Cosmonaut Keep (22 page)

The airship lurched and the floor tilted upward as the cable at the bow was released a second before that at the stern. Gregor grabbed the edge of the table, Elizabeth threw her arms across it. The engines roared to bring the craft to a level keel.

"Fear of flying, eh? Who'd have thought it?"

She laughed, and they both turned their attention to the view as the airship ascended. How broad the sprawl, how small the ships.

"Wow," said Elizabeth, "you can see our shadow."

"Where? ... Oh, right." There it was, rippling across street and field and river like a black fluke, paced by the flashing glint of the sun on pool or mire. Then the coastline like a map; clouds from the side and from above.

But after the airship had reached its cruising altitude and had followed the coast southward for a while, even this fascination palled. Gregor and Elizabeth turned away from the window and settled down like seasoned travelers. Salasso was still sleeping off the effects of smoking an entire pipe by himself.

"Still keen?" Gregor asked.

"Oh yes. Should be interesting even if we don't find any of them. I mean, I know that would be disappointing for you, but ... "

"Aye, I know what you mean." Gregor sighed, looking around the cabin. Most of the passengers seemed to be on business, and either drinking spirits in a rather forced attempt to relax, or toiling over sheets of paper and hand calculators.

"You know what this world needs?" he said. "A
Beagle
voyage. Somebody to sponsor some long-range travel just for exploration and sampling."

"And to come back with a theory of evolution?"

She smiled, he laughed.

"An account of it," Gregor said. "We already have the theory; what we need is a better idea of how it's gone, here. The planet's story."

Elizabeth looked down at the crawling coastline for a moment, then back at him.

"It would be difficult," she said. "How many incursions have there been? We can't even guess at the number of major deliberate introductions of species, let alone the accidents. I swear it must happen every time a starship comes in -- "

She laughed suddenly.

"What?"

"I just remembered. Talking to a lighter skipper down in the Bailie's. He said that if you get to one of the ships up close you can see
barnacles
on them."

"Tough little critters, barnacles."

"Uh-huh. But these must be able to survive at least hours, sometimes days, in
space."

"Vacuum barnacles!"

She nodded. "There you go, that's one new species right there. And I bet they've spread here."

"Okay," he said. "We'll call the ship the
Barnacle,
and get it sponsored by a manufacturer of anti-fouling paint."

She rubbed an eye. "I think that's a saur product, actually. But, yeah, something like that. Shipowners. Fishermen."

"Hey, don't look at me. My father isn't much of a one for pure research."

"How about the castle?"

"They've got enough on their plate with the Great Work."

They'd continued the conversation without taking it seriously up to this point.

"What?"

"If we succeed," Gregor said, "the Great Work will be done. Over. And the castle, the crew, and the families will be rich. So they might well have more money to throw into research."

He looked out, and down. The coastline had swung inward, and they were now crossing the east-west leg of the L-shaped stretch of ocean, Cargill's Sound, that divided the northwestern subcontinent from its larger neighbor. Mainland was saur country, dinosaur country.

"You know, I could get excited about that," he said. "To sail around the world just to
find out more
about the place."

"That would be wonderful," Elizabeth said, in an uncharacteristically dreamy tone.

"Even if we never did get the planet's story straight?"

"Yeah, even then."

She didn't seem to want to talk any further, hauling down a book from her coat pocket. Gregor looked out of the window for another while, then decided to emulate the business travelers by doing some work.

Paper was the heaviest part of his luggage. He tugged out a double handful of notes, fingered a pen from an inside pocket and began going over them again. They represented the best part of a week's work by him and his companions. How much previous work lay behind it, he hardly dared to fathom. Even then, it was probably inadequate.
If
they tracked down one or more of the original crew, and
if
they still had their hands on some still-functioning hard-tech (as Salasso had claimed), and
if
they were willing to share and cooperate -- then
maybe
the figures and data structures summarized here might be the basis for the outline of the model he'd imagined. And even then, the navigation problem itself would have to be formulated and formatted appropriately before it could be entered.

