The crater was in natural terrace steps to either side and sheer cliff below, nothing but air and haze three kilometers to the tumbled jungle-shaggy hills at the base. To her right a river sprang out of the rock, fell with unearthly slowness in a long bright-blue arc until it misted away into rain; a lake gathered underneath, and the river flowed like silver off through the mottled greens of the landscape below. Clouds drifted in layers, silver and dappled with Earth light; they cast shadows over fields, meadows, forest, roads. There was no horizon, only a vast arch that melted green into blue. Lights were appearing here and there; far and far, she could just make out the high spike of the mountain at the crater’s center, bright-lit, with the thin illuminated streak of the elevator tower rising to the landing platform on the airless side of the dome.
“Mistis.”
A presence at her elbow; she took the cup without glancing around, murmured abstracted thanks, propped one haunch on the balustrade, sipped. Kenya Mountain Best, diluted with a quarter of hot cream and a tenth of Thieuniskraal. Warmth and richness flowed over her tongue, with a hint of bite at the back of her mouth and down her throat. It was very quiet, the thunder of the falling water far enough away to be a muted background. The soft wind that flickered ends of her gray-blond hair about her face was louder; she ignored their tickling caress. All about the balcony, rock that had lain lifeless since the forming of the Earth was covered in rustling vines that bore sheets of pale-pink blossoms; they smelled of mint and lavender.
As they had been designed to do. So had the multicolored birds that flitted through the flowers been designed for the intricate flutelike songs they trilled; farther out a yellow-feathered hawk banked on four-meter wings and called, a long mournful wailing. Yolande sipped again, feeling a sensation that was half contentment, half the repletion that followed the end of a poem. This was a composition, and she one of its manifold creators; part of what she had dreamed, as a child looking up at the new lights in the sky over Claestum. The Glory of the Race was more than power; that was just the beginning. It was accomplishment, it was to do.
She closed her eyes, squeezing them against a flash of old remembered pain. Myfwany, darlin’, if only you could be here to see it with me, she thought. Then somewhere far back in her mind a ghost met her gaze with sardonic green: Freya, what a sentimentalist you are, Yolande-sweet, to let me haunt you so. One thing I never aspired to be was the drop of fall in your cup; you alive, so live, girl.
“Such good advice, and as always easier to give than to follow,” she murmured to herself.
“Mistis?”
“Nothin’, Tina,” Yolande said to the serf who squatted at her feet and peered through the finger-thick rods of the balustrade.
The wench rose. Tina had a glass of milk in one hand, and a white mustache of it on her upper lip that she licked away with unselfconscious relish; then drank more, taking the slow care needful in one-sixth gravity. Eighteen and softly pretty in a doe-eyed Italian way, big-hipped, the four-month belly just starting to show. Yolande smiled and laid a hand on it; the serf smiled shyly back and put her hand over the Draka’s in turn. For a moment Yolande wondered what it must feel like, to bear a living child beneath the heart. She was too old herself, of course, even if there had ever been time, and bearing your own eggs was eccentric to the point of suspiciousness now, anyway. Strange to think that she herself was of the last generation of the Race born of their mothers’ wombs.
She rubbed her serf’s stomach affectionately. “Time to get you home to Claestum, Tina,” she said.
The later stages of pregnancy did not do well below .3 G; in theory, regular centrifuge was enough to compensate, but she did not intend to take any chances at all. Strictly speaking, there was no need to get involved in the process to this extent; a lot of people just sent the fertilized ova in to the Clinic and picked up the baby nine months later. Yolande had always found that too impersonal; she insisted on being present at the implantation and the birthing, and used only family servants as brooders, volunteers from the plantation. It seemed more . . . more fitting, somehow. Birth was no less a miracle because the Race had mastered its secrets, after all. And this was the most important of all, truly hers and Myfwany’s, now that the ova-merging technique was perfected.
“Yes, time to get home Mistis,” Tina said with a sigh, leaning into the caress and looking out over the crater. “I will miss this. It so pretty.”
And such a vanity, Yolande thought. Oh, not so difficult, not when you could use fusion bombs and bomb-pumped lasers for excavation; not when energy poured down in vacuum, to be stored as pressurized water or liquid metal or in superconducting rings . . . Anything local and not too complex was cheap, given autofabricators, and the whole construct was basically titanium and glass. Oxygen and silica and light metals were abundant on the moon; launch lasers and magnetic catapults at Gibraltar and Kilimanjaro and in the Tien Shan were part of the War effort, and might as well be kept to capacity with cargo loads; an abundance of water and volatiles was coming in from the outer system. Also, a closed ecosystem was a tricky thing; the bigger you made it the easier it was to manage.
Also a chance to put the Drakon’s eye up here on the Moon, she thought. And wouldn’t the Yankees love to stick a thumb in it.
Which was why the bulk of Aresopolis was burrowed kilometers deep into the lunar crust—factories and dormitories, refineries and chemosynthesis plants, the far-down caverns with their stores of liquid hydrogen, oxygen, methane, ammonia, metals, a Fafnir’s horde gathered from as far out as Saturn. The orbital battle stations clustering about Earth were largely armed and built from here; so were the outposts at the L-5 points, the far-flung bases, Mercury, the Venus study project, Mars, a scattering of outposts in the Alliance-dominated asteroids. Half the two million souls the Domination had sent into space lived here, in this strange city of warriors and warriors’ servants; a third of them free Citizens, the highest ratio of any city in the Domination.
All of there beneath her command—and able, in their leisure, to come out here to walk naked under living green, swim in water that bore silver-speckled trout, to fly with muscle-powered wings as no humans before them had ever done. She flicked the last droplets from the cup out into the void, watching the long dreamy slowness of the fall.
“They say the neoredwoods we’ve planted down there will grow a thousand meters tall in another fifty years,” Yolande said, softly. “I’ll bring the children here, and we’ll rent wings and fly off the highest branches like eagles.” She should still be hale, then, with modern biotech.
“Will you bring me to watch?” Tina asked, and snuggled another question.
“Yes,” Yolande said. “That’s a promise. And no, get you off to a nice quiet bed, wench; mind you health.”
The serf left with the long glide-bounce of an experienced Aresopolite. Yolande lingered for a moment, yawning and rolling the still-warm porcelain of the cup between her palms. The sky had gone true dark, and the hard bright stars were out; the clouds below reflected blue-silver Earth light back into her eyes. Moving stars, many of them, and she could see another rising swiftly to join them from beyond the crater rim, a laser-boost capsule from one of the emplacements that studded the mountains around the city. That was one of their functions; another might be to rip targets as far away as Earth, one day.