Aubry and Sint were already packed, and Kelly always kept a small travel bag at the ready with toiletries and a change of clothes. He could usually obtain all these things instantly, wherever he went, but there was something about using his own stuff, and not just the blueprints for his own stuff, that reminded him of home when he was away. Of course, he would never confess such a thing to Danis in such terms. She was, after all, nothing but a blueprint of a sort. In any case, reinstantiating things from the grist cost money, and there was the possibility that, though he was now quite wealthy, he might run out of money before all this was through—or that the greenleaves that he had would become devalued.
He gave everyone a few minutes to say good-bye to the apartment. He had thought that Danis, whose body was basically the apartment, would linger the longest, but she had, apparently, made her farewells, and was busy getting transportation arranged. The kids took longer, shuffling about in their room. Aubry had destroyed the hard copies of the journals that Kelly knew she kept, while Sint had played a final game on one of the enigma boxes that he would not be able to take along.
Before they left, Danis had both children download their short-term memories and somatic readouts into Kelly’s pocketbook as a safety precaution. They could not be reconstructed if their aspects were totally destroyed, but there was a great deal of Aubry and Sint that was convert-only, and such information might be subject to degradation and erasure on a hard trip. Kelly wished he could take a dynamic copy of both children and Danis in his pocketbook, rather than the archived, static ones he had made. With such copies, their entire personalities might be reconstructed. But this was simply not possible without a grist-rich matrix as big as the apartment. It was also completely illegal in some of the sectors of the Met they would be passing through. Convert copying and transfer was strictly regulated by the Convert and Free Convert Iteration Section of the Department of Immunity.
Then the coach arrived, and it was time to go.
Kelly would miss the apartment, he knew, but what he would really miss was the city of Bach itself, the greatest town in the solar system. It had started out as an outpost, centuries ago—even before the first cables of the Met had been strung. The pioneers had put their cluster of underground dwellings in Bach crater, near Mercury’s south pole, in order to be close to the water ice that existed, miraculously it seemed at the time, in the never-ending dark shadows of the planet’s polar regions. Of course water was no longer a problem: first, because it was rather easily manufactured by grist synthesizing units using abundant hydrogen and oxygen, and second, because most citizens of Bach and all of Mercury were optimized physically to need less of it. In comparison to the standard human model, Mercurian innards were as dry as the sand of the Sahara back on Earth.
The old outpost was an art museum now, and Bach had grown, and grown, and grown—spreading out over the rims of the crater like a tenacious lichen clinging to the rocky basalt of Mercury’s surface. The reason for the growth was the same as lichen’s, as well: sunlight, and lots of it. Mercury turned on its axis every fifty-nine days. So, for a good two Earth weeks, the grist solar collectors were sitting under the midday sun at temperatures that could easily melt many metals. The origins of the city were in energy production, but the pioneers had come to realize that energy meant money, and now it was as a center of banking and finance that Bach thrived.
The family piled into the coach, and Danis flowed in and took over the driving functions. They wound through the twists and turns of Calay, the neighborhood in which they lived. Then the coach entered a feeder tube and was squeezed to higher and higher speeds by the peristalsis of the feeder tube’s sides. After the tube cleared the tangle of Calay, its opaque wall became clear to visible light and the eyes of Kelly and his family—Mercurians all—opaqued over with lenses manufactured by the grist of their bodies’ pellicles. To someone from the outer system, it would appear that they suddenly had welding goggles instead of corneas.
The great architect Klaus Branigan had designed the south crater section of Bach in which Calay was ensconced, and Kelly, as always, was amazed by Branigan’s handiwork. Branigan claimed to have based his conception upon structures he’d found in the final movement of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto Number One in D Minor. Like Bach, with his two interwoven themes, Branigan had taken essentially two cities and knitted them together in a great harmonious clash, like a surf crashing into land on Earth. There was mellifluous, residential Calay, with its bulbous pearl strings of apartments. These existed between the square, almost mineral, stretches of New Frankfurt and its central corridor, Earth Street, which housed the most powerful banks and brokerages in the solar system. All of it gleamed and twinkled under the evening sun. During the twenty-nine e-days of night that would follow, the south crater would shine brilliantly, like an enormous gemstone interlaced with the luster of pearls.
The coach rose higher, and the feeder tube became the main polar conduit, South Vect, and they were soon surrounded by other coaches, the public transport vector buses, and camions, which carried huge loads of imports into Bach, and exports away, to the southern polar lift. Danis was a better driver than most of the coaches, with their standard control coding, and the family’s coach maneuvered in and out of traffic like a needle weaving a complex pattern through cloth. Even though Kelly could no longer see where they were in relation to the city below them, he could feel the change in acceleration as the conduit began angling down toward the pole. Within a few minutes, it had split into the myriad tributaries that spread out like a net from the gigantic south pole complex that everyone called the Hub.
Sint had spent the journey engrossed in his single remaining enigma box, and Aubry had been very quiet. Kelly suspected that she’d been dealing with the free fall of the investments in her personal portfolio. He’d given her the port and some seed money an e-year ago, and he had been surreptitiously keeping track of her financial progress ever since. Unlike her personal journals (which Kelly wouldn’t dream of looking into) he hadn’t been able to resist a peek at his daughter’s investments. To his great satisfaction, she’d taken to the markets instantly. She watched the toys her contemporaries indulged in and the games they played and had made some startlingly perspicacious moves with the knowledge. In fact, based on Aubry’s decision, Kelly had bought up a block of Enigmatica stock that was many times the size of Aubry’s entire holdings, and watched its value steadily climb—that is, until yesterday. He’d shorted it, along with the rest. He felt a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t advised Aubry to do the same.
Danis eased the coach into a parking bay, and he and the kids gathered their things as the door contracted open. They stepped into the push and bustle of the Hub departure sector. It seemed that a large part of Mercury was on the move.