Cosmonaut Keep (10 page)

And hence, Elizabeth supposed, the dress she eventually decided on. She found it in the back of the shop, on the inside of a bundle of frocks on wire hangers suspended from the same wall-hook. She disengaged them carefully, took one look at the last dress, and put the rest less carefully back.

It had a bodice of embroidered leaves, in satin silk and autumn colors; its long, wide skirts of organza over net a darker shade and stiffer texture, fading and fraying to cobweb consistency toward the hems; and to go with it, a long-sleeved short jacket of gold-colored lace. She carried them triumphantly behind the curtain of the changing-alcove, stepped out a few minutes later to do a twirl in front of a freestanding mirror. She liked the outfit so much that she had to make a conscious decision not wear it home on the bus.

If the tall servant just inside the doorway of the Cosmonauts' keep thought her hooded oilskin cape amusing in its practicality and contrast with her dress, his expression as he took it gave no sign. She smiled at him, thanked him, and walked quickly on into the entrance hall. There was no more formal greeting, no announcement or introductions. It wasn't that kind of party; it was assumed, at least as a polite fiction, that anyone turning up already knew enough people present to make such a protocol redundant.

Elizabeth wasn't too sure about that. She felt very much on her own, she would have very much liked some welcoming person to show her in, as she passed from the shadows of the passage to the bright light of the main hall. She felt unsteady on her feet, and not just because the heels of her shoes (borrowed for the occasion from her sister) were higher than she was used to. The only sound that seemed louder than the thumping of her heart was the rustle of her dress, like the sound of walking through a heap of dry leaves.

The great room was laid out for a cold buffet and for dancing, with long tables, chairs, and benches along two of the walls, and tables laden with food and drink along the third, with the musicians -- at the moment tuning up their instruments -- in the corner formed by that wall and the wall which contained the fireplace. For a couple of seconds, Elizabeth paused just inside the doorway, gawping at the gigantic decorations on the walls; the scale of everything -- walls, carpets, animal heads -- was about twice what a human scale should have been. Even the portraits were large, and high up. Then she walked firmly onward, relieved to see that about a hundred people had already arrived, so that she wasn't embarrassingly early or late. Several of them -- the old Cosmonaut Cairns, the university's Chancellor, the owner of Mueller's Mill -- she recognized as from a distance, and one or two she knew personally. Gregor, so far, wasn't among them, which was also a relief, in a way.

"Oh, hello, Harkness." Mark Garnet, the head of the marine-biology department, hailed her and beckoned her over to the huddle of academics at the drinks table. A small, rather fat man with slicked-back dark hair -- he'd always irresistibly reminded her of a seal -- Garnet was probably her best friend in the staff hierarchy, always helpful with a knotty statistical problem or an obscure reference.

"What's your pleasure?" he asked.

She glanced over the array of glasses. "Ah, white wine for now, I think."

"Very good, very good." He passed her a glass and waved at a slender, almost skinny woman by his side. "Now, Harkness, this is my wife, Judith."

"Pleased to meet you." The two women bobbed politely at each other. Judith's dress was slim-fitted and elegant, not new but not secondhand either, her hair coiled and stacked.

"I should warn you," Garnet went on, "that she has absolutely no interest in biology, so let's not talk shop."

They took their glasses and sat down at the corner of one of the tables, gossiping idly about the department's office politics while watching the growing throng. More people were arriving: guild-masters and journeymen, industrialists and engineers, heresiarchs in tall black hats and Scoffers in black suits with broad white collars, their swords on their belts. The interstellar merchant and his family and retinue made a particularly grand entrance. The men wore long linen coats with embroidered waistcoats over shirts and knee-breeches, the women loose gowns in various jewel or pastel shades of satin. The dresses' construction was simple, their decoration elaborate, with signifiers of age and status suggested by variations in the length, and presence and absence, of collars and sleeves.

"Not bad," Judith remarked, sotto voce. "Looks like Nova Babylonia is still setting its own styles. For now, at least. Our ancestors really shouldn't have let those costume-history picture books out in the universe. Heaven only knows what concoctions are being contrived right now out of Earth's old dressing-up box."

