“Which is not open today,” Natan said repressively. There was an awkward silence. They all kept walking.
“What are deepsiders?” Iain asked.
“Deepsiders are people who live and work in space,” Natan said, with a twist of contempt in his voice that made Iain lift an eyebrow. “A diminishing population, without the vigor of Tritoner stock. We allow them to trade with us, when one of their carrier ships is in. But that does not happen to be the case today.”
“But it will be tomorrow,” Cleopa said, with a glance at Linnea.
“Deepsiders are of no interest,” Natan said, repressive again. “You must have something similar in the Hidden Worlds. People who wander from asteroid to asteroid, mining.” Linnea wondered at the hostility in his voice. “They scavenge what they can to sell to us, and they manufacture in zero gee what we cannot here on the surface. They’re not like us,” he said vigorously. “They live in chaotic, smelly habitats, they move randomly from place to place—and their social customs are shocking.”
Linnea’s eyes met Iain’s. “They sound interesting,” Linnea said, and looked away from Iain’s grin. “A different culture. And I understand that they, too, have jump pilots.”
“They do,” Cleopa said, with an unfriendly glance at Natan. “A few jumpships, in constant use. You must understand—they live in widely scattered places. It takes years for one of their ore carriers from the Trojan asteroids to reach our orbit. Rocks have the patience for such a journey. But people do not.”
“Perhaps the Hidden Worlds never had any need for deepsiders,” Natan said. He sniffed. “You don’t have to trade for water and ammonia and nitrogen. You don’t have to buy metal, just dig where you stand! Dig here on Triton, and it’s ice for hundreds of meters down.”
“Deepsiders interest me,” Linnea said, catching Cleopa’s eye. Deepsiders, and deepsider pilots. “Iain and I would like very much to meet some of them. Perhaps we could visit their market tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid it would be too difficult to arrange for your safety on such short notice,” Natan said.
“But we’ve come so far,” Linnea murmured, allowing regret to inform her tone. And at that moment she caught a glimmer of humor in Cleopa’s eyes. “It seems a shame.” She ignored Iain’s exasperated expression.
“Perhaps I can arrange it,” Cleopa said. “After all, Triton is extremely safe. You were telling Madame Tereu only last week, Scholar Natan, how you rejoiced at the fact that a child might walk alone from the refinery quarter to the Palace of Sport . . . ?”
Natan reddened. “There is no need for our guests to visit the actual market. If you are curious about deepsiders, Pilot Kiaho, we can provide educational recordings that—”
“Scholar Natan,” Cleopa said blandly, “you’ll give our guests the impression that we have something to hide.” She slid her arm through his. “I know you can arrange this. I know you wouldn’t wish to disappoint these guests.”
Linnea caught Iain’s wondering glance, but they both kept silent. Deepsiders. Linnea had stumbled onto something important. But she could not yet guess what.
Natan stared at his colleague for a moment. Then nodded with obvious reluctance. “If our guests insist, and if Madame Tereu agrees, I’ll do my best to arrange the visit.”
They had reached their first destination, which turned out to be a school. In a vividly lit assembly hall, walled in pale green tile and gray metal, perhaps a hundred children knelt, waiting in neat rows on the black plastic floor—girls in clean gray dresses, boys in black trousers and neatly fitting white shirts. The children rose gracefully to their feet, all at once, as Linnea, Iain, and the scholars entered.
A row of pretty, exquisitely tidy little girls stepped forward and sang a welcome song whose words Linnea could not quite follow: words about warmth, and shielding, and the ever-bright light of watchfulness—whatever that meant. A large picture of Tereu, more cheerful than the official portraits in the corridors, smiled down on them all from one wall.
A thin, nervous boy made a speech, his words coming so rapidly that Linnea was helpless to follow them. Then there was another song, about how the minstrel boy to the war had gone, and how his songs were made for the pure and free. And the visit was over.
“There were almost as many teachers as students,” Iain remarked, as they left the school corridor.
