Cosmonaut Keep (18 page)

"Yes, that's it," she said. "To look smart for the trader."
And in front of his daughter.
"You never know, he could be thinking of investing."

"Or be willing to share knowledge," said the saur, rather primly. "We have much to learn about the oceans of the other worlds."

"There is that," she said listlessly.

Salasso's head rocked a little. He might have been insensitive to the nuances of human facial expressions but he was quick to pick up tones of voice.

"You are troubled," he said.

"It's nothing I can explain."

"You mean you would not expect me to understand. I think I would." The saur's huge eyes looked down at the floor for a moment, then back at her. "We have such troubles ourselves. But they are more long-lasting."

She stared. This was the closest the saur had ever come to a statement about his personal life, or about relationships within his species.

Then his narrow shoulders shrugged, and he added, "Perhaps that makes it too different to discuss with profit."

Before she could think of anything more to say, the outside door banged open and voices, then footsteps, approached. Gregor opened the lab's spring-loaded door and held it while the trader and his daughter walked in past him. They wore jackets and jumpers and jeans, as though just off a boat. The sight of how Lydia carried this off made Elizabeth feel simultaneously dowdy and overdressed.

De Tenebre's broad freckled face smiled, his voice boomed.

"Good morning," he said, sticking out a hand. "I believe we met at the party."

"How do you do."

"And this is my daughter, Lydia. I don't believe you've been introduced. Elizabeth Harkness."

Good memory for names. She shook Lydia's hand as lightly as possible. At the same time de Tenebre said, or sang, something that made Salasso almost bound forward and bow over his hand, with a response that sounded like the same word/tones, but faster. After a further such exchange, Salasso nodded and said, "I'm honored to meet you."

"And I you."

Looking pleased with himself at his polyglot tour de force, the trader stepped back a little and looked up at the drawings on the walls and around at the tanks and trays and equipment.

"Interesting," he said. "Fascinating. I've seen something like this back home ... " He sucked a lip and snapped his fingers a few times. "Ah yes, the Maritime Museum! Remember it, Lydia?"

"Oh yes," she said. "You took me there when I was small. There was this huge glass case, and inside it was a copy of the brain and nervous system of a kraken, done in black glass. It
did
look like that drawing, but bigger."

"Gods above," said Salasso, "somebody had dissected a
Teuthys!"

"I believe it was a dead one, washed up on a beach," said de Tenebre, still gazing around. "The scientists managed to preserve it before it had time to decay, and later dissolved it in some fluid that left the nerves and brain intact, and dyed them, and made a resin cast, and then drew out a model in glass. Most ingenious technique. That was a few hundred years ago even then, of course."

"Of course," Elizabeth echoed, unimpressed. "And what did they learn from it?"

"Oh, nothing much, dear lady. Very much a natural-history approach back then. Observation and speculation. The experimental method hadn't yet quite caught on. Still ... "

His smile traveled from Elizabeth to Lydia. "It gave my little girl an interest in natural history which she still keeps up."

I bet she does,
Elizabeth thought.
I bet she collects
butterflies,
and
flowers,
and
feathers
!

"It
was
interesting," said Lydia. "That enormous, complicated brain, so different from our own, with its nerve-trunks thick as ropes, like roots sprouting from a bole. Of course the museum was absolutely stacked with interesting creatures, but," she laughed, "it was the brain that made me think."

"What did it make you think about?" It was all she could do to keep the poison out of her voice.

"Languages," said Lydia. "Is the cephalopod mode of communication via chromatophore display something intrinsic to their neural anatomy? Does it vary within the species like human languages? Is it abstractly symbolic or is it fundamentally ideographic and quasi-pictorial? How is translation possible between it and the verbal and gestural languages of hominids and saurs? That sort of thing."

"Ah." This minimally communicative noise was all Elizabeth could come out with.

"Profound questions," said Salasso. "Our approach to such problems is modest and, as your father suggests, experimental."

"Surely
you're
not cutting up krakens?" de Tenebre asked.

"Gods, no," said Gregor, touching Lydia's elbow and urging her in the direction of a lab bench. "We cut up innocent little squids."

