Cosmonaut Keep (23 page)

"I had forgotten," he said. "No human has been here before."

He beckoned, and they followed him to where three saurs sat on a low hillock a little way off the path. Two were of normal height, one in black pajamas, the other in a loose robe. The third, the two-foot-high one kneeling on the grass gazing intently at a wheeled wooden box it pushed along with both hands, was covered in what Gregor at first took to be a fluffy yellow one-piece outfit.

Then he saw how the covering became sparser at the nape, and realized that it was all the infant's own downy feathers. Elizabeth saw it at the same moment and immediately squatted down a couple of meters away from the infant, looking at it intently. Salasso was talking to the adults; Gregor hung back, not wanting to scare anyone. His own knees were shaking. No human had seen a saur infant before, not even in a photograph. He'd heard half-joking, edgy speculations that saur infants hatched from eggs in hot sand and lived like beasts, unparented until they proved their capacity to survive; that saurs didn't even have offspring, that they were as sterile as they were ancient; that they were all constructed like robots by the manufacturing plant ...

He wished he'd thought to bring a camera, to document the evidence of this close encounter.

The child turned to look at Elizabeth, then stood up. The head was more disproportionately large than that of a human baby. Upon some reassuring sounds from the adults, the young saur ran across the grass and tumbled into Elizabeth's arms and lap. She crooned over it, tickling and stroking; it reached up its clawed fingers to her hair and whistled.

"Her name is Blathora," said Salasso. "She is two years old."

"She's just so cute," said Elizabeth. "Super cute. Such big eyes. Aren't you just the sweetest thing. Wow. What a tiny mouth."

"Sharp teeth," warned Salasso, as Elizabeth's fingers teased around the high cheekbones. "And a taste for mammal blood."

"Oh." She drew back a little. "Gregor? Do you want to hold her?"

"Oh yes."

Dandling the saurian child, drowning in black pools deep as the past of her species, Gregor had one of those moments when time stops. The rarity of the moment, the privilege, stunned him. How many human parents would trust their baby to the hands of even another hominid, to one of the tall hairy men of the high snows? He found himself responding to the saurs' trust, in a rush of affection and protective feeling toward this small but significant life.

He returned Blathora to the adults, and found that she'd left a spot of snotty, chalky guano on his thigh.

"Where are we going?" Gregor asked, after half an hour of walking on the floor of the city.

Salasso looked back.

"This a very safe area, outside the industrial processes. Like a park, but safer. It's used for relaxation, play, and teaching. I expect to meet one of my old teachers."

"Teachers!"

"Why do you laugh?"

"It's funny to think of saurs having teachers."

"Did you think we hatch knowing everything?"

"Some people do think that," said Elizabeth. "Seriously."

"No, it isn't that, it's just -- " Gregor shrugged. "I suppose I imagined you taught by machines, or something."

"Machines!" Salasso hooted. He paused to let them both walk beside him, and continued in a lower tone:

"We have a policy, an agreement. It is not enforced, but ... nearly all of us see the wisdom of it -- not to share much information with you, and especially not about ourselves. We are a very private people, and cautious. But when I hear things like this, I wish we could be more forthcoming."

He hissed through his teeth, a sigh. "But we cannot. Our societies would become less distinct, and the stronger one would absorb the weaker."

Gregor looked around and upward yet again at the biotechnological complex, shining and alien. Spectacular though it was, it held no attraction for him.

"I don't think you need worry about us being absorbed," he said.

"That," said Salasso, "is not what we worry about."

Oh.

"How many people are here?" Elizabeth asked.

"Saurs?"

"Yes. In Saur City One."

Salasso shrugged and waved his arms. He was walking ahead of them again, pressing on, eager. The shadows had shortened, and the light and heat become more intense.

"A million or so. At a guess. We do not number each other."

"Hm," said Elizabeth. She glanced from side to side as she walked, her lips moving, her thumbs moving along the tips of her fingers.

"What are you doing?" Gregor asked, in a low voice.

