Cosmonaut Keep (2 page)

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

He turned around resolutely, taking Margaret along with him, and together they set off down from the castle's heights to meet the bourgeois with a smile. Under his left elbow he held the furled and folded flag, the star-circled banner which he'd lowered, as was his custom, at sunset. Behind him the steel rope clanged on the mast, bare against the windy night.

They descended the spiral stair, down steps a meter and a half wide and about thirty centimeters high, each of whose treads had been worn down over millennia into a terrifyingly deep normal distribution curve, as though the stone itself were sagging. The iron handrail around the central well was only centuries old, and at the right height for human hands; the electric lighting, though dim, was tuned for human eyes.

James and Margaret kept close to the wall as they descended. Margaret went first, clattering and chatting merrily; James followed, half listening, the rest of his attention devoted to the many fossils embedded in the stones of the wall's interior cladding, some of which generations of curious or reverent fingertips of successive species of the castle's occupants had polished to a mahogany sheen. He trailed his own fingers across the fragmentary remains of fish and dragons and sea-monsters and other organisms in a bizarrely Noachic, diluvial conglomerate whose ordering had little to do with their evolutionary succession; as always when he climbed up or down these steps, the line he'd used on his children and grandchildren came to mind: this castle had been built by giants, mined by dwarfs, stormed by goblins, and left to ghosts long before people on Earth had laid so much as one stone upon another.

Sounds and smells echoing or wafting from below intensified as the old couple descended. The arrival of the merchant ship might or might not have been expected, but the keep's staff planned routinely for such a contingency. For this first evening nothing much was expected but hot water, hot food, and a lot of drinking and some kind of bed to stagger off to afterward: merchants just off a ship were usually in no condition for formal negotiations or celebrations. The saurs would require even less.

The exits from the spiral stair went past, their numbers as fixed in James's mind as the numerals on a lift's display. He and Margaret stepped out on the ground floor -- the stair still had many levels to go, down into the rock -- and made their way around several
zigzag
turns of narrow defensive corridor. Antique space-suits stood in artfully placed ambuscade niches.

The corridor opened to the castle's main hall, a cavernous space hung with retrofitted electric lights, its fifteen-meter-high walls covered with carpets and tapestries, oil-paintings of members of the Cosmonaut Families, heads and hides of dinosaurs, and decoratively arranged displays of the light artillery with which these gigantic quarry had been sportingly slain.

The wide doors stood open; the hall's blazing fire and more practical electric radiators did little to repel the chill inward swirl of evening air. The merchants, their saur companions, and their servants were already mingled with the welcoming crowd that had gathered from all quarters of the castle. Mingled, but easily distinguishable: for this evening at least, the castle's occupants -- Cosmonauts and stewards and seneschals and servants -- outdid the merchants in the style and spectacle of their attire. In days to come, the most senior of the Cosmonauts and the richest merchants in Kyohvic would be easily outshone by their visitors' youngest child or lowliest page; their present plebeian appearance, though partly dictated by the necessities of interstellar travel, was for all its apparent casualness part of a protocol -- setting themselves conspicuously below their hosts -- whose invariance James Cairns had observed many times before.

Right now the new arrivals had discarded their protective clothing in a careless heap in the doorway's broad vestibule, and were padding around in woollen socks and likewise warm gear, shaking or kissing hands with all and sundry, smiling and laughing and slapping shoulders. Children scampered and scooted, chased by their own servants, tactfully redirected from the big room's many exits by swiftly posted stewards. Through it all the saurs drifted, their domed heads bobbing in the throng like stray balloons.

Hal Driver, the Security Man, was in the center of the pressing crowd, already deep in hearty converse with a mature, burly man who had "merchant prince" written all over him, albeit he was dressed like a trawlerman. Red hair sprang in a great shock from his head; freckles spattered his broad-cheeked, flat-nosed face; his rich voice boomed above the babble, his asides to Driver now and again dropping to a confidential murmur.

Margaret nudged James with a confidential murmur of her own.

"Didn't take them long to figure out who's in charge here."

"Aren't you going up to the keep?" Elizabeth asked.