If, indeed, it could. His ideas of the capability of these ancient machines were based on little more than family legend. Even if the most enthusiastic and incredible accounts were true, very likely the machinery had deteriorated over time.

Enough. He could only do what he could. He worked steadily for a couple of hours, pausing only for a coffee brought around by the air-steward, and then noticed that Salasso was stirring. He got up and joined him, leaving Elizabeth nodding off over her book.

"Feeling better?"

"Yes," said Salasso. He looked out of the window and blinked. "One gets used to the most astonishing things. I think I can fill my pipe myself now."

That he did, lit up and toked and passed it to Gregor. After they'd shared two pipes and the saur had passed out once more, Gregor returned to his seat and found that the figures no longer made much sense. Or rather, they made a completely different kind of sense. They'd begun to resemble the physical structure of the squid brain which they mathematically modeled.

Some time after that, he woke to find himself leaning forward over the table and sideways against the window, and Elizabeth having done the same. They each had a forearm across the table, and Elizabeth's hand rested on top of his. He eased his head back gently, wary of cricking his neck. His hair and Elizabeth's had become entangled. As he was easing the strands apart she woke up. She blinked and looked at him, bewildered but beginning to smile. Then she woke up fully and pulled away.

"Ouch! Sorry." She combed with her fingers, freeing their hair finally, and sat up straight. "You fell asleep stoned then I fell asleep reading. Right on top of you!"

"Ah, it's all right," Gregor said. "What are friends for?"

"Good night," said Elizabeth.

Gregor looked up from his stack of paper and cup of coffee.

"Good night."

She tugged her overnight satchel from her bag, picked up her book and walked to the end of the cabin where a small stair coiled up to the interior of the hull. Salasso turned from gazing at the night, or at the reflections, and raised a floppy hand. Most of the rest of the passengers had already gone to bed.

Up the stair, two turns. Did gravity
increase
as you rose above the surface? It seemed so. Inside the creaking, tough fabric hull was a warren of narrow, low-lit passages between the translucent plastic bulges of the gasbags. She used a tiny washroom and made her way to a cabin -- little more than an enclosed bunk -- of laminated wood. Balsa for the walls, aluminum for the bed; thin foam mattress and down covering. There was room to stand, and undress, and hang her clothes. The top of the bunk was too low to sit hugging her knees. She lay on her side, hugging her knees.

Gregor had seemed a little surprised, and pleased, that she wanted to come at all. Really, he'd insisted, it wasn't necessary. Salasso had to come because they had to track down saur rumors -- rumors so obscure that even old Tharovar had never heard them. Gregor had to come because they'd then have to track down people, maybe in tough places. She didn't need to put herself to this trouble and possible hazard. Why not continue the labwork while they were away?

She'd told him she had no intention whatsoever of staying behind. She wouldn't miss this for anything. She'd pay her fare herself if she had to. James had assured her that the castle would pay her way, no problem. Research expenses.

So here she was: huddled in a narrow bunk, a few meters away from Gregor, on a journey to find what just might help Gregor catch up with -- and catch -- Lydia. Her only consolation was that its success was unlikely.

Wonderful.

The thousand-mile journey took two more days and nights. They spent the days much as they had the first one; the nights in their separate cabins in the hull, between the plastic spheres of the gasbags.

On the third morning, at breakfast, Salasso called across to Elizabeth and Gregor.

"Look down," he said.

The ship had descended to what seemed to Gregor like a couple of thousand feet. Beneath them, in a glaring low sun, lay the northern fringes of the manufacturing plant. Here, it was still sparse, but startling nonetheless. Clumps and stands of trees, their green branches angled out then straight up like those of decision trees or clade diagrams, cast long shadows. Some had leaves in the shape of inverted umbrellas; others, diamond-shaped.

"Like giant cactuses," said Elizabeth.

The saur had wandered over and leaned in beside them, his breath smelling of kippers.

