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Neptune. To build and launch those power plants, they need heavy elements—mined locally. And guess what? Someone needs to run those mines.
    To avoid the extremes of temperature, the city of Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn. Thermocouples on the rails drain the heat of daylight into the chill of the wintry night, extracting power to propel the city at a fast walking pace, year in and year out. There are other nomad cities on Mercury, but I believe Cinnabar is the largest, and by extension the largest railway train in the solar system. But it’s no express.
    Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency—a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continuous megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long. The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach. I slide along the maglev track, a prisoner sewn up inside Lindy’s corpse, closing feetfirst with the shadows of the city until I coast up a ramp and come to a standstill beneath the arching ice-rimed shadow of Cinnabar’s vast arrival hall, with a last gentle bump. “Good-bye, Lindy,” I whisper, as the triple-jointed arms swing down out of the darkness above and unfold their cutting blades, slicing me free of her mortal husk.
    It takes me little time to clear the immigration protocols. They’re mostly concerned with monitoring for pink goo—there have been a spate of outbreaks on Venusian floaters recently—but my steerage status reassures them. (Lindy’s packing foam is riddled with digestive parazymes: If one of our Creators tried to travel that way, they’d have arrived as a deeply eroded skeleton.) “Enjoy your stay,” the shakedown captain advises me, as I pass him one of my precious reserve of Reals. “Try to stay out of the darkside, nu?”
    Darkside? I smile and nod as I step through the doorway into air and light. I’d follow it up, but I’m not on the local grid yet. I look around the concourse. Mercury is famously metal-rich, so the signs of evident wealth are misleading: They pave their streets with gold for its thermal properties and corrosion resistance. The buildings are close-fronted, windowless, and forbidding. Above my head, a partially transparent roof blocks the starlight and filters the long shadows of the towers. There are a plethora of body plans on display, but as is usual away from Earth, I’m still the outsize freak. I find a public grid terminal near one exit, and I squat next to it and guide its fibrous leech into the empty socket under my hairline. “Can’t you reduce your height?” it complains querulously. “You’ll damage me if you stretch!”
    “I’ll try. Comfortable?”
    It misses my sharp tone. “That is an improvement. Let me see. Twenty centimes, please?” I release my wallet and lean back. My vision flickers, then returns. “Your keys, now.” I let my wallet open farther and exchange keys with the terminal over the secure channel. “Good, you are now configured, Person Freya. Your mail will be forwarded. You may disconnect now.”
    I stand up, relieved that I don’t have to deal any further with the little bigot. “Bye,” I say, and run my fingers through my hair as I try to decide what to do next. New planet, first call : I’ve done this before. My weight is the first clue. I’m heavier than on Mars, but much lighter than Venus or Earth. It puts a spring in my toes even before I extend my heels. “A hotel,” an echo of one of my sibs whispers through my lips. “You need to find a hotel and install a sister who’s been here before. And you need to deepsleep.”
    She’s right. I need a local