sure!” she said brightly. “What have you been doing?”
“Not sleeping.” Frank shook himself. “I’m a mess. Mind if I freshen up first?” He looked almost apologetic.
She grinned at him. “That looks like a public toilet over there.”
“Okay. Two minutes.”
He took nearer to a quarter of an hour, but when he returned he’d had a shower and run his outerwear through a fastcleaner. “Sorry ’bout that. Do I look better?”
“You look fine,” she said diplomatically. “At least, you’ll pass. Are you going to fall over on me?”
“Nope.” He dry swallowed a capsule and shuddered slightly. “Not until we get back to the ship.” He tapped the pocket with his keyboard in it. “Captured enough color for three features, interviewed four midlevel government officials and six random civilians, grabbed about four hours of full-motion. One last push and—” This time his smile looked less stressed.
“Okay, let’s go.” She took his hand again and led him along the street.
“You know where we’re going? The embassy reception hall?”
“Never been there.” She pointed at the floor. “Got a guide.”
“Oh good, tell everyone where we’re going,” he muttered. “I just hope they don’t mistake me for a vagrant.”
“An, uh, what? What was that?”
“A vagrant?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “They don’t have them where you come from? Lucky.”
She checked the word in her lexicon. “I’ll tell them you’re my guest,” she said, and patted his hand. Having Frank around made her feel safe, like walking through a strange town with a huge and ferocious guard dog — the biological kind — to protect her. Her spirits rose as they neared the embassy.
Embassies were traditionally the public representatives of a nation abroad. As such, they tended to be built with a swagger, gratuitously broad facades and conspicuously gilded flagpoles. The Muscovite embassy was typical of the breed, a big, classically styled limestone-and-marble heap squatting sullenly behind a row of poplar trees, a discreet virtual fence, and a lawn that appeared to have been trimmed with a micrometer gauge and nail scissors. But something about it wasn’t quite right. It might have been the flag out front — set to half-mast ever since the dreadful day, years ago, when the diplomatic causal channel went dead — or something more subtle. There was a down-at-heel air to it, of retired gentry keeping up appearances but quietly living beyond their means.