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fists held at arm’s length. “Two hours, and we’ll be down! Whee!” Lindy squeezes. “Are you worried? Be happy! I can relax you!”
    On a rail. I have an archaic emulation mode in my fight/flight module. It makes me swallow, my throat dry. “Massage. Please.” Resolved : If I’m to die at a time not of my choosing, I will die happy. But Lindy’s theory of mind is too weak to model me, and so she takes me at my word. I arrive on Mercury butt first, scared witless, with my spine totally relaxed. Just as well, really.
    Mercury’s escape velocity is over four kilometers per second, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of. We are coming in at just over orbital velocity, without a thruster pack, and there can’t possibly be enough orbital tethers for this crowd. But the Mercurials have come up with a solution: the equatorial maglev track. Come down just so , and its magnets will catch you in a grip of steel and drag you to a standstill at the gates of Cinnabar. (Miss it even by centimeters, and you learn exactly what it’s like to be a meteorite.)
    The maglev track is a blinding-bright line slashed across the cratered lunar landscape of Mercury. We’re landing in daylight but driving into the twilight zone, with the searing solar glare blasting our shadow across the gray-brown landscape that blurs beneath us. I can’t look back—even if I could, Lindy’s solar parasol would block the view—but there’s a string of glittering pods lined up behind our approach path, like those arrayed in front, all with blinking emerald beacons like an expensive and fragile necklace. The horizon pancakes up and flattens beneath me as the landscape unwinds. It seems to speed up as we fall toward the track. Mountains frame the distant horizon. Is that Cinnabar’s huge dome I see at the vanishing point? I’m not sure—even with vision boosted to the max, I can’t quite make it out. “This is the fun part!” Lindy enthuses. “Try not to flinch! Whee! ”
    The horizon is coming up fast now. I glimpse sawtooth underpinnings as a giant hand grabs us and squeezes. For a moment my vision sparkles with myriad brilliant disconnects, pixelating alarmingly; then a series of titanic jolts rattle my teeth in my head and try to squeeze me down into a puddle. My spine creaks as Lindy’s grip tightens painfully, and I can feel myself bloating, my internals settling in the grip of her foam. But then the deceleration eases, and my vision stabilizes. I can’t see directly ahead, there’s something in the way—something on the track ahead of us. For a panicky moment I think, We’re going to crash! then I realize it’s a fellow steerage passenger. The struts beneath the track are still skimming past alarmingly fast, but they’re no longer a sawtooth blur. We must be down to less than a thousand kilometers per hour. “Is it always like that?”
    No reply. My vision fades to black.
    “Lindy?” I ask.
    There is a pause. Then a strange male voice in my ears says: “Thank you for traveling with Astradyne Tours. Your journey is now at an end, and flight-support services are terminating. You will shortly arrive in the inbound reception area at Cinnabar City trackside terminus. To disembark safely, please wait until you see a steady green light above your disposable pod and the pod peels open—”
    “Lindy?” I ask again. But she doesn’t reply. And I realize soon enough that she never will. I’m on my own again.

Silent Movie
    MERCURY, UNIQUELY AMONG the planets, is locked in a spin/orbit resonance with the sun; it revolves on its axis and has days and nights, but it takes three of its days to orbit the sun twice. At noon, things get a little hot on the surface—even hotter than down among the half-melted valleys of Venus. At midnight it’s as cold as Pluto or Eris. They build power plants here, vast beampower stations that fly in solar orbit, exporting infrared power to the shipyards of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt, out beyond