Migan was still laughing at that as they came up to the Angel Steps –a tremendous sweep of a thousand broad stone steps, rising over ten levels with intervening squares. Either side of the steps were the temples, big and small, with the secular buildings jammed in between them. True pilgrims walked up the steps to visit the shrine at the top – a natural spring and pool in a glade known, inevitably, as Angel Falls.
Migan, though, only wanted to show him the most famous of the temples here. There was a queue to go in when they got there, and they joined it. It did not seem to occur to Migan that they might use their VIP status to be taken in past the crowd, and nor did it occur to the queue to wave them through. They were simply accepted, with friendly conversation from those around them as they shuffled their way forward to the front. Only so many people were allowed in the temple at a time, so the queue advanced as other visitors came out of the exit.
‘This is the Caravin temple,’ Migan told him, and Alex recognised the name from his destination briefing.
‘After the artist who painted it?’
‘Yes – one of our great Creatives,’ Migan said. ‘Everyone on Camae knows about Caravin, we study her life and work at school. This temple is her masterpiece - she’s said to have been divinely inspired when she painted it, a work of rapture.’
‘It took her four years,’ a neighbour in the queue put in, helpfully, and another added that she’d died shortly after she’d finished it.
As a debate broke out over whether two years later could really be called ‘shortly after’, the queue shuffled forward again. And, within a few minutes, Alex found himself shuffling around the temple interior, too. There was no room to walk normally. The queue condensed as you went through the door, to the point where you were shoulder to shoulder, moving into a clockwise rotation around the inside of the temple which would, in due course, shuffle you out of the exit.
On the way around, people listened to the earpiece guide you were given as you entered. It was comical to see the crowd ahead all turning their heads this way and that as the guides directed them to look at particular features, but all the same, Alex found himself doing that too as the guide requested him to ‘notice’ this or ‘observe’ that.
His own impression of the great Caravin’s work was that whatever she might have been on when she’d painted it was very probably illegal. The paintings told the story of the Salvation, as many such decorated temples did, starting with a diseased, sin-ridden world being blasted to destruction, then the Angels carrying the Blessed to safety, their arrival at their paradisiacal new world, and the departure of the Angels back to heaven. In Caravin’s portrayal the scenes of fiery destruction were a psychotic’s nightmare, the Angels were vast, weirdly distorted six-armed beings and the Departure, with the Blessed busily populating their new world, was downright pornographic. But it was Art, Migan said, so that made it okay.
‘But you,’ she commented, as they walked away, ‘prefer that temple at Turu, I bet.’
Alex smiled agreement, thinking back to that moment of recognition, there, of something that was both ancient and alien.
‘Hard to imagine being able to have a spiritual experience in a crowd like that,’ he said.
‘Depends what you mean by a spiritual experience.’ Migan said. ‘There’s a buzz to being part of something like that, in with a crowd sharing it together. But hardly anyone really believes in the angels, really – not as something real and now, you know, actually up there listening to us all saying thank you.’
‘And if an angel,’ Alex asked, ‘suddenly appeared to you, in a blaze of light…?’
Migan giggled merrily. ‘I would,’ she said, ‘head straight for the nearest clinic!’ She grinned, and took his hand. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Your turn – show me your world!’
‘If you’re sure…’ Alex would have taken her to the ship any time, but Migan had declined. She was, she said, scared of what she called ‘high flight’ and the thought of going into space gave her the heeby-jeebies.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, with resolution. ‘I want to.’
All the same, the journey tested her resolve. She was nervous by the time they got to the Findur spaceport, hesitating to get into the shuttle which was waiting for them there, and exclaiming with unflattering dismay at the realisation that Alex was its pilot.
‘You’re going to drive?’
Alex couldn’t help it, he snurged, causing her to shove him on the arm for laughing at her.
‘I would,’ he pointed out, ‘be a pretty odd kind of starship officer if I couldn’t pilot a shuttle, Migan!’
‘Yes, yes, I know that, but…’ she was getting in as she spoke, but still hanging back from taking a seat. This was a four-seater gig shuttle, two seats at the flight console and two rather grander ones behind. ‘Don’t you normally get taken around by pilots?’
‘Only when I’m on duty,’ Alex said. ‘And even then, I fly myself more often than not – no, come and sit up here.’ He’d sat down in the right hand seat and was beckoning her to the one beside it. ‘It’s fine – you’re perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘But if you feel you’d rather not, that’s fine too – no pressure, none at all.’
She sat down, eyeing the controls as if they might be electrified, and keeping her hands well away from them.
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Alex told her. ‘These are biometric systems, responding only to authorised pilots.’
She held her breath as they took off, relaxed a little as she found that it was just the same as being in an aircar, and only started to tense again as they came up into stratospheric, hypersonic flight. Here, they were on the edge of space, able to see the planetary curvature and the thin envelope of atmosphere around it.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ Alex told her. ‘You say when.’
They’d travelled round the world twice before she said when, and she did hold her breath again, closing her eyes for a moment, as the planet fell away beneath them.