"Population stats." She looked sidelong at him. "There seem to be a lot of kids ... " She laughed. "Whatever -- chicks? squabs? -- anyway ... young saurs about. But if you actually count them, as in per hectare, and see how each of them is getting serious adult attention ... it looks like a very low reproduction rate. High K/R strategy."

"Goes with the long life," said Gregor lightly.

Elizabeth shook her head firmly. "No! Not necessarily. They're limiting their population, maybe keeping it just ticking over. No growth."

"While we -- "

She smiled crookedly. "Us humans. Yes. How many cousins do you have?"

He waggled his fingers in front of her. "I'd have to take my boots off to count them, unless you have a clicker."

Salasso stopped walking and looked back. His mouth stretched to the sides.

"There she is!" he cried, pointing. Fifty meters away, a saur in a long blue coat was sitting on a cork chair in front of a dozen smaller and younger people, in the shade of a metallic umbrella.

Then he did something they'd never seen him do before. He ran to the adult saur, who stood up and embraced him.

"Gods above," said Gregor. "The little bugger has feelings."

"I knew
that"
said Elizabeth.

Something in her tone made Gregor turn to her, but she was looking away. Salasso waved to them and they joined him.

Up close, neither the greater age nor different sex of the other saur were apparent, at least to them. The features were as smooth as Salasso's, the body -- naked where the coat fell open -- as neutral and neuter in its external anatomy as that of the male, whom they had once or twice seen swimming, very badly.

"My friends, meet Athranal, my venerable teacher," said Salasso.

They introduced themselves.

"Good day to you," she said, in a stilted, sibilant Trade Latin. "We welcome you here."

"We are honored to meet you."

She laughed, wheezily, for the first time sounding old.

"Indeed you are. I was young when this tongue was new."

Gregor felt his nape hairs prickle. They suddenly felt as stiff as the pinfeathers of the infant saur he'd played with. He preferred to think he'd misunderstood, or that her grasp of the language was rusty. He nodded politely.

"We seek our own ... old folk."

"So my best pupil has told me," she said. She laid a hand on Salasso's shoulder. "Salasso, Salasso! How good to see you again!"

Turning to the younger saurs -- adolescent, Gregor guessed -- who were standing politely back, she launched into a declamation in the saurian speech which had the pupils sinking to their haunches and staring at Salasso, who after a time squirmed his shoulders and looked down. Had he learned the body language of embarrassment from humanity? Gregor wondered.

After about five minutes, Athranal stopped. Her pupils thumped the ground with their feet.

"And so we say good-bye," she concluded, clapping Salasso's back and turning to the others.

"Good-bye, and good fortune," said Salasso.

Gregor and Elizabeth stumbled the same salutation.

"We must go," said Salasso.

He almost grabbed them, almost swept them up in his arms as he shot past them, then sprinted to the base of the nearest shaft without a backward glance. With one hurried look over his shoulder at the old teacher, now placidly returning to her seat, Gregor raced after the saur, with Elizabeth's footsteps thudding on the turf behind him.

They tumbled over each other into a lift. The door slithered shut. Their knees buckled as it ascended, then they were pulled sideways as it accelerated horizontally.

"What's going on?" Elizabeth asked. "Why didn't you wait for her to tell you?"

"She told me," said Salasso. His breathing had become deep and rapid. "Into that ... oration, she worked an account of where they are. The old crew. Not so that the young ones would understand, but I understood."

"How?"

"A code." The lift swung around some corner, and shot upward again. "Something like what you would call an acrostic."

"A what?"

"Initials of words, spelling out a word," Elizabeth explained.

"Many words," said Salasso.

"You did all that in your head?" asked Gregor. "And she must have -- "

"Improvised it on the spot. She is clever."

"Why not just tell you straight-out?"

Salasso passed a forearm across his forehead, in a curiously inhuman gesture, like a fly cleaning its eyes.

"If the children understood it, they might tell their parents, and some might think that the gods would not approve."

Well, that clears that up,
thought Gregor.

"And where are they?" he asked.