“We don’t have very many children,” Cleopa said, with a note of sadness in her voice. “The radiation here—it’s more than is quite—safe.” She glanced at Linnea. “Have you had any children yet?”
“We’re at war,” Linnea said steadily. “So that is a decision I’m not free to make.” This was not a matter she’d ever yet chosen to speak of; certainly not with strangers.
“You choose not to have children,” Natan said, with a puzzled glance at Iain, who showed no expression. “Interesting. Do you see, among our people—we never refuse the gift, if it comes to us. So many couples are sterile.”
“Can’t you match fertile people?” Iain asked. “At least to produce children?”
Natan looked shocked. “That’s deepsider thinking.” He shook his head. “We would lose too much. Social order. The bond of family. The foundation of our strength.” He stopped, with obvious relief, in front of a series of sliding metal doors. “The shuttle to the industrial section.” He touched a metal door in front of them. It slid aside, revealing the car, without seats but lined with metal bars reaching from floor to ceiling.
Linnea stood close to Iain as the car started up. As she’d suspected, the acceleration of its motion was so much greater than the weak gravity that she had to brace her feet against the bar as well as gripping it with her hands. As the car careened around a curve, Iain’s arm slid around her waist and steadied her, and she leaned gratefully into his warm strength. No one else seemed to feel the cold as she did.
Natan was droning on about nitrogen geysers, the local stability of the crust. “We mine water, and extract ammonia; and there’s a region a few kilometers away where we’ve blasted away the frozen nitrogen and are mining or ganics, mostly short-chain.” Natan lifted his chin. “It’s reduced our dependency on the deepsiders—we are no longer forced to buy what they mine out of the eccentric chon drites.”
“By which my colleague means asteroids,” Cleopa said to Linnea. “Asteroids with carbon in them. Scholar Natan talks like that all the time, I fear.” As she was speaking, the car came to a slow, gentle halt, and the door slid open. “Here we are.”
The high, cold spaces of the industrial section, smelling faintly of ammonia, were a complicated maze of pipes and storage tanks and pumps, big sealed propane burners, chemical processing. Men in sealed suits and respirators glided past on small carts, anonymous behind plastic visors. “You built all this after Earth fell?” Iain marveled.
“Much of it was already here,” Cleopa said.
Natan gave her a cold glance, then turned to Linnea. “The deepsiders had been out here for years already, you see, setting up an immense project to collect helium-3 from Neptune’s atmosphere and ship it back to Earth as fuel for the vast fusion plants they were starting to build, right at the end of—before the Cold Minds. A glorious time in Earth’s history, one that—” He caught Cleopa’s eye and hurried on. “Well, there was no need for the fuel once Earth was lost; and our ancestors needed shelter. The abandoned project left plenty of material and equipment for us all, here on Triton and in Neptune’s orbit.”
“And so we pushed the deepsiders off Triton,” Cleopa said.
“It was a reasonable division of resources,” Natan said. “Deepsiders prefer space; we prefer gravity. Deepsiders complain when they come here, you know. Eight percent gee, and they complain.”
“I have a deepsider cousin who comes here often,” Cleopa said. “She rarely complains.”
Natan moved away abruptly to stand beside Iain, who was looking through a viewing window at an array of tanks and pipes that meant nothing to Linnea. Cleopa lingered
beside her.
“Natan thinks I should be more ashamed of my cousin.” Cleopa said with a grin. “My cousin says it’s not the gee that bothers her—it’s everything moving in the same direction when she lets go of it.”
“I look forward to meeting some deepsiders for myself,” Linnea said, smiling back at her.
“Let me give you my cousin’s name and family code—in case you should need it,” Cleopa said. She pulled a notebook out of one of the capacious pockets of her robe, scribbled a few words on the corner of a page, tore it off, and pressed it into Linnea’s hand.” “Keep that safe,” she said in a low voice. “Look at it later.”
Linnea blinked at her, but it was too late for questions; Natan and Iain had turned away from whatever it was that had fascinated Iain. Linnea slipped the scrap of paper into her own pocket and smiled her thanks to Cleopa.