‘It’s just like the holos,’ she said bravely. ‘Camae from space.’ Then, as it shrank rapidly, ‘Are we superlight yet?’
‘No,’ Alex said, ‘we’re in a near-orbit lane, just lining up for our run… flight control consent…’ his hands, eyes and feet moved purposefully, operating tactile and optical controls. ‘And here we go – three, two, one…’
Migan, holding herself rigid in her chair as if braced for impact, felt a momentary disorientation and the stomach-lifting sensation you got at the top of a roller-coaster ride. But she’d hardly even had time to gasp when it was over, the shuttle continuing smoothly and everything around them appearing perfectly as usual.
‘And there we are,’ Alex said, indicating a readout. ‘L-Basic. That’s light speed. We’ll be accelerating up to L6 – eta at the Assegai…’ he created a highly simplified flight information screen and pointed it out to her, ‘Five minutes, forty three seconds.’
She watched that, rather than visual screens, as they cruised straight out on the arterial lane leading out to the edge of the system from Camae’s current location – as always in inhabited systems, the entire organisation of it swung around the star in synchrony with the inhabited planet.
‘And here we are – outer orbital zone, where the Fleet ships are parked,’ Alex said. ‘That’s the homeworld defence squadron, over there…’ She looked at the tiny lights on the real-view image he was showing her.
‘They look a whole lot bigger on the holly,’ she observed. ‘Where’s the Assegai?’
‘On the far side of the orbit,’ he said. ‘It’s always like that. Homeworld defence is geostationary and closest to the homeworld, visiting ships are parked on the opposite side.’
‘So – we came out in the wrong direction, and now we’re having to go all the way round?’
Alex grinned. ‘Traffic control,’ he said. ‘That, and the fact that there’s a rather large ball of flaming hydrogen between Camae and the Assegai. Watch the traffic. It comes out from Cama
e on the arterial path, branching off into the various orbital lanes. And there it is – that’s the Assegai, just coming into view. We’ll be decelerating in a few seconds… sorry, bit more of a wobble there. There’s a higher particle density out here, gas particles shoved out by the solar wind, and that can make things a little more turbulent, but nothing to worry about.’ He switched to a different tone, speaking on comms, ‘CA2 acknowledged, FCOR on your mark… received.’ He passed his hands across the controls with a sweeping motion. ‘Thank you, Flight.’ And then, reverting to his conversational tone, ‘We’re now under the Assegai’s flight control – they will bring us in to dock. If this was the Heron,’ he added, with a little grin, ‘I would dock manually, but the Assegai is a regular Fleet ship and that isn’t allowed. Anyway, there we are – what do you think?’
She gazed at the ship as the shuttle was drawn in towards the amidships airlock on the port side.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, but he could hear the guarded note in her voice, and grinned.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘be honest!’ And with a glance at the Assegai, ‘It’s not even my ship.’
‘Well, I thought it would be bigger,’ Migan admitted. ‘People talk about it as if it’s massive, enormous, like the size of a city. But it’s more of a tower block, really.’
‘That’s pretty big by starship standards,’ Alex assured her.
‘But tiny,’ she said, ‘to be in for weeks and weeks at a time, no sunshine, no fresh air… I would go nuts.’
She was politely unimpressed by the Assegai. The technology was all very wonderful, no doubt, but that meant nothing to her. The diurnal lighting system didn’t strike her as anything special, either, since natural lighting was routine and expected in work places on Camae. The grey décor and industrial gear, she thought, was depressing. As for the food, the less said about that, the better. And while she thought that mess decks looked reasonably tolerable places to live, with their bunk-cubbies and communal living, the pompous isolation of the flag quarters appalled her.
‘I only use them for formal events,’ Alex said, and took her to see his preferred quarters on the training deck.
‘But – you live here by yourself.’ She looked around his cabin, seeing no pictures, no ornaments, no personal belongings of any kind. ‘You work, eat and sleep… here?’
‘Not really.’ Alex said, and as he looked at his quarters, it was as if he saw them through her eyes… stark, cold, meaningless. ‘I work at the desk sometimes but I’m more often out and about. And if I am having a meal alone here it’s because I want to. Generally speaking I have breakfast with Min, lunch with the training group, and dinner, well, I’m usually either a guest or having guests for dinner myself, informally.’
‘But there’s nothing – nothing – to even show it’s yours!’ Migan said. ‘Doesn’t the Fleet allow you to have even a picture?’
‘They do,’ Alex said, and admitted, ‘It started as a joke, really – well, kind of a joke. I did a tour of duty doing some training with Fleet Intelligence, and one of the…’
‘You were a secret agent?’ Migan interrupted.
Once he’d stopped laughing and they were seated on the sofa, comfortably, with a tray of coffee for him and tea for her in front of them, Alex explained. ‘I was offered the chance to do some field-work training – really not anywhere near as exciting as you might think – and one of the things I was taught was how to profile a room, to analyse a person’s personality, their strengths and their potential weaknesses, from the things they choose to have in their personal space and how they are presented. I came back from that training and stripped my cabin so that the only thing anyone can find out about me from looking at my room is that I choose not to be profiled. And it has,’ he admitted, ‘become a habit, easier to travel light.’
