Cosmonaut Keep (26 page)

The dim glow faded. Salasso stepped back.

"I have arranged it," he said. "The skiff will be here in an hour."

Two automatic glass doors
thunked
open as they walked toward the entrance. Looking from one side to the other rather warily, Gregor and Elizabeth stepped through. Salasso hesitated for a moment, the doors began to close, then opened again as he jumped through. He glanced back at it suspiciously.

The room was quite large, with a counter along one side, fluorescent tubes suspended from the high ceiling. CRT monitors displaying flight information were mounted on the walls, as were long vertical loudspeakers playing indistinct and undistinguished music. Varieties of padded plastic seating and laminated plastic tables were scattered and clumped on the broad floor, some of which was polished wood, the rest carpeted. A few businessmen were sitting about, some still negotiating with saurs, others sipping drinks and looking blank.

"This is bizarre," said Gregor. "Like something from outer space."

Salasso climbed onto a seat by a small table. "Luxurious, anyway," he said, swinging his legs. "Much better than our facilities."

"Speaking of facilities ... " said Elizabeth.

Salasso pointed. Elizabeth looked at the sign and shook her head.

"Just as well I'm not wearing trousers ... By the way, is anyone else hungry?"

The girl at the refreshment counter wore a pink-and-white-striped dress that didn't seem to fit properly, and an apron over it that looked prettier and more valuable than the dress it was supposed to protect, and a similarly frilled band on her head that didn't actually keep her hair out of her eyes. Gregor was troubled by a vague puzzlement about all this, the uneasy feeling that everything here was a copy of something that was itself not the original and not quite right in the first place. He paid for the coffee, sandwiches, and fish-stock in Kyohvic coin, reluctantly accepted change in a handful of New Lisbon hole-punched lira, and returned with the tray.

"Didn't realize humans worked here," he remarked. "Must be boring as hell."

Salasso's mouth twitched.

"They tend not to stay long."

"Hmm," said Elizabeth. "I'd find it interesting. Fascinating. Working in Saur City!"

"The novelty palls," said Salasso.

As Gregor drank his coffee the stimulant rush made him vividly aware of the queasy, fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach. He realized he was actually nervous and excited at the prospect of traveling in a gravity skiff. In truth, more nervous than excited.

"Salasso," he said. "Would you mind, perhaps, sharing a pipe?"

"You're welcome."

Elizabeth drained her coffee and stood up, taking her half-eaten sandwich with her.

"Excuse me, chaps," she said. "I'd rather not partake, right now. I'll just go and watch the airships."

"Fine," said Gregor, squinting at her around the lighter flame. "See you."

She walked off briskly.

"What's eating
her?"
Gregor asked.

Salasso shrugged. The man and the saur smoked in companionable silence for a while, the saur taking far less than half the puffs. He accepted the final toke. Then he put down the pipe and fixed Gregor with his gaze.

"Perhaps I should not say this," he said in a barely audible voice, leaning forward. "The hemp makes one relaxed and emotionally expressive. Elizabeth wishes to keep very close rein on what emotions she expresses."

"Oh. I see." Gregor frowned. "Is she worried about something?"

Disturbing possibilities flashed through his mind -- an ill parent or grandparent, an injured sibling, student debt, some medical trouble of her own --

"Is it something I can help with?"

Of course she wouldn't want to
ask.
Her prickly dignity would get in the way.

The doors banged open as another lot of passengers came in. Salasso fiddled with the pipe, tapping the ash into an ornamental glass dish on the table before Gregor could remind him to use the floor.

"I don't know if you could help," he said. "But -- "

He closed his eyes for a second, then looked up at Gregor.

"You must know this. Elizabeth is in love with you and is distressed that you are in love with someone else."

Gregor felt a chill go through his belly like a cold blade. The fuzzy cloud of the hemp dispersed instantly, letting everything else crash in. Never had he felt so surprised, so embarrassed, so wrong-footed; and at the same time, so painfully pleased, and so satisfied -- as everything that Elizabeth had said or done in his presence was seen in its true, and now obvious, significance.

But it was his dismay that told in his voice.

