No Going Back by Mark L. Van Name Page B

sometimes extra money provided the best path out of a difficult situation.
    I’m going to see an old friend, I realized, and I view it as a mission. I shook my head. Normal people didn’t think that way.
    On the other hand, it could be a mission, because it could be a trap. When I knew Omani, she was brilliant and beautiful and fun, but she also possessed more than a little of the drive and ruthlessness that had made her family rich and powerful. I had no doubt that if she knew I didn’t age, she would lock me in a cage until either scientists she would hire had figured out what made me that way or she died.
    I wasn’t wrong. It was a mission, and I’d do damned well to remember that fact.
    Yet it was a mission no one was asking me to undertake. I could ignore Pimlani’s messages. In a few years at most, she’d almost certainly be dead, and the problem would have taken care of itself. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed her. Once, all those years ago, at least for a couple of years I had been sure we loved one another. We’d been together almost all the time, and for the most part the experience had been great. I hadn’t lived with a woman since that time—I didn’t count bunking with squad mates on combat or training missions—and I sure hadn’t let myself get that close to any other woman.
    I shook my head to clear it. I’d been over this ground before. All I was doing was wasting time. I also wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, which is never wise. Walking while lost in thought and mostly blind to the world around you is a good way to get hurt, particularly in a big city.
    Most large cities follow similar layouts, but not York. York was an urban testimony to the power of very old money. Part of the usual layout more or less existed: Downtown areas crammed with skyscrapers gleaming with corporate logos held the center of the city, with neighborhoods of varying degrees of wealth sprawling all around it. What made York so different was that scattered through it were the estates of the seven families that had managed to hold onto their wealth and influence from the time of Haven’s colonization to today. The smallest of those estates was over fifty hectares, and most ran to a hundred or more hectares. These great wooded private areas were walled off from the rest of the city, protected by both machine and human security systems. They were as much parks as residences, though people lived in them to this day.
    Omani’s family resided in the very largest of them, most of its multiple houses and the grand main building constructed during the first decade humans were on Haven.
    Kang and many members of his family also lived in one of the estates. Fortunately, it was on the far side of York from Omani’s home.
    I was walking in a commercial area that was rapidly transitioning to a tourist and residential district. In every big city on every world I’ve visited, the same human currents ebb and flow. A part of the city runs down and turns poor and dangerous. Those in power initially ignore it and try simply to contain its troubles; as long as what happens in it stays in it, even the police give it only token attention. Over time, of course, the problems of any area spill over into nearby zones, so politicians start making speeches about it, and the city sends in more cops. Meanwhile, the cost of living in the city keeps rising, so a few intrepid souls, lured by low prices in the bad parts of town, buy and move in. If all goes well, more follow them, and gentrification turns the district from dangerous to funky, and then from funky into a shopping and eating destination. Tourists come both to partake of the offerings of the vendors and to watch the natives, who marvel that somehow they’ve become attractions. The lucky districts stop their transformations there; the unlucky ones continue to morph from interesting to bland and ultimately become indistinguishable from others like them in any city