Alex’s eyes were bright with laughter, and his snurge was almost a giggle, this time.
‘They sound fun!’ he observed, with a hint of regret, never having experienced anything like that big-family life.
‘Oh, we have a lot of fun,’ Migan agreed. ‘Also all the usual bickering, family squabbles. But we’re tight. Like most families on Camae we spend most of our time visiting each other’s houses, interfering in one another’s lives, telling one another what to do.’ She spoke with just a hint of feeling, at that, and a grin which held some resignation. ‘I’m coming in for quite a lot of that at the moment,’ she explained, ‘I moved back home after a divorce six months ago, and my entire family is supporting and advising me on a daily basis.’
Alex felt a pang of sympathy and some concern, too – did that divorce mean that she was emotionally vulnerable right now? Making it even more unfair and inappropriate even to consider a relationship with her?
Shut up, his libido commanded his perhaps rather over-developed sense of responsibility. You’re only talking.
‘Friends, too,’ Migan observed. ‘And neighbours. Pretty much everyone I know, really. Which is lovely, of course, great to feel that so many people care about you. But I do wish they’d believe me when I tell them I’m fine, and stop lining up dates for me with ‘lovely young men.’’
Alex sympathised with that, too, having endured years of his friends doing their best to get him back in the dating game after his divorce.
‘I’ve told them,’ Migan said, ‘that I’ll date when I meet someone I like.’ She looked at him in a way that made Alex’s pulse flutter. ‘So – how about you?’ she asked. ‘Family? Partner?’
‘Parents, no siblings,’ Alex said. ‘Aunts, uncles, grandparents I haven’t seen since I was a kid, and even then, never close, only saw them at weddings and funerals. And no partner, no.’ He looked back at her with a smile lurking, and felt the understanding and attraction between them like the pull of a powerful, almost irresistible magnet.
They were still standing there talking more than an hour later when the Ambassador came to bring Alex back to a sense of his social obligations. She was reluctant to intrude, but nobody could leave an Embassy event before the guest of honour had retired. After dinner coffees had been over for ages and it was getting late by Camag standards, gone midnight, time for everyone to be on their way.
‘You are welcome,’ she told Migan, ‘to join us in the Embassy.’ And with a twinkle, ‘One more coffee?’
‘Oh – thanks, but I’d better be off.’ Migan looked at Alex and he knew that it could not, just could not, end like this. He hadn’t felt this way about anyone in years – had not allowed himself to feel this way.
‘I’d really like,’ he said, ‘to see you again.’
‘Likewise,’ said Migan, with a very slight but just perceptible blush. ‘I can be free whenever…’ she glanced from him to the Ambassador, aware his time was not his own.
‘You’re free tomorrow afternoon,’ the Ambassador reminded Alex, and with a benevolent look, ‘Make whatever arrangements you like.’
The day before, Alex would have hesitated, concerned about the security issues involved in making any kind of arrangement even to meet Migan here at the Embassy, let alone venturing beyond it. But he had, even in that short space of time, come to trust both the Embassy and the Camag authorities… and the people of Camag, too. He’d been on a walkabout the day before, surrounded by tens of thousands of people who’d poured in to see him made ip Camae by the President Prince, their equivalent of honouring him with the ceremonial freedom of the planet. The crowd had been noisy, as people here tended to be, but they had been amazingly well behaved, organising themselves with nothing like the army of safety-stewards and police that size of event would have required on other worlds.
Security, indeed, had been invisible. They didn’t go in for bodyguards with suits and shades on Camae. Their princes were expected to be able to walk amongst crowds in that kind of walkabout, apparently protected by no more than the public’s own sense of courteous and responsible behaviour.
There was security, of course. There was very good security. But it was mingled with the crowd, or just out of sight, always there if you needed it and never even visible if you didn’t. So this was, Alex knew, a world on which he actually could go out in public without a massive cordon of uniforms and suits around him.
