Cosmonaut Keep (9 page)

"Oh!" She gave me another funny look. "So
that's
where you're coming from!"

"What did you think I was, a patriot?"

"That or a totally amoral criminal."

"Thanks a lot."

She grinned, looking happier than I'd seen her in a long while. "Both of them were looking a bit more unlikely as time went on, but I didn't want to pry, just in case."

I leaned back on the sofa, looking up at her. "You should trust me even less now, you know. There's no love lost between us Webblies and your so-called libertarian capitalists."

She waved a hand. "Oh, that." She laughed. "I don't trust you an inch, actually, but trust doesn't come into it -- prediction does. I know now which way you're likely to jump."

"We'll see about that."

I jumped up, surprising her and myself by giving her an awkward, one-arm hug around the shoulders, and walked out to the main door. The drama of this was marred by my being unable to actually open the door, Jadey having locked it from the inside. I stepped aside and let her unlock it.

She looked up at me just before the door swung open.

"So where are we going now?"

"Somewhere safer, warmer, and pleasanter," I told her. "The union office."

"Wow," she said. "You sure know how to show a girl a good time."

"You'll be surprised," I told her.

The IWWWW building in Picardie Place, opposite the Playhouse at the top of Leith Walk, was slightly decrepit but still imposing: seven stories of concrete and glass, post-war but not new-tech. I had no doubt it was watched, but I didn't think the surveillance would be more than routine. Officially classified as "hostile and slanderous toward the state and social system of Socialist Democracy," the IWWWW was officially tolerated as a textbook (and, more importantly,
newscast)
example of how tolerant and pluralist Socialist Democracy really was.

As I swiped my union card through the lock, Jadey eyed the slogan chiseled in neat roman capitals above the doorway: THE WORKING CLASS AND THE EMPLOYING CLASS HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON.

"Hmm," she said as the door swung back for us. "What about common humanity?"

"After three world wars? Don't make me laugh."

The entrance lobby was empty except for the guy at the reception desk, who glanced up then returned to his book. I inhaled deeply of the familiar smell of the place -- the rubber flooring, the faint waft of sweat and chlorine from the gym and swimming-pool downstairs; the tang of alcohol and herbal smoke from the bar on the first floor alongside the warmer, steamier cafeteria odors; and underlying it all the sharp notes of wire and plastic and fresh cement from the ongoing overhaul of the electronics.

Jadey, too, was sniffing, watching a middle-aged man and a couple of young women, all carrying towels and soft drinks, stroll past and pad down the steps.

"Not what I expected," she admitted as we headed for the lift. "Reminds me of a youth hostel -- or the YMCA." She grinned as the lift arrived. " 'Young Militants' Class-War Association,' anybody?"

"Near enough," I allowed, jabbing the fourth-floor button. "We're a sociable lot. You can even stay the night here."

She smiled, distantly, at some point behind my shoulder. The lift doors
thunked
shut. We stood for a moment in infinite reflections and varying g-forces, then stepped out. The fourth floor was not as benign and casual-looking as the ones we'd seen. Long, carpeted corridors, heavy doors, everything beaded with cameras. The electric smell was strong.

I ambled down the corridor, Jadey pacing cautiously after me, until I reached the door marked 413. Another card-swipe and we were in. The room was about ten meters by five, windowless, strip-lit, filled with half a dozen long tables with swivel seats, keyboards, and screens. It had the look of a classroom or learning-lab. Nobody else was there, which was a relief. I stepped over to the wall-mounted keypad and hastily booked the room until midnight: greedy, but unlikely to be challenged.

"Right," I said, sitting down and inviting Jadey, with a suitably expansive gesture, to do the same. She did, curling her legs under the swivel chair's seat and giving it a spin.

"God, what a tedious place," she remarked. "Even the walls are bare. No pictures, no screens."

"Yeah, well, there's a reason," I said. "They're
firewalls." I
smirked at my own feeble joke.

I took out my reader and uncoiled some cable, and connected it to the back of the nearest screen. "Could I have your disk again please?"

She spun it over.