"Oh, gods above. I never knew."

"I am sorry I had to tell you," said Salasso, the double edge of his words as polite as ever. "But it may be important for our expedition that you know this. It would be good if you were considerate of what she feels, and if you took great care not to give her any opportunity, in a moment of danger, for recklessness on your behalf." Some humor returned to his expression. "Or against you, come to that."

"Oh, gods, yes," said Gregor. It came out as a groan. "I think I need another coffee to pull myself together."

"Bring two," said Salasso, gazing out through the glass doors. "Elizabeth is heading back."

Fetching the drinks served as a small distraction for Gregor's mind and enabled him to face Elizabeth with some restored equanimity when he returned to the table.

"Oh, thanks," she said.

"How did you find the airships? Or has the skiff arrived?"

"We have about ten minutes," said Salasso.

"I wasn't watching the airships much," said Elizabeth. "The city itself is actually more interesting. More going on, all the time. And I kept getting the scale wrong, it's -- "

"Fractal?"

"Yes. Like the waves when we were above the sea. You can't tell how high you are, just by looking down."

"I can," said Salasso. He rolled his eyes from side to side, and they all laughed, and drained their cups, and went out to wait for the skiff.

Salasso spotted it first, and pointed southward, upward, and tracking. Gregor could see nothing but blue sky for half a minute, and then he saw a tiny point of light racing to the zenith, where it stopped. The silvery fleck enlarged above them until it became obviously a descending disc. Other people began looking and pointing, gathering in a small, excited crowd. At a thousand feet above them the disc went into a bravura display of falling-leaf motion, finally swooping around the platform until it came to rest a few meters above and a meter out from the safety rail. Close up, the silvery surface was streaked and splashed with brown muck that looked like dried mud, dung, and blood. Bits flaked off as the hatch opened and the stairladder extended to the platform.

Salasso hefted his case.

"Let's not keep them waiting."

Gregor gestured to Elizabeth. "Let me take your bag. After you."

"Oh, thanks!"

She ascended the ladder rather grandly, raising the hem of her skirt, wrinkling her nose at the faint farmyard pong. Gregor followed, clutching their bags and trying not to look down where the stairladder passed beyond the edge of the platform. As soon as he'd stepped inside, the stair folded in and the hatch closed.

The interior was in apparent daylight, from a window that went all around and which had been invisible from the outside -- a screen, he guessed. Around a central fairing was a circular seat, at the far end of which a single saur was sitting in front of a panel, looking back at them over his shoulder, his hands resting on a sloping panel under the window-screen.

He exchanged greetings with Salasso then said in English, "Hi, grab a seat. Doesn't matter where you sit. Or stand if you like."

But, moved by the impulse to avoid being thrown about by acceleration, Elizabeth, then Gregor, crowded up to sit alongside Salasso who had taken the place beside the pilot.

"I've turned the view to your vision," said the pilot. "Hope I got the colors right."

Gregor looked around. Where the screen wrapped behind him he could see people waving from the platform, standing back.

"Looks perfect," he said.

"Okay," said the pilot.

He turned to face forward, and his fingers rippled on the panel. The view tilted away from the tops of the city's towers to the sky and clouds. For a moment it seemed stationary, then the clouds began to grow visibly larger. Gregor looked around to the back, and saw the city tipped at a crazy angle, dwindling behind them. There was absolutely no sense of motion or that the craft was anything but horizontal. He felt Elizabeth clutch his arm as she leaned around him. They shot through a cloud in a white blink and then the view tilted again, revealing nothing but a very dark-blue sky.

Still unable to make his reflexes believe what he saw, Gregor stood up. Elizabeth, hanging on to his arm, rose too. Looking down from the upper side of the screen they could see the ground -- or rather, the surface of the planet, the horizon discernibly curving away on either side.

"Oh, gods above!" breathed Elizabeth, letting go of his arm and leaning on the yielding material of the screen's sill, peering downward, then tilting her head sideways and looking up. "You can see
stars!
We're practically in
space!"