‘There is such a thing,’ Migan said, ‘as taking things to extremes. You need a picture, Alex. Come on,’ she was half commanding, half coaxing. ‘One picture!’ She turned, pointing to the wall above the sofa, where there was indeed a space intended for the display of personal holos. ‘There!’ She turned back to him. ‘Let me help you choose something,’ she asked, and then, chuckling, ‘And you can tell me what they would say about you if someone was profiling!’
They had a lot of fun with that, not just on the ship but in the remaining days of the visit.
And they went too fast.
Nineteen
As the Assegai left Camae, Alex watched it dwindling away into nothing, on scopes.
He was taking with him a whole lot of happy memories, a sense of achievement, and a picture.
The achievement had not needed any great effort, admittedly. He had merely had to go there, singling Camae out as so important it had beaten out every other applicant for a visit from Silvie. Once there, he had needed to do little more than show the respect for Camae’s culture that he genuinely felt, and to give a little reassuring support here and there. Silvie’s own praise would be a thousand times more effective. Media reports were already flying out of her delight in Camae’s warm-hearted people, their culture, their language, their delicious organic food, their beautiful world and their deep, clean, wonderful oceans. Speculation was already very excited as to how long it would be before other quarians came to visit. Liners, no question, would be pouring in here as fast as White Star and Red Line could organise them. And there would, too, be overtures from central authorities and even corporations now seeing Camae as important enough to notice.
What happened then would be largely down to the Camag themselves. Whether they became a significant player in League affairs, and what impact that rush of tourism would have on them, long term, only time would tell. Alex was optimistic – but then, as he’d have to concede, Alex always was optimistic.
He had done his bit, anyway, and Camae had their chance, now, to rise from a silenced, ignored backwater into whatever they wanted to become.
And the Assegai had done well, too. It might not have been as high-glamour as a run to Quarus, but they had found a very different culture there from any other world in the League. Each and every one of them had stepped up to learning about that culture, representing their ship creditably in every way from attending palace functions to joining local people on picnics. Those who could speak quarian – and there were quite a number who’d already started learning in anticipation of their posting to Serenity – found that they could make themselves understood in it and pick up at least the general sense of what people were saying in Camag, and that had been a matter of great pride and pleasure, all round. And Alex, it turned out, was not the only person who had ‘met someone’ during the visit. More than half the Assegai’s crew were not currently in a committed relationship, which was pretty typical for young, ambitious members of the Fleet, and many of them had enjoyed a little romance while they were there. And four of them, more than a little romance. They were leaving with four fewer crew than when they had arrived, the four remaining there having decided even in the space of two weeks that their high flying careers on the Assegai no longer offered them the personal fulfilment they had found on Camae.
Four lost in a fortnight, Min had observed. Well, it could have been worse.
Another week, Alex thought, and it might have been. At least one of their Subs had been crying when they came aboard, and there was a torn, wistful air about many of the Assegai’s people, crew and officers alike. Nobody wanted to leave.
Alex felt it, too, that yearning – just a few more days, temptation had kept whispering, just another week.
Not another twenty five hours, duty had rapped back, utterly immovable. They were due at Therik at a specified date, and if they were to make it at standard cruising speed, without diversions, they had to leave now. Alex had already allowed as much time as possible for the visit, secondary to the time required for the combat training and exercises.
Visits to Camae, Alex mused, as he watched the system vanish into the cosmic starfield, ought to come
with a warning. All planets had a bioshock rating, after all, indicating how much of an impact their biospheres were likely to make on someone visiting from other worlds. Some worlds even had a Paradise Syndrome warning in the Fleet, like Telathor, advising skippers that they might find their crews succumbing to the laid-back party culture and losing professional focus. Alex had disregarded that warning when he’d gone to Telathor, assured that his crew was far too focussed and self-disciplined for that. It had taken weeks, afterwards, to bring them back to the levels of fitness and efficiency they’d had before their arrival.
Paradise Syndrome, though, didn’t feel appropriate for Camae. It didn’t have the tropical fiesta atmosphere, the culture of pleasure, the low work ethic and the liberal morality of the kind of party-world liable to undermine military discipline. On the contrary, Camae was a quiet, conservative world where people worked in a highly structured way and family life governed conduct and morality more firmly than any laws.
And yet, Alex understood now why so many League officials posted to Camae never came back. It wasn’t, in fact, where careers went to die. It was where lives went to flourish.
‘Idyll Syndrome,’ Eldovan suggested, when they were discussing that in the seminar next day. This was the first language seminar they had had since the day before arriving at Camae. The topic had been Alex’s choice, something he felt was genuinely important to consider.
‘GOD Syndrome,’ said Dan, and as Skipper Hevine and a couple of the others rose to that bait with scandalised looks, clarified innocently, ‘Good Old Days. People are always going on about how much better things were in the Good Old Days when families were tight and communities looked out for one another. Try to pin people down on when the Good Old Days actually were and they usually go back three or four generations, on no more evidential basis than that their grannies and grandpas kept telling them how much better things had been in their young days.’
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