I slotted it into the reader, powered up the screen and board, and keyed in a password. The familiar Microsoft Windows 2045 image floated up, to be instantly replaced by a demonically laughing penguin which left the words BUT SERIOUSLY ... fading on the screen before cutting to the primary interface. I patched through a quick call to the satellite server, asking for an immediate downlink download. That took about a minute -- the office, naturally, had roof antennae and bandwidth to burn -- after which I leaned back, hands behind my head, legs as close as my precarious balance would permit to putting my feet up.

"That's a load off my mind," I said.

"Great," said Jadey. "Care to explain what I should be feeling relieved about?"

"Depends how much you want to hear about computers," I said, swinging my feet to the floor, my elbows to my knees, and leaning forward earnestly. As usual I felt a little awkward talking about this subject; if I wasn't careful I could easily end up sounding like an old geek.

Jadey waved a hand, generously. "I'll tell you when to fast-forward."

"Fine ... Well, basically, we -- that is, the biz -- have become fairly reliant on what we call the empty-hand model." I waved my reader. "Like this thing. It's a wireless terminal, pretty dumb by the standards of the systems it's accessing, which are usually on hardware a long way away. Makes you overdependent on encryption, for one thing, and on the goodwill of the server owners, for another. That's exactly the kind of thing us Webblies like to avoid. It tends to, shall we say, weaken your negotiating position. We've always been big on the workers controlling the means of production. Result: This building has so much computing power packed in it that you need never go outside it for any program that can be feasibly run at all." I scratched my head. "Apart from ones that need dedicated distributed processors, anyway. What it means is that I've just copied everything I've got, and everything you got, onto the machines in here. And the great thing about them is, they're not accessible from the outside. That download had to go through the equivalent of a series of airlocks and showers before it was stored. Nobody can hack in to them."

"Like, this place is a data haven?" She glanced around, looking more respectful.

"Not quite," I said. "Physically, it's not terribly secure against serious reverse social engineering, but apart from that, yeah -- it's pretty safe. We can now work on the data with a fair certainty that nobody's snooping on us."

She cocked her head. "Except from inside?"

"Hey," I said. "This is the union. We have rules against that sort of thing."

"Okay," she said. "What next?"

"I pull together a small company to investigate this thing." I turned back to the screen. "I have a lot of good contacts for this."

"Maybe you do," she said, "but not tonight."

"What?"

She stared at me, then reached out and caught my hand. "Come on. I've had a
murderously
long day. Let's go down to the bar, then I'll take you up on the offer of a bed for the night."

First I knew of the offer, but I didn't refuse.

5

____________

Cosmonaut Keep

Elizabeth Harkness sought the dress she needed in the back of Ancient Finery, an old shop in the old town, popular with students but hitherto not one of her haunts. Kyohvic, and Tain, and indeed Mingulay in general, had a textile-and-garment industry, but nothing like a self-sustaining fashion industry. Left to themselves, there was little doubt that styles would have changed as slowly in the towns as they did in the villages along the coast: Fashion would have become costume, with mere individual and local variants of cut and decoration. The starships changed all that, their irregular but frequent arrivals imposing a jerky punctuation on that tendency to equilibrium. Fads and fancies, years or decades dead in their places and planets of origin, freakishly flourished in this backwater, until the next arrival of new notions from the sky. The whole relationship, she was pleased to realize, was the precise opposite of what Gregor had thought it was: If the merchants didn't know what the fashion was in Kyohvic, it was because they set (or reset) it with their every arrival.

This wasn't the only relationship Gregor was getting wrong. Elizabeth wasn't sure if he was arrogant or just
blind
or if he just plain found her unattractive or (more hopefully) that he misinterpreted every one of her looks and gestures as part of their relationship as friends and colleagues.

But she had no more idea than he of what would be the Next Big Thing at the merchants' ball, and no way of affording what the better-off ladies of the town would wear to it while they eyed up whatever the ladies of the latest ship were showing off; so the best she could do was to go for something so out-of-date that it wasn't unfashionable. Ancient Finery, the best of several such by-products of Mingulay's externally driven style-cycle, was the place to look.