Gregor finished hosing the scales and slime off his oilskins and hung them in the locker. "Nah," he said, pulling his boots off. "Time enough for that when they have the big bash. Won't be for a day or two yet." He sat on the low fold-down bench, tugging off his thick socks and stuffing them in the boots, then carefully eased his feet into his leather shoes. "Fancy coming along yourself?"

Elizabeth reddened. "Oh, that's nice of you -- thanks, but I just don't know if I can."

"Well, the invitation's open," Gregor said, oblivious to her momentary embarrassment, and turned to the saur. "How about you?"

The slow-swinging electric light's reflection made tiny arcs in Salasso's black eyes as the saur waited patiently in the converted hold's low narrow doorway. His clothing needed no cleaning or adjustment. Nor, Gregor suddenly realized with a blush of his own, would it need any possibly expensive alternative for social occasions.

He ducked to lace up his shoes as Salasso said he would certainly come along.

"Don't worry about, uh, dressing up," he called after Elizabeth as she stepped up to the deck. "You know what the merchants are like, they wouldn't know what the fashion is here anyway."

"I'll think about it," she told him, not looking back.

Up on deck the three students thanked Renwick, the skipper, who was making the last check of the boat before leaving it for the night. The specimens, safe in their various containers, would keep until the morning, when they'd be hauled off to the Marine Biology Station.

"Pint at the Bailie's?" Elizabeth asked Renwick.

The skipper shook his head. "Nah, I'll have a short with the crew. Last seen heading for the Shipwright, I think. See you tomorrow, folks."

The harbor was so old it might have been natural, but it was merely pre-human. The quarter-mile-long mole was built of the same hard metamorphic rock as the castle's exterior walls, and was reckoned to have been blasted and lifted from the harbor basin in ancient times, either by the brute force and primitive ingenuity of multitudes, or by the laser lances and gravity sleds of visitors from outer space. It formed one curved arm of the harbor's embrace, the other being provided by the headland's cliffs. Beyond it, the rocky outcrops gave way to a long, white sandy beach, which broke up in the distance to tussocked dunes.

Gregor scrambled up the rusty rungs of the ladder and out onto the mole. A few hundred meters across the water, on the harbor's central docks, a small knot of humans and saurs had gathered around the landed skiffs. Gregor glanced at them incuriously and turned to gazing again at the sky as he waited for the others to join him.

The rainbow clouds had dispersed. Gabriel, the evening and morning star, burned like a lamp low in the west, its light outshone by the god standing higher in the sky, and by the auroral flicker of the starship floating on the sea beneath it. High above them all hung the icy gleam of Raphael and the tiny spark of Ariel, its moon; and -- following the ecliptic around to the east -- the bright sickle of the new moon, beyond which Gog and Magog, the ringed gas giants of the outer system, glowered like a monster's eyes.

Crossing the sky from north to south, alone in its polar orbit, deserted for two hundred years, went the old ship from home. To Gregor, tracking it with a rapidly blinking eye, the
Bright Star
seemed a stranger and more evocative sight than all the familiar constellations -- the Musketeer, the Squid, the Angel's Wing, and the rest -- that straddled the sky on either side of the Foamy Wake.

And, ironically, more difficult for humans to reach.

The two humans and the saur walked briskly along the mole and into the waterfront streets of Kyohvic, turning right along a brightlit, cobbled esplanade to the Bailie's Bar, its sign a jolly, pint-quaffing grandee in plumed hat and lace cravat. Inside, it was long, low-ceilinged, its plastered walls decorated with naive murals and shelves and brackets supporting harpoons and stuffed ichthyosaurs; its tables and bar counters half filled with men just off the boats and ships. It was that kind of place, at this time of the evening; later, the sawdust would be swept up, the tables wiped, and a cleaner crowd would pour in from the shows or the eating-houses; but for now it reeked of sweat and fish, yeast and baccy and hemp, its dim light glinting with the glitter of glasses and pots and the glazed, lidded gaze of men relaxing thoughtfully over their long pipes. The regulars recognized the students with a nod and a smile; others, seamen in from another port, frowned at the saur. As Gregor waved Elizabeth and Salasso to a seat and strode to the bar, he heard hissed mutterings about "snakes." He ignored it; the saur himself turned a black, blank glare in that direction; and, out of the corner of his eye, Gregor noticed the most vocal objector getting an urgent word in his ear from one of the barmaids.

