Cosmonaut Keep (3 page)

Gregor leaned across and stroked the dry, warm skin of the saur's face. No response was forthcoming.

"He's offline," he remarked.

"Another pint while we wait?" Elizabeth asked.

"Aye, thanks."

No time, or a long time, seemed to pass before she returned.

"Do you think he meant that literally?" she asked, as he settled in again. The saur's head, its great eyes still open, suddenly lolled sideways against her shoulder. She patted it. "Well, that's me here for the duration!"

"About twenty minutes, I reckon," Gregor said abstractedly. "Urn, how could he not have meant it literally?"

Elizabeth leaned forward on one elbow, careful not to disturb Salasso, gazing with what seemed like half-stoned fixity into Gre-gor's eyes. "You know. Metaphorically. Might be that their families, or lines, or whatever, know each other from way back." She laughed. "Do you really think our friend here is that old? He doesn't
act
like it."

"We all know the saurs live a long time."

"Supposedly."

Gregor looked straight back at her, narrow-eyed. "The saurs say it, and I've no reason to doubt it."

Elizabeth nodded slowly. "Aye, well, sometimes I wonder if the saurs are ... ancient people. That they are what people become, if they live long enough."

Gregor laughed. "It's a nice idea. But the saurs, they're obviously reptilian -- or saurian, if you want to be exact!"

"And so? The reptilian genes could still be in us, and only expressed much later in life than people normally live."

"You might have a point there," Gregor conceded, not entertaining the idea for a second. "Nobody's ever seen a saur dissected, after all, or even a picture of a saur skeleton."

He shook the last of the crumbled leaf into Salasso's ornate pipe. That moment when saurs got well and truly whacked by the hemp was the only time they'd open up for a few seconds, and they'd let slip weird things then. But that might just be the drug talking.

"Has anyone ever asked for one?" Elizabeth wondered aloud.

Gregor shook his head. "And I'll lay good money Salasso won't answer any questions we ask him when he comes back to the land of the living."

"Hmm, I wouldn't even try. He'd be touchy about it."

"There you go."

This was an old subject. The saurs' individualism and prickly sense of privacy made humans look like some kind of garrulous, gossiping animal that hunted in packs. They might all look the same to a casual or hostile eye -- though here, Gregor had found, familiarity made their distinctions apparent -- but their personalities were unpredictably diverse. The few traits they shared included a ravenous thirst for knowledge and a great reluctance to divulge any. Their language, their sexuality, their social relationships, their politics and philosophies -- if any -- were as mysterious as they must have been to the first terrified savage they'd encountered, many millennia back in humanity's history.

"Well," Gregor said, lighting up, "the least we can do is smoke the last of his weed. He sure won't be needing it."

"Hmm." Elizabeth puffed quickly and returned the pipe. "No more for me, thanks. I want to keep my head clear to write up some notes."

Gods in orbit, his colleague was beginning to look attractive as her merry eyes stared with fathomless pupils into his mind, even though her face and frame were a little more ... angular than he usually took to in a woman. That girl Peden at the bar -- now, she was quite something ...

Elizabeth laughed, and Gregor had a sudden suspicion, sobering as a cold wave over the deck, that he'd actually said what he'd just been thinking ... but no, his dry lips were still stuck to the stem of the pipe.

He licked his lips, overcome by another effect of the weed: sudden hunger. "What?"

"The way you look, Gregor, I wouldn't advise you to bother writing any notes tonight. They won't make much sense in the morning."

Her voice, or the vibration of her laughter, made Salasso stir and sit abruptly upright, blinking hard and looking around. Elizabeth stroked his hand, lightly grasped Gregor's for a moment of what he took to be stoned affection, and rose.

"Good night, chaps," she said, and was gone before Gregor could ask her if she had any plans to
eat.

2

____________

Resident Alien

I wake with my ears ringing and a light flashing in my right eye. It takes a licked forefinger to ungum my eyelid enough for the two deliberate blinks that put the incoming video on hold. Then I tug at my left earlobe to take the audio call.

"Yes?" I say testily, sitting up. It's some ungodly hour like eleven in the morning. The bed's a mess and the whisky I incautiously drank while listening to music after coming home from the pub last night is making my head ache.

