Cosmonaut Keep (13 page)

I swiveled my gaze sideways, scanning the street. The trolleybus had reached about halfway down the mile-long street; rows of shop-fronts alternated with rows of residential tenements. The pavements were busy, but not crowded.

"Everything looks normal," I said.

"That's the trouble," Jason said. "This is Leith, not fucking Morningside. Look again."

And suddenly the way he saw it came into focus for me. There were no idlers on the street, no strollers or beggars or hawkers. Everyone walked as though they might at any moment have to explain why their journey was really necessary. A pair of policemen strode along as though they didn't have to worry about their backs. As the trolleybus lurched and jangled from stop to stop the whole thing became even more incongruous -- Constitution Street looked as if its notorious squares and boulevards had been cleaned up by some particularly puritanical local authority (which Leith Council, brazenly on the take itself, wasn't).

Even then I wasn't sure that we weren't being paranoid. Perhaps it was just a quiet time of day. I glanced at my watch. It was 13:10.

Only 13:10. Lunchtime. But still --

I had been through so many shocks in the past twenty-six or so hours -- Christ, was that all? -- that I could be excused for feeling paranoid. So could Jason. Indeed the same applied to the people in the street, who were quite as capable of drawing troubling conclusions from government announcements as any clued-up geek in the Darwin's Arms. Discovering that the superpower in whose comfortably corrupt embrace we lived had an apparently friendly relationship with
aliens from outer space
would be quite enough to get people more than usually anxious not to get on its wrong side. Perhaps they were jumping at shadows, and so were we -- but we were jumping more violently, because we knew more.

And because we had already been betrayed. I strongly suspected that Curran had had a fit of patriotic funk at the thought of our discovery's going to the Yanks, or at least at his being mixed up in such a thing, and had taken his chance of nipping out for a slash to call the cops on us. That he would immediately afterward give us a chance to get away was entirely in character.

"We never should have trusted the old geeks," I said under my breath.

"Too fucking right," said Jason. "Now shut the fuck up about it."

The trolleybus jerked and sparked left into Great Junction Road, and clanged to a halt at a stop.

"Go," said Jason.

Rain was falling. I sealed my jacket and followed Jason again as he crossed carefully at the lights and walked briskly but casually along the southern side of the street, a long way down some back-streets and finally ducked into a waterfront pub, the Deil and Exciseman. The place was crowded, as though all the unrespectable people who were no longer to be seen on the street had congregated here. Doubtless every dive in Leith was similarly packed. This was the sort of place where eyes and lenses turned toward the door whenever someone came in -- but, apparently recognizing Jason, everyone turned away again. We made our way through the steam and smell of wet coats in the warm, smoky fug to the bar.

"What's yours?" Jason asked.

"Belhaven Export, thanks."

Suddenly hungry, I ordered us a couple of pasties. The microwave
pinged
at the same time as the beer settled.

"God, that's welcome," I said.

We shifted away from the bar and stood in a corner, where there was a shelf for our elbows and pints. The music was loud enough to make conversation difficult, and eavesdropping very difficult. Still I, leaned in and spoke quietly.

"Is this place safe?"

Jason chuckled darkly. "It's safe for us."

I wasn't quite as sure of Jason's assurances as I'd been in the morning, but I still had nothing else on which to rely.

"What can we do now?"

Jason shrugged. "Get you to America, I guess."

"What?" I forgot to speak quietly.

"Sure. Isn't that what the lady said?"

"Yeah, but I thought that meant as a last resort. Come on. We can do something -- I can get a lawyer, go to the media and the embassies, see if they'll get her out, make sure that if I'm pulled I don't just disappear off the street. I might not even be, uh, wanted."

He stared at me. "You don't get it, do you? Jadey can look after herself. It's endgame. This
is
the fucking last resort."

7

____________

The Great Work

Some sects of the Scoffers still clung to the old ways -- to the Bible, at least as Joanna had interpreted it, and to her early-industrial materialism, complete with such sacraments as the anointing with oil, to symbolize the belief that man was a machine built by the Creator. Others had adopted the dialectical materialism of Engels and Haldane (and had duly, dialectically, split into further fractious factions). Most, including the sect in which Gregor had been brought up, took what they considered a moderate position, venerating the ancient materialists more than the modern prophets of religious or political messianism, while of course acknowledging their contributions (as the tolerant cliché went).

The interior of the North Street Meeting-House was dark with wood, bright with colored glass. Walking as though balancing books on his head, Gregor made his way down the aisle to his family's pew and edged in beside Anthony, his younger brother. His parents leaned forward -- his mother with her usual anxious smile, his father with his customary curt nod -- then settled back. No doubt they were both grateful to see him; his visits to the house of philosophy were becoming rarer as he got older.

In fact he had come along out of a mixture of motives, in which the desire for material enlightenment was the least. He'd vaguely promised Clarissa, who now sat at the front, her husband on one side, and on the other a comically regular series of successively older and taller children. He still had his good suit, relatively unwrinkled. And his hangover was too delicately poised for him to even think about breakfast. So here he was, instead of in bed, at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning.

The Scoffer stepped up to the lectern and smiled at the larger-than-usual congregation; it was probably doubled by the younger members of the Cairns family and their more distant relatives. He raised his arms and in a resonant voice intoned the evocation:

"
'Self-moving matter, mother-maker of all, move my small self!