‘I was planning,’ he said, ‘on doing some sightseeing tomorrow...’ a hopeful look. ‘Perhaps you’d like to show me around?’
‘Good,’ Migan said, with a happy grin. ‘Yes.’ He only realised later that she would have said no to that, regardless of their chemistry and how much she’d enjoyed talking with him, if he had said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to come with me.’ This was her world, he was the visitor, and she was not some bit of local totty to be picked up as a holiday amusement.
‘I’ll meet you here,’ she said, ‘At…?’
‘1400?’ Alex suggested, which made her chuckle.
‘Two pm, then,’ she said, assertively civilian and Camag, since they were one of the few worlds not to adopt Chartseyan digital time for everyday use. And with a bright, lingering look. ‘See you tomorrow…’
Alex gave his speech to the System Senate next morning, which went down very well. It was, in essence, the same speech he’d given far too many times at Chartsey, saying all the things the Senate there and the Diplomatic Corps had wanted him to say – reassuring, positive, inspirational.
It was, of course, given in his usual far from inspirational flat-tone delivery, but the senators listened as if he was the most accomplished of public speakers, rising to applaud him at the end. It was only when he would have left the Speaker’s Podium that a rush of disappointment went around the senatorial assembly, at which an aide murmured politely but emphatically through his earpiece.
Alex stifled the uh? Really? of his instinctive reaction, drew a breath, and turned back to face the senators.
‘Saluté,’ he said, ‘Valori!’ and gave them a salute.
Rapture, a roar of applause which followed him out of the chamber. And a car, then, waiting to take him to lunch.
Lunch for him, anyway. It was early morning in the time zone he was taken to, so technically it was breakfast, there. But the Embassy had far more influence here and far more cooperative hosts, too. Alex was served with the food that the Embassy specified, at the times they specified, regardless of local time and whatever anyone else might be eating.
In fact, the Camag seemed perfectly adaptable to having a lunch menu served at six in the morning, helping themselves from the kind of buffet Alex was already getting used to, here.
His father, he thought, would have been quite disappointed in Camag buffets. There were no grandiose set pieces in it, no ornate presentation at all. And definitely no blancmange. Theirs was very much a familial style of dining, even at formal events. So there was a typical lunch buffet there, a salad bar, a range of savouries and a dessert table with ices and fruit.
Alex enjoyed it, though – light, tasty food, and much of it organic. You could get vat-grown food, here, available in ready meals, but it was regarded as low quality convenience junk and certainly not something to be served to a guest. The salad, vegetables and fruit here had been grown on farms, mostly hydroponic but grown from seed, not manufactured by a biovat from base nutrients.
Alex, as adventurous a diner as most spacers, was happy to eat organic, and found the fruit on Camag, especially, to be delicious. He liked the apples, particularly – a hundred and seventy six distinct varieties, they’d told him, each of them unique to the region where they were grown. So he finished his lunch with an apple, crunching into its tart, crisp flesh with real enjoyment.
Back at the Embassy, he found that civilian clothes had been provided for his outing with Migan, along with a note from the Security Attaché telling him that they’d received an itinerary from her and all necessary arrangements were in hand, no problem.
; Alex put on the clothes they’d provided for him. This had already been set down by the Ambassador and Port Admiral uniting in their determination to take good and proper care of him. He was not to wear uniform when he was going about sightseeing, they’d directed. It must be obvious to everyone that he was going about privately, just as obvious as it would be if people saw a member of royalty going about in casual clothes. Camag had very powerful mores for that situation. There were no paparazzi here, nobody who’d rush up and ask for an autograph, and any boorish fool who tried to take sneaky holos would be told off, very fast, by everyone around. However instantly recognisable someone might be, if they were going about in clothing which declared them to be off duty, as it were, their privacy would be respected.
So, Alex put on the supple leather boots, hiking pants and shirt. The shirt was of soft woollen fabric, lined with something that felt silky on the skin, with three-quarter sleeves and a mid-thigh length. It was barley-cream, plain other than for a very little black-work embroidery around the neck. Casual gear, Camag style.
