“You? I doubt it.”
***
“The sea’s right outside,” Barry squealed as he ran back through the house. He flung himself at Mark. “Right there, Dad!”
Mark ruffled his son’s hair. “I told you it would be.”
“Can I go in now? Please! Please!”
“No.” Mark gestured at the pile of boxes and crates that the trolleybots had taken off the big removal truck. He could see them through the wide open doors, bringing more boxes. How did we acquire so much stuff so quickly; we lost everything in the Ulon Valley. “You can’t, I’ve no idea where your swim trunks are. And besides, I don’t know what the currents are like.” Which was a white lie; the development company brochure file guaranteed that the beaches of the Mulako Estate had benign weather and tides.
“Where’s the sea?” Sandy demanded as she came in through the front door, holding her backpack.
“Outside, come on!” Barry grabbed her hand, and the two of them raced off through the huge living room and out onto the veranda, Panda barking loudly as she raced after them. The lawn beyond had only just been turfed, gardenbots were still tending the new shrub boarders. It ended with a long dune that topped the private beach of white sand and azure water. A thicket of palms had been planted down one side of the lawn, shielding them from the rest of the estate. Mark had never seen so much civil construction work in one place before, not even on Cressat. That morning they’d driven out of Tanyata station, itself undergoing a massive expansion, and down the coastal road. Outside the burgeoning capital city, the land along the shore was one giant building site, with the developers offering exclusive homes in fifteen-acre private grounds. Mark had bought the plot at the farthest end of the estate, where the national park began. They didn’t need a mortgage, the Sheldon Dynasty had paid for it, although Nigel had wanted him to take something even grander on Cressat—in fact anything anywhere was the offer. Mark said no thanks, living in mansions just wasn’t him. He didn’t want to live off a trust fund, either; he’d seen the way Dynasty children turned out and he wasn’t going to let that happen to Barry and Sandy. So he’d accepted a directorship at the Tanyata offices of Alatonics, the Dynasty’s principal bot manufacturer, which paid him a colossal salary—and the way Tanyata was growing he was going to be earning it. Immigration was running at a quarter of a million a week, mainly refugees from the Lost23. Once all the arrangements had been made, Liz sat down with the architect for a week, designing the big airy house that to be honest was a small mansion. Now they were here, it didn’t seem quite real.
“Don’t go in the water,” he yelled after the kids. “I really mean it.” He looked around the big hall, trying to remember which doors led where. Then he caught sight of the marks that Barry’s sneakers had left on the living room’s polished hardwood floor, and winced. “Find out if there’s a maidbot,” he told his e-butler.
Liz walked in, carrying a box full of crockery. “Guess what?”
“Er…”
“The furniture store just called. They won’t be delivering until Thursday.”
“But that’s two days. What are we supposed to do until then? We haven’t got much furniture.” He still couldn’t believe the size of the rooms; it was like a house made up from aircraft hangars. The few items they had brought with them wouldn’t fill his study, let alone the reception rooms.
“Good question. The marshaling yard at the station is just a mess, the container is there somewhere. They think.” Liz gave the hall lighting a suspicious stare. “Those aren’t the fittings I ordered.”
“Aren’t they?” Mark thought the gold and pearl fittings were quite nice.
“No. Where the hell is that development company rep? She should have been here when we arrived.”
“Yes, dear.”
“What’s that?” Liz was looking back out at the front of the house, where a MoZ Express courier van had drawn up next to the removal truck. “Never mind, I’ll find out.”
“Do you want me to help unpack some of the boxes?”
“No. You watch the show, it’s starting. The portals were all installed—at least they’d goddamn better be.”
Mark hurriedly found a big floor cushion in one of the boxes, and carried it through into the living room. He put it on top of the scuff marks. Liz would kill Barry if she saw them.
He sat down and told the house management array to access the Michelangelo show. The portal projected the image across half of the empty floor. The resolution and color definition was superb, even with the sunlight streaming in through the open veranda doors.
