Cosmonaut Keep (7 page)

Along the quay baffled seabats squabbled around the well-protected tanks that Renwick and his crew were already lifting off the deck with a creaking crane and screeching winch. Elizabeth mucked in as best she could, helping to maneuver the tanks and crates onto the department's flatbed truck parked alongside. After a while she glimpsed Gregor hurrying up, and her heart jumped like a fish.

"Good morning," he said. "Sorry I'm late."

"You're hardly that," Elizabeth said. "We were early."

She smiled at him, staring and trying not to, trying not to look too long, hoping that he'd notice that she was looking too long. But he just grinned and nodded and grabbed the rope. His hand brushed hers accidentally as they hauled together; she almost jerked it away.

Things might have been different if he hadn't
grown
on her, if they'd met at some student bash instead of in the lab, if they hadn't worked together and become colleagues and good mates before she'd realized what she really felt for him, and had felt from the beginning. Now she felt completely entangled in that easy friendship and close collaboration, frozen by the fear of losing it in a welter of embarrassment and misunderstanding.

He rode beside her as she drove the flatbed, its electric engine whining under the strain, along the coast road to the marine-biology department on the town's westward and seaward edge. There they turned them over to the keeper of the saltwater aquaria, and headed in to the laboratories to begin another day of the research they shared. The frequent fishing-trips for new specimens were almost a holiday; this was their real work.

Gregor, Elizabeth, and Salasso were cooperating on mapping the nervous system of the squid. Its simple structure, relatively large neurons, and -- to be blunt -- its absence of a hard skeleton made it an ideal laboratory animal for investigating neurophysiology in general, but it was the peculiarities of cephalopod neural morphology that they were concentrating on. The walls were almost papered-over with drawings, diagrams, and readings of pH levels and electrical potentials.

Salasso, as usual, was already there, crouched over a deep glass dish within which a small squid hovered, oblivious to the fine-needle electrode which the saur was slowly bringing to bear.

"Come here, little one," he crooned through barely opened lips. "This is your lucky day."

Tenebre woke beside his number three wife to the dawn's light and the morning chorus of the bats. Somewhere in the roof-space above the ceiling, birds chirruped and scratched as they settled in for their day of roosting sleep. For a few minutes he, like them, huddled in shared warmth, watching his breath fog. The Keep of Aird, like castles everywhere in the known universe, lacked central heating.

Tenebre grunted and rolled out of the low bed, wrapped himself in one of the quilted robes which his hosts had thoughtfully provided, and dragged on the woollen socks he'd discarded the previous night. Thus fortified, he made his way over to the south-facing window -- at least it was glazed, even if not double-glazed -- leaned on the sill, and looked out across the harbor to the town.

Seeing Kyohvic from the skiff had been his first shock here. The daylight did not diminish the surprise it afforded. He stared for a long time at the buildings, sharp in the long shadows and pink light of the autumn dawn. When he'd last seen it, four centuries in its past and five months in his, it had been a straggle of low houses along the shore, a harbor busy with fishing-smacks, and a scatter of farms beyond. The castle itself had been empty, superstitiously avoided. Now the buildings had climbed to five or six stories and spread miles along the sides of the valley; the fishing-boats still crowded the harbor, but they were dwarfed by much-larger sea-ships, tall masts bristling; the fields were laid out in a dense patchwork -- some plowed black, some brown with stubble, others green with the shoots of this spring's winter wheat. At the brow of the hill, airships nudged and bobbed among mooring-pylons, and flying-machines (frighteningly rickety aerial vehicles; to his eyes, little more than motor-powered kites) took off on frivolous or fateful missions.

Tenebre was used to seeing change speeded-up, compressed; it was one of the benefits of life as a merchant -- it gave one a long view of history, the closest, perhaps, that a human mind could come to the millennial perspective of the saur. In forty years of life and five centuries of objective time he'd seen Mingulay's parent colony, Croatan, surge upward and expand from unpromising beginnings; he'd seen Nova Babylonia fallen in flames, and risen from the ashes ... but this was different -- this was something new under the suns.

