Звезда Пандоры

With its uncomfortably close G1 sun blazing down through a heat-bleached sky, the temperature along the entire one-hundred-fifty-kilometer length of Venice Coast rose uncompromisingly during the day. It didn’t help that the beautiful island city was only just outside what was technically Anacona’s northern polar region, and the planet was also approaching the middle of summer. This mix of geography and calendar was currently giving the city over sixteen hours of intense sunlight every day. In deep winter, of course, the pattern would be reversed, and the sun would only be visible for about six hours a day. Even then the climate would cool down to something like Earth’s Mediterranean temperatures. Anacona’s proximity to its primary star made the planet uninhabitable from the equator out to fifty degrees latitude north and south, most of which was a rocky desert.

From space, Anacona had the same kind of symmetrical banded appearance as a gas giant, with its broad expanse of coffee-colored sands wrapped around the center, and skirted with black and auburn mountain ranges. The planet had kicked off a large, and ongoing, debate among Commonwealth planetologists about how climate could affect topography, or if the symmetry was just a transient tectonic fluke. For it wasn’t just the central regions that were regular; beyond the peaks that bounded each side of the desert, the cornflower-blue waters of annular seas sparked in the strong sun to the north and the south. Both the polar zones boasted continents, although the southern one was smaller, and their coastlines were completely dissimilar. They did share an abundance of emerald vegetation, with rainforests and grasslands nurtured by the heat and daily rains. Both seas shunted long trails of swan-white cloud across the continents where they formed permanent slow-spinning spiral whirls over the actual poles.

The sea gave Venice Coast an indecent humidity. By midafternoon, the siesta was well under way, hustling tourists and inhabitants alike off the streets. Shops shut for four or five hours at a time, waiting until evening and a low golden sun before they opened their doors again. People took long rests in the shaded courtyard gardens to be found at the center of every block. The only service that carried on regardless was the monorail, which linked every district along the narrow city’s hundred-fifty-kilometer length. Even most of the gondolas, water taxis, and little supply boats that swarmed the canals tied up at some quay or other, bobbing about empty while their skippers lounged around in the bars.

It was these long people-less interludes every day that gave Paula Myo her greatest cause for concern. The surveillance operation would be much better served by crowds and activity providing cover for the Agency’s operatives. As it was they had to linger over long meals and drinks as they sat on the verandas of neighboring cafés and restaurants. It was proving a popular duty. Paula disapproved, they were likely to grow lax during such leisurely episodes.

The center of their attention was the Nystol Gallery, a big three-story canal-side building in the Cesena district that specialized in EK art, electrokinetic machines with hundreds or even thousands of moving parts. Paula had reviewed the gallery’s catalogue, going virtual through the TSI construct, where she marveled as every non-art-lover did at the striking, pointless fusion of art and machine; some were like working sculptures of animals, aliens, and mythical creatures, their micro-gears and pistons running through biological functions with cheeky mimicry, while others were random collections of mechanical components assembled in bizarre asymmetric patterns, that shouldn’t work, yet somehow managed to buzz, whir, rotate, and wobble about with jerky elegance; still others were variants on the old domino relay, with modules of fire, water, air, rubber, protoplasm, and ordinary misapplied components from domestic or industrial machines, all of them reacting against each other, activating the next piece, then somehow resetting themselves in an impossible perpetual motion.