Michelangelo was dressed in a flowing purple silk suit, standing by himself in the middle of the studio. “Hello, one and all. This is the show we’ve been trailing for a couple of weeks now, the one where we promise to give you the real story behind the war. And believe me, I am not kidding. To prove it, we have Nigel Sheldon here in the studio.” The image focus switched to a line of chairs, Nigel sat at one end, and smiled at the studio audience as the applause started. “Ozzie, himself,” Michelangelo announced as if he couldn’t quite believe the guest list. “Retired Admiral Wilson Kime, Senator Justine Burnelli, Chief Investigator Paula Myo, and our two very special visitors, Stig McSobel, spokesman for the Guardians of Selfhood, and a MorningLightMountain motile containing the memories of Dudley Bose.” Michelangelo applauded the line-up, then smiled winningly out at the audience to show how really happy he was with the next announcement. “And although it’s technically my show, the interviewer of course simply has to be our very own Mellanie Rescorai.”
Mark chuckled as the image zoomed in on Mellanie sitting behind Michelangelo’s big desk.
“You should have gone,” Liz told him.
He looked up and grinned. “Not a chance. Remember the last time she interviewed me?”
“Yes,” Liz drawled. “Anyway, the delivery was for you.”
“Oh, what is it?”
Liz gestured at the trollybot. There were ten children’s school lunch boxes resting in its basket. “There was a note.”
Mark frowned as he opened the little envelope. “Fresh from the kindergarten,” he read. “Enjoy your new house. Ozzie.” He grinned and opened the first lunch box. “Hey, champagne!”
“Millextow crab salad,” Liz exclaimed as she opened another. “Thornton’s chocolates. Damn, we need more rich friends.”
Someone knocked on the front door. When they went into the hall they saw three people standing on the shaded porch. Mark did his best not to stare at the tallest of them, a lean man wearing a kilt and white T-shirt. Every part of his exposed skin had an OCtattoo; golden galaxies glowed on his bald head. “Hello there, I’m Lionwalker Eyre, and these are my life partners, Scott and Chi. We’re your new neighbors. Thought we should come and introduce ourselves.”
“Please, come in,” Mark said. He was now having trouble not staring at Chi, who was enchantingly beautiful. “I didn’t know we had neighbors yet.”
“Aye, well, we’ve been here a while,” Lionwalker said in a broad Scottish accent. “Normally I’d have moved planets by now. Don’t like the crowds. No offense. But there are no uncrowded planets anymore. So, best make the most of it, eh?”
“We were just about to open a bottle.”
“In the middle of the afternoon? My kind of neighbors.”
“I know you,” Chi said. “You’re the Mark Vernon.”
“Ah.” Mark casually sucked his belly back in. “Guilty, I’m afraid.”
“Actually,” Liz said, as her arm closed around Mark’s shoulder. “He’s my Mark Vernon.”
***
Bradley Johansson did the one thing he didn’t expect to do: he opened his eyes. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed. His throat had trouble forming the words, they came out very wrong. These vocal cords were evolved for more sophisticated sound, and song.
“Did you ever doubt that?” Clouddancer asked. “We named you our friend.”
“Ah,” Bradley said. He tried to get up
. When he moved his arms, the wing membranes came with it, rustling heavily. He looked down in astonishment at his Silfen body. “Is this real?”
Clouddancer laughed. “Hey, pal, if you ever find out what real is, you be sure and let us know, okay?”
***
It had been a long three weeks out in the new desert. Tom was tired and filthy after the endless days scanning the sandy soil and digging endless holes. He also wanted a break from Andy’s constant whining and Hagen’s wretched cooking—say about ten years. Brothers they might be, but that didn’t mean he could stand being cooped up with them for so long.
It had seemed like a good idea after their home had burned down in Armstrong City thanks to the psycho Guardians. The Commonwealth was keen to acquire sections of the smashed alien starship, the navy paid good money for pieces. All you had to do was head out into the new desert that the planet’s revenge had laid across the veldt between the Dessault Mountains and the Oak Sea, swing a metal detector about, and dig where it went ping. A lot of guys were doing it. They claimed to be very rich, not that you’d know it from the way they dressed or the vehicles they rode.