Thus, a couple of days after the ship had arrived, Elizabeth left the lab early -- it was a Saturday anyway -- hurried to her parents' home in the new town, and hastily changed and showered to remove the lingering taint of dead marine life from her hair and, especially, her hands, and took the electric bus down to the cob-blestoned streets of old Kyohvic below the university's fastness.

A pair of chipped shop-window dummies guarded the shop's doorway. The male figure was resplendent in a generations-old braided guard's uniform from a minor estate on Croatan, the female slightly risqué in a chinoiserie chemise off the last-but-one starship from somewhere farther in. Elizabeth considered it for a reckless moment, then smiled at herself and pressed on into the shop's cavernous, brightly-lit interior. The ceiling was at least two stories high, hung at intervals with clumps of long dresses; the walls accommodated two rows, one above the other, of dresses and coats; smaller and shorter garments were shelved or hung on portable rails standing on the floor. The air of the place was a marvelous melange of the smell of old but clean clothes, cleaning-fluid, phantom scents, patchouli potpourri, joss-sticks permanently burning, and the occasional cigarette surreptitiously smoked by the girl at the till.

Elizabeth took a deep breath and plunged happily in. An hour passed without her noticing. Apart from the -- for her -- rarely indulged frivolously feminine fun of it all, something about the layered antiquity of the shop's stock appealed to her scientific spirit. There was history here, even astronomy, an almost inconceivably minute particular of the kind of evidence you could find in the fossil record or the shock-shell of an exploded star. Wisps of fabric and echoes of ideas that had moved at the speed of light ... She thought about it with one part of her mind, while another part guided her rummaging and considering and discarding.

Nothing here dated back to the
Bright Star's
arrival, or even to the cultural explosion that had followed hard upon it. Anything that historic was in the museums, not the secondhand clothes shops. But some of the stuff showed traces of influences, radiated out from Mingulay and bounced back -- voyages later, decades later -- of fashions from twenty-first-century Earth: silly little details that she recognized from the ship's picture files, such as the drawstring hem and the duffel button, these trivial impracticalities betraying their origins like junk DNA.

History, like fashion, was a necessarily disjointed process in the Second Sphere. New arrivals from Earth were rare, migrations between planets within the Sphere relatively frequent. Any of them could jolt society forward, or at least out of its previous course, as the
Bright Star
had done to Mingulay's.

Approximately six hundred and fifty years ago, Elizabeth's ancestors had arrived on Croatan. About a thousand people: some English, some Indians, a shipload of Africans, and not all from the same place or even (from what later historians had deduced from fragmentary records and traditions) the same time. Others -- fishermen, sailors, and slaves rescued from the wild Atlantic by beings that some of them saw as angels, others as demons -- arrived in small, bewildered consignments as time went on. The dates of their origin were not necessarily in the same order as the dates of their arrival. Out of two centuries and half of living on this world -- newer than the New World from which most of their ancestors had come -- and of trying to make some sense of it and of the other worlds with which they gradually came into contact, a sect had emerged that the majority of Croatan's human community called the Scoffers -- a name which they eventually claimed proudly for themselves. Their prophetess, Joanna Tain, had preached that the greater universe revealed to them by their displacement, and the strange nature of its other inhabitants, left the Scriptures at best irrelevant ("a Revelation solely to the People of the Earth, as the Law of Moses was unto the people of Israel, and not Universall, as even the Scripture itselfe saith") -- at worst, false. The influence of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of Nova Babylonia was evident in her doctrines, and deplored.

Blood had been shed, and after urgent appeals from both sides the gray folk had moved in swiftly to evacuate Tain's few thousand followers and to set them down on another planet, which they named Mingulay. They had been there two centuries when the
Bright Star
had risen in their sky, and had brought heresies beyond the wildest rantings of Joanna, and evidence that the universe was even stranger than she had supposed. The ship's library had become the foundation of the university and of most science and technology, and a good deal of the culture and art, in the hands of humans on Mingulay -- and on an expanding radius of other worlds.