I had no quantum of a clue what was going on, but the bag was pretty comfortable. I tried to relax. The cliffs continued to slide by; we must have been making forty knots. I saw a dolphin break the surface off the port bow.
Steel asked him one more question. “We’ll make the mouth of the river by dark?”
“With time to spare. We should be a ways up it when Prime finally disappears.”
“Good. And Tamika will be over Manlung La in the morning.”
“Twenty-six-thirty hours sidereal. About three hours after sun-up.”
“Which gives us—”
“About fifty-two hours.”
“Fifty-two hours. I hope Yuri can pull it off.”
“He either does or we wait another rotation.”
“No. I don’t want to wait. I’ll have Tamika shift orbit.”
“How will we explain that to traffic control? The story is thin enough as it is.”
Steel thought for a moment. “It won’t come to that. Yuri will be ready.” She turned, came back to where I was sitting and stood over me. “How are you doing?” she asked me, her mane whipping in the breeze.
“I’m all right. A little tired, a little hungry, about as confused as I’ve ever been in my life. Other than that I’m fine.”
She smiled as she sat down next to me. Even in the open air with the wind over us she smelled really good. Like—like bread and almonds. “Sorry about all the secrecy.” She looked at me like I was the secret, then sighed, “Corporate stuff. You know.”
Marcus turned and glanced at her, saw me looking at him, turned away again.
“Is everything all right?” I wasn’t getting any less confused. The Captain was gone again, replaced by the woman who had picked me up in a bar. Or maybe someone else.
“Yes. Yes, I think it is.” She sank down farther into the hull and lay back against the bag. “I’m tired, too. We’ve been through a rough few weeks, but I think it’s going to be okay now. I was very, very lucky to find you.”
Heady stuff. “Well, I guess I was lucky to be found.”
She smiled and looked at her feet. “I mean, you were the only qualified crewman off the net on this whole planet.”
Oh. “I thought you said it was a moon.”
“Right,” she laughed.
“Why is it so important that I’m off the net?”
She looked at me. “Not yet.” Oops, the Captain was back. “I’ll give you a full briefing when we get on the ship. If you still want to know.”
If I still want to know. Oh, boy. “Why wouldn’t I still want to know?”
“Let’s wait until we get to the ship, and you can decide.”
Hmm. “All right.” There were so many things I wanted to know, and right then most of them were about her. But there are so many things you can’t ask, so many things I wouldn’t ask, and so many things I was willing to bet she wouldn’t answer.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “You did very well coming down the cliff.”
“I’ve been on that trail many times. It’s hardwired into me.”
“Mm. Still—” She was looking at the sunset. I followed her gaze and saw Prime just kiss the water. “They do last a long time here.”
“Yes.” We watched it for a while. If you watched long enough you could see that it was sinking, but ever so slowly. I tried to think of something to say. Finally, “Where did you get your fur? It’s beautiful.”
“Mm.” She stroked her arms. “This wonderful little place in Lausanne. It’s on a little street up the hill and you just lie there looking out the window at Lac Leman and the French Alps while they make you spectacular.”
I thought for a moment. “On Earth.”
“I’m sorry, yes. I forgot. You haven’t been back to the system for a long time, have you?”
“Not for a long time.”
She yawned and snuggled in beside me on the bag. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to put my arm around her or not. I didn’t.
Marcus called out to Jemal in the stern, “We’re coming to the end of the cliffs. Keep an eye out.”
“Yes, sir.”
I looked over my shoulder at the shore. The cliffs were much lower already and I could see to the south where they disappeared altogether. I’d never been down here. I hadn’t gotten farther from Spam-town than the end of the monorail since Shaughnessy had left me there. The mountains were visible in the distance, a ragged horizon of ice and rock set afire with alpenglow. Sperry and Alta were rising, a melon and a grape in the deepening blue. I looked farther up in the sky and found the crimson glint of Ruby. I was going to point it out to Steel but when I looked down at her she was asleep. She must have been tired. I wondered how long she’d been awake. Many times when people first get to Vesper they try to stay awake all day, and that can be an awfully long forty-six hours.