“I think,” Natan said as he reached the two women, “that this has been a long enough day for our two guests. Madame Tereu will be concerned if it should prove we’ve overtired them. I suggest that we return to the city at once.”
“As you instruct, of course, Scholar Natan,” Cleopa said calmly. She did not look at Linnea.
And Linnea did not look at Iain. She kept her hand in her pocket, her fingers on the scrap of paper that might be her first clue to the answers she sought.
EIGHT
I ain hid his sigh of relief as the door of their quarters closed behind them, leaving him alone with Linnea. He’d seen her suppressed excitement, the slight tension in her expression, after her short private conversation with Cleopa. Now, at last, he could ask her what had caused it.
In the red “sunset” light streaming in through the window, she stood with her back to him, looking down at something in her hand. Without speaking he walked over to her and looked down as well.
A note on a scrap of paper—was that it? Linnea turned her hand slightly, and he could make out the scribbled words: Market tomorrow alone FAINT.
He looked into her eyes and saw only eagerness there. Alone. This must be another sign: like the blue flower that they still had not seen, that he hoped they would never see. She could be so incautious when she was sure of herself. Had she even considered that it was one of Tereu’s people who had given her this paper? One of Tereu’s people who wanted her to go to the market tomorrow, and mark herself out for—what?
He kissed her forehead. “I’m tired. Aren’t you?”
“Not really,” Linnea said. He saw the question in her eyes.
“I think you should stay here tomorrow and rest.” He tried not to put any particular urgency in the words.
But from her quick glance, he saw that she understood him. He saw her hand tighten, crumpling the bit of paper, and she dropped it into her pocket again. “Don’t come along, then, if you’re tired.”
“It’s you I’m thinking of,” he said, as gently as he could.
She lifted her chin. “Iain, you know that all I want, all I’ve wanted since we came here, is—the chance to learn.”
He took her in his arms. “Today we learned about ammonia purification. Will nothing satisfy you?”
She smiled, but the faint spark of anger underlying it was as plain to him as a flame in a dark room. She set her fists on his chest—the old distancing gesture. “Iain. Please. You’ve always trusted me to judge what’s best for me.”
“But I always worry when you take risks,” he said. “Which means I’m always worried.” He knew she would see past the lightness in his words.
“I do what I have to,” she said quietly. “You know that, Iain. And you know you have no right to stop me.”
“No right!” Unfair.
Her head went back. “No right,” she said, and pushed away from him.
At that moment Iain knew, bitterly, that once again he had gone too far in his need to protect her. Once again she would prove her independence by putting herself in danger. And there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do to stop her.
Half an hour before dawn, Hiso stood in Tereu’s bed-chamber, straightening and smoothing his clothing before one of her many tall mirrors. Through the window at his left, the watery gray light of earliest morning lit the pale flowers of the walled private garden outside. Tereu lay smiling behind him, curled naked on the thin, soft padding of her bed, sleepy from their lovemaking. Always she liked getting this proof of her power over him; never had she understood that to him it meant nothing.
Tereu had never understood power. Or its price. Or the tools it required to maintain it and increase it. He turned his head, studying himself in the mirror. “What do you have planned for our guests today? Specifically Kiaho.”
“She’s off on another tour later this morning,” Tereu said lazily.
Hiso looked down at her in annoyance. “I told you that I need a private word with her, as soon as possible.”
Tereu got to her feet and touched a commscreen. “Then you’re in luck. She’s already gone to the breakfast room. Early for her—they must keep luxurious hours in those Hidden Worlds.”
Hiso turned and looked down at Tereu. “This is more important than you appear to understand. That ship of hers. The engines alone—” He leaned toward the mirror and smoothed his beard carefully. “There should be complete plans, complete technical specifications on board. Do you have any idea what they might mean to our efforts here?”
“That’s your department,” she said. “You pilots, all of you together. You, and Kiaho, and that man of hers.”
