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A compulsion for privacy was hardly unusual for a Julian living and working in Blue. The Julian part of the ring, centered on the Tokomaru habitat, was the least populous of the eight segments. Ninety-five percent of it lay on the Red side of the turnpike. Only a tiny sprinkling of habitats projected east of Kiribati into the Blue zone, and in those the Julians had been diluted by the more numerous and aggressive Teklans, whose segment lay just on the far side of the Hawaii boneyard. Thus the Julians had maintained enough of a presence in Blue that they could live and work in it without being seen as aliens, or immigrants. Many of them were “dukhos,” playing approximately the same role in modern society as priests had done pre-Zero.

The destruction of Old Earth and the reduction of the human population to eight had done for the idea that there was a God, at least in any sense remotely similar to how most pre-Zero believers had conceived of Him. Thousands of years had passed before anyone, even in the most remote outposts of human settlement, had dared to suggest that religion, in anything like its traditional sense, might be or ought to be revived. In its place a new set of thoughtways had grown up under the general heading of “dukh,” a Russian word referring to the human spirit. Dukh-based institutions had developed under the general term of “kupol,” a word that harked back to the glass bubble that had served as a kind of interfaith chapel and meditation room on Endurance. Modern-day kupols all traced their origins back to that structure, which Dubois Harris had called the Woo-Woo Pod. When people nowadays watched scenes from the Epic that took place in it, they were in the backs of their minds thinking of their local kupols and the people who staffed them. A professional member of a kupol’s staff was generally called a dukho, a truncation of the Russian word “dukhobor,” meaning one who wrestled with spiritual matters. Kupols, like churches of old, were supported by contributions from their members. Some, as on the Great Chain, were richly endowed, magnificent buildings. Others, like the one in the Q, were just quiet rooms where people could go to think or to seek help from what amounted to social workers. Dukhos tended to trace their lineage back to Luisa, who had played a similar role during the Epic, and some of the better-educated ones drew explicit connections between their kupols and the Ethical Culture Society, where Luisa had gone to school in New York. But Luisa, of course, had not produced a race. The dukho profession had ended up being dominated by Julians. The Julian habitat of Astrakhan, which hovered anomalously in the middle of the Dinan segment, had become a sort of hothouse for the production of dukhos of various denominations. Kath Two was able to establish that Ariane had originated from there, but little else. It was fine. There were ample reasons for Ariane to keep to herself and lead a quiet life.

MOST OF THE GIANT NICKEL–IRON MOON CORE FRAGMENT NAMED Cleft had been melted down and reshaped into what was now the Eye. The engineers had not been able to bring themselves, however, to destroy the part of it immediately surrounding the place where Endurance had come to rest at the end of the Big Ride, and where the bodies of Doob, Zeke Petersen, and other heroes of the Epic had been interred directly into iron catacombs. That patch of the asteroid — the deep, shielded declivity where the first several generations of the new human races had lived out their entire lives — had come to be known as Cradle.

Everyone had, of course, seen the chapter from the Epic where Doob had gone out on his last space walk with Eve Dinah, looked up at the walls of iron rising from the valley floor, and foreseen that one day a ceiling of glass would be built over the top, turning the “Vale of the Eves” into a huge greenhouse where children would be able to float about unencumbered by space suits, eating fresh greens from terraced gardens. It was probably the biggest tearjerker in the whole Epic, and a perennial favorite. All of Doob’s predictions had, of course, come true. Cradle had ended up supporting a population of several thousand, until later generations had been obliged to push outward.

Cradle’s main defect had been a lack of simulated gravity, which had obliged those early generations to construct what amounted to glorified merry-go-rounds on which children could take turns being centrifuged in order to foster bone growth. Subsequent habitats — spinning tori mounted to the walls of the cleft — had actually been more crowded and confined than Izzy itself, and many generations had lived cramped lives in them with only occasional opportunities for R & R in Cradle’s sunny open volumes. In time they had learned to make bigger and better habitats, and Cradle had been abandoned for many centuries, an occasional destination for historians or curiosity seekers.

