Stars Rise

XXI. "You Know Who, and I Know Who"

Ante Lucem — Before Light

Casicaa, a city south and east of Soliara's capital, and to the opposite extreme of Invernali's snow storm, sweltered in heat all night.

At ante lucem, the twilight half hour before sunrise, what business still existed crawled. Early birds took advantage of the darkness's relative cool — mostly assistants picking up groceries and laundry for Constellation managers, and running a few business-related errands.

The city operated like a ship with a skeleton crew. A year ago, there had been bustle, industry, small businesses, big businesses, manufacturing, construction, transportation; there had been farmers and markets. Now Casicaa was a ghost city, a big city turned down, as if operating on low power.

Every industry disrupted all at once. Now there were no more jobs in food production, mining, on factory floors — few stores, few cafes, few diners. The workers remaining moved on to bigger cities with more forgiving climates. Fields were left to bake, unharvested, under a white sun. The last remaining residents of Casicaa — aside from their assistants — were affluent and could sleep in rather than wake up and face the heat.

Hollow windswept multi-story estates bordered the central plaza, skeletons of houses with windows that never closed and might not even have glass panes. Curtains made better walls, anything to let a breeze cross a bedroom. Staircases outside and exposed balcony hallways formed a perimeter of rooms concealed only by the barely opaque sheets that billowed out, breathing air, like lungs, in the wind.

Cooling magic was yet to become widespread.

The ghost city almost made Cristo feel alone. As if there would be no witnesses, despite the professionals he had passed lining up for coffee, monochrome suit silhouettes shadowing the pale pre-dawn sidewalks.

He stopped to watch the park. In this residential quarter bordering it, the sidewalks were empty, the plaza frozen still. Trees and topiary cast motionless penumbras, though the shadows of wildlife flickered across the pond in the mirror image of flight, critters occasionally swiftly scuttering. Absent was the slow, predictable movement of human pedestrians.

He felt like the only person in the city as he approached the stairs climbing the outside of Exequi Benito Fortunato's urban estate. There was time to watch the park and wait to see whether anyone would go for an early morning stroll, because it would be best if no witnesses saw Cristo's shadow creeping outside the exequi's curtains.

The absolute transformations of people's behavior caused by teleportation was striking. Now everyone always linked straight to where they were going. They skipped right over the park that otherwise might have been a pleasant highlight of their commute. Not a single soul tramped down the pebbled path to pass by the magically embellished fountains flashing true blue to orange and yellow, or the augmented artwork that cast changing colors and light across famous old Casicaan sculptures.

They would get over it. The novelty of teleporting would wear off, and they would realize how many literal walks in the park they had missed out on, course correcting from the immediate instinct to link right from one's home to one's office sixty seconds before one was expected to show up for work (or sixty seconds after). Instead, they would eventually come to make use of the time saved by instant teleportation to enjoy public facilities like Nestor Plaza.

No one would see Cristo climb up Fortunato's estate to rooms protected only by translucent curtains and magical security systems that were long obsolete for him. With link portals not yet used for surveillance, Cristo had only to dodge real time patrols.