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it.”
    â€œI think you are wise not to rely on them exclusively. We must include our own drives in the construction program.”
    â€œYes. The design teams have worked on that premise from the beginning.” His secondary routines started to pull files from the storage lacunae in his macrocellular clusters. “In the meantime, let us begin with some simple appointments, shall we?”

    Aaron walked across the red marble bridge that arched over Sisterhood Canal, which linked Golden Park with the Low Moat district. It contained a strip of simple paddock land that had no city buildings, only stockades for commercial animals and a couple of archaic markets. He strode along the meandering paths illuminated by small oil lanterns hanging from posts and on into the Ogden district. This was also grassland, but it contained the majority of the city’s wooden-built stables where the aristocracy kept their horses and carriages. It was where the main city gate had been cut into the wall.
    The gates were open wide when he went through, mingling with little groups of stragglers heading back to the urban expanse outside. Makkathran2 was surrounded by a two-mile-wide strip of parkland separating it from the vast modern metropolis that had sprung up around it over the last two centuries. Greater Makkathran2 now sprawled over four hundred square miles, an urban grid that contained sixteen million people, ninety-nine percent of whom were devout Living Dream followers. It was now the capital of Ellezelin, taking over from the original capital city of Riasi after the 3379 election had returned a Living Dream majority to the planetary senate.
    There was no powered transport across the park: no ground taxis or underground train or even pedwalk strips. Of course, no capsule was allowed into Makkathran2’s airspace. Inigo’s thinking had been simple enough: The faithful would never mind walking the distance; that was what everyone did on Querencia. He wanted authenticity to be the governing factor in his movement’s citadel. Riding across the park was permissible; Querencia had horses. Aaron smiled at that notion as he set off past the gates. Then an elusive memory flickered like a dying hologram. There was a time when he had clung to the neck of some giant horse as they galloped across an undulating terrain. The movement was powerful and rhythmic yet strangely leisurely. It was as if the horse were gliding rather than galloping, bounding forward. He knew exactly how to flow with it, grinning wildly as they raced onward, air blasting against his face, hair wild. An astonishingly deep sapphire sky was bright and warm above. The horse had a small, tough-looking horn at the top of its forehead, tipped with the traditional black metal spike.
    Aaron grunted dismissively. It must have been some sensory immersion drama he had accessed on the unisphere. Not real.
    The midpoint of the park was a uniform ridge. When Aaron reached the crest, it was as though he were stepping across a rift in time. Behind him the quaintly archaic profile of Makkathran2 bathed in its alien orange glow; in front were the modernistic block towers and neat district grids, producing a multicolored haze that stretched over the horizon. Regrav capsules slipped effortlessly through the air above it in strictly maintained traffic streams, long horizontal bands of fast motion winding up at cycloidal junctions that knitted the city together in a pulsing kinetic dance. In the southeastern sky he could see the brighter lights of starships as they slipped in and out of the atmosphere far above the spaceport. A never-ending procession of big cargo craft provided the city with economic bonds to planets outside the reach of the official Free Market Zone wormholes.
    When he reached the outer rim of the park, he told his u-shadow to call a taxi. A glossy jade-colored regrav capsule dropped silently out of the traffic swarm above and dilated its door. Aaron settled on