The construction of the Eye had, in effect, cut Cradle and its immediate surroundings loose from Cleft, and it had drifted in a boneyard for a while until the decision had been made to give it a new purpose. The original greenhouse, which was a wreck by that point, had been replaced by a new, bigger, retractable cover. The underside had been planed flat. The canyon walls had been terraced back, making them less steep, and not incidentally creating valuable, buildable real estate. A nickel-iron yoke had been arched over the whole thing so that it could be attached to the bottom end of the thirty-six-thousand-kilometer tether that dangled from the Eye.

The icon in the transit station — two hills enclosed in a bubble — was a simplified depiction of what Cradle actually looked like. Its total inhabitable footprint was a circular zone about two thousand meters in diameter, which put it on about the same scale as downtown Boston or the City of London. This was cleaved by the Vale of the Eves, whose walls had once been nearly vertical. Now this was true only of the bottom-most ten meters or so: a slot that snaked through the bottom of the town like a gully. It became a rust-brown river when there was heavy rain, and so they had maintained an island in the middle of the stream, exactly on the site where Endurance had touched down. Once, it had been possible to go there and touch the little nubs of steel where Eve Dinah had welded the ship into place. These, however, had since been protected under glass domes so that they would not rust, or get worn away by tourists’ fingers. The ship itself was long gone, of course; the survivors had begun dismantling it almost as soon as they had arrived, and what little they hadn’t used was radioactive waste, long since shipped away to carefully tended locations in boneyards.

It was therefore a city constructed on two dizzyingly steep hills that faced each other across a crevasse. A kilometer-long bridge, celebrated for its grace, arched across the gulf between the hills, a plunging wedge of air flocculent with grizzled crows.

It was a city of compounds. Some of these dated back to the early days of its construction, when the bubble had not yet been completed and there had been a need to make smaller inflatable domes over certain areas. Others had been built in imitation of those first ones. Neither the compounds — which, for structural reasons, tended to be circular — nor the overall topography lent themselves to a grid street pattern. Consequently the map was a chaos of switchbacks and meanders and streets that turned suddenly into stairways or tunnels. Limitations on building height led people to dig down into the underlying metal, rather than building upward, and so most of the city’s square footage was hidden. The buildings were like icebergs, larger below than above.

Above grade, stone was a popular building material. Older and less prestigious buildings used the synthetic rock known as moonstone, made from pieces of Earth’s former satellite. Newer and nicer buildings were made from marble, granite, or other rock quarried from the surface of the Earth itself. For the one resource that the shattered surface of Earth had been able to produce in abundance, even before it had an atmosphere, had been rocks. The city thus presented a hard face to pedestrians in its narrow streets. Those granted access to compounds would, however, find themselves in fragrant gardens under the shade of trees. Since Cradle was confined to the equator, green things grew there so luxuriantly that they had to be kept in check by hordes of little grabbs with pruning bill hands.

Atop each of the hills was a park. Rising above one of those parks was a roundish, domed building called the Capitol. Rising above the other was a squarish, pillared colonnade called the Change, short for Exchange.

At the time Kath Two and the other passengers arrived, Cradle was dangling two thousand meters above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, being dragged due west toward where the equator cut across the reshaped coastline of South America. This movement reflected the fact that, thirty-six thousand kilometers above it, the Eye was traversing the habitat ring westward, or CASFON (Clockwise As Seen From Over the North pole). Being nothing more than a weight on the end of a long string, Cradle always followed the movements of the Eye. The city’s dome was open, with its baffles raised to reduce the windblast.

It was balmy and humid. This was almost always true on the equator, but altitude and the brisk movement of the air made it pleasant enough. The smell of that air, redolent of salt and iodine and marine life, was proof irrefutable that Kath Two was back in the atmosphere of New Earth.

It was an artificial atmosphere. The human races had bombarded the parched and dead surface of the planet with comet cores for hundreds of years just to bring the sea level up to where they wanted it. Then they had infected that water with organisms genetically engineered to produce the balance of gases needed to support life — and, having done that, to commit suicide, so that their biomass could be used as nutrients for the next wave of atmosphere-building creatures.

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