Elizabeth grinned at her. "Funny, I was thinking along those lines myself, when I was looking for a party dress today."

"Hmm, I don't know," Mark said. "I don't think Nova Babylonia has had time to be influenced. I mean, what's the turnaround time?"

"Shorter than a craze, back there," Judith said. She sounded slightly disapproving. Nova Babylonia had a fantasy reputation, going all the way back to the first contacts with Croatan, as a land of luxury, almost of decadence -- an image intensified by the relative rarity of actual contact and reliable information. Hundred-year-old news would be eagerly seized upon at this party, and at trade negotiations, and talked about for years, or until the next ship came along. There was little doubt that the frequency would increase, now that Nova Babylonia's merchants were actively responding to the new developments in the colony, rather than discovering them for the first time. But no matter how frequently it arrived, the news would always be a hundred years old ...

"Anyway," said Judith, "you pulled a good dress out of the box yourself. So tell me, where did you find it?"

Elizabeth smiled sideways at Mark. "Now
we're
talking shop," she said. Mark gave them both an ironic wave and wandered off to pick up some food and information.

As he strolled into the hall Gregor felt slightly self-conscious in an heirloom outfit of black velvet jacket, white shirt, and narrow black trousers, but nobody looked at him twice. In the jacket's inside pocket, rather spoiling its drape, was a sheaf of folded-up papers over which he'd sweated all that day and most of the previous night. His grandfather, James, had included the demand, as imperative as a tax return, with his invitation.

He knew the hall, and the castle, from holiday memories of childhood and, more rarely, of adolescence. These days, though still fond of his grandparents, he visited it more often in dreams. His father had -- wisely, Gregor thought -- done what most descendants of the original crew had done, and moved out and struck out on his own in his teens, several years before Gregor was born. Now the owner of a substantial fishing-fleet, Frederick Cairns was pleased that his first son shared his enthusiasm for the business, and brusquely tolerant of his second son's more academic interest in marine life. Of his father James's far more abstract interests and motivations, Frederick affected nothing but contempt.

Over at the buffet table, Gregor selected a small stack of mollusca and Crustacea, a pinch of herbs, a clump of vegetables and a spoonful of rice, picked up a glass of red wine on the sound theory that it was the faster route to intoxication, and looked around rather vaguely for anyone he knew or somewhere to sit. Some of the local children, looking stiffer and more awkward in their formal clothes than Gregor, were staring and nudging each other in response to the saurs. It was rare, in Kyohvic, to see as many as thirty of them in one place, and the opportunity to gawp and murmur was also being taken, more discreetly, by the adults.

Gregor turned away, embarrassed by this rustic behavior, and found himself face-to-face with a young woman whom he instantly evaluated as the most beautiful he'd ever seen in his life. Her skin was the color of amber, her long and wavy hair of jet, her large dark eyes of bright mahogany, all of it set off by the glowing pink of the straight, soft dress which gently skimmed and subtly showed the contours of her body. Hands full, like his, with plate and glass and carefully balanced cutlery, she looked at him with a charmingly helpless but somehow self-mocking appeal. She looked as though about to say something, but hesitating to speak. Gregor felt the same way himself. Something -- his heart, presumably -- was jumping about inside him.

He smiled (a terrifying rictus, he was sure) and took a quick sip of wine to stop his mouth from going completely dry. "Good evening," he said. "Are you wondering where to sit?"

"Yes, thank you," she said. "Actually" -- she laughed lightly, and took a sip of her own wine, white -- "I have been most firmly told to mingle with the -- the natives? -- and practice the language and I'm not sure whom to speak to first."

"Well," Gregor said, "perhaps you might like to sit and speak with me, for a while?"

"Oh yes," she said, suddenly sounding confident. "That would be very utilitarian."

Gregor indicated with his eyes an empty space at a table across the hall, and followed her to it, amazed that everyone in the whole place wasn't attending to her every shimmy and shimmer as much as he was. But then -- as some gibbering, scientific, detached part of his mind, the monkey on his back, pointed out -- he wasn't actually
seeing
the rest of the party, so the issue was moot.