“There it is!” Marcus yelled, “Bring her around.” The boat slued to port and headed obliquely shoreward.
We were south of the cliffs now. The shore was a dark line of tangled jungle, bloodied by the sunset. I could see the break in it where a fairly wide river emptied into the sea. That’s where we were headed. The water around us turned slowly from translucent jade to a creamy brown as we entered the outflow. In a few more minutes we passed between mangrove and palm-clogged points flanking the mouth of the river. Prime was a glowering dome in a pool of fire as it disappeared around the first bend.
Chapter 5
I wondered about Marcus and Jemal. It could be embarrassing, if not downright inconvenient, if one or both of them nodded off while we were driving up this river at forty knots. I got up without disturbing Steel and walked up to Marcus.
“How long have you been on Vesper?” I asked him. He looked back at where Steel lay curled up. “She’s asleep,” I said. “I was wondering if you two needed to get some sleep, too. It takes a while for people to adjust.”
He kept looking upstream like a man with a purpose, a purpose I totally agreed with; you could see logs, branches, and sometimes entire uprooted trees half-submerged in the thick, brown current. “Yes. We’ve been on the surface since early—what would you call it—yesterday? Seems a strange thing to call an event that happened over a hundred and thirty hours ago.”
“They call them ‘quads.’ Most people take four sleeps per quad. A five or six hour siesta before noon, another in the late afternoon, then a longer sleep before mid-night and another before dawn. It’s strange at first, but it seems to work.”
“I see.” A flock of birds exploded from the trees on the south bank, disturbed by our turbine. “So, you’ve only been up a couple of hours?”
“No, my schedule’s all screwed up. I’ve been out of a job, and my digs in Spam—that is, New Spanaway, were down in the bowels of the ’works. I could sleep pretty much whenever. I guess I’ve been up quite a while. Being off the net, you know, time kind of gets away from you.”
“I suppose it would. Jemal! Watch that snag to port!”
“Got it,” Jemal called back.
“Well, I’m on the payroll,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He looked at me, looked at my scales, then back at me again. “Do you know this river?”
“Never been anywhere near it.”
He gazed at me for a moment longer, then looked back at the water rushing past us. “I think Jemal and I will be able to muddle through,” he said. “Thank you.”
This guy was beginning to annoy me. “Look, Marcus—”
“I think ...” he glanced back at Steel curled up on the bag then back at me, “I think it would be better if you addressed me as ‘sir.’ I find a ship runs more smoothly if the formalities are observed. I don’t know what your arrangement is with the Captain—”
“She offered me a job. I took it. Sir.” He was really beginning to burn my ass.
“I didn’t mean to imply anything else.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”
He looked at me a moment l
onger, then turned back to watching for snags. “In any case,” he said, “I appreciate your offer to help, but Jemal and I had a little nap while we were waiting for the Captain to return. You probably need sleep more than we do. We’ll be in Kindu in about four hours.”
What the heck, I thought, I’d give it one more try. “It’ll be dark in an hour. It’s going to be a lot more difficult to spot stuff in the water. I could take one side and you could take the other. What do you think?”
He sighed heavily, a sigh born of—what? His face was stony, unreadable. His posture was stoic, like he was refusing to be crushed under something he couldn’t solve. “I apologize if I seem—” he stared hard at the river, “Yes, that’s a good idea. Why don’t you get some rest and I’ll call you when it gets dark.”
Why did I feel like I’d just joined the crew of the Flying Dutchman? “All right. I mean, yes, sir.” He kept staring at the water, back straight, hands folded behind him, keeping the fabric of reality from unraveling through sheer force of will. There was nothing else to do, so I made my way aft to look for someplace to take a nap. I looked down at Steel as I passed. If anything, she was more beautiful than when she was awake. Her body was even more fluid, her features clearer, more connected. If we’d been alone I would have lain down beside her, but—but what the hell was I doing?
