Small elongated triangles of golden fabric were already drifting idly across the sky as the first of the days fliers flapped their way upward in search of the thermals. They normally launched themselves off the ridges on Blackwater Crag, which rose up from the back of the town’s eastern quarter. A cable car run sliced through the forest that covered the crag, leading from its ground base behind the high school’s playing fields up to the semicircular Orbit building that protruded from the top of the broad cliff six hundred meters above the town, looking as if a flying saucer were sticking out over the edge. The restaurant it housed was an overpriced tourist trap, although the view it provided across the town and lake was unbeatable.
Every day the little chrome-blue cable cars carried tourists and flight professionals and extreme sports addicts up to the Orbit. From there they’d make their way through the forest paths to a ridge that had the wind blowing in the right direction, seal themselves into a Vinci suit, and take flight. The real professionals would spend all day soaring and spiraling in the thermals, coming back down only as darkness fell. A Vinci suit was easy enough to use: it was basically a tapered slimline sleeping bag with bird wings that had a span up to eight meters. You stood up inside it on the crest of the ridge, arms outstretched in a cruciform position, and dived forward into the chasm below. Electromuscle bands in the wings mimicked and amplified your arm and wrist motions, allowing the wings to flap and bank and roll. It was the closest humans had ever got to pure bird flight.
Mark had been up a couple of times, sharing an instructor suit with a friend who lived in town. The sensation was truly amazing, but he wasn’t about to switch jobs to do it full-time.
He walked down the sloping Main Mall toward the waterfront. The stores on either side of the walkway were a collection of Commonwealth-wide retail franchises like the Bean Here and the inevitable Bab’s Kebabs fast food, interspaced with local craft shops and the bars and cafés to provide an eclectic shopping mix.
Doors all the way along the Main Mall were being opened for business. Mark said hello to a lot of the staff, waving to even more. They were all young people, and strangely uniform in appearance; if it wasn’t for their varied skin colors they could all have been cousins. The boys had stiff hair cut short, maybe a few days’ stubble, bodies that were genuinely fit, not simply overaerobicized in a gym; they wore baggy sweaters or even baggier waterproof coats, with knee-length shorts, and trainer sandals. The girls were easy to look at in their short skirts or tight trousers, with T-shirts all showing off firm midriffs no matter how cold the day was. All of them were just filling in with these jobs: serving in the stores, waitressing, working bar, portering at the hotels, stewarding on the dive boats, hostessing the scenic tours, doing childcare for the permanent residents. They did it for one thing, to raise enough money for the next extreme experience. Randtown’s biggest industry was tourism, and what set it apart from countless other holiday destinations in the Commonwealth were the sports that were practiced in the rugged countryside surrounding it. They attracted the first-lifers, the ones moderately disaffected with the mainstream of Commonwealth life; not rebels, just thrill-junkies hell-bent on finding a quicker way down a mountain, or a rougher way to raft over rapids, or turn tighter corners on jetskis, or go ever higher for heliski drops. Older, more conservative multi-life types visited as well, staying in the fancy hotels and getting bused out to their scheduled activity each day in air-conditioned coaches. They were the ones who generated the service economy that provided hundreds of low-paying jobs for the likes of Mandy and Julie.
Mark crossed the single-lane road at the end of Main Mall, and walked along the waterfront promenade. Randtown was built around a horseshoe-shaped inlet on the northern shore of Lake Trine’ba. At a hundred eighty kilometers long, it was the biggest stretch of inland freshwater on Elan. Complementing the height of the mountains that corraled it at their center, it was over a kilometer deep in places. Lurking below the astonishingly blue surface was a unique marine ecology that had evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years. Stunningly beautiful coral reefs dominated the shallows, while conical atolls rose from the central deeps like miniature volcanoes. They were home to thousands of fish species, ranging from the bizarre to the sublime; though like their saltwater cousins of this planet they used lethal-looking spines and spindles rather than fins to propel themselves along.
After the winter skiing and snowboarding, diving was Randtown’s second largest tourist draw. The waterfront provided dozens of jetties, where the commercial diving boats were berthed. Even today, with the Trine’ba only just above freezing, ten of the operators were running trips out over the waters. Mark watched a big Celestial Tours catamaran slide past, its impellers kicking up a thick spume behind each hull. A couple of the crew waved to him from the prow, calling out something that was lost in the noise of the engines.
He carried on along the side of the stone wall, with its single line of poetry that stretched the entire length. One day he was going to read it from start to finish. The Ables Motors garage, which was his franchise, was situated a couple of streets away from the eastern end of the promenade. He got to it well before quarter to nine. Randtown, for all it was the only real town for eight hundred kilometers, wasn’t particularly large. Without the tourists and youthful transients, the population was only just over five thousand people. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a quarter of an hour.
There were an equal number of people living out in the valleys and lowlands to the north and west where the farms and vineyards were spreading. To travel about on the district’s dirt-track roads they needed decent four-wheel drive transport. That was what Ables Motors specialized in; it was a division of Farndale that produced vehicles for harsh terrain. It had seemed like the perfect solution to Mark when they were searching for a new home and career. He was good with machines, so he could do most of the light repairs himself; and trading both new and second-hand models would add considerably to that income. Unfortunately, Ables Motors was a relatively new venture for Farndale, an unproven brand, while the old familiar Mercedes, Ford, Range Rover, and Telmar products took the lion’s share of the market. Nor did it help that the Ables garage was only a couple of years old. He perhaps should have realized that when he took it on along with the outstanding mortgage. Sales were slow, and given the tiny number of Ables vehicles in the area, maintenance work was equally sparse.
It had taken Mark less than a fortnight to realize that the four-wheel drive business wasn’t going to bring in anything like a decent income for the family. When he started looking around for extra work, he swiftly found that people in town and on the farms had a lot of broken-down hardware that could be fixed by anyone with rudimentary mechanical aptitude. Mark had damn good mechanical, and electrical, aptitude; on top of which he had a fully equipped workshop. At the start of the third week he brought a few items back to the shop: a couple of janitorbots, an air conditioner, the sonar out of a dive operator’s catamaran, cookers, solar heat exchangers.
Randtown was a tight-knit community, people got to hear about anyone with that kind of talent. Pretty soon he was deluged with appliances and equipment that needed to be patched up. Most of it was done for cash. They’d been paying off the mortgage on the vineyard faster than they’d originally planned.
That morning had three autopickers waiting for him in the workshop. Each unit was the size of a car, with enough electromuscle appendages to fit a Raiel with prosthetics. They belonged to Yuri Conant, who owned three vineyards in Ulon Valley, and was now a good friend and neighbor. One of Yuri’s kids was the same age as Barry.