Shooting the Rift - eARC (6 page)

CHAPTER SIX

In which I lose sight of my aunt, and find pies.

I’d thought I was reasonably familiar with the layout of Skyhaven in general, and Aunt Jenny’s immediate neighborhood in particular, but the walk to her favorite tavern soon made me realize the difference between the superficial local knowledge of the frequent visitor and the innate sense of place possessed by the long-term resident.

For the first ten minutes or so I felt confident enough of finding my way back to her lodgings if I had to, the bland residential thoroughfares we ambled along being laid out on a fairly simple grid of interlocking hexagons. The streets were wide, the tiled sidewalks broken at intervals by brightly-hued mosaics, usually outside the main entrances of apartment blocks, which had been blandly uniform when built; now, however, they’d been personalized by their residents using a variety of pigments, tapestries, and multi-colored flora, which spilled from innumerable terraces and window boxes.

The street above our heads, where the localized gravity pulled the other way, was a mirror image of the one we walked along, many of the larger dwellings in both merging seamlessly into a single block midway between them, like mountains reflected in a placid lake. (The apartments just either side of the center line were particularly sought after, I gathered, as they shared a ceiling, so the residents would never be troubled by the footfalls of their neighbors.)

Traffic hummed busily between the sidewalks; if I stretched my ‘sphere a little, I could catch the cicada buzz of the on-board drones, dutifully following the course and speed set for them by the district’s traffic control, and watch the sudden flurries of processing as they decided whether or not to brake in response to one of the swarm of bicycles, which wove their way through the larger, slower-moving vehicles with cheerful disdain, cutting across their paths without thought of apology. There were plenty of pedestrians, too, although for the most part they kept to the pavement, only venturing to cross the turbulent stream of traffic at one of the footbridges which had been strategically placed at every intersection.

After a while I became aware that the street-level dwellings on both sides of the road had been replaced by storefronts, selling a bewildering variety of foodstuffs and beverages I’d never heard of (in some cases fortunately, judging by the smell), clothing in unfamiliar cuts, and an astonishing range of curios and artworks. Cafes, bars and restaurants began to appear among them in ever-increasing numbers, too, and I began to salivate, suddenly reminded of how long it had been since I’d last had anything approaching an appetite.

As the buildings had changed around me, so had the people. Many more of them were wearing the unfamiliar garments I’d glimpsed in the shop windows, and not everyone I saw seemed quite . . . well, normal, I suppose. As well as all the usual variations in skin, hair and eye color you’d expect to find on most worlds with a reasonably-sized population, there were one or two which struck me as quite bizarre: a fellow practically naked, apart from sandals and a barely adequate loin cloth, for instance, whose skin had a distinctly greenish hue, and whose breath carried a faint odor of summertime meadows.

“Don’t gawp, Simon, it makes you look provincial,” Aunt Jenny said, although her words carried more amusement than rebuke.

“I am provincial,” I replied, truthfully enough. It began to dawn on me that all my previous visits to Skyhaven had been to the core section, where the passenger flights up from Avalon docked, and nothing in the decor, ambience or services would have seemed out of place in any of the cities on the surface. Same architecture, same businesses, same music in the elevators.

“’Scuse me,” a young lady said, brushing past with an apologetic smile. She was wearing something which floated around her, rippling gently, and I felt the hairs on my arms rise briefly, caught in the fringes of the electrostatic field creating the effect. I found myself turning involuntarily to watch her pass, and my jaw dropped.

“Tails are quite a popular tweak with the transgeners,” Aunt Jenny said, looking even more amused as she caught sight of my expression. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of that sort of thing if you ship outsystem.”

“Transgeners,” I repeated, as though I’d never heard the word before. Which I had, of course, but seldom spoken so casually. Most Commonwealthers strongly disapproved of altering the human body too much, on the entirely reasonable grounds that God had got it right the first time round, although not everyone in the galaxy agreed with them. Some worlds had entire populations who’d been altered in response to specific local conditions, and whose tweaks bred true down the generations, while on others morphology fluctuated with the fad of the moment, plaid fur giving way to scales pretty much on a whim, the way dandies like Sherman adopted the latest style of cravat.