'Lend weight to my words, vigor to my voice, impetus to my instruction!' "

Stepping down, he stood by the font of seawater and waited while Clarissa carried her baby forward. Gently he took the child in his arms and asked:

"Who names this child?"

"I, Clarissa Louise Cairns, his mother."

"What name do you give him?"

"Owen John James Matthew Cairns."

The Scoffer dipped his index finger in the salt water, tested on his tongue that it was indeed salty, wet his middle finger with saliva from his mouth, then dipped his index finger again and with the two waters of life drew a circle on the baby's forehead.

"Welcome," he said.

He raised the baby up for all to see: the small, fortunately sleeping head looking even smaller above the white moistening-gown whose trailing train symbolized the child's kinship with the gods. Then he returned the child to Clarissa, who sat back down and listened to the blessing, formally addressed to the new arrival.

"Owen, you have come to us from the death of stars, and to their birth you shall return. Nothing you knew before, and nothing shall you know after. For a moment between, you will enjoy the gift of life. Your life is now defended by us all." Briefly he drew his sword, swiftly he sheathed it again. "Your blood is our blood. Your life is your own. Enjoy it all your days, and when you must, leave it without fear. Your needs are few and easily satisfied. Understand this, and your life will be a happy one, worthy of the gods. Long may you live, joyous may you live, happy may you live!"

The benediction complete, the Scoffer stepped back to the lectern, opened the Good Books and began his speech. It was an entirely inoffensive and banal homily on the good life, the ethics illustrated with some stretched metaphors from physics and biology, enlivened by brief tales for the children -- and, no doubt, all the better for all of that. After about five minutes Gregor's attention wandered to the high stained-glass windows, in which flowers blooming, leaves twining, dinosaurs striding, bats flying, martyrs burning, couples coupling, scientists investigating, and other edifying phenomena of nature, society, and thought, sported in fecund profusion. It was perhaps his bad luck that one panel, for the-gods-knew-what reason, depicted a dark-haired maiden in a pink gown. The pang in his heart brought back the pain in his head, and he was immensely grateful when the discourse ended.

Under cover of the final hymn he made his escape, ducking out of any conversation with his family. The day was fine and blustery; the warm sunshine and cool gusts began to soothe Gregor's hangover as he walked down North Street and up the High Street, on the road out of town and around to the castle. On the way he bought a news-sheet. As he handed over the change and exchanged greetings, he noticed consciously for the first time the romantic novels discreetly displayed in plain covers on the bottom rack at the back of the stall, beneath the eyeline of innocent children and much lower than the racks of books and chapbooks of erotic pictures and fantasies, whose colorful covers were as vivid and public, and as cheerfully explicit, as the stained-glass windows of the meetinghouse.

He briefly considered buying one of those under-the-counter love stories, then decided it would be too embarrassing for words.

"Good to see you, Greg. Come on in."

James stepped back, swinging the massive door open, and Gregor entered the study. Dust danced in the sunlight beaming in through the window that occupied most of one wall of the wide, high-ceilinged room. Gregor had known where to find it, from childhood memory. Even childhood memory did not exaggerate the number of stairs to be climbed, or the length and dimness of the corridors to be traversed to reach this room, high in a barely occupied wing of the keep.

But now, the shelves seemed lower, the table broader, the stacks of paper higher and more disorderly, the calculating-machines more eccentric and obsolete. The air was peppery with dust. Suppressing sneezes, Gregor accepted a welcome cup of coffee that the Navigator poured from a vacuum-flask, and sat down on the cleanest-looking chair available. His grandfather relaxed into an old leather sofa from which springs and horsehair sprouted, and waved a hand at the surrounding clutter.

"Well, here it is," he said. "The Great Work, so far. I'd like you to help me ... finish it."

Gregor's consternation must have shown on his face. The Great Work had been going on for so long that finishing it had never even crossed his mind as a realistic prospect. The task James proposed seemed to loom in front of him like an impossible cliff.

"Oh, don't worry," James hastened to add. "It won't demand much of your time. I just need someone younger and sharper than myself, frankly, to integrate the top level of what we've got, and see if it all makes sense."

"Okay," said Gregor. He sipped at the now cooling coffee. "Just one question. Can you tell me, in confidence if necessary, just what the Great Work actually is?"

"Sure," said James. "In confidence, yes -- strictest confidence. We're trying to plot a course to take the
Bright Star
to Croatan."

Gregor almost dropped the cup. He had honestly thought that the whole object of the exercise
was
the exercise, a prolonged and ultimately unavailing struggle to keep programming skills alive and within the family.

"All this time we've been doing this
by hand?"

James nodded.

"Why in the name of the gods haven't we been using calculating-machines, or even ... computers?"

"The computers the first crew brought down with them from the ship," James said, "were partly organic -- 'wet tech,' they called them -- and have mostly decayed or become unreliable. As to the calculating-machines, mechanical or electronic, well -- "

He balanced his cup on the arm of the sofa, spread his hands and smiled disarmingly; then waved vaguely and dismissively at the machines, gleaming or rusty, thick with oil and dust. "You can use them to crunch the numbers, but you can't program a computer
with
a computer."