Moving Mars

“Don’t stick on the names,” Oria

“Why?”

“It’s a game. Two rules — nobody knows what you’re doing, and you do nothing illegal.”

“Doesn’t that take the fun out of doing crypto?” I asked.

“Wow — crypto! Hide in the tomb. Sorry. I shy from two-edged words. We call it Vernoring.”

“Doesn’t it?” I persisted.

“No,” Oria

Kite came through a double door dressed in faded denim shirt and pants. He stood two meters high, minus a few centimeters, and carried a green-and-white mottled sun kitten.

Oria

“We’re going out tonight,” Oria

“Asleep, I think. He’s spent the last three days working a commission.”

“Well, wake him up!”

“You do it,” Kite said.

“Pleasure’s mine.” Oria

“She could just buzz him,” Kite said ruefully, shaking his head. “She pretends she’s a storm, sometimes.”

I murmured assent.

“But she’s really sweet. You must know that.”

“I like her a lot,” I said.

“She’s an only and that makes a difference,” Kite added. “I have a brother and sister. You?”

“A brother,” I said. “And lots of blood relations.”

Kite smiled. The smile rendered his face transcendentally beautiful. I blinked and looked away.

“Is it rough, having everyone vid you?”

“I’m getting tired of it.”

“You know, you should watch whom you touch… Shake hands with. That sort of thing. Some of the LitVids are casual about privacy. They could plant watchers on you.” He held up pinched fingers and peered through a tiny gap. “Some are micro. Hide anywhere.”

“Isn’t that against the law?”

“If you haven’t filed for privacy rights, they could argue you’re common-law open. Then you’d only be protected in surveillance negative areas. The watchers would turn off… Most of the time.”

“That’s bolsh,” said a deep, lion-like voice. I turned to see Oria

“Casseia Majumdar, of Mars, this is Shrug. He’s studied law. He has almost as many enhancements as I do.”

Shrug dipped on one knee as I stood. I barely reached his chin when he kneeled.

“Charmed,” he said, kissing my hand.

“Stop that,” Oria

“You don’t curve,” Shrug said.

“We’re sisters of sim,” Oria

“Oh, dear, such an arc!” Kite said, smiling.

I don’t think I understand a third of what was said the whole time I spent in New York .

Back on the streets, holding hands with Shrug and Oria

“Yeah,” Oria

“I choose lunch,” Kite said. “There’s a great old delicatessen here. Total goback.”

My expression of surprise caught his eye. “Goback. Means retro, atavistic, historic. All are good drive words now, no negs.”

“It means something else on Mars,” I said.

“Folks who want to keep BM rule are called Gobacks,” Oria

“Are you a Goback?” Shrug asked me.

“I’m neutral,” I said. “My family has strong links to BM autonomy. I’m still learning.”

Echoing the theme, we passed a family of Chasids dressed in black. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and styled their hair in long thin locks around their temples. The women wore long simple dresses in natural fabrics. The children skipped and danced happily, dressed in black and white.

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Oria

“ New York is great for that sort of thing,” Kite said.

We passed three women in red chadors; a woman herding five blue dogs, followed by an arbeiter carrying a waste can; five men in single file, nude, not that it mattered — their bodies were completely smooth, with featureless tan skin; a male centaur with a half-size horse body, perfectly at home cantering along the sidewalk, man’s portion clothed in formal Edwardian English wool suit and bowler; jaguar-pelted women, furry, not in furs; two young girls, perhaps ten Earth years, dressed in white ballet gowns with fairy wings growing from their backs (temp or permanent? I couldn’t tell); a gaggle of school-children dressed in red coats and black shorts, escorted by men in black cassocks (“Papal Catholics,” Kite said); more of the mineral-patterned designer bodies; a great many people who might have fit in without notice on Mars; and of course the mechaniques, who replaced major portions of their bodies with metal shells filled with biorep nano. That, I had heard, was very expensive as an elective. Complete body replacement was much cheaper. Neither could be done legally unless one could prove major problems in birth genotype; it spun too much of the Eloi and Ten Cubed.

“After lunch, we’re going to Central Park ,” Oria

Kite laughed. “Oria

“An Omphalos!” Oria

We ate in the delicatessen and it smelled of cooked meat, which I had never smelled before, and which offended me all the same, whether or not meat was actually being cooked. Customers- — chiefly drive folks, a high proportion of transforms — lined up before glass cases filled with what appeared to be sliced processed animals. Plastic labels on metal skewers pronounced the shapes to be Ham, that is, smoked pig legs, Beef (cows) corned (though having nothing to do with corn) and otherwise, something called Pastrami which was another type of cow covered with pepper, smoked fish, fish in fermented dairy products, vegetables in brine and vinegar, pig feet in jars, and other things that, had they been real, would have caused a true uproar even on Earth.

We stood at the counter until the clerk took our order, then found a table. Martian reserve kept me from expressing my distaste to Oria

“The stuff here is the best in town,” she said. “It was set up by New York Preserve. History scholars. They have a nano artist design the food — he’s orthodox Gathering of Abraham. They have state dispensation to eat meat, for religious reasons. He quit eating meat ten years ago, but he remembers what it tastes like.”

Our food arrived. The salmon appeared raw, felt slimy-soft, and tasted salty and offensive.