Cosmonaut Keep (6 page)

Instead he'd found himself in a universe where gods swarmed by the trillion, a regular Oort Crowd of them around every star -- most of the gods, as far as anyone knew, being convinced atheists. The only thing the gods had ever created for anyone else's benefit was the stardrive. The stardrive could get you to the stars, in an instant of subjective time. At the speed of light.

There were times when he felt like saying to the gods,
Thanks a bunch.

" ... purchase a great deal of our staple foodstuffs and machinery from the saurs, naturally enough," Tenebre was saying. "Most of our wealth, as you might expect, comes from the profits of trade. Much of the commerce between the elder species is handled by Babylonian business families, who are thus able to support many of the populace through the purchase of various services. The manufacturing and farming classes sensu stricto tend to specialize in luxury production for the saur market. Among the saurs there is quite a fashion for human handicraft products, a taste for certain fruits and vegetables, spices, and, er, herbs ... "

Everyone laughed.

The merchant leaned back, patting his belly complacently. "All indications are that the popular masses are quite satisfied with their lot; those who aren't, are free to take ship to the younger colonies, and for several centuries such emigration has been at a low trickle."

James grinned to himself, noticing Driver's slow, sober nod. Nova Babylonia didn't exactly sound like a technologically dynamic society. They'd always suspected as much, but it was encouraging, in a way, to have it confirmed.
We could already walk all over them,
he thought, wondering if Driver -- to say nothing of Tenebre -- was thinking the same. Not that the elder species would allow them to actually do it, but still ...

"So," said Driver, "although this is no time for serious bargaining, I find myself wondering just what you could possibly want from our ... somewhat isolated and backward society." He shrugged, spreading his hands. "Your predecessors have for the most part traded with the other species here, buying little but our poor local copies of gadgets and trinkets originally manufactured in the Solar System. I hardly think our technology is much of a match for that of the saurs."

Cairns noticed frowns around the table, from their own side's more business-oriented types, obviously thinking that Driver wasn't much of a salesman. He wished there was some secret signal meaning,
Give the man credit for being a bit devious,
then realized that these discomfited faces might at some level be a part of Driver's devious design.

"Oh, when we've had a chance to examine what my family and your traders each have to offer, I think we'll all be pleasantly surprised," said Tenebre smoothly. "Products for human use are best devised -- if not necessarily manufactured -- by human beings. And we have, as usual, much business to do with the saurs and with our cousins of the mines and the forests: pharmaceuticals, certain rare minerals, hardwoods, and so forth." He waved a hand. "Routine trade. But I will tell you frankly that our strongest interest is in what you have brought from Earth. Art, science, technology, history, philosophy -- all the knowledge of the home world. Nova Babylonia thirsts for them all!"

"But that's
information!"
Matt said. "And, as we say, information wants -- "

Driver's head turned like a striking snake. His swift glare made Cairns pause.

"Information wants to be paid?" said Tenebre. He smiled around at his interlocutors. "We," he told them proudly, "have such a saying ourselves."

The guests had retired, the servants and younger family members had cleared away most of the evening's detritus and gone to their own beds. The few old members of the Cosmonaut Families who still lived in the castle had made their way through to the front hall, and set themselves down in armchairs in a loose arc around the fireplace. One saur accompanied them, old Tharovar, who had welcomed their ancestors, the original crew, on their first arrival. In his long acquaintance with humans he'd acquired a better head for the hemp than most of his kind, and was now relaxed, rather than comatose in the servants' hall like the others.

Cairns nursed his brandy and cigar, in the chair nearest the dying fire. Margaret sat on the floor, resting against the chair's arm, basking in the embers' heat. Tharovar squatted at his other hand. The others gazed unseeing into the fire for a while: Driver, and Andrei Volkov, and Larisa Telesnikova, and Jean-Pierre Lemieux. Those all had partners or lovers who were from outside the notional, hereditary crew -- the cosmonaut cadre -- and who had tactfully left them to their private thoughts and conversation.