As soon as I hear the coins drop I know it's trouble. England is the only place outside of sub-Saharan Africa that still has coin-operated payphones. My friends use them not because they aren't bugged -- they bloody are -- but to signal an unspoken message: Yes, trouble.

"Hi, Matt?" says a familiar American voice. "It's Jadey. Can you meet me at the Market? Say around five?"

Jadey's our local Yank. She has resident-alien status as an exchange student, or something, but spends most of her time running ops for the resistance down south. I've never been sure quite who she really works for, but I've always been happy to modify the software for the hardware fixes she takes with her on visits to London. My little hack for the face-recognition neural net was a rush job, but, like Jadey said, it beats balaclavas.

"Yeah, sure," I say, trying to sound casual. I have a bit of a thing about Jadey; hopeless, given who she probably is and what she probably does, and anyway she's away a lot.

"See you there," she says. The money runs out in a dribble of
bleep.

I blink my eye again and patch the other call over to the wall-screen. I peel the phone from my cheek, annoyed that I fell asleep with it on, throw it in the trash and look at the screen. It's an offer from one of the agencies, and I check it out while scratching absently at the weal the phone left.

It looks like another quick and dirty contract job for the European Space Agency; it'll involve digging down several levels of emulation running on top of each other to find a bug in the underlying operating system; which, knowing my luck, will probably turn out to be MS-DOS. I'll have to rope in an old programmer for that, preferably one who hasn't been a paid-up lifelong member of the Linux jihad.

I put in a bid -- costing and schedule -- making sure to allocate myself about double the time the job should take to do properly. The agency bounces back instantly with a schedule that'll give me about half the time I'd need to do the job properly. But the fee should cover the code-geek subcontract on top of my other expenses and my own day rate, so I take it.

Software project management has always been like herding cats. So I've been told, anyway, by old managers, between snorts of coke in the trendy snow-bars where they blow their well-hedged pension funds. In their day, though, the cats were human, or at least the kind of guys who are now code-geeks. These days, the
programmers
are programs, as are the systems analysts. My job as a project manager is to assemble a convincing suite of AIs -- not untried, but not too far behind the curve, either -- then let loose marketing strategy webcrawlers to parade their skills before the endless bored beauty-contest of the agencies' business 'bots, take the contracts and ride herd on the whole squabbling mob when a deal comes in.

You need something almost like people skills to do it, but you need to be practically borderline Asperger's syndrome to develop these skills with AI. And when you need code-geeks for the bottom-level stuff, you need to be something of a sociable animal after all. It's a sufficiently rare combination to be worth more than the average wage. I'm an artist, not a technician. It pays the bills.

This contract is for a manufacturing control interface for ESA's asteroid mining project. The asteroid in question is 10049 Lora, a stray piece of junk between the orbits of Earth and Mars, about thirty kilometers long, with a low albedo -- currently, I vaguely remember seeing, swinging by within a few million miles of Earth; detected in the 2020s, reached by an ESA probe about ten years later, and found to be a carbonaceous chondrite. A potential source of immensely useful organics for space settlement, if that ever comes up. ESA's experimental mining station, built around a ship called the
Marshall Titov,
has been running for years, with notoriously poor returns: Think groundnut scheme, think
Mir,
think bottomless pit.

I stare at it for a few minutes, flicking my thumb to tab down the pages, and down: The background info seems excessive, but (I check) it's indexed and searchable. The actual spec is large but manageable. I can handle it, but not before breakfast.

My flat is on the twenty-fifth floor of one of the new Housing Authority high-rises at the top of Leith Walk. The fabric of the place is showing its age -- five years, about the expected half-life of new-tech constructions -- but for four rooms it's cheap. I traverse all of them, ambling from the bedroom through the living-room to the kitchen via the bathroom. It's in the bathroom that I conclude that I look like shit.

In the kitchen I chew a brace of aspirins and drink coffee and crunch my way through a bowl of cereal. I scroll through the morning's news without much attention, skipping channels. I gaze unseeing through the south-facing kitchen window at the castle and the tall towers of the South Bridge. The sky is blue and the clouds are white, whipping across from left to right, east to west. Their steady procession cools my mind.