Tom and his brothers had never had any real finds. A few scraps, chunks of twisted metal that truthfully could have been anything. The dealers in Zeefield never offered much. Scavengers said if any true find came along the dealers would bid against each other, bumping the price up. Tom hated the dealers, but the only way to get the true price on the scraps was to drive all the way back to Armstrong City where the navy starship visited every couple of months to see what’d been found. Traveling cost them weeks. They weren’t making enough to do that.
Every time they went out, Tom was convinced that this would be the trip that hit pay dirt. The starship was huge, mostly solid machinery according to the dealers and other scavengers. That meant there should be segments the size of houses buried under the new desert. How difficult could it be?
This had been another washout trip. They had sensors rigged to cables that stretched out for twenty-five meters on either side of their old Mazda jeep. The ends were fixed to small quad bikes that Hagan and Andy rode, keeping the cable taut. That way they could cover big stretches of the new desert driving along together. The guy they’d bought them off swore the system could find metal twenty meters down. The price he charged them for the rig, they should have been able to locate anything a kilometer away.
All they’d got was a battered old pump made of some lightweight metallic composite, which was probably going to fetch a couple of hundred Far Away dollars, and three curving jags of metal that looked suspiciously like wheel arches to Tom. But they had wires and some electronic modules fixed to them. So you never knew…It had taken the better part of five days to excavate them. The trouble with the new desert was that it wasn’t a real desert, especially not now, a year after the planet’s revenge. To start with it had been a naked expanse of sandy soil. But the rains washed over it, and seeds from the buried plants germinated and began to grow. It was a faint green color now, and the soil was claggy, making digging difficult, especially after the rain. Streams and rivers were reappearing along contours. There were some lowlands that were now just bogs, impossible to traverse. Every time they went out, they’d spend hours digging the Mazda out of unexpected patches of mud.
Tom found Highway One just after midday, and turned onto it, heading north. Farther south, where the road ran parallel to the Dessault Mountains, it had completely vanished beneath the soil of the new desert. Here, it extended out in the open, sometimes for kilometers before high dunes covered it again. They slowly diminished the farther north you went, until half a day past Mount StOmer they ended altogether. It was easy to follow the road, though. Every vehicle left tracks along the line of the concrete underneath the dunes. You could even find the road in the dark.
When he was on the crest of one dune, he saw a dark figure by the side of the tracks a few hundred meters ahead. “What the hell is that?”
“What’s what?” Hagen shouted.
“Will you turn your fucking music off,” Tom told him. That was another thing: Hagen played his jazzy rock all day long at full volume.
“It’s a girl,” Andy said. “Yahoooo.”
Tom peered forward. No way you could tell. “Come on, guys, it’s someone with a busted truck, is all.” Not that he could see one. Not anywhere. But how else would anybody get out here?
“I’m telling you, it’s a girl.”
“Hagen, turn you music off right now, or I’m gonna throw that array out of the jeep.”
“Screw you, asshole.”
But he did turn it down. Tom gunned the Mazda down the slope. Not that he believed Andy, but…
“How much do we charge for recovery and taxi service?” Andy said with a laugh.
“Hell, I know what I’m gonna charge her,” Hagen said, and cupped his crotch.
It made Tom realize what they must look like. Filthy overalls and T-shirts, all in raggedy old sunhats, ancient shades. Unshaved for the whole three weeks. And the state of the Mazda was pretty poor. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered as they approached the figure who still hadn’t moved. He slowed the jeep.
“Told you so,” Andy said.
Hagan started an excited heavy breathing laugh as if he were some kind of retard.
“Shut up, Hagen,” Tom shouted. It really was a girl. She had short dark hair under a white peaked cap, and wore a sleeveless orange T-shirt with tight dark pants cut off just above the knees. And she was sitting in a very weird position, with her legs crossed and feet bent back somehow. All he could think of was how supple she must be to do that. A smile was growing on his face. He halted the jeep beside her. “Good afternoon, there.”