When he emerged from the Embassy, directed to where he was told Migan was waiting, he found that she was wearing similar gear, though her shirt had rather more in the way of colourful embroidery around the cuffs and hem.
‘Hello,’ they said together, and beamed with mutual delight – no reserve on Alex’s face now, out of uniform and meeting her in private. An Embassy car was waiting not far away, and after telling one another how nice they both looked, Migan led the way towards it.
‘Where are we going?’ Alex asked, as they settled into the car.
‘Findur,’ she told him, with a look to check that he was happy with that.
Alex smiled. Findur was the most northerly and the most mountainous of the nine continents, containing vast ranges and six out of the ten highest mountains on the planet. It was the most sparsely populated of the continents, too, liable to have rather more visitors than residents, at least in the summer.
It was winter there now, in the northern hemisphere, and a cold but clear day over Findur, with dawn rising there as they approached. There would, Alex knew, be beautiful scenery. It was also where the ancient site of The Chambers was located, deep within a mountain range. But that would be a special trip, already planned for later in the visit under the escort of the Finduri Prince.
And Migan, as it turned out, had rather more in mind than just a car-tour of the prettiest scenic spots. The car took them to another Embassy building – a country house at the coast, surrounded by woodland and with a panoramic view of the sea. They were not staying there, though; merely changing transport.
As they got out of the car, Alex saw the waiting airbikes.
They were parked together; Embassy bikes, deep glossy green with the Diplomatic Corps emblem on their side panels.
He might have expected it, he realised. Airbikes were the preferred method of personal transport on Camae. Very few people owned cars. Families owned buses, as Migan had said, owned communally and used to take the family about as a group. There were good public transport links between towns and cities, too, mostly used for commuting. But more than half of people on Camag owned or had the use of an airbike, with hire-bikes readily available everywhere.
Alex could ride such a bike, of course. He was a spacer, there weren’t many vehicles he couldn’t operate. But he hadn’t ridden one since he was a teenager, and that on Novaterre.
A smile of delight came onto his face. ‘Oh! Excellent!’ he said.
And it was. After a few minutes of vehicle-briefing and putting on a safety harness, he was allowed to take off, following Migan as she led the way.
Airbikes were not the fastest means of transport. The ones on Camae couldn’t even go supersonic. They were low and slow, mostly used only for local journeys. Migan was cruising at well under the speed limit, too, just a couple of hundred klicks an hour, four hundred metres up.
It felt a lot faster. The bikes were very stable, a saddle-seat with a platform foot rest on which there were sliding control pedals. The controls were intuitive – move your right foot forward and the bike would curve to the right, banking more or less steeply depending on how far and how rapidly you moved your foot. Handlebar grips controlled altitude and speed. A child could operate it. And on Camag, they did. Even kids on Camag were allowed to use a low-powered ground-level version of an airbike, starting with a ‘wobbler’ at walking pace almost as soon as they started to toddle. A twelve year old, subject to parental approval and passing stringent tests, could get a license and drive an airbike, here.
For Alex, though, it was an exhilarating experience. The bike’s air-shield and the safety harness he was wearing kept him from being buffeted by the wind, but there was still a wonderful sense of racing so close to the ground, and over contoured landscape, at that, which wove them through valleys and soared over hills.
There were, as he’d expect in a visit to Findur, great crags and glaciers, stunning waterfalls and lakes of an astonishing blue. But there was also, unexpectedly, an orchard. Someone had obviously told Migan that Alex liked apples, so one of the stops she had planned was at an apple farm.
It didn’t look like a farm to Alex’s eyes. On most worlds, ‘farm’ meant mind-bogglingly huge expanses of land under robotically managed agriculture, thousands upon thousands of kilometres of protobean, protarice or some other crop destined to be processed into base nutrient. It could be quite impressive from space, whole continents orange with ripening beans. Here on Camag, most farms were actually in the cities; industrial buildings housing hydroponic production. Here and there around the towns, though, there were small areas under open-air cultivation, specialist market gardens and fruit farms.