“You’ll get used to it,” Aunt Jenny assured me, ogling the green fellow’s well-sculpted gluteals as he vanished into the crowd. Then she turned back to me with a mischievous grin. “Always liked the photosynthesisers myself. Don’t leave a lot to the imagination.”

“I don’t suppose they would,” I said, trying to sound blasé and utterly failing to do so. The streets were growing narrower and more crowded here, the gridding less regular, and I hurried after my aunt, determined to keep her in sight. I kept expecting her to stop, or slow down, or at least glance behind to make sure I was keeping up, but she never did, gradually opening up the distance between us, slipping through the press of bodies with a speed and dexterity I found faintly surprising in a woman of her age and bulk.

For a moment she vanished as the street suddenly dropped away at a sharp sixty degree angle, and I felt a stab of panic as I lost sight of her; but a second or two later I felt the surge in my inner ear as I stepped through the intersecting gravity fields, and found myself once again trotting along a subjectively level surface. After a moment of frantic scanning I spotted her again, just disappearing down the mouth of an alleyway half-hidden by the stall of a street vendor, who waved a skewer-full of something greasy resembling meat hopefully in my general direction as I dived down the narrow slot between a tavern and a lingerie emporium.

This was a part of Skyhaven I’d never even suspected of existing before, and I must confess I felt a growing sense of unease. The alley was beginning to feel less like a thoroughfare, and more like a utility conduit into which the population had flowed under pressure from the more affluent regions. There was metal mesh underfoot now, while piping and ductwork had become visible on walls and ceiling, lending the whole place a cramped and furtive air, despite the illumination, which remained as bright as the streets I’d just left. Or would have done, anyway, if all of it was still working.

The people I passed seemed more shabbily dressed than those on the main thoroughfares, or at least in utilitarian garb, with little ornamentation; and a higher proportion of them were transgeners, with whom I was reluctant to make eye contact, for fear of being thought impolite. (Believe me, good manners are important when some of the folk you’re mingling with have visible claws or tusks.) Every now and then I could still catch a glimpse of Aunt Jenny in the distance, and tried to pick up my pace, but most of the traffic was moving in the opposite direction. If it hadn’t been for my pride, and the fear of marking myself out as someone who didn’t belong here, I might have called out to her, but I held my tongue, and bounced a message instead.

Is it far now?
If I’m honest, I half hoped that the reminder of my presence would slow her down, but it had no discernable effect that I could see across the distance that now separated us.

No
, she sent back, and promptly vanished from sight.

All right, I told myself, that was clearly impossible, so she must have gone somewhere. I had no idea why she seemed to want to turn going out for a drink into a game of hide and seek, but I wasn’t so far from childhood, and the wariness I’d learned from Tinkie’s habit of changing the rules to hide and ambush, that I’d forgotten how to play.

So, start from the last place I’d seen her. Not difficult: several of the ubiquitous cables converged into a junction box there, emitting a distinctive electromagnetic signature. Not to mention the garish yellow panel warning danger of death, which was kind of hard to miss.

This time there was no obvious alley mouth into which my aunt could have disappeared, but there had to be something—my view further down the tunnel had only been blocked for a moment, and if she’d carried on along it I would have been sure to see her. I glanced up at the tangle of pipework depending from the ceiling—which, as I’d expected, had no room above it to conceal anyone, even if she’d been able to scramble up without attracting the attention of the passersby.

I examined my immediate short-term memories. No one had reacted as though anything out of the ordinary was going on, and in a place this confined, that pretty much guaranteed that nothing had. It would simply have been too noticeable. Which ruled out any trapdoors in the floor, too, although I took a glance at it anyway, just to be sure.

That only left the wall, which clearly concealed a door of some kind. The only question was where.

Adopting as nonchalant an air as I could, though none of the passers-by seemed particularly interested in me, I examined the blank metal carefully. Sure enough, one of the inspection panels seemed a little loose, held in place by only one corner. Before I could reach out a hand to confirm my guess, however, it moved aside, apparently of its own volition, tugged by a rather down-at-heel fellow in early middle age, whose halitosis preceded him like an honor guard.

