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By Root 2211 0

forty-fifth latitude. These tracks were made of a metalloceramic alloy that was the first of the Mercurial physicists’ many alchemical tricks, a matrix that withstood the eight-hundred-K heat of midbrightside. The city itself, called Terminator, then ran over these tracks at a speed of about three kilometers per hour, which kept it within the planet’s terminator, the zone of predawn shadow that was in most terrain about twenty kilometers wide. A slight expansion of the tracks exposed to the morning sun farther to the east drove the city ever westward, as it rested on tightly fitting sleeves shaped to slide the city away from the expansion. This motion was so inexorable that resistance to it in another part of the sleeves generated great amounts of electrical power, as did the solar collectors trailing the city, and set on the very top of the high Dawn Wall, catching the first blasting rays of sunlight. Even in a civilization where energy was cheap, Mercury was amazingly blessed. And so it joined the worlds farther out, and became one of the brightest of all. And a hundred new floating worlds opened every year— cities in flight, little city-states, each with its own charter, settler mix, landscape, style.

And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and confidence of the accelerando, there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger. For despite all the building, emigration, settlement, and inhabitation, there were still eighteen billion on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and the semipermeable membrane between the two planets was curved taut with the osmotic pressure of that demographic imbalance. Relations between the two were tense, and many feared that a prick of the taut membrane could tear everything asunder. In this pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they had dealt with it well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of need with any longterm consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted before; and they were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced with matters of subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other indiscriminately. Presumably it could happen again. So people built, argued, grew furious; waited, uneasily, for signs that the oldest superelderly were dying; stared hard at every child they saw. A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge, a manic golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could say what would happen next.

1

Zo sat at the back of a room full of diplomats, looking out the window at Terminator as the oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of Mercury. The hemiellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have been a pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too dangerous— one of many fascist regulations that bound life here— the state as nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere, hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems— everywhere except on noble Mars.

Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. She wanted to forget them and their little world, to go home and fly.

On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had up to this point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension of these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she took aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private