by Alex Stewart
For a moment she vanished as the street suddenly dropped away at a sharp sixty degree angle, and I felt a stab of panic as I lost sight of her; but a second or two later I felt the surge in my inner ear as I stepped through the intersecting gravity fields, and found myself once again trotting along a subjectively level surface. After a moment of frantic scanning I spotted her again, just disappearing down the mouth of an alleyway half-hidden by the stall of a street vendor, who waved a skewer-full of something greasy resembling meat hopefully in my general direction as I dived down the narrow slot between a tavern and a lingerie emporium.
This was a part of Skyhaven I’d never even suspected of existing before, and I must confess I felt a growing sense of unease. The alley was beginning to feel less like a thoroughfare, and more like a utility conduit into which the population had flowed under pressure from the more affluent regions. There was metal mesh underfoot now, while piping and ductwork had become visible on walls and ceiling, lending the whole place a cramped and furtive air, despite the illumination, which remained as bright as the streets I’d just left. Or would have done, anyway, if all of it was still working.
The people I passed seemed more shabbily dressed than those on the main thoroughfares, or at least in utilitarian garb, with little ornamentation; and a higher proportion of them were transgeners, with whom I was reluctant to make eye contact, for fear of being thought impolite. (Believe me, good manners are important when some of the folk you’re mingling with have visible claws or tusks.) Every now and then I could still catch a glimpse of Aunt Jenny in the distance, and tried to pick up my pace, but most of the traffic was moving in the opposite direction. If it hadn’t been for my pride, and the fear of marking myself out as someone who didn’t belong here, I might have called out to her, but I held my tongue, and bounced a message instead.
Is it far now? If I’m honest, I half hoped that the reminder of my presence would slow her down, but it had no discernable effect that I could see across the distance that now separated us.
No, she sent back, and promptly vanished from sight.
All right, I told myself, that was clearly impossible, so she must have gone somewhere. I had no idea why she seemed to want to turn going out for a drink into a game of hide and seek, but I wasn’t so far from childhood, and the wariness I’d learned from Tinkie’s habit of changing the rules to hide and ambush, that I’d forgotten how to play.
So, start from the last place I’d seen her. Not difficult: several of the ubiquitous cables converged into a junction box there, emitting a distinctive electromagnetic signature. Not to mention the garish yellow panel warning danger of death, which was kind of hard to miss.
This time there was no obvious alley mouth into which my aunt could have disappeared, but there had to be something—my view further down the tunnel had only been blocked for a moment, and if she’d carried on along it I would have been sure to see her. I glanced up at the tangle of pipework depending from the ceiling—which, as I’d expected, had no room above it to conceal anyone, even if she’d been able to scramble up without attracting the attention of the passersby.
I examined my immediate short-term memories. No one had reacted as though anything out of the ordinary was going on, and in a place this confined, that pretty much guaranteed that nothing had. It would simply have been too noticeable. Which ruled out any trapdoors in the floor, too, although I took a glance at it anyway, just to be sure.
That only left the wall, which clearly concealed a door of some kind. The only question was where.
Adopting as nonchalant an air as I could, though none of the passers-by seemed particularly interested in me, I examined the blank metal carefully. Sure enough, one of the inspection panels seemed a little loose, held in place by only one corner. Before I could reach out a hand to confirm my guess, however, it moved aside, apparently of its own volition, tugged by a rather down-at-heel fellow in early middle age, whose halitosis preceded him like an honor guard.
“Sorry mate, di’n’t see yer,” he said, ducking through and hoisting a bag to his shoulder, before disappearing down the corridor, whistling. Since no one else seemed in the least bit surprised by his sudden appearance, I surmised that this was a commonly used, though distinctly unofficial, short cut, and so it proved to be. Lowering my head I clambered through the gap, finding myself in a narrow space between two walls, stuffed with far too many things festooned with warning decals color-coded by the ways they could kill you. A chink of light showed just ahead of me, however, so after a moment’s fumbling I was able to push aside the twin of the panel behind me, and straighten up gratefully in the passageway beyond.
Which was, if anything, even narrower and more wretched than the one I’d just left, though no less densely populated. I glanced up and down it, seeking some clue as to which direction my aunt might have taken. More people seemed to be heading towards my right, and the illumination in that direction seemed a little brighter, so I headed that way, essentially just drifting with the current.
By now, it must be said, I was becoming more than a little irritated. I could, of course, simply have bounced her a message demanding to know where she was and what the hell she thought she was playing at, but I was damned if I’d give her the satisfaction. Besides, she might not tell me. I was beginning to get the feeling that this was some kind of test, and after the Naval Academy debacle, I wasn’t about to fail if I could help it.
The lights up ahead were getting brighter, and the ambient noise was growing too: the sort of diffuse assault on the eardrums that comes from a lot of people in a large enclosed space trying to make themselves heard over everyone else’s conversation. There seemed to be music, too, quite a lot of it, if you stretched your definition of tonality to the breaking point, competing for attention from a dozen different sources.