"Aha!" said de Tenebre. "On the hypothesis of common descent! Well, you could say it's a start."

"You could," said Salasso. There was some taut vibration in his tone. "But ... common descent is not a
hypothesis.
It is an observation."

De Tenebre had started to amble along the side of the room, looking up at the diagrams like a visitor in an art gallery who knows what he likes.

"To your species, perhaps, Salasso," he bantered. "To mine, however, it will remain a hypothesis until we start living as long as you do."

Salasso gave a tinny peal of saur laughter -- whether out of genuine amusement or obsequiousness, Elizabeth couldn't tell. Amusement, she guessed. Flattery was not a saur vice. Salasso joined the trader and began earnestly pointing out salient or problematic features of the neural mapping. Gregor and Lydia were already leaning over a preparation on the bench, heads almost touching, talking quietly.

Elizabeth was reminded of how she and Gregor had met. In an undergraduate laboratory demonstration, where the students were randomly assigned in pairs to carry out a classic exercise: the dogfish cranial dissection. The fish stank dreadfully, you had to use great dollops of skin cream and wear rubber gloves if you didn't want to smell of dead shark for a week. The guy beside her had gallantly volunteered to do the actual cutting, letting her concentrate on sketching the brain and optic nerves and eyeballs which were the object of the exercise. She remembered his big fingers gripping the scalpel, the precise and confident way he'd slit through the cartilaginous skull and laid it open, his knowledgeable comments. This wasn't the first dogfish he'd had a good look at: he'd cut them up -- for bait, and for curiosity -- on the deck of his father's boat.

They'd barely looked at each other -- well, he'd barely looked at her, and, after the first few sidelong glances, she'd hardly dared look at him -- and that apparent, outward-directed, easy camaraderie had set the tone for their relationship ever since.

She walked briskly to another bench and set to work recalibrating an electrode reader, a tedious, finicky job that had to be repeated every morning, because of overnight changes in temperature and humidity. It absorbed her, letting her tune out Gregor and Lydia's lighthearted chat. The saur and the trader continued their sightseeing stroll around the lab; she could overhear their conversation slide back and forth between English and Trade Latin, and fragments of the saurian speech. She wasn't offended that de Tenebre had chosen Salasso to speak for the team's work; the saur's superior intelligence and honesty would make him, as any trader as experienced as this one was sure to know, unlikely to bullshit. (Salasso had once explained to her, with perfect aplomb, that the qualities of intelligence and honesty were linked: with sufficient intelligence one could see the ramifying consequences of a lie, the sheer cost in mental processing-power of sustaining it, and draw back from it. "Perhaps this relationship does not hold for the hominidae," he'd added, with wounding tact.)

A silence made her look up. The trader stood on his own at the front like a lecturer, Salasso off to one side, Lydia and Gregor still sitting together.

"Well, my friends," de Tenebre began, "this has been most interesting. Fascinating. I have to say it's the most advanced biological research I've come across. I'm sure your ancestors surpassed it, but mine never did. Nor have my contemporaries." He smiled disarmingly. "Unless the academies of Nova Babylonia have shaken up their approach in the past century, of course!"

He stalked to a table and propped himself on the edge of it, leaning forward confidentially.

"Now, I'm a practical man, and I have no idea what practical use this research might serve. But I have no doubt that by the time I return here, some useful applications -- in medicine, in industry, in the gods-know-what -- will have come out of it. Possibly even in calculating -- I understand that the Cosmonaut the lord Cairns is interested in something he calls 'neural nets,' and has been encouraging your work to that end."

Gregor glanced back over his shoulder at Elizabeth, raising his eyebrows for half a second. She allowed herself an almost imperceptible shrug and shake of the head. Salasso, she noticed, had chosen this moment to gaze out of the window.

If de Tenebre observed this brief byplay he gave no sign of it, continuing: "It doesn't matter. What matters is that there'll be money to be made from it, and I'd be delighted to put some money into it now for some share in the returns later."

