Cosmonaut Keep (15 page)

She laughed, and waved a hand as though to dispel the darkness of her words. "I got out of that temple as fast as my little legs would carry me!"

"And ever since have thanked the gods for Epicurus?"

"Yes!" She threw out an arm in a rhetorical gesture, and recited:

" 'Who stormed the flaming ramparts of the world, and superstition down in ruin hurled.' "

He looked sidelong at her, surprised and pleased. "You know the Good Books?"

"Oh yes, we use the Mingulayan paraphrases to learn the English."

"No wonder you sometimes sound quaint," he teased; then relented. "No, really, your English is astonishingly good."

"Oh, I know," she said. "I hope to use it a lot."

"You already are."

She took this as the compliment it was intended to be. Gregor was glad she didn't notice the pain that lay beneath it.

They walked on up the headland until they reached its point, which rose like a prow higher even than the castle. The path turned around a few meters from the very forward edge of the cliff. They looked at the edge, then at each other, and both laughed.

"I can't," said Gregor.

"Me neither."

She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled forward; after a moment's hesitation he did the same. There was something ludicrously reassuring about the ground's still-upward slope. Rationally he knew it was safe: the cliff was of solid metamorphic rock, not given to crumbling. Irrationally, he vividly imagined it splitting away.

They arrived at the edge by inching forward with their toes and elbows, and peered over -- black rocks, white water, and in the stupendous volume of intervening air, the backs of the seabats and diving-bats lofting on the upward rush. Gregor's fingertips were digging into the thin soil. With a deliberate effort of will he unlocked one hooked hand and laid it across the small of Lydia's back. Her body's heat rushed at him through the dry, papery texture of the fabric; he heard its whisper, and found that he was stroking her, higher and lower. She closed her eyes; he felt the muscles in her back relax.

"Mmm," she said, "that's nice."

She opened her eyes, still looking down, and shifted so that her side pressed against his. "To feel in danger, and at the same time to feel held, and safe."

His whole arm was right across her now, his hand in the hollow between her upper arm and her breast. Their shoulders were on the very edge of the cliff, their faces looking down at the sea. They lay like that for what seemed a long time, the roar of blood in his ears and the beat of his heart drowning the sound of the surf and the waves and the high cries of the bats.

They turned to each other. Their faces, now inches apart, were drawn inexorably together as if by gravity. Her eyes closed and her mouth opened to his. They kissed above the void for a long minute, then she pulled away.

"This is not safe," she said; then, in answer to his smile, added: "We might not stop at a kiss, and we might be seen. It would be embarrassing to our families."

She rolled onto her back, sat up, and stood in one continuous fluid movement. A few quick strokes of her hands restored her dress to its ideal shape, leaving not a trace of grass or damp or any wrinkle.

He followed her back to the path, and they walked together back to the keep.

On Sunday evenings the Bailie's Bar was relatively clean and quiet. Its usual clientele of maritime and longshore workers, having an early start on the Monday, left it to the students and the former students who'd settled into casual employment and a student lifestyle before -- in most cases -- finding their real profession.

Gregor drank and smoked with Salasso and Elizabeth and with his brother Anthony and two of Anthony's friends, Muir and Gunn. Ruefully he told them a discreetly edited version of his misadventure.

"I can't bear to be away from her," he concluded.

"So why aren't you with her now?" Gunn asked. She was a bright undergraduate with curly red hair.

"She has to help with the family business," Gregor explained miserably. "I might see her tomorrow. She and her father are interested in our work at the marine station."

"Is that allowed?" Anthony asked.

"Of course it's bloody allowed. We're not researching anything secret."

Not at the marine station, anyway.

"I didn't mean sharing the research," said Anthony, smirking wickedly. "I meant you and her spooning about at work. All these pheromones in the air, it'll probably wreck your experiments."

"Oh, shut the fuck up!"

His brother regarded him with unabashed amusement. Anthony had not seen Gregor making such a fool of himself since he'd broken a leg falling out of a tree at the age of eight, and he was making the most of it.