Gregor ordered pints for himself and Elizabeth, and a tall billican of hot fish-stock for Salasso. As he waited for the stout to settle and the thin soup to be brought back to the boil, he found himself worrying again about the unerring aim that so often connected his foot with his mouth. The awkwardness, he was sure, came not from the difference between the sexes but from the perhaps greater communicative gulf of class. Elizabeth Harkness was of predominantly local descent, albeit of good family, some of whose members were prominent in the Scoffer heresiarchy; his own ancestry, give or take a good deal of exogamy with the locals, came from the
Bright Star's
crew.

From the bar's mirror behind the bottles his own face scrutinized him: the same thin nose and grim mouth and long black hair swept back from a high hairline that he'd seen in generations of portraits. He felt their presence like a weight on his back.

"That'll be five shillings, Greg."

"Oh!" He blinked and shook his head; with that slight start recognizing the barmaid as Andrea Peden, one of the undergraduate students whose work he'd occasionally supervised. Her rippling auburn hair was loose on her shoulders rather than tied back, and he'd only ever seen her in a lab overall, but still. "Uh, thanks, Peden. And, let's see, an ounce of hemp as well, please." Alcohol was not a saur vice -- it was a physiological difference; they assimilated it without intoxication -- but hemp had definitely taken with the species, centuries ago.

"Another sixpence, then," the girl said. She glanced around. "And we're off-study, so first names, okay, Greg?"

"Ah, sure, Andrea, thanks."

He just knew that if he commented on her working here it would come across as yet another clumsy reminder of the difference between his economic status and that of most other students, so he forbore.

Back at the table he raised his glass soberly to Elizabeth as Salasso nodded almost imperceptibly at both of them and took from a thigh pocket a thin aluminum tube and a long-stemmed bone pipe, its bowl elaborately carved. The saur sucked up fish-stock through the tube and began filling the pipe from the paper twist.

"Hah!" he sighed after a minute, his mouth opening, snakelike, suprisingly wide and showing little fangs. Gregor winced slightly at the momentary waft of carnivore breath. A thin brass rectangle appeared between Salasso's long fingers like a conjuring trick, and he applied its faint flame to the tamped hemp and puffed. "Hah! That's better!"

"Any idea where the ship's from?" Elizabeth asked, as though Gregor might know. But it was Salasso who answered.

"Nova Babylonia," he said, and inhaled on the pipe. His lashless eyelids made a rare blink, and his third eyelid -- the nictitating membrane -- was flickering more rapidly than usual. "Of the fleet of the family Tenebre." His voice was reedy and harsh. He passed the pipe to Elizabeth.

"Recognize it, do you?" she asked, puffing for politeness' sake.

Gregor was a little disappointed by her seizing on this point. To hell with how the saur knew about it, the ship's origin was what mattered. Ships from Nova Babylonia were rare. From his twenty years, he could recall two such visits.

"Yesss," said Salasso, leaning his narrow shoulders against the seat's tall back. He drew on the metal straw again, hot colors briefly flowing in the gray-green skin of his cheeks. "I have seen that ship ... many times."

Elizabeth gave Gregor a skeptical look as she handed over the pipe. Gregor returned her a warning glance and just nodded at Salasso, keeping his face carefully expressionless as he sucked the last vile embers of the hemp. He tapped them out on the floor and began refilling the pipe.

"So you might know some of the shore crew?" he asked.

Salasso's shoulders lifted. "It is very possible. If so, I'll find out when I go to the reception at the castle." His great eyes closed for a moment. "Of the family Tenebre, perhaps a few. The human generations pass."

Gregor struck a match on his boot and relit, the cannabis rush roaring in his ears like a burn in spate. He heard Elizabeth's light laugh.

"This I have to see!" she said. "For this, I would come to your party as I am, rags and holes and boots and all!"

"Yeah, you do that," he said warmly. "Come as a scientist."

"Oh, thanks," said Elizabeth indignantly, then giggled. Gregor returned the pipe to the saur, who smoked the rest of it but said no more, his body still, his mind gliding into a typically saurian trance. The two humans watched in silence for a couple of minutes, supping at their pints until the pipe clattered from Salasso's fingers onto the table.