“Sorry mate, di’n’t see yer,” he said, ducking through and hoisting a bag to his shoulder, before disappearing down the corridor, whistling. Since no one else seemed in the least bit surprised by his sudden appearance, I surmised that this was a commonly used, though distinctly unofficial, short cut, and so it proved to be. Lowering my head I clambered through the gap, finding myself in a narrow space between two walls, stuffed with far too many things festooned with warning decals color-coded by the ways they could kill you. A chink of light showed just ahead of me, however, so after a moment’s fumbling I was able to push aside the twin of the panel behind me, and straighten up gratefully in the passageway beyond.

Which was, if anything, even narrower and more wretched than the one I’d just left, though no less densely populated. I glanced up and down it, seeking some clue as to which direction my aunt might have taken. More people seemed to be heading towards my right, and the illumination in that direction seemed a little brighter, so I headed that way, essentially just drifting with the current.

By now, it must be said, I was becoming more than a little irritated. I could, of course, simply have bounced her a message demanding to know where she was and what the hell she thought she was playing at, but I was damned if I’d give her the satisfaction. Besides, she might not tell me. I was beginning to get the feeling that this was some kind of test, and after the Naval Academy debacle, I wasn’t about to fail if I could help it.

The lights up ahead were getting brighter, and the ambient noise was growing too: the sort of diffuse assault on the eardrums that comes from a lot of people in a large enclosed space trying to make themselves heard over everyone else’s conversation. There seemed to be music, too, quite a lot of it, if you stretched your definition of tonality to the breaking point, competing for attention from a dozen different sources.

Suddenly, the narrow corridor opened out into a wide, high-ceilinged space, roughly the size of a sports stadium. What its original purpose had been, I had no idea, but the number of pipes converging here, many large enough to have driven a sled down, hinted at a storage tank of some sort. These days, however, it seemed to be a marketplace, the stalls of which stretched into the distance, laden down with goods and junk of all kinds. Some served food, and, prompted by my growling stomach, I fished a couple of coins from my pocket and approached the nearest, though not without a sense of trepidation.

“What can I do you for?” the proprietor asked, in professionally friendly tones, taking in the cut of my garments in a single practiced glance. “We got meat pies, cheese pies, veggie pies, cheese an’ veggie pies, meat an’ veggie pies, cheese an’ meat pies, or meat, cheese an’ veggie.” He paused for a moment, perhaps wondering if he should have added “pies” to the end of the last selection, in case I’d missed that small but vital point. “Or fruit pies,” he added as an afterthought, “if you was thinking more along dessert kind of lines.”

“What kind of meat?” I asked, and his face furrowed, as he calculated how much honesty would be required to effect a sale.

“Hard to say,” he said at last. “They’re more of a mixture than anythin’, tell you the truth.”

In the end it was my stomach that made the decision, rather than my brain, by cramping vigorously in response to the surprisingly appetizing aroma.

“Meat and veggie,” I said, feeling I could at least mitigate the damage by spreading it out among the food groups, and the proprietor nodded, his good graces assured by the prospect of immanent money.

“Don’t get many groundsiders down here,” he said chattily, “this close to the docks. Shippin’ out, are you?”

“Maybe,” I said, before the first part of his question properly sank in, then nodded as the implications of his opening remark belatedly did so. “Seen any others?”

The stallholder shrugged. “Hard to say,” he said, handing me an oblong of warm pastry wrapped in a napkin. “What with all this crowd around.”

Unable to resist the importunate growling of my stomach any longer, I bit into the pie, finding it hotter inside than I’d expected, and a great deal more appetizing. Gravy oozed down my chin as I chewed and swallowed, and before I could stop myself I’d taken a second bite, and then a third. Almost before I realized it, the snack had gone. I wiped my face and fingers. “Another one, please,” I said, handing over a few more pieces of change. “And a fruit to follow.”