Again Hiso studied her in the mirror. “Then you admit that he’s interesting.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Tereu said, an edge in her voice. “He almost never speaks. . . . Tell me, Hiso. Once you’ve gotten inside Kiaho’s ship—do you even need her anymore?”
Hiso looked at her in the mirror, wondering again at her lack of subtlety. Without the complex linkage of family that had allowed her to inherit her high position, she would have been a lesser bureaucrat at most—not even a wife and mother; her body had failed at that. Denying him sons. . . . “These are early days,” Hiso said. “She and the man together are a force we need to understand, before we dare break it. The bond between them—they are not married in our sense, of that I’m sure, but there is something deep and dangerous there.”
“Romantic nonsense,” Tereu said. “The woman is nothing, aside from her piloting skill. But the man—he’s Line, Line by training if nothing else. He must know the meaning of service to humanity. He’ll understand our need.”
“But the ship, apparently, is hers.” Hiso turned and faced her. The lines on her face, the shadows under her eyes were plain to see in the bare, cruel light of morning. “And—consider, my dear. They’re both outsiders.” He folded his arms and looked down at her. “He might serve, they might both serve—until they understood the basis of our power here.”
She sat up straight, realization clear on her face. “And what we’ve paid to remain who we are.” He heard again the low, bitter note in her voice, the note he hated; the note that had crept into her voice in the empty years after her final miscarriage.
He let his anger show, to wake her to her cowardice. “Are you becoming weak? Now?”
Her eyes widened a little, even as she gave him a mechanical smile. “You keep me strong, Hiso. You keep us all strong.”
“Remember it,” he said curtly, and left her there.
In Tereu’s richly decorated breakfast room, by the light of a gas fire, Linnea waited impatiently for the hour when she could make her promised expedition to the deepsider market—when at last she might meet, face-to-face, someone who would finally answer her questions. Standing at the sealed window, sipping at a pouch full of coffee, she watched the slow rising of the artificial light over the park. There was almost nothing real about it but the living plants themselves; the birdsong was played from speakers in the trees, Tereu had said. . . . But Linnea had already sensed the reverence in which this small green space was held; those who had been selected
to tend it moved and spoke like priests, and the flowers they brought Tereu were offered and accepted with precise ceremony.
The park was false, the shadow of a shadow of real nature; but these people could not know that. No living human in the Earth system had ever set foot on a world with open air, open skies—none of them had ever walked freely under the sun. Not for generations. She could not help but pity them.
She sipped once more at the bitter, fragrant coffee, and looked out again at the symmetrical ranks of rosebushes—stalked globes of red or white blossoms, their beds bordered meticulously by pale pink, fleshy-stemmed flowers whose names she did not know. She’d touched one yesterday, when no one was looking; but the leaves were hairy, and the whole plant had a strange, pungent smell that lingered on her fingertips.
Behind her in the breakfast room, someone coughed. Her shoulders tightened. She arranged a welcoming smile, then turned.
Kimura Hiso, perfectly groomed and smiling, bowed to her. “Pilot Kiaho.”
“Pilot Kimura,” she murmured. “May I serve you some coffee?”
“Thank you, no,” he said. “The servant told me you were here. I was hoping for a word before you leave.”
“Of course,” she said. They sat down opposite each other on soft pink chairs near the window, on each side of a small table on which was set a bowl of pink and white flowers that smelled faintly of cloves. Through the glass of the window Linnea could hear the faint buzz of clippers at the far side of the garden, no doubt perfecting the angle of a hedge.
“What I have to say concerns your ship,” Hiso said.
“I was hoping to hear of it at last,” Linnea said.
Hiso’s raised eyebrow registered the reproach in her voice. “We have it safe at our skyport. But we’ve not been able to check its systems. It will not open to us.”
“No,” Linnea said. “It will not. It requires my touch.” She would not mention, to this man, the Line override codes Iain knew, with which he could always gain access in her absence. “And I believe it isn’t, in any case, compatible with your interlink technology? Or so Iain said.”
The Dark Reaches Page 10