Cosmonaut Keep (14 page)

He turned around sharply, vehement. "And we are weak. If we don't establish some
decisive
advantage, we'll be assimilated into Nova Babylonia's benevolent sway. Our writings will fill their libraries, our thoughts will fascinate their philosophers, our arts will add new colors to their palette. Some might call that a victory of a sort. But
they will not change,
and we will. What makes us unique, what makes us ourselves, will be lost."

"What is it," Gregor frowned, "that makes us 'unique'?"

The old man smiled.

"Instability," he said. "Nova Babylonia has been absorbing new ideas and peoples, as well as generating its own, for hundreds if not thousands of years, and it's a very stable place. We absorb ideas from them, some of which they took with them from Earth, but look what we make of them! The Scoffers' secular Christianity is a very different thing from the rather passive philosophy proclaimed by the ancient materialists in the Good Books, for all that it's hard to make the heresiarchs see that. We change all the time, and I don't want us to change into more of them, and then stop changing. Which, as I say, will happen, as more and more of their ships come in, year after year, maybe month after month. Unless we do something about it."

"What
can
we do?"

"We can build ships of our own," James said. "Ships that don't depend on the krakens and the saurs. We can become
the
trading people of the Second Sphere and beyond. With that power, we will maintain our independence."

Gregor looked up at him, astonished. "Now that," he said at last, "is a
great
work."

"Then let's get to it," James said. He stepped forward and held out his hand. "Welcome to the Cosmonaut cadre."

Gregor was shaken by the casually bestowed honor. The cadre was the core of the Families, the fraction which -- by membership in the notional crew of the
Bright Star
-- maintained the mystique of a continuity with Earth; with, indeed, its mightiest and most glorious empire, the European Union. Some of the Families had grown wealthy on Mingulay, others poor; but the poorest fisherman or smallholder descended from the original crew felt at least a touch of inherited superiority over his or her native neighbor, and which only the continuity of the cadre with the great union of socialist republics did anything to justify. In the opinion of Family members who'd made it on their own merits, such as Gregor's father, the whole cachet was a hollow tradition.

James ran his fingers through his lanky white hair and tied it back in a ponytail with an elastic band. Then he stalked over to a shelf, tugged out a bundle of papers and spread them on the table.

"Right," he said, leaning on his hands and peering down at them, "this is where we start. The setting of the problem."

The oldest papers, where the task began, were even physically difficult to understand, faded and yellowed, their script sufficiently antique to make reading them an effort.

"It begins here," the Navigator told him, stabbing a ridged fingernail on a row of scrawled numbers, "with these stellar parallax observations. They had to work out the distance to Croatan first, obviously. The stellar drift in the intervening centuries is, uh, within the margin of error.
However.
The drive's working is sensitively dependent on mass distribution in the surrounding volume of space, out to several light-years -- say, ten, to be on the safe side. So the process had to be repeated for dozens of nearby stars."

He tapped at another page.

"Next, there are readings from the
Bright Star's
instruments. That's just the top cover, by the way. The rest are over there."

His hand wave alarmingly took in a couple of sets of shelving, all wooden and all bowed under the weight of stacked paper.

"These two sets of information are, fundamentally, the input. The root of the program, the 'algorithm' as it's called, for calculating from them a setting for the drive which will take the ship to Croatan and not to, let us say, the fucking middle of some fucking inter-meta-galactic gulf a billion light-years across is,
we think,
this set of equations here. Deriving a practical program from it to crunch the numbers is a formidable task in itself, which ... "

And so it went. James spent the next hour or so showing Gregor the barest outline of the task of integration and interpretation he would be assisting with. It still seemed overwhelming, as though he had been appointed an executor of some terrible cumulative will, landed with the job of sorting out the affairs of generations of procrastinators. When the explanation was, as far as it went, complete, it was Gregor's turn to stand by the window and look moodily out.

"Why can't we just
buy
computers?" he said at last. "The saurs sell us instruments and automation for manufactories. Why not for this?"

