And then, because she was a Moiran, she wondered if all that had to do with the fact that she had overslept. Her previous Survey missions had been quick insertions lasting a few days. And they had typically sent her to less developed biomes: the fringes of the TerReForm process, where the seeding of the ground had occurred more recently, and less complexity struck the eye, nose, and ear. This mission, however, had lasted long enough that she could feel it changing her.
Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city. Here that meant gazing up into the sky.
Yesterday had been overcast, with little movement in the air. She might have been hard-pressed to find and organize the energy she would need to get home. But matters had changed during the night. The air was moving. Not strongly enough, yet, that she could feel it on her face, but enough to stir the leaves at the tops of the trees and to wobble the heavy heads of the tall grass. Above, it must be moving more strongly, for yesterday’s sheet of clouds had been shredded to tufts and tissues, purplish-gray on the bottom and pink-orange on their eastern faces. The sky between them, however, was perfectly clear, and still dark enough that she could see a few bright stars and planets. And, to the south — for she was in the northern hemisphere — an orderly ring of brilliant points erupting from the eastern horizon and arching across the vault of the sky until it plunged into the shadow of the world, off to the west. From here she could see nearly half of the ten thousand or so habitats in the ring. Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.
It was time to go there.
She had pitched her little shelter on a flat lozenge of soft grass some distance back from the brow of the hill where the wind would soon be bending. She struck her camp, shouldered her pack one last time, and carried it a short distance to the break in the slope she had noticed yesterday. She popped the clasp on the hip belt and let it drop to the ground.
Unrolling the deflated wings and the tail structure was as easy as giving each a swift kick. Smaller bundles had been stuffed between them: a foot-operated pump and a hard sphere, somewhat larger than Kath Two’s head.
She devoted a few minutes to stomping the pump. The wrinkles began to disappear from the splayed runs of fabric, and it began to look like a glider.
The sun had cleared the opposite rim of the crater. The tops of the wings began gathering its energy and feeding it to built-in air pumps that would pressurize the wing and tail tubes beyond what could be achieved with muscle power.
She got dressed. Which began with getting naked, and cold. She was glad she had worked up a sweat operating the pump.
The hard sphere was a glass bubble with an opening at the bottom large enough to admit Kath Two’s head. At the moment, though, it was stuffed with a roll of gray fabric. She withdrew this and kicked it out on the ground. It was as long as she was tall. Rolled up in it had been a semirigid funnel with straps dangling from its edge. Stuffed into the funnel were two packets. One of the packets was tiny, just a pill that would stop up her bowels for a day. She swallowed it. The other was a heavy and distressingly cold sac of gel. Kath Two bit off one corner and then smeared the gel all over herself, wincing at its chilly touch. It was an emollient, rumored to be very complicated, and it had an official name. But everyone called it Space Grease. The stuff would never be sold as a cosmetic; it lay heavy on her skin, and she could practically feel her pores clogging.
The funnel-and-strap contraption was for collecting urine. She stepped into it, pulled it up over her pubic mound, and cinched the straps high over her pelvic crest. A short tube dangled from it, tickling her inner thigh.
She then picked up the gray fabric thing. This was a one-piece bodysuit whose only opening was at the neck. It was a mesh of nearly microscopic nats — simple three-legged robots that knew how to do very little other than hold hands with their neighbors. It would have been impossible to put on were it not for the fact that the nats, talking to each other in a simple language, could stretch and shrink those connections according to a shared program. She got both of her hands into the neck hole and pulled opposite ways. Recognizing the gesture, the nats relaxed, and the opening widened to the point where she could insert one foot, then the other. This required good balance, which Kath Two was fortunate enough to have. She was standing on a towel that she had spread out on the ground. The classic error was to lose one’s balance and plant a foot in the dirt, or even fall down, and get covered with dirt and rocks and twigs that would stick to the Space Grease. But Kath Two got her feet into the suit without incident. Finding the leg holes, and then the individual toe holes, was, as usual, slapstick comedy. Once she got the suit pulled up over her buttocks she was able to sit down and manage this one digit at a time. Then she reached down inside the still-baggy thighs and connected the urine tube to a fitting on the inside of her right thigh. Recognizing as much, the fabric drew tight, nearly trapping her hands inside. The tightness moved up in a wave from toes to knees to thighs to buttocks, pausing once it had noticed her waist. She shrugged the suit’s upper half on over her shoulders and got her fingers sorted into the gloves that terminated its arms. The suit, sensing what she was up to, grew tighter as she went, save at the neck.
From the helmet’s orifice she detached a rigid collar with a hinge on one side and a latch on the other. She snapped it into place around her neck, then pulled the loose fabric of the suit up over it and held it in place as it shrank, forming a tight connection to the collar.
From the hard collar down to her toes, she was now clad in gray material that fit her so closely she could see tendons in the backs of her hands, nipples reacting to the early morning chill, and the little valleys where her nails erupted from their beds.
She hesitated to lower the helmet over her face. This would be her last opportunity for a while to breathe the fresh air of New Earth. The scientist in her was at odds with a deeper layer, common to all human races, that wanted to see beauty and purpose in the “natural” world. She knew perfectly well what Doc — or just about any other Ivyn — would say to her, if he could read her mind. The water in that lake below you is there because we crashed comet cores into the dead Earth until it stayed wet. The air you’re breathing was manufactured by organisms we genetically engineered and sprayed all over the wet planet, then killed once they had accomplished their task. And the sharp scent you like so much comes from vegetation that, for many years, existed only as a string of binary digits stored on a thumb drive on a string around the neck of your Eve.
None of which changed the fact that she liked it. But the breeze was building, making the craft jostle and fidget. It was trimmed for minimum lift and unlikely to go anywhere, but a sudden gust might still carry it away.
Unnerved by a sudden movement, Kath Two reached out and slapped the upper surface of the right wing, about an arm’s length in from the tip.
Kath Two felt her own touch. A patch of skin on the back of her right forearm, a finger’s length in from the wrist, thrilled as the suit’s fabric contracted over it: a configuration of puckers no larger than a fingerprint. But shaped, unmistakably, like a miniature hand — Moira’s hand. Her skin and that of the glider had become joined in a common sensorium, mediated by the smart fabric of the suit.