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Page 20.
 Climbing to an altitude a mile above the top, we soared above the Royal Olympus Dome. No matter how seasoned the traveler, I am told this sight always causes a gasp to move through the entire ship. Under a thin cloud deck, I saw hundreds of points of light large and small, the Royal cities. The Royal Olympus Dome is a natural formation covering over 150 square miles in which live about ten million subjects of the king's court at King City.
For the last hour, we droned over the rim of the caldera and gasped again. A mile below us lay a city of a million inhabitants in the largest dome of all, two miles in diameter and stretched over several internal mountain tops and manmade pillars. As we spiraled slowly in our descent, I could make out the boxy and pillared buildings, the streets with their moving cars, the parks and ponds, even a river that gathers the melt waters of the high cliffs and pours them through the caldera where they fall out into the atmosphere in plumes of fine frost. Perhaps most surprising is that it is always both day and night in King City. Deep seismic forces remain in the extinct volcano, and these drive the engines that power the city. It is always daylight in the surface floor under the dome, and always night time in the hundred decks below that. To parse it more finely: in some places below decks, daylight is piped down into chosen parks and other public spaces.
The airship docked among a dozen others at Queen's Field, the global airport. That is a busy place with shopping malls, factories, shipping centers, warehouses, and, surprisingly, gambling casinos. The Royals are more forgiving than the puritanical Free Domers, and much goes on here that would be frowned upon in the austere places I had known. If it weren't for some of the filth and crime here, I might have preferred King City to anywhere else on Mars.
As I stood with my cowl, beads, and rucksack on a busy street corner, I was thoroughly confused. I had come here, thinking to find the secret of the seventh point, and instead I felt like an insect in this vast city. Traffic rushed past in all directions as I stood on the curb. Pedestrians crowded around me. Since the air was cured, nobody worried about oxygen. Cured means it is treated and recycled through huge turbines. There are more trees than people in the dome cities, and this place is no different. Trees and greens generate oxygen that we breathe, while the hydrogen cars burn clean and give off only water and trace elements.
Another strange thing for me is that they use a medium called money, which is hard to explain. I had seen coins, like Sam Gorepoint's mysterious find from the Royal mines, but never thought of them as anything other than decorative items. The unit of currency is the Royal Credit (RC), which is a paper that can be divided into four Royal Quarters (RQ). There are denominations of five RC (5RC), 10RC, 20RC, and so forth. Most of what you do every day can be done with these small denominations. The bigger stuff is done electronically.
I had exchanged some bent and rusty Triber coins for a few RC, but my main source was Timony's billfold. Of that, I had spent most of it on air fare, and I spent my last few RC on food and drink aboard the airship. Fortunately, it is an acceptable sight to see a monk mendicant, so I stood near a bank building with a cup and collected about twenty RC in a few hours. As I waited for kind strangers to say their prayer mantras as they dropped coins or bills into my cup, I studied a map I had bought at a news stand nearby. King City is divided into several major sections, with the Palace Section in the middle on one side of the Olympus River, and the Temple section across the way. That's where Her Holiness Gina-Paulina Benedictina XXIV stays when she is not on the road. I could see the two complexes from where I sat—golden spires on the right for Temple, golden domes on the left for Palace. The other Sections included Banking, Commerce, Shipping, Warehousing, and so forth—functional, unromantic names. Spread through all but the Palace and Temple districts were all manner of dwellings ranging from the palatial to the efficiency.
I spent my first night in broad daylight in a place called River Park. While I dozed on the grass, a policeman came by to ask if I were all right. Satisfied, he muttered a mantra and moved on. Evidently, monks are sacred and must not be disturbed because they are conduits of blessings from the Gods. This was lost on a pair of street thugs who tried to roll me after noticing that I paid for a meal earlier. My finely honed Triber skills came to the fore, and I swung my stick around even as I was lying on the grass. One of them, who had his hand in my pocket, caught it on the temple and may have lain there dead for all I knew. The other ran off with my wallet, and I after him with my rucksack on my back and my walking stick clutched close to me.
He ran through the park, down a concrete flight of steps two or three at a time, down into the night, and I after him.
Now we were on a night street illumined by ornate, paired metal poles that leaned—one over the sidewalk, one over the street— with glowing globes on top.
The thief thought he had lost me, because I fell back and moved in the shadows. He had no idea of my determination when I am after something. I followed him down two or three more decks, each with its own flavor. One deck seemed alive with noisy street cars, trucks, trains, all sorts of moving traffic. Another deck seemed composed of looming warehouses and freight yards in which night crews labored wearing yellow helmets and driving tow motors. He brought me to a deck that smelled of cheap restaurants, beer, and night-blooming flowers. I heard girls laughing in conversation, men laughing back, other people arguing. This was a residential deck. The thief led me to his building, up a flight of rickety wooden steps whose steep plaster walls were gouged and smelled moldy.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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