They sat down, half facing each other on a bench. Another moment of not knowing what to say. Gregor pointed a thumb at his chest. "Gregor Cairns."

"My name is Lydia de Tenebre," the girl said gravely; and then, more casually, "the merchant Esias de Tenebre's seventh daughter, third child of his second wife. I am nineteen years old and I was born" -- she waved a hand -- "oh, hundreds and hundreds of years ago."

"I must say you don't look it." As soon as he'd said it Gregor was certain he'd just made a stupid remark, the first thing which had popped into his head, but Lydia laughed. She flicked her hair back and at that moment Gregor belatedly realized he was smitten, "stabbed by the arrow of Eros" as the poet had said, and that her objective age was not only the strangest but also the most significant thing about her: the one that hung over everything that might happen between them.

"Now, can you tell me about yourself, and your family?" she asked, as though it were the next item on a protocol.

"I'm training to be a marine biologist," he said. "My father is a fisherman, my mother teaches children. My grandfather -- over there -- has the more or less hereditary post of Navigator."

"What do those old people do, the ones who call themselves the Cosmonauts? How do they live?" She looked around, at the walls and ceiling. "How do they afford ... all this? They are not merchants. Are they rulers?"

Gregor rubbed the back of his neck, with a sense of being defensive. "No, not exactly, the real rulers here are the Heresiarchy, although Driver -- that's the big guy talking to my grandfather -- is a very powerful man. The Security Man."

He scratched his head as she frowned over this. "He runs the police business here. It used to be for the castle and the university, but now it's for the whole town."

"All right," she said, as though comprehending, but probably not, "and what about the rest?"

"They're some of the descendants of the crew of the old starship. Every generation there have been a few people who nominally took the posts that their ancestors in the original crew had held." He shrugged. "It's a tradition. The first crew took over this castle because the local people had left it empty, and because it was, well, a castle! Easily defended. When they came here they were able to sell knowledge and technology to the existing population, and indeed to the saurs and later to merchants from other worlds. Eventually they established the university, which became a research center for local industry and agriculture and fisheries. And not just local industry -- we get students and scientists from the nearer worlds, particularly Croatan. The nominal crew still get an income from it, and from other investments, and they oversee it. A hereditary sinecure. Not a very demanding job, but they do it to maintain a continuity with the ship, and with Earth."

"A continuity which is now being lost, then?"

A shrewd question, and not one it would be politic to fully answer.

"Yes, it's being lost. My father has no intention of becoming the Navigator, and nor do I. But my grandfather, I hope, has many years to live, and if I have sons one of them may wish to take his place."

"Or daughters?"

Gregor's cheeks burned. "Of course, yes."

Lydia's dark eyes sparkled, perhaps in amusement at his evident discomfiture. "And what would it involve, being the Navigator?"

"Oh, I'll show you," said Gregor. He fished the folded papers from his pocket and spread them on the table. The papers were covered with crabbed symbols and labored diagrams.

"A few months ago James, my grandfather, sent me this problem. It involves logic and mathematics, neither of which I'm very good at. But I worked at it, on and off, until yesterday evening, when James sent me a message asking me to deliver the solution tonight." He looked down at the paper ruefully. "I've wasted all day on it, but at least it's done."

She poked at the edge of the papers with a perfectly oval fingernail. "You have no calculating-machines to do this?"

Careful now, careful!
"We do, of course, have calculating-machines. But not all calculation can be left to machines." It was an ethical platitude throughout the Second Sphere.

"Indeed not," she said solemnly. "But if you are not talented for this, why not give the problem to people who are?"

You've put your pretty little fingernail right on the problem,
he thought. "Ah, well, the point of doing this is to keep certain skills alive within the family."

Which was true, though with a different emphasis to the one he gave it. The explanation seemed to satisfy her, and she peered at the pages for a moment and was on the point of reaching to pick them up when James Cairns hurried over. Gregor stood up and embraced him.