"Would you look at me?"

No "sir" after the question.  Naas looked up at the man.  It wasn't that he was taller, or that Naas was so short--he was well over six feet, thin, muscular--but the man was standing on a higher level.  The area on the other side of the customs counter was at least two feet higher than where Naas and the girl (what did she say her name was, Andrea?) were waiting in line.

The man, dressed in a light red uniform, didn't say "thank you," either, when Naas turned his chin up so he could run a scan of his face.  Actually it was a device mounted in the wall behind the man that did the work.  And somebody was running the device, no doubt.  And somebody was supervising them.  Nothing was left to individual responsibility sub-Orbit...redundancies within redundancies was the nature of the ghost down here.  Naas guessed that the system could provide more work that way.  

The scan complete, the man looked casually through Naas's things.  He had two black leather bags with him, both of them lay open on the counter.  They looked like dead things, he thought, split apart for public view.

"What's this?"

The man held up a pair of black matte metal headphones.  Naas hadn't bothered to bring the device they went with.  He knew he wouldn't be able to use it, but he thought maybe, just maybe, he would find a regular hardwire porto-deck...

"Headphones," he anwered, in a flat tone of voice.  He wasn't looking for a confrontation.  The man confiscated them without a word, glanced over the rest of the contents, and shoved the bags down the counter.

"Next."

As they moved away, the girl said, "You should have argued about the headphones.  They were solid-state, weren't they?  They're very valuable, that's why he took them, to resell them."

Naas shrugged, shouldering one bag so he could carry everything on the same side.  He liked to have at least one hand free at all times.  "They just would have taken them anyway.  Besides, I didn't want to risk making them suspicious."

"They'll be even more suspicious because you didn't object."

He smiled to himself.  Earth.  How wonderful...

They exited onto the escalator.  This was one of several dozen, all going down, all filled.  There was surprisingly little noise, he noticed, considering the size of the space, and the crowd.  As they descended a sign--several stories high and wider from side to side--flashed a video-ad of a long, sleek ship flying through a golden stream of lighted orbs, jewel-like planets, and glowing nebulae.  As it emerged on the far side, a rounded horizon rose from the bottom of the screen.  The ship, seen from above and appearing tiny now compared to the planet below, slipped through the reddish clouds, skipping like a stone across a sunlit pond.  "A N T A E U S," the letters materialized across the top of the screen, the spaces between them growing until the name of the planet took up the whole view.  And then they faded, replaced by the inevitable, over-familiar tagline, the tagline everyone, everywhere had come to know so well:  "Where the heart is healed.  Where the body is made whole.  Where wanderers go."

The escalator shook under the collective weight of its passengers.

At the bottom they found themselves in a long tube, as long as a skyscraper turned on its side, its grand arching shape a reminder of the previous administration.  They had built portals like this everywhere, monuments to themselves.  Already it was falling into disrepair.  The trains ran along parallel tracks down the center of the tube, several levels deep, and at the end of the tunnel they branched off in all directions like the circuitry on an old computer-board.

There were signs floating in dirty plastic kiosks every few feet, but Andrea seemed to know the way.  He followed as she wended between knots of new arrivals, and departures, and people who were just standing there, trying to figure out where to go.  As they came alongside a train that was shutting its doors--twin glass wings sliding from both sides, a third descending, over the carapace of the train, to complete the seal with a hiss--he caught sight of a group of about a dozen men, dressed in dark blue robes, heads shaved, kneeling on the platform.  Each of them had a palm out.

"DUO's," the girl said over her shoulder.  He nodded.  DUO's were a religious sect--Do Unto Others--who didn't follow their titular creed all that much.  Mostly they begged in public places, and passed the money around amongst themselves.  Naas ignored them.

"Here we are, the E31.  It bypasses the city."

Naas followed her down one flight of steps to the level below.  The train was shishing into the station.  There was a low buzz, and it stopped.  The doors came apart.  Crowd off.  Crowd on.

Naas managed to fit into a space between an old woman and the far wall, the plastic side of the train pressed against his left arm--there were windows here, smaller rectangles of transparent material in the translucent hull.  He shoved his bags under the seat.  The girl found a spot facing him.  Just as the doors were closing again, a small group of DUO's got on, their robes swaying as they stood in the aisle and the train got underway.  The woman beside Naas coughed, shaking all over and producing an alarmingly deep, bronchial sound.