The project keeps me busy all afternoon. Whenever I need a patch from outside the E.U. -- and let's face it, you do -- the connections turn bumpy. At four-thirty, bug-eyed and sore-jointed from jollying the AIs along, I save the story-so-far to a satellite uplink and hit the street.

Waverley Market was a posh bijou shopping-center until the third week of the Ural-Caspian Oil War, by which time Edinburgh was irretrievably enemy territory. A U.S. cruise missile missed the railhead and took out the eastern end of Princes Street, and with it the Scottish government offices which had probably been the real target all along. These days it's a fine example of the role of the flea market in a Socialist Democracy. I browse the electronics and bio-tech stalls in the late-afternoon, late-summer sunlight, shoulders hunched in a parka -- Scottish Augusts have been a bit chilly since the Gulf Stream downshifted -- and elbows on guard against the crowds of tourists jostling for the bootleg foreign tech. The Edinburgh Festival is still the biggest in the world, and pulls in tourists from all over the E.U.: I see a Siberian woman pounce on a sliver of nerve-driver memory from Brazil, an Italian couple arguing over whether they can afford a Raytheon eyepatch -- months obsolete in America, years ahead of our stuff.

Our stuff ... I can smell it on the wind. New tech, wet tech: bioelectronic manufacture, with its whiff of acetone and alcohol, Edinburgh's familiar technology of brewery and distillery and refinery expanded to produce a whole new range of hardware kit, as cheap and disposable and recyclable as paper. All very nice and sustainable, but the old hard tech of America's fossil/metal economy still has the technical edge.

Jadey finds me with her usual alarming ease. I look up and there she is, leaning over the stall. Cropped blonde hair, blue eyes, heat-exchanger tank top, arm-warmers, and a mil-green nylon pod-skirt. She has one of those girlie versions of a rucksack on her back. Her tired smile matches her London-train drained look.

"Border hassles?" I ask.

She shakes her head as she catches my elbow and begins steering me toward a coffee stall. "Nah, but man, I've had hassles." Talking's safe enough, here; the buzz from the gadgetry on sale jams all but the most dedicated surveillance. Most of the street-cameras and other sensors in Scotland and the rest of the E.U. get regularly fucked over by hackers anyway. The arms race between surveillance and sabotage is Darwinian, a Red Queen's Race in which the hackers are usually a whisker ahead. It's a bit tougher down south, where the authorities use heavier, harder apps and hacking is more effectively suppressed by reverse social engineering. Hence my specialist devices for Jadey.

She says, "The gear didn't work -- "

"What?"

"Not your fault. Something's changed. Most of the cells down there got the old dawn-knock this morning. It's like, shit, all our codes are being cracked or something. I think they're even on to me -- the cops at King's Cross just waved me through with that knowing smile they have."

Jadey lives in the cracks between jurisdictions: U.S.A. and E.U., the Scottish Republic and the Former United Kingdom; within the F.U.K. she plays off the jealousies and incompetences of the contending post-war authorities -- the English, the Russkis, and the blue helmets.

I buy two paper thimbles of espresso and we sit on a bit of broken wall, sipping.

"You mean the resistance is getting smashed as we speak?"

She stares down, fiddles with the drawstring at her skirt's hem, looks up sadly. "That's about the size of it, Matt. I gotta get out."

"Okay," I say, with a pang. "What do you need?"

"New ID. Oh, not a retinal job or anything, just a new passport and history. If they're going for bio checks I'll be picked up before I've had time to fiddle a DNA hack anyway."

"Hey, don't sound so fatalistic. You're depressing me." I jump up. "Tell you what. Let me get you something to eat, then we can hit the Darwin and see what's on offer. I've got a job of my own to check out there, anyway."

"Great," she says. "McDonald's."

"What?"

She glances back, already heading up the path to the street.

"Last place the cops'll come looking for an American."

As we edge through the crowd in the Darwin's Arms I check the nasal readout in my left eye. Thank God for smokeless cigarettes -- they make pheromone analysis a breeze. You try pulling that trick in Turkey, or Azerbaijan, and you get botanical data, not psychological. The atmosphere's oddly tense, with an undercurrent of brittle hilarity. Now that I notice it on the air, I can pick it up in the sound as well. Jadey, walking behind me and leaving a spreading wake of lust (I can see the little red line humping up on the readout), must have caught it too.