And here, at least, a fruit farm turned out to mean an orchard spread throughout natural woodland, on the lower slopes of a south-facing hillside which rose to high granite crags.
There were good reasons, the farmer told Alex, for integrating the orchard with the woodland. Apple trees flourished in a biodiverse environment, being fertilised and pollinated, protected from wind and from soil erosion.
‘If you stuck them in rows in a field,’ he said, chuckling even at the absurdity of such a thought, ‘you’d have to chuck a ton of chemicals at them to do the same things as the woodland, with wind-breaks and soil pegs. And who in their senses would do that, when nature will do it all for you?’
He showed them round some of the nearer reaches of the orchard, chatting happily about tree management and the excellent crop they’d had this year. If he had been at all surprised by the arrival of Captain von Strada and a local woman on Embassy airbikes, he certainly hadn’t shown it, just welcomed them as if they were expected, casual visitors. And, as Alex had realised was usual for Camae, he was keen to talk to them about the farm, and about his life there. His family, he said, with a little give-away of pride, was ‘away right now’ – meaning, Alex realised later, that the Diplomatic Corps had quietly cleared the farm for his visit, leaving only the farmer primed to give the tour.
He gave them apples too, straight from the tree. This species was a winter-harvest apple, not considered ready for harvest till they’d had at least three deep overnight frosts, and even then not seized from the trees in any great indiscriminate sweep. There might be as much as a six week run between the first apples ready on a tree and the last. But he found them some ripe for picking, giving them a casual rub on his shirt by way of cleaning them, and handing them over.
Alex put all thought of airborne contaminants and insects out of his mind and ate, just as Migan did, with relish. This scored him points with the farmer.
‘Offworlders,’ he said, ‘generally wants to sterilise them, if they’ll eat ‘em at all.’
This betrayed the fact that the farm was used by the Embassy as a safe place for offworlders to visit. The chances of the farmer having had offworld visitors here otherwise were extremely remote, after all. Disregarding the Fleet and Embassy staff, there were unlikely to be any more tha
n a few hundred visitors to Camae over the course of a year. Someone, Alex realised, had been advising Migan on where she might take him, with a lot more organisation to this than there appeared. But that was fine, standing there eating his freshly picked apple with the scent of snow in the air and Migan giving him a twinkling grin, Alex was more than happy.
After a half hour visit, though, they moved on, Migan telling him that there was something she wanted to show him. To his surprise, she led him down out of the mountains and back along the coast, cruising faster and higher than before and for several minutes before she dropped the speed right down to a near stationary ten kph.
They were looking over a very different landscape, now. The coastal plain was broad, almost flat, with meandering rivers and a denser, greener kind of woodland. After a few moments to get his bearings, Alex could see that there were towns, too, scattered all around. They were like islands in the forest, each island a network of streets and squares, a few hundred houses and a temple.
There was always a temple. A town could not call itself a town unless it had a temple. Without one, however big it might grow, it was a suburb. Temples were easy to spot, too. They weren’t necessarily all that big, but they were always oval, aligned north-south, and with a domed roof rising to a distinctive spire.
And there was, in the distance, a city. It was clearly a city not merely because of its size but because of its architecture. It was a mass of towers and boxy, hangar-sized buildings visible even at this distance. Closer to, Alex knew, it would be revealed as a mass of industrial estates and office blocks.
Hardly anyone lived there. Cities on Camae were not for living in. They were where you went to work.
And this, it turned out, was what Migan, the town planner, had brought him here to see.
‘Never get tired of watching this,’ she observed, hovering her airbike and gesturing at the broad expanse of coastal plain. ‘Be about…’ she glanced at the time, ‘four or five minutes.’ And in answer to his questioning look, a grin. ‘You’ll see.’
Assegai Page 40