"Correct," he said. "The cactus plant was one of the sources of the original genes. Of course, much has been edited in since."

"Such as the pipelines between them," said Gregor. He'd just begun to grasp the scale of what he was seeing. Some of these things were a hundred meters tall. The airship was still descending, and he could see dots moving on the ground. At first he'd thought they were saurs, but now he could see they were vehicles.

He swallowed to ease the pressure on his eardrums. The scale jumped again -- the vehicles were chemical tankers. He saw a road and his gaze followed it south ... to even taller structures, well over the horizon now and rapidly approaching.

"Docking at Saur City One in twenty minutes," the steward announced.

Salasso said something.

"What?"

The saur's lips twitched. "Its real name," he said. "Some of the syllables are outside the range of human hearing."

"Ah," said Gregor, who had been mentally trying to pronounce it. "Fine. Saur City One it is."

As they drifted closer it became obvious that the city was of the same stuff and shapes as the manufacturing plant, but expanded and contorted into towers and gantries, platforms and plazas, aerial roadways and walkways. These structures were clothed and foliated with dense, decorative overgrowths of smaller and more colorful, more vegetation-like versions of the plant.

One tall tower loomed, a helical twist of three trunks supporting a platform that bristled with masts.

"Docking in two minutes," said the steward. "Please return to your seats."

Gregor followed the others down a ladder, made -- almost reassuringly -- of something like mutated bamboo. The platform, too, was wooden, but without planks or other divisions, and it swayed slightly. Two saurs sat in a saddle out from the edge of the platform, operating levers which seemed to control the snaking vines of the airship's tethers. A steady breath of oxygenated and cooled air from stomata in the wall at the far end of the platform did little to relieve the heat and humidity.

"Over here," said Salasso. The other passengers, disembarking or just stretching their legs before the next part of the journey south, had trooped off through a double-glass doorway. Gregor and Elizabeth lugged their bags after Salasso, through an arched doorway off to the left. Inside, they found themselves in a green, smooth-sided corridor which expanded to a circular room, its walls dotted with yellow-green lights and broken by further doorways. A ring of low seating, like some fungoid growth of cork, occupied the hub of the room.

"We wait here," said Salasso.

"At least it's cooler," said Elizabeth, sitting down. "What are we waiting for?"

"A lift," said Salasso.

Other saurs passed in and out, most busy and incurious, a few exchanging words and gestures with Salasso.

"Why here and not with the other passengers?" Gregor asked.

Salasso shrugged. "They'll be here to make deals, in the human quarter. More comfortable accommodations. We are going deep into the city. Perhaps deeper." He hesitated. "Forgive me. You may wish to stay with the other humans? I can very well go on alone."

"Not a chance," Elizabeth and Gregor told him.

"Good," he said. "You can, however, leave your luggage here."

In one of the apertures something settled with a thud, filling the space behind it. Then it, too, opened up, revealing a small, bright chamber just large enough for a few people to stand in.

Salasso stood and walked toward it; they hurried after him and joined him inside it.

"What's this?"

"Like I said," Salasso explained. "A lift."

A section of the wall slid across the opening. Then, quite without warning, they dropped. Gregor felt his body become lighter for a few seconds, then briefly heavier. The sliding door opened again, to the open air.

They stepped out, onto grass, and then Gregor and Elizabeth stopped and stared. At the foot of all the towers and silos they were as mice in a forest. Sunlight, shining down between the trunks and reflected off their polished-looking surfaces, fell shadowless, filtered to green. Across all the grassy space that they could see, saurs strolled between towers or sat or ran about on the grass. Most of the saurs here looked quite unlike those Gregor had seen before. They wore a diversity of clothing and ornament: loose, flapping trousers and jackets, robes and gowns, cloaks and daggers, in colors vivid and various. Their height, too, varied from taller than Salasso to so short they had to be infants. High-pitched, fluting cries filled the air like batsong.

Salasso looked back from a few meters ahead, and returned a couple of steps.