Cosmonaut Keep (17 page)

I sat down at a corner table with a Budweiser and a bagel for breakfast, shaded my spex and checked out the scene. About half the crowd that packed out the place seemed to be workers gobbling hasty, preoccupied breakfasts over goggled visions; the more leisurely eaters, chatting loudly or quietly and conspiratorially, were apparently tourists and aging obsessives, with a sprinkle of journalists who had arrived for cheap laughs at their expense. The real alien contact had blown the dust off all the old stories of imaginary ones, freshened them up and revived them to lurch once more through the media landscape like zombies doused with deodorant, and Dreamland was becoming again a mecca for the sad and the mad and -- to be fair -- the inconveniently inquiring.

"Mind if I sit down?"

A woman loomed over me with a tray and a fixed smile. She was the woman who'd intercepted me in Jadey's records, looking exactly the same, in a most unbecoming fractal-paisley blouse with a floppy neck-bow. I hadn't seen her coming in. She sat down beside me, edging me along the bench and neatly trapping me against the corner wall. Further territorial encroachments were provided by her substantial selection of foodstuffs. Her male companion, tall and heavy in a dark suit and white shirt and darkened spex, sat down opposite, placing an insultingly token cup of Coke carefully in front of him.

"Well, hi," the woman said. She stuck her right hand across to me, for a shake so awkward it must have looked Masonic. "Name's Mary-Jo Greenberg." An eyebrow twitch. "And this is Al."

The big man inclined his head slightly. "From Nevada Orbital Dynamics."

"Matt Cairns," I said. "Pleased to meet you."

"I assume we've checked out each other's credentials," Mary-Jo said. "We know who you are, and you know who we are."

I nodded and glanced around; the inevitable question occurred to me. "Is this place safe to talk?"

Mary-Jo laughed. "Safe enough, Thin Red. Safer than you're used to. Besides our privacy laws and such, there's so much crap being talked here it'd take a damn dedicated processor to sort the wheat from the chaff."

"I'll take your word for it," I shrugged. "Any news of Jadey?"

"We're working on it," Mary-Jo said. "I mean, we've had a bit of direct contact. The U.S. consulate in Edinburg's on the job, for what that's worth. She's fine. Basically all that has to be done is dicker over the deal. Should be out in a few days, no problem."

"Oh, that's great," I said. This good news combined with an overpowering burst of relief and pleasure at having someone to talk to at last.

"So," I went on, "how much do you want for a flying saucer?"

"Ah," said Al. "I don't think this place is quite safe enough to talk about
that."

The offices of Nevada Orbital Dynamics were in a long, low, and -- most importantly -- air-conditioned building. The short walk there had left me somewhat drained. Sweat evaporated before it had time to wet my skin; then, as soon as I'd stepped into the interior, it went all clammy and cold. I sat in a leather-and-aluminum sling chair, gulped, a Bud to replace lost fluids, and sipped a coffee to warm up.

The office we were in seemed to be AI's -- the name ALAN ARMSTRONG was on the door, and he was familiar with everything within, but he'd not expanded on his introduction. He sat with his feet on the desk, leaning back and sucking a smokeless cigarette. Mary-Jo stood by the window. The painted concrete walls were bare except for a few discreet posters showing cutaway diagrams of obscure machinery and components, cycling through their incomprehensible activities in a distractingly attention-grabbing way.

I told them my story; they acted less impressed than my code-geeks had been. Maybe they'd heard this sort of thing before. When I'd finished, I placed the little datadisk on Alan's desk; they gathered around, looking down at it. For a moment neither of them spoke.

"Do you have something that can
read
this thing?" Alan asked.

"Yeah, sure," I said, amused. I hadn't expected hardware-incompatibility problems, though I should have. I took out my reader, slotted the disk in, peeled out a connection and reached for Alan's desk viewplate, then glanced up at him.

"Do you mind?"

He pulled a plug somewhere -- smart guy -- then waved.

"Go ahead."

I patched it across, handed him the reader, and stepped back.

"Check it out."