"In and around New Lisbon," said Salasso. "At the dinosaur drive and the meat market. We must catch the flight. There is not another for days, and by then it will be over."

The lift slammed and buffeted them and spat them out into the circular hall. They raced through, barely remembering to snatch up their bags, and out onto the platform just in time to see the airship vanish behind the most distant of the city's towers.

12

____________

Orbital Commie Hell

The station gleefully informed us as he led us through its crowded, cluttered spaces, was no longer called the
Marshall Titov.
It was called (deep breath)
The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star;
after a volume of some obscure biography of Trotsky, I gathered. I wanted to suggest that
The Prophet Stoned
would have been snappier as well as more apt -- the people we passed were certainly high on something, maybe the pervasive acetone and alcohol vapors of degrading wet-tech -- but I forbore.

I began to get the hang of moving in microgravity, with the occasional shove from Camila to correct my mistakes. Beyond the heavy rubber-sealed door of the receiving area the smells of the place were stronger and more various. The air-circulation system made a lot of white noise but didn't seem to make the air any fresher. Hardly a light source was without its huddle of hydroponics. Rabbits and chickens -- the mammals better pre-adapted to free fall than the birds, oddly -- floated or dived in airy spaces fenced off with fine plastic netting that contained their droppings but not their odor. People in grubby fatigues or quirky, scant selections of clothing and tools worked at all angles in every available cranny. As they glanced up -- or down, or across -- at us, they looked pleased enough to see us but returned without reluctance to their work.

At a corner of two corridors Camila took advantage of a momentary collision and entanglement to ask me, sharply under her breath, "Why aren't they
saying
anything to us?"

Lemieux glanced back. "Because they don't know who's listening."

"That's us told," Camila muttered, as she pushed me on.

I didn't believe Lemieux's explanation for a moment. These people didn't look as though they were worried about saying something that might be held against them by whoever came out on top of the power struggle. They looked like people who had something better to think about than that.

Driver looked much as I'd seen him in his announcement, but thinner, with a few days' growth of stubble; eyes bloodshot and sleepless. Patches of his cheeks had been scratched almost raw from the itch of overused wet-tech. He'd angled himself in between a work surface and a wall as though sitting at a desk. A net bag tethered to the surface bulged with crushed smokeless filters and crumpled sets of waste goggles and phones. Shelves of transparent containers, tool-racks, computing equipment, and surveillance gear covered the walls behind him and the ceiling. Postcards of landscapes and seascapes -- almost pornographic in the circumstances -- decorated them.

Lemieux crouched in an upper corner of the inadequate space, watching us at a disconcerting angle. Camila and I looped our arms through some webbing opposite Driver's desk and relaxed in the air.

"Well," Driver said, "I got a warning from Area 51 that a flying saucer was on the way. Kind of amusing. Didn't say why you were coming, though, or who you were." He grimaced. "We've been announcing you as the first American researchers to accept Big Uncle's kind invitation to join us. So who are you really?"

Camila came close to standing to attention.

"Camila Hernandez, test pilot for Nevada Orbital Dynamics. This is Matt Cairns, a systems manager from Scotland who has some information for you. That's all I know."

Colin Driver's attention switched over to me. "Hey, I've seen you on the news somewhere. The defector, right?"

"You could say that."

"Well, what have you got?"

"I've brought back some information you downloaded to ESA," I said. "It's been ramped up into project designs. It'll drop out a complete manufacturing spec, once I've done some more work on it."

"A spec for what?"

I glanced at Camila and Lemieux and then thought, the hell with it, this was something that everybody needed to know.

"You know, for the anti-gravity vehicle and the space-drive."

Camila turned and stared at me.

"The
what?"

Lemieux guffawed, from his simian perch. Driver contained his amusement not much better.

"First, I've heard of it," he said. "You're telling me it came from
here?"

I nodded. "Via the ESA planning-system, yeah."

"Well, it
can't
have," Driver insisted. "Everything -- the legit info to ESA, the disinfo to the, ah, other side -- all went through my desk." He thumped it, in ringing emphasis.