These people whose hospitality (socially warm, however physically chilly) he was enjoying and enduring, were descended from independent human space explorers -- "Cosmonauts," they called themselves. He relished the word, with a sort of rebellious vainglory in the human species which he'd never before imagined he could feel. In the great chain of being, humanity had a respected but restricted place: restricted not by force but by circumstance.

The gods wheeled in their million-year orbits, indifferent and inviolate in the spaces between the worlds, much as the terrestrial philosopher Epicurus had supposed, and as the poet Lucretius had sung. The krakens plied their trade between the stars, navigating the lightspeed ships. The saurs steered a shorter course, piloting their gravity skiffs and working in their tropical and subtropical biological factories, their
manufacturing plant.

The humans ... ah yes, the humans had a place: inventing and manufacturing, trucking and bartering, farming and fishing, all of it on the surface of land or sea, or as passengers in the older races' craft. The only sentient species with a humbler role were humanity's cousins, the small hominidae digging in the mines and the tall hominidae tending the temperate forests. So it was, in variant proportions, on all the worlds of the Second Sphere, the hundred-light-year radius around Nova Sol. This was the generous limit of the journeys on which the krakens' starships were willing to take humans.

Generous, but still a limit.

Matters were managed very differently on Earth, the home planet; and perhaps on this one, Mingulay, to which humans had come from Earth on their own initiative, and their own ship.

Just before he'd gone to bed, one of his saur crew, Bishlayan, had passed on a piece of information she'd picked up from one of the local saurs. Some of the first crew, the original cosmonauts, were believed to be still alive, somewhere out in the wilds. That ship had brought the secret of long life, as well as of long journeys.
A bright star indeed,
Tenebre thought, turning with a smile to greet the waking mumbles and hungover groans of his third wife. The other two were still asleep beside her.

4

____________

Legacy Systems

Outside, Princes street was heaving with the usual Festival crowd, but they weren't behaving in the usual Festival way. A surprising number of people were actually looking up, like they expected some shining mothership to arrive at any moment. Others stood about talking, or grabbing passersby and spreading the news: the number of people discussing it or watching the skies was increasing by the minute. I hadn't seen anything like this since the revolution, when I was a little kid, when we emerged blinking from the shelters and basements and ruins to greet the Russki troops on the street. I remembered the noise of the jubilant car horns. Now, the susurrus of human voices, of feet and bicycle wheels and trolleybuses, seemed eerily quiet by comparison.

Jadey grabbed my elbow as I poised to cross the street.

"Where you going?"

I jerked my head rightward, indicating. "Waverley -- run your stuff through the station copyshop, then get a shuttle train to the airport?"

"Na-na-na-nah. We gotta think this through. No rush, it's an open ticket, right?"

"Yeah, sure, but the faster you get out -- "

She looked at me sharply. "Hey, who's the expert here? Do I give you programming tips? So, shut up and come with me."

Not much I could say to that. She turned left and we headed down Leith Walk, past the new-tech buildings in the bombed area where I lived and on down to the older part of the street. The crowds were thinner here, the bicycles fewer. Trolleybuses glided down the middle of the carriageway. To the north, the direction we were more or less heading, the sky remained noticeably light: a mere few hundred kilometers poleward, the sun still shone.

After a few minutes' silent hurrying past the software stores and delis and restaurants, Jadey took another left, into one of the side streets in the Broughton area, a canyon of sandstone tenements. Stopped at a door beside a tacky boutique shopfront.

"Won't this place be watched, if you're -- ?"

Another glare. "Like I said."

She thumbed the keypad, peered into the retinal scanner, and the door swung open. I sidled after her, past tangled bicycles and stacked mail and up a stone stairway. On the third floor she unlocked the door of a flat, using metal keys. Hardware.

Inside, it was chilly and dark. She strolled in, flicking light-switches. The windows -- I saw when we stepped into the main room -- were covered by aluminum Venetian blinds. There was a sofa, a screen, and a table, and not much else; the wall-posters were tuned to the previous year's bands. Looked like an empty student pad, and probably was.

"Coffee?"

"Thanks. Black, no sugar."

"Just as well," Jadey said.