For the next hour or so Alan burrowed through the documentation; as his suspicions eased he added his spex to the interface, keying air and murmuring. Mary-Jo followed him in, but broke off occasionally to give me a reassuring smile or urge me to another coffee. At last Alan came out of it, and pushed the kit away, took his spex off and looked at me. His eyes were blue and mild; the skin around them betrayed tiredness beyond that from examining the specification.

I plucked off the connection, picked up the reader and stashed it.

"Well?" I asked.

Alan nodded slowly, thin-lipped.

"Whatever this is," he said, "it looks damn authentic. The bits I can understand are sound, and the bits I can't are ... well,
alien
in a way that'd be hard to fake." He laughed briefly. "I've
seen
fake alien flying-saucer specs that were really good -- old disinformation, pre-war. They were nothing like this. You always hit some kind of bullshit and hand-waving when you got in deep enough."

"Boron," Mary-Jo said. For some reason they both found this funny.

"Yeah, boron." Alan sighed. "A lot of talk about boron and magnetism and Tesla. Mind you, they didn't have the transplutonics to waffle about back then, maybe that's the equivalent here. There's no 'unobtanium' involved, but the only way this thing can fly is if we are deeply ignorant of the properties of island-of-stability elements. Which, as it happens, we are, so -- " He spread his hands.

"Are we talking AG?" Mary-Jo asked.

"Something like that," Alan replied. He rubbed his nose. "I mean, what's a flying saucer without anti-gravity?" He jerked his head back, vaguely indicating the window. "Apart from the ones flying above us, right?
And,
the thing the spec calls 'the engine' looks to me like a space drive."

"Are we talking FTL?" I asked, mimicking Mary-Jo.

Alan shook his head. "No. But fast."

"Could we build it?" Mary-Jo asked.

"Yes, but only in space. That process requires a micro-gravity environment. As for the transplutonics -- shit, they're only made in space anyway. By ESA, to be exact. I suppose we could ask nicely."

I stood up, feeling restless; stretched my arms and rubbed my shoulders. "I wonder," I said idly, "if they've already built it, out there."

Mary-Jo and Alan looked at each other. Alan's shrug was not quite imperceptible. Mary-Jo turned to me.

"No," she said. "They haven't."

"How do you -- ? Oh. You're in touch with them."

"Since the mutiny. Yeah. It's no secret. They're doing everything in the open. Unless they're playing some kind of real elaborate double-bluff, which, given the history of commie intrigues, can't be ruled out; they've given us a general picture of what they've learned. Have you seen any of that, by the way?"

"No, I've been kind of preoccupied with worrying about Jadey, and the politics back home."

"Tell me about it," Mary-Jo grinned. "Looks like all hell's breaking loose in Red Europe, huh?
Anyway
-- check out the science data, sometime soon -- it's fascinating. Man, they are talking to
gods.
But the
Titov
crew have said nothing about this. Alien space-drives -- my God, you'd think they'd mention it."

"Oh." I felt a cold wash of disappointment as the obvious inference struck home. "Do you think this stuff could be some of the 'disinformation' that guy Driver talked about in his broadcast?"

Alan shook his head. "I doubt it," he said. "Look at the time-stamp -- last year. Whatever this is, it's been kicking around somewhere inside ESA for a while, and if the U.S. government or even the CIA had its hands on something like this, I'd have heard about it. I've been cultivating contacts very busily for the past few days, and if I'm sure of anything it's that nobody on our side knew about the alien minds at all. They were getting stacks of what they thought were bits of valuable scientific information, mainly in Comp Sci and low-temp physics, and all of it true as far as it went, but nothing -- I mean
nothing
-- of a hint about the full truth. Jesus, these guys did their job well."

"Driver and Weber?"

"Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Beats me how they stopped the real CIA agent -- Major, uh, Sukhanov -- from blowing the gaff whenever he was off the station. He managed at least two furloughs on Earth in the past ten years, and he must've had
some
contact on the ground."

"Oh, that," I said. "My guess is Sukhanov's totally innocent, and Driver accused him to stir up trouble in the Army and take the flak off the FSB."

"So who
was
the CIA's -- ?" He stared at me. "You're kidding."

"Driver," I said. "It must have been. Or that's what the CIA thought! He and Weber were double agents. That's why there was real evidence against Weber."