"Welcome to the stratosphere," said the pilot. He leaned back and took his hands off the panel, revealing what looked like shallow imprints of his palms. "Makes a pleasant break for me too, I must say. I've been dodging sauropod shit for weeks."

"Not always dodging," said Elizabeth.

"Nothing a good tropical rainstorm won't wash off. It's their tails you have to watch out for, even in this crate."

He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs. Gregor guessed that, like Salasso, he'd been around humans for a while.

"Why do you get close to their tails in the first place?" Gregor asked, returning to the seat.

The pilot laughed. "I might have to give you a demo, on the way in to New Lisbon. Don't worry -- never lost a skiff yet."

On the area around the palm-prints, tiny rectangles of dim light appeared, flickering back and forth. The pilot leaned forward and scrutinized them.

"Oh good, Coriolis storm ahead. Time for a wash."

He laid his hands on the panel again and the view swung down to a blue ocean surface and, some way ahead of them, a roiling mass of cloud. Within seconds the craft had plunged into it, swooping out of its dive and into level flight. Rain-lashed darkness, a glimpse of blue sky, a rollover in another wet and dark space, then out the other side and up to the stratosphere again.

"If you pull something like that again," Elizabeth said, "you're going to have some cleaning to do on the
inside."

"If I have to do that again I'll ask you to close your eyes first," retorted the pilot. "It's the dissonance between eye and inner ear that -- "

Salasso hissed something and the pilot shut up.

Gregor, now that everyone understood that no motion of the craft could throw them about, was careful to sit clear of Elizabeth. He edged around the seat until he was looking directly behind, to the north and east. The seatback and the faintly vibrating, quietly humming, dimly glowing truncated cone of the engine-faring was between him and Elizabeth, a far more dangerous body. The hurricane, typical of the band of equatorial ocean between Mainland and Southland, receded over the horizon.

As this flight in its turn passed from the magical to the familiar, what Salasso had told him returned in all its novelty and force. He remained at once flattered and appalled. As he reviewed and re-evaluated their three years' acquaintance and friendship, he found himself wishing heartily that Elizabeth had made her true feelings known from the start. He couldn't know if he'd have reciprocated, but at least things would have been resolved. He had never thought of her in a sexual context, apart from an undercurrent of approbation of her as a good-looking, healthy woman, hardly more erotic than the sort of admiration he'd feel for a fit and handsome and intelligent man. It was possible, he supposed, that in their work relationship -- inevitably close and sometimes physical, when they sweated together on the boat -- he'd unconsciously masked off any such thoughts as no more appropriate for fellow scientists than for fellow soldiers.

Now -- breaking through that screen -- the knowledge that she was in love with him was in itself enough to make her suddenly enormously attractive and exciting, in a way that was both natural and perverse.

Lydia still shone in his mind in a way that made him feel guilty about even enjoying the thought of Elizabeth ... and yet Lydia had turned back from throwing in her lot with him; instead making it conditional on his meeting her father's extravagant requirement. His own requirement of her, he knew, was perhaps more exorbitant. The fact remained that Elizabeth had chosen to accompany him, and Lydia had not.

He wished that Elizabeth and not the saur had told him of her feelings, but he could not blame Salasso for doing it. The thought of what infelicities and blunders -- even perils -- his ignorance of the situation could have brought about, made his sweat run cold.

The sea behind them gave way to the long white beaches of the northern coast of Southland, then a broad fringe of manufacturing-plant which in its turn merged almost imperceptibly into the natural rainforest. Gregor stood up and moved around again to the front. When Elizabeth looked up as he sat down, he returned her a smile more gentle, more inquiring, than he perhaps intended.

Again the landscape below tilted upward, almost filling the screen, and they hurtled down to where the rainforest thinned out to grassland. Interrupted only by outcrops and mountain ranges, the sea of grass stretched all the way to the permafrost below the ice cap. Vast herds of gigantic beasts browsed the prairie; from this height, they appeared as stains on the land, irregular patches the size of counties. Untroubled by anything except the packs of predators and hordes of parasites that harassed their every moment, the dinosaurs of the northern reaches paid the high-skimming skiff less attention than they would a fly.