"You've got it bad," he said.

"He sure has," said Elizabeth. She stared at Gregor.

"Come on," she said. "You know what to do. Lucretius, Book Four, lines 1065-1066:

"
'Oh, ease the pain of love's urgent need!

On other men or women spend your seed!' "

This helpful quotation from the Good Books was usually offered in a friendly, soothing manner to the lovesick, but Elizabeth spoke them in a bitter tone, for which Gregor could not account.

8

____________

The Dreamland Gate

Walking in rain across wet tarmac, I felt exposed. My heels lifted with difficulty, and the back of my head felt a backward tug like sleep. Far ahead of me, nearly twenty meters away, a huge rectangular box loomed through the hissing drops. Much farther away, more than two hundred meters, the cranes and container ship bulked like a space station. Jason had got me a travel agent -- or "people-smuggler," in
Pravda-
speak -- and that entrepreneur had taken four thousand euros cash to put me on a barge at Leith Docks. It had taken the rest of that day and all that night for the barge to make its way up the Firth of Forth, past the busy site of the Grangemouth oil refinery and the abandoned site of the Longannet power station, through the Forth and Clyde Canal, and down the Clyde. We'd reached Greenock, and the Atlantic container terminal.

I walked up to the big box and walked around it, acutely conscious of a Harbor Patrol blimp hanging just below the cloud cover, a few hundred meters out over the Firth of Clyde. In the far end of the container, which just happened to be turned away from the waterfront and to face the other containers so that it could not be seen from a distance, was an iron door. I turned the handle. From inside came a shuffling, scuttling noise. As the door opened, a little light fell on the interior and reflected momentarily off the eyes of a huddle of perhaps a dozen people at the back of the otherwise empty container. Not quite empty; their small bundles of possessions lay at random on the floor. I could think of nothing to say, so I raised my palms to them and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The darkness settled around me like a hood of felt. Feet moved stealthily. I slipped the goggles on and tuned them to infrared: The people at the back had begun to spread themselves out along the sides, bracing their feet on the floor and their backs to the wall. They moved as though they couldn't see, with much groping and stumbling. I settled myself down the same way that they had.

About half an hour passed. Once or twice a child whispered, and an adult hissed them to silence. Somebody muttered something about a cigarette. Then came the sound of an engine and of fat tires on a wet surface, the jangle and rattle of chains and the thumps and scrapes as some connection was made to the outside of the box. After a moment of increasing strain, the container was lifted off the ground and carried along. More jolting and clanging, shouts -- and then it swung, to the now unsilenced cries of the children. I could feel it going up like a lift, and tried not to imagine the height. Down again it dropped, and was eased -- at last, gently -- into its place.

After so much motion this felt at first like stillness, but after a minute of silent attention it was obvious that the surface on which the container now lay was itself moving, in slight and subtle rhythm. We were on the ship. After a few minutes we could feel the throb of the engine underfoot, and the sway of the floor steepened a little.

We stayed there, in the dark, for another six hours in which the only entertainment was the long buildup of increasingly agitated whispering before one of the kids took a leak. The glow of the puddle's warmth slowly faded. This cycle was repeated more than once.

Somebody knocked on the door, not too hard. The sound still rang out and made us all jump.

"All right," said a man's voice from outside, "you can come out now. I'm gonna open the door real slow, okay?"

A fan of light gradually widened from the door, giving eyes time to adjust. I pocketed the goggles and hung back, letting the others -- the "illegals," as I kept thinking of them, patronizingly
not
including myself in their number -- go ahead of me onto the deck. They all walked forward. A family -- a man, a woman, two small children -- and five teenagers and one man who looked a bit older than me. I fell in behind him.

The vessel was so fucking vast that when I stepped out somewhere near the midline of the deck I hardly felt I was on a ship at all. Beyond the ship, as far as I could see, was nothing but whitecapped steel-gray to the horizon. The horizon moved up and down a little, that was all. The deck was a low, open area between the bow and stern superstructures, and a maze of close-packed and lashed-down containers.

