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completely smooth and neutral in temperature.
"This is Haiti," she said.
He knew Haiti; the wasted, eroded hills barren as the Sahara, the pitiful starving people, hardly a
tree or an animal besides goats left west of the Dominican border.
This showed tropical rainforest, lush and untouched, the view sweeping down mountain valleys
where mist hung in ragged tatters from the great trees. A spray of birds went by, feathers gaudy; he could
hear their cries, faint and raucous. The view swept down to the coast. Here were people, squares of
sugarcane, a hillside terraced and planted to glossy-leaved bushes he recognized as coffee. Workers with
hand tools or simple machines were busy among them. The view moved closer; he could see they were
brown-skinned, stocky and muscular, well-clothed. One laughed as he heaved a full basket onto a floating
platform. In the middle distance a white stone building covered in purple bougainvillea stood on a hillside
amid gardens. Beyond it was Port-au-Prince harbor. There was no city, no teeming antheap of ragged
peasant refugees. Just a few buildings half-lost amid greenery, a stone wharf, and a schooner tied to it.
And a big skeletal structure, like a dish of impossibly rigid rope.
"That's the orbital power receptor," Gwen said. "Now, the Yangtze Gorges."
The great river ran unbound through tall beautiful cliffs, no sign of the giant concrete dam the
Chinese had used to tame the wild water.
"Great plains, North America—near what you'd call Fargo."
Tall grass, stretching from horizon to horizon. And across it buffalo unnumbered, in clumps and
herds of thousands each. The horned heads lifted in mild curiosity; there was a stir, and a pack of great
gray lobo wolves trotted through, twenty strong.
"Bitterfield, eastern Germany."
He knew that, too; one of the worst chemical-waste nightmares left by the old East German
regime. The picture showed a stream flowing through thick poplar forest. Behind it were oaks, huge and
moss-grown. He heard the chuckle of water, the cries of birds, wind in the branches. The view moved
through them at walking pace, pausing at a wildcat on a tree limb, at a sounder of wild boar, in a
sun-dappled meadow clearing where an aurochs raised its head in majesty. Its bellow filled his ears.
"The Aral Sea."
Which had disappeared almost altogether, leaving salt flats poisoned with insecticide—the legacy of
the old Soviet Union's insane irrigation megaprojects.
The window into a world that wasn't showed white-caps on blue water.
"The delta of the Syr Darya, where it empties into the Aral." A huge marsh. Through the reeds and
onto a firmer island moved striped deadliness, a Siberian tiger. Waterfowl rose from the water in honking
thousands, enough to cast shadow on the great predator.
"Paris."
No Eiffel Tower, although Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe still stood. The air was crystal. From
overhead, he could see that the medieval core remained, Notre Dame, the radial roadways laid out in
Napoleon III's time. None of the great sprawl of suburbs he knew; Versailles stood alone among its
ordered gardens. Dense forest and open parkland stretched from the outskirts; occasionally a building
would rise above them, usually roofed in green copper. The roadways were grassy turf. Foot traffic was
pedestrians, or small machines that floated soundlessly beneath their passengers. Aircraft moved through
the air above, elongated teardrop shapes and blunt wedges moving without visible support; a colorful hot-air
balloon drifted among them.
"The Serengeti, looking northeast."
A herd of hundreds of elephants, moving with slow ponderous dignity through a landscape of
lion-colored grass and scattered flat-topped thorn trees. His eyes darted about; lions, giraffe, antelope, a
dozen rhino . . . Snow-topped Kilimanjaro rose like an empress in the distance. Beyond it was something
new, something alien: a great pillar stretching up into the sky until it turned into a curving thread, vanishing in
the blue.
"What's that?" he asked, hearing his voice shake.
"The Kenia beanstalk—think of it as a tower or a cable reaching from Low Earth Orbit to the
surface." She touched the edge of the window. "And this is the Valles Marineris, on Mars."
The sky was a faded blue, with a hint of pink. The view was on the edge of a reddish cliff,
overlooking a vast expanse of deep-blue water five hundred feet or more below; miles distant across it the
edge of another cliff showed. The waves were like none he had ever seen, taller and thinner in section than
water could support. While he watched a whale breached, soaring out of the sea until only its tail was under
the surface. A blue whale, and huge. It crashed back with a mountainous spray of surf. The view tilted
downward, showing a city dropping in terraces from the cliff-face. The buildings were white or soft pastels,
built with domes and arches and pillared colonnades, connected with roadways of colored stone or
sweeping staircases. Gardens surrounded every building and lined the streets.
Just below him stood a group of people. People like Gwen. He recognized a likeness in some of
them. Racial? Tall, with a slender muscularity, light-eyed, their hair shades of blond or red. Some of them
wore tunics or robes; others only tight briefs. Those near-naked ones were being fitted with gossamer
gliding wings on frameworks thinner than thread but steel-rigid. The helpers were of a subtly different type,
shorter, trim and healthy but without the sinewy tigerish look of the first variety.
One of the figures strapping wings to her arms, he realized suddenly, was Gwen—but her skin was
milk-pale, not the Indian-brown he saw across from him. She launched herself off the cliff edge, dived, then
began to scull upward like one of Da Vinci's ornithopters.
"Yes, that's me. A few years ago on my personal world-line. My skin tone adjusts automatically to
the ambient sunlight, all over," she explained.
The flyers exploded from their perch in a rainbow of colors. Condors glided along the cliff face,
among the men and women. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]