Driver looked around the depleted company and cleared his throat, spat into the fire. Sputum sizzled horribly for a second or two.

"Well," he said, "I got an interesting offer from Tenebre."

"A different one from the ones he was making at the table?" asked Volkov.

Driver nodded. "He picked a quieter moment ... What he offered was to pay us well -- for shipping. He could make it very advantageous for us to go into the carrying trade."

Low and bitter laughter greeted this statement.

Cairns felt Margaret grip his ankle, and relaxed his own grip, unconsciously fastened on her shoulder.

"So what did you say to that?"

Driver shrugged, a movement exaggerated by the padded shoulders of his loosened doublet. "I ... temporized, but gave him to understand we'd be interested."

"What?"
Cairns almost shouted. The others sat up in their seats, equally agitated. Driver regarded them all with a sardonic smile.

"We always knew it would come to this sometime," he said mildly. "We've prepared for it." He fixed Cairns with a reproving look. "After a fashion. So -- what progress do
you
have to report, Navigator?"

James waited for a second or two; Margaret was urgently stroking his foot, and the gentle touch calmed him a little, not much. Tharovar sat tense and rigid beside him; the tendons in the saur's thin neck were like taut wires, and his mouth was, if possible, thinner than usual.

"Come off it, Hal," Cairns said. "For decades now it's been little more than a gods-damned
hobby,
as you well know. It's not easy to interest the younger members of the family in the" -- his lips curled -- "Great Work, and it gets more tedious with every computer that breaks down and can't be repaired. Every so often somebody shamefacedly turns in a few pages of logic or math. Christ Almighty, I could sometimes swear the paper has had
tears
fall on it, like some kid's exercise book. I put them together in order, I file them, I pass out a few more problems, and they take even longer to come back. People have other priorities, other opportunities, and more as time goes on."

Only the knowledge of how pathetic, how feeble it would sound, made him refrain from adding,
What else can I do?
He hated hearing himself make excuses; it wasn't his manner, not his style at all, not part of the program.
Not done, old chap.
But it was true, and Driver knew it was true, and Cairns knew that he knew.

So he concluded by saying, confidently and aggressively, his oldest excuse of all, a Navigator family joke:

"I'm an artist, not a technician."

That got a laugh -- even Driver had to smile -- and the tension eased. Larisa Telesnikova took the opportunity to lean forward and speak diplomatically.

"Okay, comrades," she began, as she usually did when talking seriously to any gathering larger than two, "what this means is that we
don't know
what progress may have been made by now. Why don't we use the formal reception for the merchants to invite as many as possible of the Navigator's family, and ask them to bring their latest results, even their latest workings?"

"Better than nothing," agreed Driver.

"That's all very well," said Cairns, "but I don't hold out much hope." He glared at Driver. "As you well know. And what will you tell your new friend Tenebre when it becomes obvious that we can't come up with the goods?"

Driver chuckled darkly, scratching his belly through the bunched cambric of his shirt.

"That's the beauty of it," he said. "I tell him we have technical difficulties, demand a substantial retainer, swear blind we won't cut a deal with any other merchants who may come hurrying to the scene, and ask him to call back on his next trip. For him, that means a wait of a couple of months, maybe a year. For us ... well, one way or another, it won't be our problem."

Cairns guffawed; the others laughed too, less heartily. Their ages were all in the seventies or eighties, and -- even with the medical knowledge that the saurs had long shared with the hominid genera -- none of them expected to live more than another few decades. Unless, of course, the secrets of the ancient Cosmonauts could be rediscovered in the meantime -- but that was a hope, not an expectation.

Tharovar stood up and strolled over to the fireplace and stood in front of it on the hearth. His silhouette gave Cairns an atavistic pang of unease, like a childish reaction to a familiar person in a frightening mask.

"Have you considered," the saur said in his low, hissing voice,
"accompanying
the family Tenebre to Nova Babylonia and back? You could use their starship as a time machine into the future of this colony, a future in which, perhaps, your mathematical problems will be solved -- and your lives could be extended further."