By the time she came back from the kitchen I had the screen working, with the sound off. Most of the news channels had moved on to talking heads. Jadey sat down at the other end of the sofa, nodded at the screen.

"Countermeasures," she said. "Built in. We can talk."

"So ... are you really CIA?" I asked. Not the most tactful of opening lines, but it had been on my mind.

"No, of course I'm not bloody CIA!" she answered, almost spilling her coffee. "Statist sons of bitches! They're almost as bad as the goddamn commies, when they're not doing deals with them."

"All right. I only asked. So what
are
you?"

She gave me a serious frown. "You really want to know?"

"Well, yeah. Call it idle curiosity."

"Hah! All right. I'm working for a political organization that does what we think the CIA
should
be doing: stirring up a bit of subversion in the E.U."

"I'd figured that," I said slowly. "It's the bit that came before it that kind of has me baffled. How does it work? Counterrevolution for fun and profit?"

"Neither," she said. "The money comes from ... well, basically from legacies and trust funds set up by Net entrepreneurs who got rich in the Century Boom, and who thought it might be a good idea to, ah, invest in the future of the free market. As for the fun -- "

She put down the cup. Her hands were shaking. "It was fun for a while, down in old England. Making contacts, setting things up, basic agitprop. But the scene's got a lot heavier lately. You know, like, pseudo-gangs?"

"What?"

"Resistance groups set up by ... whoever -- the Russkis, I guess, maybe even the Brits -- to discredit the real opposition with the odd terrorist outrage; black propaganda that makes us smell like fascists; spreading rumors that the
real
resistance groups are pseudo-gangs, that the best activists are police agents." She waved a hand. "You know the score."

"The trusting trust problem?" I asked, translating into geek-speak.

"Exactly!"

She frowned again, looked at her nails. One of her thumbnails was bitten right down. "Shit, I thought I'd
broken
that habit ... " Looked up. "Let me tell you about last night."

There's a scene in
Battle of Algiers
where the Muslim women of the FLN are preparing to go out and plant bombs in the European quarter, and they're tarting themselves up in immodest European clothes and applying makeup for the first time in their lives, and as they preen solemnly in front of mirrors the soundtrack becomes a relentless martial drumbeat.

Jadey hears that beat as she gets herself ready for the work of the night. She's always liked her complexion; with its natural-blonde creamy smoothness matching her fair brows and pale lips, but now she's covering it all up with blusher and tint, mascara and eyeshadow and bloody-red lipstick. Dye gel turns her hair black and spiky, stains the swirling water as she rinses her hands under the tap.

Her preparations complete, she waits for a few minutes, watching her watch. Time is of the essence. Two minutes until contact. Time to go.

She checks herself in the mirror: lacy white blouse, small black vinyl skirt, fishnet tights, high heels. Subtlety is not the name of her game. She grins at her own unfamiliar features, and jauntily hoists the red leather shoulderbag. She's already checked the gun inside it.

"You go, girl," she tells herself. "Go out there and slay them!"

The air is damp and the light is yellow. It's a dead pre-dawn hour, but not too late for the tarts to ply their trade. Jadey avoids their eyes, outglares the raised brows of lurking pimps and Johns. Up ahead, she sees the back of the man she's after, in Russian military uniform. The hardware is soft and warm through her glove, like a wee lump of that stuff kids play with; or maybe plastique, and just as dangerous: Silly Semtex. She slaps it onto a lamppost and walks briskly up York Way, about thirty meters behind the man. A slow, silently counted ten seconds later, the Russki turns off the main drag and into an alley. Jadey follows him without looking back.

Ten seconds is ample time for the hardware to work: for the lump to fasten and flow like a sinister, fast-moving slime-mold, extending its tendrils into the cable of the street camera on the lamppost, and to insinuate its programs into the datastream. By now it should have subtly degraded the image quality to the point where every face on York Way might as well have a balaclava mask over it. With luck, it'll be burrowing into and editing storage as well as input, scrambling the recognition software, but none of that can be counted on. The input masking, however, can -- but still she doesn't look around, doesn't give them even that flicker of a chance.