"The saurs are very careful about what they sell us," James said, still looking down at the papers spread on the table. "They haven't sold us any general-purpose computers. I mean, we've tried cannibalizing and reverse-engineering the stuff they do sell us, but it's like trying to do the same with living organisms before you even have a clue about genetics, let alone genetic engineering. Fucking impossible. Something hard and shiny turns into a smelly puddle."

"Why don't they sell us computers?"

James sighed. "From what old Tharovar deigns to say on the subject, and even he is a bit cagey, it seems that the gods would not approve. And the saurs are gods-fearing, in a way that we are not. The gods may have been involved in some disaster in their past ... We can speculate about its being remembered in tradition, even 'race memory,' something in the genes -- but that's all. They don't want to talk about it."

"I've noticed something like that," said Gregor. "With Salasso."

"Anyway, relying for our navigation on computers from the saurs would be ... missing the point, don't you think?" James abandoned the task and joined him at the window.

"Yes," Gregor said. "I see that."

"Good!" James grinned at him and slapped his back. "Now go and see your girl."

He walked slowly along the dark corridors, and slowly down the long -- straight or spiral -- stairs. The anachronistic fossil assemblages in the walls' sedimentary-rock cladding held a mirror to the confusion in his mind. Still in upheaval over the immensity of the task his ancestors and living relatives had accomplished, still appalled at the scale and complexity of the task to come, he was already trembling at the thought of meeting Lydia again.

This was not the normal and natural passion of sexual desire, or the easy affection that came from its mutual satisfaction -- even, at times, from its friendly mutual recognition. This was the madness of infatuation, capable of suspending reason, of destroying lives. His sudden involuntary obsession with Lydia was only made more intense by the improbability of its ever being fulfilled without unhappy consequences. If they were to be together for more than the ship's few brief weeks on Mingulay, one or the other of them would be separated by light-years and lifetimes from all they had hitherto held dear.

Fleeting sexual liaisons between unattached starfarers and locals were to be expected and were, indeed, welcomed on both sides for the new genes thus exchanged. Every visit resulted in a small flurry of pregnancies, and even temporarily broken hearts. The real heart-breaker, the exclusive passion, the mad desire for the one and only -- that was neither encouraged nor frequent. But it was what he felt.

Last night he had not told Lydia how he felt. But she must know! They had talked and talked and talked, until they'd noticed how their quiet voices echoed, and they'd looked around and found themselves among the last few people in the hall. And, just before she turned to leave, she'd placed her hands in his, as she had done during the dance; then danced away.

She sat on a bench against the seaward wall of one of the lower levels of the castle, which faced onto a walled garden: a green lawn surrounded by beds in which rhododendron, hydrangea, and dwarf pine ran riot. Honeysuckle and ivy had long since struck their tiny pitons in that wall of the castle and clawed their way to near its summit. Her eyes half-closed against the distant dazzle and persistent breeze, she gazed out at the early-afternoon sea in whose choppy water her family's starship did not float, but hovered, the humming energies of its engines sending visible patterns of distortion across the surrounding surface. Lighters on the sea, gravity skiffs in the air, hurried to and fro, loading or unloading; invisible from this angle and distance, larger submarine vehicles would be doing the same, transacting the starship's real business, which was between the krakens -- the trade of saurs and humans being in every sense superficial by comparison.

Gregor approached her from the side, across the grass, enjoying the unguarded moment before she noticed him. Her hair was blown about her face in a breeze to which her knee-length dress, pleated and folded to a sculpted shell of dark-blue fabric, was apparently impervious. As he came into her peripheral vision she turned her head sharply, saw him and stood up, smiling. He stopped a few feet away, not wanting to stop; wanting to walk right into her.

"Good afternoon," she said.

"Good afternoon," said Gregor.

They stood regarding each other for a moment.

"Would you like to take me for a walk?" she asked.

"Good idea," he said, mentally cursing the banality of his words.

They strolled across the grass, toward the far right corner of the garden where a gate opened on empty air. In the sunlight her hair, so wavy it was slightly frizzy, looked different, as did her skin, in endless fascinating ways. The scent that drifted from within the wide high fold of her dress's collar competed with that of the garden's flora: there was something of the animal as well as of the plant in it.