The man who'd opened the door for us was a short, stout Black-American wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an impressive collection of flashy hardware around his fingers, wrists, and neck. The single obsidian curved band of his wraparound goggles suddenly became transparent, and so non-reflective it was almost invisible. He grinned at us as we stood blinking in the noon sun and breathing the fresh air.

"Hi," he said, "welcome to the free world, and all. You're outside the commies' territorial waters, so you can now do whatever the hell you please." He jerked a thumb backward. "So long as you don't get in the way and the captain don't mind, of course."

People crowded around him, hugging, kissing, crying. The older guy actually kissed the deck. I looked on, bemused. I was relieved, sure, to be safe -- safe from the state, and not fallen into worse hands -- but my companions' behavior struck me as excessive and unwarm.

Over the next couple of days I realized I'd been mistaken about that. Their reaction wasn't excessive at all. For one thing, the crewman was, literally, right -- we had effectively already made it to the U.S., there being no immigration controls whatsoever on entrants from the E.U.

The crew of this huge ship was about the same in number as that of the barge that had taken me across Scotland; the men were more like technicians than sailors. I don't remember their names, and their faces are confused in my memory, but their quick unguarded expressions and loud unironic voices still shine and shout in my mind. Even the way they moved was expansive, uninhibited. On duty and off, their attention flitted and flicked between the real and the virtual worlds so fast their goggles seemed sometimes to strobe between dark and clear. Their hands, when not otherwise occupied, flexed in the flow of the five-finger chording alphabets of the virtual keyboards, and their lips synched in silent conversations.

Not all of them were tall, but each of them seemed to be always at his full height. It wasn't so much (I reflected, as I, too, began to stretch) that we'd had a weight on our backs, as that we had lived all our lives under a low ceiling.

Even my handheld reader and wet-tech goggles seemed to brighten up, and access to U.S. sources to become easier, but that may have been just an illusion. I used my comms and comp gear intensely. Prices on the ship -- for food and berths, because our thousands had merely paid for the passage, we were told -- made our cash evaporate rapidly. I was luckier than my fellow travelers in that I could start my new work in the brave New World right there on the ship, whereas they had to pile up debts. My serious accounts had always been offshore, and were still valid. I plunged into the New York labor market, holding my nose for the descent into legacy systems. The old code-geeks seemed to be out of the running, and I was in demand. A corner of the ship's canteen made an adequate office, with a convenient bottomless cup of coffee.

I phoned my mother. Her image popped up in the dataspace. She was thirty-five at the time and could have passed for younger than me, except for the wary, weary look she had.

"Yi've got yirsel into some trouble now," she said, in a tone of gloomy satisfaction. "Where are yi?"

"On my way to America."

She looked a bit shocked. She was the most conservative person I knew. She believed in the revolution.

"I always told yi, yi'd get nothing but trouble wi' they anarchists and that Yank spy."

After a moment she relented. "You look after yirsel, son."

"Yeah, I'll do that, Mum."

I'd been looking after myself, I reflected after she'd rung off, for quite some time.

In the minutes between hours-long contract jobs, I dived into the mail and the news, trying to find out what had happened to Jadey, and what was going on back home, and about Dreamland. The answers, not to my surprise, were linked.

I still had the trace of Jadey's original records, which Jason and Curran had so expertly distorted; working back through them, I hit --

"What the fuck are you up to, mister?"

The woman shoved her face into my field, making me recoil slightly. The resolution wasn't good enough to tell if she were real or a repro 'bot, but she certainly looked indignant enough, her otherwise kindly, fortyish features blazing like the henna in her unstylish hair.

"I'm looking for information about Jadey Ericson," I mumbled into the throat-mike. The woman retreated a bit and consulted something out-of-field.

"So what do
you
know about her?" she demanded.