I thought about crossing over to the other hull, to put as much distance as possible between us, but I’d have to cross right in front of Ham to do it. He was sitting amidships, a huge, hairy pile of patience. I supposed if I wasn’t doing anything threatening to Steel I’d be okay, but it seemed like one of those experiments that you might get to try only once. Ultimately, my distaste for Marcus’ insinuations, even if they might be true, overcame my fear of being eaten alive. Funny how dignity can override self-preservation sometimes.
I figured it would be safer to cross in front of him than behind. I didn’t want to make him nervous. I stepped up on deck. As I neared he looked me right in the eye. He pursed his lips and raised his chin a couple of times. I guess he was saying “hi.” I stopped, thinking, what the heck, maybe I could make friends with him. He seemed to like getting his ears scratched, at least when Steel did it. I reached out a hand and his gaze shifted to it, but he let me place my hand on the back of his head and give him a rub. I scratched his ears for a minute; then he shook his head. Scratching time was over. As I was pulling my hand back he reached up and wrapped his huge paw around it, not with any force; he just took my hand in his and held it while he looked out at the water.
How long was this going to last? I stood there for a time while he meditated on the ironies of being a genetically altered gorilla-chimpanzee-whatever, riding up a river on a moon, circling a planet that was three hundred fifty light years from the globe he’d evolved on. Well, maybe he wasn’t but it seemed like he might have been. After a minute or two he let go of my hand but continued to stare at the water, or maybe the jungle. Maybe he was homesick. Had he ever been in a jungle? Or had he grown up in a lab somewhere? Suddenly I felt closer to Ham than anyone else on the boat. Both of us were a long way from home, and neither one of us had the faintest idea what was going on.
“Take it easy, Hamster.” I know, a pretty silly nickname for a three hundred kilo guard dog, but it just popped out of my mouth. “I’m going to go log off for a while.”
He didn’t look at me when I spoke, just kept staring off at the passing scenery. I slipped past him and stepped down into the starboard hull, found more sacks of stuff (it smelled like some sort of grain), laid down on them and passed out for a while.
I’d had a big day.
“Hey, Mo! Mohandas, wake up, man.” I looked blearily up into Jemal’s face hanging over me. “Marcus wants you to go forward and help watch for snags.”
“Yeah, right. Right. Okay, I’m up,” I started to get to my feet. I must have gone straight into REM. I felt hung over.
Oh, right. ’Burbs’ place.
Oh, right. Cat-eyes. Steel. Captain Steel. I wasn’t in Spam-town anymore, I was—
I stood up and looked over the bulwark.
It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise. I knew about them. I’d read about them on the net centuries ago, when Vesper’s biosphere was being designed, but I’d never been outside a city at night since I’d landed here. When I was working there just never seemed to be any reason to, and after Shaughnessy left me I was too depressed. You couldn’t really see them even from the edge of Spam-town, even from Paradise Alley. The lights were too bright. Of course, people had them potted, and in Capri on the other side there was a botanical garden that had a nice display. But nothing like this.
It was night. The sky was peppered with stars. Sperry and Alta were still too low in the east to be seen in the middle of the jungle. The trees hid them. And Ruby, although much brighter than the stars, didn’t give off an appreciable amount of light. It was really dark.
The flowers had come out.
Come out, maybe they’d already been out, but you didn’t notice them in daylight, not in the tangle of manic fecundity that was the rain forest. But at night—
In order to make the whole ecosystem work, back when they were putting it together, the biggest problem they’d had to overcome was the forty-six hours of darkness every day. I mean once they had a reducing atmosphere established. Circadian rhythms could be altered, but sleeping that long on a regular basis just wasn’t healthy for a lot of things. Birds and insects started to act very strangely. That meant the things they liked to eat weren’t getting pollinated because the pollinators couldn’t find them in the dark, and everything started to fall apart.