Suddenly, the narrow corridor opened out into a wide, high-ceilinged space, roughly the size of a sports stadium. What its original purpose had been, I had no idea, but the number of pipes converging here, many large enough to have driven a sled down, hinted at a storage tank of some sort. These days, however, it seemed to be a marketplace, the stalls of which stretched into the distance, laden down with goods and junk of all kinds. Some served food, and, prompted by my growling stomach, I fished a couple of coins from my pocket and approached the nearest, though not without a sense of trepidation.
“What can I do you for?” the proprietor asked, in professionally friendly tones, taking in the cut of my garments in a single practiced glance. “We got meat pies, cheese pies, veggie pies, cheese an’ veggie pies, meat an’ veggie pies, cheese an’ meat pies, or meat, cheese an’ veggie.” He paused for a moment, perhaps wondering if he should have added “pies” to the end of the last selection, in case I’d missed that small but vital point. “Or fruit pies,” he added as an afterthought, “if you was thinking more along dessert kind of lines.”
“What kind of meat?” I asked, and his face furrowed, as he calculated how much honesty would be required to effect a sale.
“Hard to say,” he said at last. “They’re more of a mixture than anythin’, tell you the truth.”
In the end it was my stomach that made the decision, rather than my brain, by cramping vigorously in response to the surprisingly appetizing aroma.
“Meat and veggie,” I said, feeling I could at least mitigate the damage by spreading it out among the food groups, and the proprietor nodded, his good graces assured by the prospect of immanent money.
“Don’t get many groundsiders down here,” he said chattily, “this close to the docks. Shippin’ out, are you?”
“Maybe,” I said, before the first part of his question properly sank in, then nodded as the implications of his opening remark belatedly did so. “Seen any others?”
The stallholder shrugged. “Hard to say,” he said, handing me an oblong of warm pastry wrapped in a napkin. “What with all this crowd around.”
Unable to resist the importunate growling of my stoma
ch any longer, I bit into the pie, finding it hotter inside than I’d expected, and a great deal more appetizing. Gravy oozed down my chin as I chewed and swallowed, and before I could stop myself I’d taken a second bite, and then a third. Almost before I realized it, the snack had gone. I wiped my face and fingers. “Another one, please,” I said, handing over a few more pieces of change. “And a fruit to follow.”
“Looks like you needed that,” the pie-seller said, distinctly more well-disposed since my evident enthusiasm for his wares had attracted a few more potential customers towards his stall. “Anyone in partic’lar you was keepin’ an eye out for? Or just groundsiders in gen’ral?”
“My aunt,” I said. “Middle-aged, stocky, brown hair, going grey. Floral print jacket.”
“Seen her about,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “Not today, though. If it’s the one I’m thinking of.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said, wiping the remains of the second pie from my fingers, and accepting my dessert. (Which was sweeter than I’d expected, but still remarkably palatable.) I started to turn away, already scanning the crowds, with a distinct lack of hope.
“You could try down there,” the stallholder said, indicating a gap between two nearby pipes, each with the girth of a mature redwood. “She gen’rally comes and goes from that direction.”
“Thanks,” I said again, with greater warmth, and set off the way he’d indicated.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In which I entertain two offers of employment.
To my relief, the area beyond turned out to be far smaller than the cavernous marketplace, being no larger than the sort of square you might find in a quiet market town; an analogy which struck me as soon as I’d rounded the nearer of the two vast metal cylinders. Every gap and crevice between the excrescences of infrastructure large enough to hold a home or business had been enclosed, using whatever materials had come to hand, to create pockets of living space: sheets of scrap metal, sections of cargo containers, even the odd piece of lumber, which seemed stridently out of place in this defiantly man-made environment. As I tilted my head back, scanning the rising and erratic terraces, I was reminded of the apartment buildings surrounding a central courtyard I’d seen on visits to the cities on the surface.
Most of the buildings, for want of a better word, seemed to be residential; even this far from the more salubrious quarter I was familiar with, plants and banners provided welcome splashes of color in a bewildering variety of hues. The people living here seemed quieter, more domestic, than the ones I’d seen in the streets and market, chatting easily among themselves instead of rushing about on mysterious business of their own. At least the adults were; for the first time since leaving Aunt Jenny’s apartment I noticed children, running across the central space or clambering on struts and buttresses, chattering happily under the watchful eyes of their parents and neighbors.
A handful of public spaces were scattered among the living quarters; from the door of one music spilled, the plangent notes of a harp, trailing away in a spatter of applause before resuming after a brief interlude. Others seemed to be selling food, of a far higher quality than the pies I’d guzzled a few moments before, and I felt a pang of regret at having quelled my appetite so comprehensively, before coming to the conclusion that my time would be better spent searching for my aunt in any case.
Feeling uncomfortably conspicuous, I glanced at the nearest shops and taverns, looking for some other clue as to her whereabouts. Given her reason for going out in the first place, bars seemed the most likely place to try, so I concentrated on those, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Not the one with the music; traditional tunes and instruments were decidedly not to her taste. The closest one was crowded enough for its customers to be spilling outside, and I knew she preferred to drink quietly—besides which, nearly half the people milling around the doorway were transgeners, and however blasé Aunt Jenny was about such things, I still found myself a little unnerved by their outlandish appearance.
