Engine City Read Free

Black hair you could swim in, brown eyes you could drown in, golden skin you could bask in. Her oversized sweater and baggy canvas trousers only added to her charm. The other occupant of the vehicle was its pilot, Voronar, who sat leaning forward past Esias.
    “What’s going on?”
    The saur’s elliptical eyes spared Volkov a glance, then returned to the display.
    “Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Voronar. His large head, which lent his slender reptilian body an almost infantile proportion, tipped forward, then nodded. “We are an hour away from Nova Terra.”
    “Could you possibly show us the view?” said Esias.
    “Your pardon,” said Voronar.
    He palmed the controls, and the entire surrounding wall of the skiff became pseudotransparent, patching data from the ship’s external sensors and automatically adjusting brightness and contrast: Nova Sol’s glare was turned down, the crescent of Nova Terra muted to a cool blue, its night side enhanced. Scattered clusters of crowded lights pricked the dark like pleiads.
    “That’s a lot of cities,” Volkov said.
    Compared with anywhere else he’d seen in the Second Sphere, if not with the Earth he remembered, it was.
    “There’s only one that matters,” said Esias. He did not need to point it out.
    Nova Babylonia was the jewel of the Second Sphere. Its millennia-old culture, and its younger but still ancient republican institutions, made it peacefully hegemonic on Nova Terra, and beyond. The temperate zones of Nova Terra’s continents were placid parks, where even wildernesses were carefully planned landscape features. All classes of its people were content. Academicians and artists assimilated the latest ideas and styles that trickled in over the millennia from Earth; patricians and politicians debated cordially and congratulated themselves on their fortune in knowing, and avoiding, the home world’s terrible mistakes. Merchants traded the rare goods of many worlds. Artisans and laborers enjoyed the advantages of a division of labor far wider than any the human species could have sustained on its own. Emigration was free, but the proportion of emigrants insignificant. The hominidae cheerfully tended and harvested the sources of raw materials, and the saurs and krakens exchanged their advanced products and services for those of human industry and craft. As an older and wiser species, the saurs were consulted to settle disputes, and as a more powerful species, they intervened to prevent any from getting out of hand.
    The lights of Nova Babylonia shone just short of the terminator, and somewhat to the north of the halfway point between the pole and the equator. Genea, the continent on whose eastern shore the city stood, sprawled diagonally across the present night side of the planet and southward into the day and the southern hemisphere. Its ragged coastline counterpointed that of the other major continent, Sauna, a couple of thousand kilometers west: the two looked as though they had been pulled apart and displaced, one northward, the other south. Much of the southern and western part of Sauria was wrapped out of sight around the other side of the planet, at this moment; in the visible part, even at this distance, the rectangular regularity of some of its green patches distinguished manufacturing plant from jungle and plain.
    “Do any humans live in Sauria?” Volkov asked.
    Esias shrugged. “A few thousand, maybe, at any one time. Short-term contract employees, traders, people involved in travel infrastructure and big-game hunting. Likewise with saurs in Genea—lots of individuals, no real communities, except around the hospitals and health services.”
    Hospitals and health services, yes, Volkov thought, that could be a problem.
    “What about the other hominidae?”
    “Ah, that’s a more usual distribution, except that they have entire cities of their own.” Esias pointed; it wasn’t much help. “Gigants here, pithkies there. Forests and mines, even some farming. More of a surprise