By that time, Osprey's wish had come true. He was mad from pain and deprivation. His insanity had nothing to do with the hadals freeing him to roam in their tunnels. If madness was the password, then most of their human captives would have been free. Who could understand such creatures? Human quirks and fallibilities were a constant source of puzzlement.
Osprey's freedom was a special case. He was allowed to go wherever his whim took him. No matter which band he strayed behind, they made sure to feed him, and it was considered meritorious to protect him from dangers and guide him along the trail. He was never given supplies to carry. He carried no claim mark or brand. No one owned him. He belonged to everyone, a creature of great beauty.
Children were brought to see him. His legend spread quickly. Wherever he went, it was known that this was a holy man, captured with small houses of souls around his neck.
Osprey would never know what the hadals had painted into the flesh of his back. It would have pleased him no end. For, every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.
The frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting-point between savagery and civilization... the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
– FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, The Significance of the Frontier in
American History
9
LA FRONTERA
The Galápagos Rift System, latitude 0.55°N
Promptly at 1700 hours, the expeditionaries boarded their electric buses. They were loaded with handouts and booklets and notebooks numbered and marked Classified, and were sporting pieces of Helios clothing. The black SWAT-style caps had proved especially popular, very menacing. Ali contented herself with a T-shirt with the Helios winged-sun logo printed on the back. With scarcely a purr, the buses eased from the walled compound out onto the street.
Nazca City reminded Ali of Beijing, with its hordes of bicyclists. At rush hour in a boomtown with streets so narrow, the bikes were faster than their buses. They had jobs to get to. Through her window, Ali took in their faces, their Pacific Rim races, their humanity. What a feast of souls!
Declassified maps showed boom cities like Nazca as veritable nerve cells reaching tendrils out into the surrounding space. The attractions were simple: cheap land, mother lodes of precious minerals and petroleum, freedom from authority, a chance to start over. Ali had come expecting glum fugitives and desperadoes with no other place to go. But these were the faces of college-educated office workers, bankers, entrepreneurs, a motivated service sector. As a port city of the future, Nazca City was said to have the potential of San Francisco or Singapore. In four years it had become the major link between the equatorial subplanet and coastal cities up and down the western side of the Americas.
Ali was relieved to see that the people of Nazca City looked normal and healthy. Indeed, because the subplanet attracted younger, stronger workers, the population abounded in good health. Most of the station cities like Nazca had been retrofitted with lamps that simulated sunlight, and so these bicyclists were as tan as beachcombers. Practically everyone had seen soldiers or workers who had returned to the surface several years ago suffering bone growths and enlarged eyes or strange cancers, even vestigial tails. For a while, religious groups had blamed hell itself for the physical spoliation, calling it proof of God's plan, a vast gulag where contact meant punishment. But as she looked around, it seemed the research labs and drag companies really had mastered the prophylaxis for hell. Certainly these people exhibited no deformities. Ali realized that her subconscious fears of turning into a toad, monkey, or goat had been for nothing.
The city was a vast indoor mall with potted trees and flowering bushes, clean, with the latest brand names. There were restaurants and coffee bars, along with brightly lit stores selling everything from work clothes and plumbing supplies to assault rifles. The neatness was slightly marred by beggars missing limbs and sidewalk merchants hawking contraband.
At one intersection an old Asian woman was selling miserable puppies lashed alive to sticks. 'Stew meat,' one of the scientists told Ali. 'They sell it by the catty, 500 grams, a little more than a pound. Beef, chicken, pork, dog.'
'Thanks,' said Ali.
Obviously it intrigued him. 'I went exploring yesterday. Anything that moves goes into the pot. Crickets, worms, slugs. They even eat dragons, xiao long, their snakes.' Ali peered out. A long gossamer sausage stretched beside the road, twenty feet high, a football field in length. The plastic had bold hangul lettering along the front. Ali didn't read Korean, but knew a greenhouse when she saw one. There were more, lying end to end like gigantic plump pupae. Through their opaque walls she saw fieldworkers tending crops, climbing little ladders propped in orchards. Parrots and macaws soared alongside the convoy of buses. A monkey scampered past. The subsere – the secondary population of invader species – was thriving down here.
In the far distance a detonation rumbled gently. She'd felt similar vibrations through her bedsprings all night. The incessant construction work was evident everywhere. It didn't take long to detect the man-made edges of this place. The neat right angles abutted raw rock. Pressure fissures spiderwebbed the asphalt. A patch of moss had grown heavy and peeled from the ceiling, exposing mesh and barbed wire and surging lasers overhead.
They reached a newly cut ring road girdling the city, and left behind the traffic jam of cyclists and workers. Picking up speed, they gained a view of the enormous hollow salt dome containing the colony. It was life in a bell jar here. The entire vault, measuring three miles across and probably a thousand feet high, was brightly lit. Up in the World, it would be approaching sunset. Down here, night never came. Nazca City's artificial sunlight burned twenty-four hours a day, Prometheus on a caffeine jag. Except for a catnap, sleep had been impossible last night. The group's collective excitement verged on the childlike, and she was caught up in their spirit of adventure. This morning, exhausted with their imagining, they were ready for the real thing.
Ali found her fellow travelers' last-minute preparations touching. She watched one rough-and-ready fellow across the aisle bent over his fingernails, clipping them just so, as if his mortal being depended on it. Last night, several of the youngest women, meeting for the first time, had spent the wee hours of the morning fixing one another's hair. A little enviously, Ali had listened to people placing calls to their spouses or lovers or parents, assuring them the subplanet was safe. Ali said a silent prayer for them all.