"Thank you," Elizabeth said, before anyone else could speak. "We would be very interested in that. I believe the next step would be to discuss your proposed investment with the syndics."

Salasso nodded vigorously; Gregor turned around again, still looking puzzled, but pleased. Then he turned back and thanked the trader for his confidence.

"Good," said de Tenebre. "Naturally there are details to be worked out, questions of intellectual property -- information wants to be paid, and so forth. And you'll want to ensure that you and your successors don't have their hands tied, about what lines of research to pursue." He held up his hands, palms open. "None of that should be a problem -- I really want and expect both sides to benefit. My legal adviser has a standard contract, and we've never had any complaints."

"That's all absolutely fine by us," Gregor said, sounding cautious. "We'd like to be involved in any discussion, as well."

"Of course. But, seriously, if we draw it up properly none of this will affect what you do -- you'll just have more resources to do it with, and in a hundred years you or your successors will be paying me a very reasonable portion of whatever gains may be made from it."

Gregor stood up and shook de Tenebre's hand; Salasso and, after a moment, Elizabeth did the same.

"Great, great," said the trader. He took a watch from his pocket and glanced at it. "Well, I'm sure you have work to do -- and so have I. Some of my servants are busy up at the university, buying large quantities of books and instruments. We're moving on the day after tomorrow, down to New Lisbon -- turns out the meat market's earlier than usual this year. I'll see my adviser this evening, and -- "

Lydia sprang up from her seat at the bench, with a loud sob and a sniff, and ran from the room.

"Excuse me," said Gregor, and disappeared after her.

De Tenebre stood looking at the swinging door for a few seconds. Then, flushed and frowning, he stalked out.

Gregor found her outside the main door, facing into a niche in the rough-cast wall, her arm across her eyes.

He put his arm around her shoulder and turned her around. She buried her tear-streaked face in his shoulder and shook for a minute.

"I knew we didn't have much time," she said, muffled and sniffling, "but this isn't
fair."

He heard the door open, and her father's heavy, hurrying footsteps stop behind him.

"Oh, in the name of Zeus!" said de Tenebre. "Please. Lydia. Stop crying and come and sit down and let's talk about ... whatever this is about."

Outside the lab-blocks was an area of bolted-down wooden tables and benches, facing the shore, buffeted by swirls of air where the prevailing wind hit the walls and so barely used for its intended purpose of open-air eating. They made their way to a table, Gregor and Lydia sitting at one side and de Tenebre diagonally across from them. At length the girl's shoulders stopped shuddering and she leaned forward, elbows on the table, propping her face and staring at her father.

"We
can't
just leave in two days!" she said.

He scratched the back of his neck.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I can see what's happened. I can't say I really blame either of you. I'm a reasonable man, and I do have your interests at heart. Especially you, Lydia, you're my daughter. I wouldn't do anything to hurt you, you know that." He gave Gregor a dark look. "And I won't
let
anyone hurt you either. I hope this man has not been giving -- or taking -- any promises."

"No!" they both said, in indignant unison.

The merchant let out a long sigh. "Well, that's not so bad. Hearts mend but words don't, eh?"

The flippant, philistine saying shocked Gregor. He tried to hold back his temper, which he knew would do nobody any good. By this time Lydia had an arm around him, too, and was holding tight. It emboldened him to speak.

"I love her," he said. "I could love her forever."

Lydia's arm tightened around him, and she smiled at him.

"No doubt you feel that way," said de Tenebre, with a sort of cool sympathy. "And believe me, I understand. But -- I can't let that affect my actions. We
must
leave." He sighed. "And I have other appointments today."

The early sun slanted across them, the breeze off the sea tugged at them. Not far across the water, the great ship's fields crackled and hummed. Lydia looked down, flicked flakes of pebble-dash from her sleeve, scowled and sniffed.

"Couldn't I stay for a while?" she said. "I could join you in New Lisbon. They have air transport here, after all!"

"Oh, Lydia," said her father, with a mixture of impatience and tenderness. "I wouldn't trust one of these gasbags or kites with a servant, let alone with you. Leaving aside accidents, they're unreliable and unpunctual."