For the first time, as they rode along, Naas had an opportunity to look at the girl.  She really was beautiful, slender, no older than thirty, her short black hair and green eyes striking even in a group of similar types.  He wanted to lean forward and say something, but the train was just loud enough that he knew he'd have to raise his voice to be heard.  And, for some reason, he wanted to speak to her and her alone.  Make his introductions, so to speak, properly.  He contented himself with smiling at her instead.  But this only caused her to angle her head, questioningly, as if his expression were a superior's sign of displeaure.  He shook his own head "no" quickly in response to her distress, and her stare wandered back out the window...

The train dipped down sharply just after their departure, and he knew that they were travelling beneath the city, beneath the layers of train lines that acted as the metro area's subway system.  The tunnel closed around them, but his eyes stayed on the passing darkness.  In part of the forward window he could see a counter-reflection of himself, reversed, in profile.  He looked thinner and better dressed than the other passengers in his simple black suit, his dark hair neatly cut and combed above the ear.  There were no signs of genetic modification about him, at least none that anyone could have recognized.  He was an Orbital, obviously, one of the special people who lived all their lives in the network of satellites speeding above the atmosphere.  The deadly atmosphere.

Then they were through, the train rising and righting itself, turning so that the city appeared through the window beside him.  He recognized its outlines from history textfiles, the river curving away, the hulks of the older buildings rising beyond...most of them were empty now.  People didn't like living, or working, in tall places anymore.  The farther they could get from the poison that held them in thrall, the better.  That's why the interlacing web of structures that stretched between the older towers had been constructed, to connect them and permit passage without exposure to the toxins, but also to allow people to go on with their business, their lives, near the surface, creeping along the ground like some species too frightened to look up at the sky.  And the sky...

It was a dim greyish-black even at this time of the early afternoon.  The clouds roiled.  Was there a storm coming?  What would fall?  Rain?  It was spring after all.  What color would it be?

The train turned again along its programmed route.  The city disappeared behind them.  It was beautiful long ago.  "Now Leaving P14."  That's what the sign flashed beside the raised track.  He understood that Philadelphia had been a beautiful city.

                                                    *                 *                  *

"I can't go any further.  I'm not allowed."

They, Naas and the girl Andrea, were standing before a tall metallic door, painted a light red color to indicate that the zone beyond was secure, restricted. 

"Only Orbitals can go inside," she explained.

"Ah," he said, and he realized that it was the first time he had spoken to her since leaving the train.  Upon disembarking at the last station along the line, a small sub-structure set in the foothills of what had once been a state park some distance east of the city--an old sign as they approached read "Ranc--" and then it was illegible--they'd gone directly to a surface transport that was waiting for them.  They were the last passengers on the train besides an elderly man, dressed in a neat brown suit, who'd gotten off and then disappeared down the steps to the lower level where another train waited to take him to a distant suburb.

The driver of their transport had a neat beard and glasses, not young, not old, and he was sitting in the unloading section smoking a thin cigar.  His uniform, a shiny grey suit with a chauffeur's cap on the riser next to him, only made him look more unofficial in some way.  It was almost as if he were playing a part.  As he rose to greet them he gave a short dramatic bow.

"Mr Naas, hello.  I'll take you the rest of the way to the lab.  Dr Tanovsky is there expecting you.  He's very excited.  Are you alright?"

"Fine," Naas said, a little confused by the question.  Not "how was your trip," but "are you alright."  As if his health were in doubt.

The man took his bags and led the way down a few steps to a small garage with a bay door, shut against the muck without.  They'd driven in the squarish ride through the hills, cleared of timber (or unable to support it), with Naas in back and the girl in front with the chauffeur, the whole time Naas sensing that the girl, with her head  half-turned to look out the window, was watching him out of the corner of her eye.  Was it because he was from Orbit?  Or was she feeling something for him?  He felt indifferent himself.  Although she was beautiful...

And then they'd arrived, and the lab, a curving white structure contoured into the surrounding hills, was sliding from view as they entered a driveway that ran down and eased them into a brightly lit indoor parking lot.  The door closed behind them.  Although there was room enough for a hundred vehicles in the lot, theirs was the only one in sight.

"Where is everyone?" Naas asked.

The driver turned in his seat and said, amicably, casually, "Home.  It's a religious holiday, The Rising.  A DUO thing, but everyone observes it.  The doctor wanted to see you when there would be no distractions."

And that was how they, Naas and the girl Andrea, had come to be standing before the locked security door.  The chauffeur had shown them to the spot, and then departed.

"Will I see you again?" he asked, more out of reflexive politeness than any real feeling.  Right?

"Yes," she said.  "We'll be seeing a lot of each other.  The doctor will explain."

And then she was gone.

The door clicked open.  There was utter darkness beyond.  Someone said:

"Ah, Mr Naas, come in.  I want to show you the future...." 

***

Disembarking music...