So they gave the flowers bioluminescence. Not just the cool green of fireflies; they ran the entire spectrum. Icy blues fading to rich lavenders. Luscious reds swelling to cool pinks and gaudy oranges. Chrome yellows flecked with crimson. Some brilliant, others the most delicate pastels, they filled the jungle on both sides of the river.
It took your breath away.
Not that they were all that bright. You could still barely see around you. But the turgid river was glassy smooth; it reflected the flowers and the stars. We were floating up a polychromatic kaleidoscope.
I made my way up to the bow and Marcus hailed me from the other hull. “We tried it with the running lights on, but we found this works better. The lights just make you think you can go faster than is really prudent. You can actually see farther without them, once your eyes adjust.”
“Right,” I called back. My eyes had been closed, so I could already see pretty well. Even so, the longer I looked, the more I could tell that the luminescence was in everything. The veins in the leaves gave off faint traces of dim emerald. The moss on the trunks showed as patches of dull jade. The way you saw logs floating in the water was by the black gap in the reflected stars. Even so, Jemal had the turbine throttled way down.
We snaked our way up the meandering river like that, with me or Marcus calling out to Jemal when he needed to avoid some obstacle. Steel must have been dead to the world; our calls never disturbed her. Ham was Ham, still and silent.
The river was already quite a bit narrower here than it had been at its mouth. Sometimes we’d come around a bend and the jungle would arch completely over the water, replacing the actinic stars with a soft gingham canopy of blooms. Once in a great while we’d pass the flickering torches of a homestead or a small settlement and our eyes would have to readjust, but that didn’t happen more than five or six times in the course of the entire voyage.
The overall effect was one of an almost timeless calm balanced against the intense need to wring every possible scrap of visual data out of any stray photon that happened to hit your retina. The hardest thing was to keep your eyes on the water and not just drift off and admire the light-show. The occasional calls, shrieks, bellows and roars of whatever was out in the bush looking for groceries, or a way to keep from becoming groceries, didn’t help. All in all, as eerily beautiful as it was, I was still glad to see th
e torches of Kindu come around the final bend.
I heard Marcus in the other bow. “Alice, how are things progressing?” The flowers dimmed out of visibility as we approached the torches lining the rough, wooden dock. “Yes, we’re just pulling in now.”
There were lots of other boats tied up along the waterfront, but none were as sterile as our fiberglass cat. Each was a unique work of painstaking craftsmanship— ornately carved and skillfully fitted mahogany hulls, rosewood and ebony rails, teak decks, sturdy masts reaching up out of the torchlight. The village of Kindu could be glimpsed through the trees. A main street twisted away from the dock lined with carved and thatched buildings, lit mostly by the yellow-orange of burning wood, occasionally with the cool blue of hydrogen. I couldn’t see a single straight line anywhere; all was soft, organic asymmetry, as comfortably functional as an old pair of shoes. After months in the brutal efficiency of Spam-town, my soul felt bathed in warm humanity.
And there were people everywhere, their dark bronze Draconian features emblazoned with tattoos, jewelry and cosmetic genome work. I saw iridescent blue feather crests, green and gold epaulet and spine plates, some designs new to me, others centuries old. It was mid-evening and the place was jumping. Bales of grain or tubers, baskets of fish, crates, bags and barrels were being lifted onto the dock or lowered onto waiting decks.
A tall, handsome woman seemed in nominal charge of the port facilities. She took time out of shouting orders to throw us a line. Her body art took me back to the last time I was in the Pleiades—a carnelian ridge lock reigned over symmetrical peacock tattoos, with the heads at the corners of her jaw, the necks stretching down the sides of her throat to bodies that spanned her shoulders and blended into real plume tails that flowed gracefully over her arms like a robe of royalty. The tails erected and fanned out as she waved to Marcus like an old friend.
“You bullet Alice?” she smiled.
Even Marcus’ obsidian composure couldn’t withstand the onslaught of vivacity; he was forced to smile back. “Yes, I’ve just been talking to her.”
Dancing with Eternity Page 4