“Howdy!” Andy shouted. “Me and my brothers, we’re heading into town.”
Tom jabbed his elbow into Andy’s ribs.
“Yes, ma’am.” Hagan laughed. “We’re gonna have us a party tonight. Do you wanna party?”
To Tom’s complete surprise she stood up and grinned at them.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said the Cat.
***
As always, lack of sleep made Ozzie testy. He unzipped his tent, flapped his arms against the chill of the early morning forest air, and wandered over to the fire they’d built last night. The Bose motile was standing beside it, feeding small chips of wood to the embers. Flames were starting to flicker again.
“Morning, Ozzie,” the Bose motile said. “I’ll have this going again in a minute. Do you want your hot chocolate?” It was speaking through a small bioneural array attached to the tip of a sensor stalk, a custom-built system that could easily be swapped for a standard Prime interface module.
“Coffee,” Ozzie grumbled. “It’ll help keep me awake.” He glowered at the tent on the other side of the small clearing that Orion and Mellanie shared.
“I’m lucky, this body doesn’t need sleep like humans. A good rest is all it takes to refresh me.”
Ozzie sat down on an ancient rotting tree trunk and started tying his boot laces up. The horses were snorting behind him, impatient for their feed. “Some humans don’t need any sleep, apparently. I mean, did you hear them last night? Man, they were at it for hours.”
“They are young.”
“Huh. They could at least be young and quiet.”
“Ozzie, you’re turning into quite a grump. Did you never have a honeymoon?”
“Yeah, yeah. Throw some eggs on the pan, will you, I’m going to see to the horses.” He busied himself with the nosebags.
Tochee was next up, unzipping the hemispherical tent that it had designed for itself. “Good morning, friend Ozzie.”
“Morning.” The array on his wrist translated his grunt into an ultraviolet pulse for Tochee. It looked like a bracelet with a black stone set in the top, the whole thing was bioneural and custom made. The experts in the CST electronics division had relished the challenge of coming up with bioluminescent ultraviolet emitters; it’d taken them
the best part of six months, but the little unit functioned perfectly along the Silfen paths.
The first cup of coffee mellowed Ozzie’s temper slightly. Then the sound of human sex started to echo around the clearing, rising in pitch and intensity. The tent was shaking.
“Why do they both refer to your deity while mating?” Tochee inquired as it munched on some rehydrated cabbage. “Is it a request for a blessing?”
Ozzie shot the Bose motile a look, but of course it didn’t have body language he could read. “Uncontrollable reflex, man, look it up in your encyclopedia files.”
“Thank you, I will do so.”
Ozzie started eating his eggs and rehydrated bread. Trying to concentrate on the food.
Orion and Mellanie appeared a little while later, both smiling broadly. They held hands as they walked over to the fire.
“I boiled some water for you,” the Bose motile said.
“Probably cold by now,” Ozzie muttered.
“Would you like some teacubes?”
“Yes, please,” Mellanie said. They sat on the trunk together. She leaned against him, her hands holding his, and they smiled at each other again. “Do you have to leave?” she asked.
Ozzie chased off his mood; that was really why he was being such a dick this morning. “Yeah, ‘fraid so, man. There’s a split in the path just the other side of the clearing.”
“He’s right,” Orion said. “I can feel it.”
Mellanie gave the tall trees a wistful look. “I wish I could.”
“You’ll learn,” he said adoringly.
Ozzie caught all four of the Bose motile’s sensor stalks waving in unison. He put it down to motile laughter.
They all took a long time to pack up that morning, delaying the moment. In the end all the bags were loaded onto the horses, water canteens filled, lunches made ready in the day packs. Ozzie stood facing Tochee and Orion, feeling thoroughly miserable.
“Tochee.”
“Friend Ozzie, I have dreaded this time.”
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