At the top of the stairway she stopped in front of him, looking down at the rough grass of the headland twenty meters below. The steps were of narrow stone, worn and wet, and they descended in one long, steady flight down the outer wall. She put a hand on the handrail and tested it gingerly.

"It's safe," Gregor assured her.

"It looks like an afterthought."

"It is. Bolted on thousands of years after the stairs." He shrugged. "Which themselves are an addition to the original structure. When they were built, safety wasn't a feature." He gestured at the wall's overhang, now a little above their line of sight. "See the slots along there, where the light comes through? For oil. The steps must have been convenient, maybe, for whoever was in the castle, and a death-trap for any attacker who was tempted to use them."

"That's encouraging."

"I'll go first," he said. He stepped forward and held out one hand. She took it, and blushed and looked down.

One hand on the rail and one holding hers behind him, he began the descent. Her shoes were flat and flexible, made of something that wasn't leather and that gripped -- as a few quick backward glances showed -- better than his did.

About halfway down, something huge and white hurtled hooting out of the wall a meter in front of his face. His involuntary backward jerk slammed the back of his head into Lydia's belly. Their yells and grabbing and stumbling were simultaneous.

The perilous moment passed. He looked up at Lydia's pale face. His own was burning. They each let go of the parts of the other's body they had grabbed.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes ... " she said. Her voice shook a little. "What the hells was that?"

He pointed. A few tens of meters out on the air, a white shape with a meter-long wingspan and trailing black claws circled on the updraughts. As it turned, its big binocular eyes seemed to be looking at him.

"Nightbat," he said. "They hunt small nocturnal mammals."

He turned, noticing the dark hollow between blocks from which it had emerged. Faint, indignant noises came from within.

"Wow," he said, awed despite everything. "A nest."

"Could we look at it?"

He stared up at her, impressed, and shook his head.

"No, sorry. The parent might get
really
annoyed. And we don't want that."

She looked over at the wheeling, watchful predator, then back at him with what seemed genuine regret. "No," she said, "I suppose it would be unwise."

She held his hand more tightly until they reached the ground. He didn't let go of it as he turned to face her; he reached out his other hand, and she took it.

"That was exciting," she said with a laugh. "Let's not do it again."

"Sorry about -- "

"No, that's all right. You couldn't have known about the nest."

"I didn't. It's years since I've been down these stairs."

Lydia grinned and let go of his hands, shaded her eyes and looked up at the wall looming above them. The nightbat had returned to its nest; around the walls flocks of much smaller bats, with long, sharp wings, swooped and soared with twittering cries, catching insects on the fly.

"They're called swallers," Gregor said. Passing clouds gave him the sensation that the wall was toppling. He looked away, at her still upturned face and the tender flutter in her throat.

"It's an amazing thing," she said. "This castle." She leaned forward and stretched up a hand to the upper edge of the lowest row of blocks. "So huge, so ... pre-human. But so human too."

"Built by giants," Gregor agreed.

He and Lydia, by unspoken consent, started walking along the path that led up the headland a few hundred meters to skirt the clifftops. "Do you have such keeps on Nova Babylonia?"

"Nova Terra," she corrected him. "Yes, some, on wild shores like this. The city -- some of the old temples are like this, but we know they were built by human beings who wanted to feel small."

"Oh." He hadn't thought of that. "What are the gods in the old temples like?"

She shivered suddenly. "I was taken to one, when I was a child, for education. A great empty space, gloomy, lit by oil-lamps with a heavy scent. Sandstone statues in niches, as high as that wall -- twenty, thirty meters. But these were of great kings and winged cherubim, not gods. The statue of the god was at the north end of the temple, and it was quite small, like a boulder about as high as a man. It was carved -- carved! -- from an iron meteorite. It's hard to remember the shape but it was very, very ugly and it seemed to be full of eyes. Not human or animal eyes. It's hard to explain why, but I knew they were eyes. And what looked like rust on it was ancient tracks of blood."