"Yeah, I've considered it," Driver said, surprising Cairns, who hadn't. "I have
no
fucking intention of tearing myself away from my life, my descendants, and my ability to keep up, in order to turn myself into a stranger in a strange time."

Cairns joined in the murmur of agreement.

"Then you could go to Croatan," the saur persisted, "and shuttle back and forth, returning here every ten years. That would surely be sufficient."

Margaret spoke up. "You really don't have much of a handle on this 'progress' thing, do you, Tharovar?"

The smile in her voice belied the criticism in her words, and the saur replied with some humor of his own.

"Perhaps not," he said. "I am only an egg."

Gregor hauled himself a meter off the edge of his futon, elbowed his way across the carpet, and slammed down the button to shut off the loud ringing of his alarm clock. Early sunlight rampaged through the narrow window of his room. He lay half in and half out of bed for minute or two, cheek pressed on the rough fibers by the planet's merciless one-gravity pull, while he made a cautious all-systems check. Thankfully, the various aches in his limbs and back were all accounted for by the previous day's work on the boat; minute movements of his head did not result in any explosion. The feeling in his stomach came from an empty belly and a full bladder; no nausea was detectable. His erection, to which one hand had reflexively returned, was comfortingly hard. His mouth was dry, but tasted no worse than neutral.

It followed that he didn't have a hangover and hadn't drunk too much last night. Memory reported in, shamefacedly admitting to a few gaps in the record, but everything seemed consistent with his having shared one more pipe with Salasso, then walked back to his room, fallen asleep fully dressed, woken around midnight from colorful dreams, read for an hour or so, and then gone to bed properly, a mere five hours or so earlier.

Still moving slowly -- in part because of the legitimate (as it were) aches in his muscles, and in part because of the remaining possibility of a stealth hangover, the kind that lurked just outside awareness and then sprang on you like a cat from a tree at the first sudden movement -- Gregor rolled over and stood up. Everything still being fine, he wrapped himself in a bathrobe and padded down the corridor to the shared toilet to relieve himself. On returning to his room he bent and stretched his way through the calisthenics of the Salute to the Sun, and finished them invigorated. That done, he switched on the electric kettle and made himself a small pot of tea.

The room was just big enough to contain the futon, a table and chair, hundreds of pages of notes, and several hundred books. It wasn't much of a gesture of independence, considering that his father gave him the money he needed for rent, university fees, and subsistence, but it was better than living at home. At the top of a building in Kyohvic's old town, built before his ancestors' ship had arrived, the room gave him peace and privacy and, if he needed it, the easy company of the other students and older eccentrics who lived in its other twenty or so single rooms and shared its decrepit facilities.

As was his habit, he opened the weighty leatherbound volume -- a gift from his father -- of the Good Books, the words of the philosophers: the Fragments of Heraclitus, the Sayings of Epictetus, the Teachings of Epicurus, the Poems of Lucretius. Their English paraphrases were among the best-loved works of Mingulayan literature; some said they were better than the originals. His glance fell on one of the Fragments:

This world, which is the same for all,
no god or man has made.

An ever-living fire it is
whose flames forever flare and fade.

The book fell open again at another familiar page, from the Teachings:

Around the world goes friendship's dancing call,

Join hands in happiness for one and all.

That would do, he thought, as a devotion for the day. He drained his cup, dressed, and set off to work, picking up his breakfast on the way.

Elizabeth jumped off the clanging tram at Harbor Halt and walked briskly to the quay. The parked skiffs glowed orange in the early light, their spindly legs and lenticular bodies casting long shadows out over the water like tall, striding tripedal machines. The traders' ship squatting in the sound still struck her eye as a startling sight, intrusive, visibly alien, massively out-of-place. High above, an airship from the skyport on the hill behind Kyohvic wallowed upward to meet a southerly air current, and tiny buzzing airplanes made sightseeing circles around the harbor and its gigantic visitor. For a moment, airship and aircraft looked like pathetic, primitive imitations of the starship and the skiffs.