"If 'evidence' means anything in this context," said Mary-Jo. She sat down on the edge of the desk. "What I wonder about, though, is how the information you've got comes to be on Earth and not on the
Titov."

"Because it was developed on Earth?" I suggested. "Maybe the design information got passed through without ever having been analyzed, and all the subsequent work was done on the ground, with the intention of not letting anyone on the station know about it until they were sure enough of the security situation, perhaps, to go ahead and build the thing."

"Need-to-know? Yeah, I guess that's plausible." Alan jumped up. "In that case the best thing we can do is get this out to the station. Get that disk, or a copy of it, out there physically."

"Why not just transmit it?"

"Because we don't want the E.U. to know what we're up to,"

Mary-Jo said. "We need someone who understands the system and the programs. Like, that manufacturing-control program? Someone who can handle the interfaces between hard tech and wet tech, and who's physically fit and politically savvy and politically reliable." She grinned at me. "Like, for example, you."

9

____________

Light-Years Gone

Elizabeth sat on a stool by a lab bench, sipping the day's first coffee, and stared at the diagrams on the wall. The annotated and revised and scribbled-on tracings of the squid nervous system looked as meaningless as a clump of roots in a random clod. Around her the saline aquaria made a continuous hiss as bubbles oozed from the pumice blocks at the ends of the aerator tubes; the little electric pump that powered them all hummed away in a corner of the lab, reliable as a heart.

Getting up had felt like an act of bravery; dressing, like donning armor; boarding the tram like riding to battle. The wise Stoic saws were little comfort when pleasure and pain were what you wanted to feel: anything but this numb sadness. The only comfort, and it was a cold one, was that Gregor would soon feel this way himself. She couldn't see Lydia staying, or Gregor leaving with her -- both had too many attachments. Each would tacitly assess that to tear themselves away from their homes would be more painful than to part from each other; but that parting would be painful enough. She was a little shocked to find herself wishing the pain on Gregor, and hoping that he'd turn to her on the rebound.

More likely, the fool would mope for months. The utter perniciousness of romantic love couldn't be more obvious in his case. Or in hers. Gods-only-knew how many opportunities of a good one-night stand or a healthy, fulfilling, longer-term relationship she'd passed up in the time she'd wasted obsessing over this son of a bitch. And because nobody even knew about it, she'd be insidiously acquiring a reputation as a rather cold character, not really interested in sex. There were such people, whose interest in some intellectual pursuit or physical skill or even in business or politics left no time or energy for human intimacy. It was a respectable, if not respected, way of life -- not admired so much as wondered at.

She had no desire to be one of them, but there were times when she feared she was. Surely if she were normal, and her desires as urgent as most people's seemed to be, she'd have broken through the awkwardness of the situation, risked rejection and embarrassment and even their existing friendship, just for the sake of grabbing him for once, of surprising him with one hot honest word or thirsty kiss.

She heard Salasso's quick, light step in the corridor and hurriedly composed her expression, looking up with a smile as the saur came in.

"Good morning," he said. He fingered his lab coat from the hook and put it on, oblivious as always to how comical it looked: too long for his height, too short for his arms, too loose for his torso. He reached for the kettle and set it to boil, crumbling a fish bouillon cube into a mug. "You're in early."

"I wanted to think over what we've been doing."

It was hard to make out where he was looking, the corners of his eyes went around so far. He poured the water and stirred.

"Hmm. Ahh, that's better." Salasso sipped the stock and visibly relaxed. His species had a taste for fish, and a distaste for fishing. The arrival of humans on Mingulay had moved fish and fish products from a rare shore-caught luxury to a staple in the saur diet. Nothing could shift their dislike of the sea and fear of deepwater fishing. As far as Elizabeth knew, Salasso was the first saur anyone had ever heard of who so much as set foot on a boat. It didn't seem to bother him at all.

"Yes, we may expect visitors today," he went on. "Is that why you have dressed differently?"

Under her lab coat she was wearing a white high-necked silk blouse and a black linen skirt to midcalf, with dark stockings and light leather shoes. Salasso had never before given the slightest indication of noticing anyone's clothes.