That left an unassuming frontage, little more than a large banner bearing a cheerful abstract design, which curtained off a shadowy area between a couple of storage tanks. Signs outside promised drinks, food, drinks, which accorded well with my current priorities, so I strolled over to it, twitched the corner aside, and slipped through the gap I’d created.
I’m not sure quite what I expected to find on the other side; probably a whole bunch of people who’d stop what they were doing and stare at me, in the way far more common in fiction than in real life, but no one seemed even to notice my arrival.
No one, that is, except for Aunt Jenny, who glanced up from a booth at the back, where she had a good view of the billowing pseudo-wall behind me, and nodded an affable greeting. Her companion was less visible from where I was standing, all but a shoulder and upper arm obscured by the corner of the booth, but I got the impression of a large man in the kind of utility garb common among artisans; an impression rapidly confirmed, as he turned in response to the shift in my aunt’s posture, and glanced in my direction. His beard was more or less neatly trimmed, and his jacket bore the universally recognized sigil of the Commerce Guild on the left breast pocket: a stylized hand cupping the swirl of the galaxy, symbolizing either the Guild’s reach across the entire Human Sphere, or its perpetual readiness to squeeze a profit out of it, depending on your level of cynicism. (Or, quite possibly, given the miniscule fragment of the galaxy humanity actually occupied, the Guild’s staggering level of hubris.)
As I made my way between the tables, which had apparently been scattered arbitrarily around the floor, I noticed a number of other Guild sigils, adorning shirts, coats, caps, and at least one evening gown half the hostesses on Avalon would cheerfully have committed murder for. I hesitated a moment, to allow a serving drone to hum past my head and land on an intermediate table with its cargo of drinks, before finally arriving at my aunt’s booth.
“That was quick,” she greeted me, adding what do you want to drink? as our ‘spheres interpenetrated.
“Ale,” I said verbally, and she kicked the order over to the drone, which had delivered its cargo, and was now aimlessly orbiting the room with its fellows, waiting for another set of instructions. The drink seemed appropriate in this kind of setting, and I wanted something I could make last without seeming to.
Aunt Jenny nodded, and glanced at her guest. “John?”
“Same again.” He drained something amber-colored from the bottom of a tumbler, and replaced the glass on the table, as I slid onto the arm of the U-shaped bench directly across from him. He looked at me the way Guilders look at everything, which is to say with a kind of guarded neutrality—at least until they’ve determined whether you’re harmless, dangerous, or likely to be useful to them in some way. “John Remington, of the Stacked Deck.”
“Simon Forrester,” I said, “of nowhere any more.” That kind of slipped out, and I mentally bit my tongue, conscious of having revealed some vulnerability he’d certainly exploit if he could. But it seemed to have been the right thing to say: Remington’s expression softened, and Aunt Jenny positively beamed.
“Told you he was forthright,” she said.
“That you did,” Remington agreed, ducking his head as the drone came back, bearing two tumblers of whisky and my tankard of ale, which had been chilled to the point where the last lingering vestige of flavor had been completely expunged—a Skyhaven foible I immediately regretted having forgotten about. The Guilder turned to me. “Jen’s just been filling me in on your university career. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing an Avalonian gentleman normally gets up to.”
I felt a hot flush of embarrassment rise up my neck.
“That’s because most of them haven’t got a thought in their heads beyond how they look in tight trousers,” I snapped, and took a gulp of the over-cooled beer that made my teeth ache.
“True enough,” my aunt agreed. “Though most of them occasionally consider how their actions will affect their reputations
and their families.”
I must admit that blindsided me; after all her support in the face of familial disapproval, I’d hardly expected her to start expressing the same kind of sentiments.
“I didn’t consider it, because I didn’t plan on getting caught,” I said, feeling I might as well be honest about the affair now she’d brought the whole thing up, even if her motives for doing so baffled me. Clearly she’d been hoping Remington would help to find me a place on a merchant ship, although calling my integrity into question seemed a strange way of going about it. “And even if I was, I knew it would be hushed up,” I added, bending the truth a little, though not by much. I had panicked for about five minutes after getting the first summons to the Dean’s office, before realizing that my clients’ social connections—not to mention their families’ financial contributions to the university—would render me pretty much untouchable. Apart from being rusticated, of course, which had brought me back into the orbit of Mother’s ire.
Remington smiled. “Sounds like you know how to work an angle,” he said, in surprisingly friendly tones. He took a sip of his drink. And you’ve a definite talent for sneakware. Our ‘spheres intersected, and I found a copy of the datanomes I’d given my aunt floating in the shared space between us. You really put this together yourself?
I shrugged. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
Remington laughed. “That they do. Just don’t practice on any of the nodes aboard the Deck, unless you want to try walking back to Avalon.” He spoke so casually, it took a moment for the full import of his words to sink in.
“You’re taking me on?” I asked, not quite able to believe my good fortune. “Just like that?”
“I’ll give it some thought,” he said, although he seemed to be addressing my aunt more than me. “If the deal’s right.”