Read Online Shooting the Rift - eARC by Alex Stewart - Free Book Online

for the most part they kept to the pavement, only venturing to cross the turbulent stream of traffic at one of the footbridges which had been strategically placed at every intersection.
    After a while I became aware that the street-level dwellings on both sides of the road had been replaced by storefronts, selling a bewildering variety of foodstuffs and beverages I’d never heard of (in some cases fortunately, judging by the smell), clothing in unfamiliar cuts, and an astonishing range of curios and artworks. Cafes, bars and restaurants began to appear among them in ever-increasing numbers, too, and I began to salivate, suddenly reminded of how long it had been since I’d last had anything approaching an appetite.
    As the buildings had changed around me, so had the people. Many more of them were wearing the unfamiliar garments I’d glimpsed in the shop windows, and not everyone I saw seemed quite . . . well, normal, I suppose. As well as all the usual variations in skin, hair and eye color you’d expect to find on most worlds with a reasonably-sized population, there were one or two which struck me as quite bizarre: a fellow practically naked, apart from sandals and a barely adequate loin cloth, for instance, whose skin had a distinctly greenish hue, and whose breath carried a faint odor of summertime meadows.
    “Don’t gawp, Simon, it makes you look provincial,” Aunt Jenny said, although her words carried more amusement than rebuke.
    “I am provincial,” I replied, truthfully enough. It began to dawn on me that all my previous visits to Skyhaven had been to the core section, where the passenger flights up from Avalon docked, and nothing in the decor, ambience or services would have seemed out of place in any of the cities on the surface. Same architecture, same businesses, same music in the elevators.
    “’Scuse me,” a young lady said, brushing past with an apologetic smile. She was wearing something which floated around her, rippling gently, and I felt the hairs on my arms rise briefly, caught in the fringes of the electrostatic field creating the effect. I found myself turning involuntarily to watch her pass, and my jaw dropped.
    “Tails are quite a popular tweak with the transgeners,” Aunt Jenny said, looking even more amused as she caught sight of my expression. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of that sort of thing if you ship outsystem.”
    “Transgeners,” I repeated, as though I’d never heard the word before. Which I had, of course, but seldom spoken so casually. Most Commonwealthers strongly disapproved of altering the human body too much, on the entirely reasonable grounds that God had got it right the first time round, although not everyone in the galaxy agreed with them. Some worlds had entire populations who’d been altered in response to specific local conditions, and whose tweaks bred true down the generations, while on others morphology fluctuated with the fad of the moment, plaid fur giving way to scales pretty much on a whim, the way dandies like Sherman adopted the latest style of cravat.
    “You’ll get used to it,” Aunt Jenny assured me, ogling the green fellow’s well-sculpted gluteals as he vanished into the crowd. Then she turned back to me with a mischievous grin. “Always liked the photosynthesisers myself. Don’t leave a lot to the imagination.”
    “I don’t suppose they would,” I said, trying to sound blasé and utterly failing to do so. The streets were growing narrower and more crowded here, the gridding less regular, and I hurried after my aunt, determined to keep her in sight. I kept expecting her to stop, or slow down, or at least glance behind to make sure I was keeping up, but she never did, gradually opening up the distance between us, slipping through the press of bodies with a speed and dexterity I found faintly surprising in a woman of her age and bulk.
    For a moment she vanished as the street suddenly dropped away at a sharp sixty degree angle, and I