Something was askew, though. A kind of unbalanced feel, something missing from the set-up she’d been dragged into, except she didn’t know what it was. She sat on the toilet and massaged her scalp, dragging through the events of the day before. Trying to think them through. Make sense of them.
Shelley’s death. No sense to that. Adam X finding her, handing her the proposition so neatly. One thing, then the other, some connection between them she couldn’t quite see. Like that interview with Duke Bonadventure, and the other Golden. Something missing there, too, she was sure of it. But there had been nothing wrong with the mission profiles, she’d know if there was. They’d been drilled into her under hypaedia, tested out on a simulator in the bowels of Bonadventure’s house, hour after hour. And Adam X had taken her up to the spacefield, shown her the craft—mean little thing more missile than ship, mostly reaction motor, lifesystem a kind of cramped coffin bolted on as an afterthought—she’d use to rendezvous with the ship she’d pilot on the mission, somewhere beyond Saturn. Not much preparation, considering how important the Golden had said all this was. But maybe they didn’t want her to know too much, just enough to fly the mission. Maybe they trusted her to do the right thing.
Sure, Suzy. Drink some more water. Take a pill to blow away your hangover. Bitemarks on her shoulder, she discovered, scratches up and down her thighs, long parallel welts (twisting to see herself in glaring mirrored light) across the humped muscles of her shoulders. Shit, they’d gone at it last night, her and Xing.
After Adam X had turned her loose, she’d wandered through the Carnival crowds, looking for a last good time on Titan. She remembered joining a theatre performance in one of the lesser malls, actors mixing with spectators and people taking turns at a bank of percussion instruments, from tambourines to a gong as tall as the tall woman who beat it. They made a roaring pulsing thunder. Suzy beat a kettledrum with her palms (‘Go ahead,’ the man who’d pulled her out of the crowd urged, ‘just find your own beat!’), while the principal characters, dominoed and in voluminous black or white, prinked and whirled about each other, mimed threats which grew ever more extravagant until a long multiple balletic sword fight was ranging up and down the length of the mall while the crowd clapped in counterpoint to the drumming, the acrobatics grew more frenzied, and holographic projections of fire roared higher as the drumming rushed of its own accord to a climax, a welcome catharsis that left Suzy breathless, her palms filled with an electric tingling that took hours to fade.
After she’d helped the actor pack away the kettledrum, she suggested they go and find something to eat. He’d looked around at the other actors (stacking boxes of percussion instruments and the equipment which had generated mood-altering ultrasonics, folding up black and white gowns, rolling up light cables which had projected the closing flames, the earlier images of skyey clouds, of leafy branches and dappled sunlight) and shrugged and smiled, said why not, he’d never met a flier before.
He had a sudden toothy smile, small, live black eyes halved by neat epicanthic folds. His eyes and mouth were ringed with white greasepaint; Suzy wiped it off for him. Not the type she usually went for—she preferred compact, muscular, hairy men—but he’d woken something in her, or just happened to be there at the right time, at the end of this long, weird day.
His name was Wu Xing.
They’d eaten at a restaurant overlooking the Glacier of Worlds; an expensive place cantilevered high above the city’s staggered tiers where you cooked your own food, meat and vegetables threaded on long skewers, turned over a bubbling lava pit to crisp. The maître d’ knew Suzy, of course, and she and Xing were given one of the prime tables, beside the thick glass window. Far below, slopes of bare water ice and fields of slushy hydrocarbon snow the colour of old dried blood stretched away to the clustered cones of ice volcanoes. Cumulus feathered the clear pink sky two or three kilometres up. Saturn a thin crescent, rings like an arrowhead fitted to his bow.
Titan. Suddenly, Suzy wanted to be very far away from it all.
Tourists were staring at her flier’s black leathers, but none dared approach, not even the enthusiasmos. Especially not the enthusiasmos, who would know that she was the leader of the team who had lost one of its members to a fatal accident that morning.
Suzy ignored the tourists’ stares as best she could, but she knew she wasn’t being very good company. Xing didn’t seem to mind, and kept up a steady stream of anecdotes about his performance troupe, occasionally reaching across the table to pat her hand, something she would normally have found irritating but which now was oddly reassuring.
Suzy smiled and nodded as Xing prattled on. It was kind of comforting, but her head was full of knife-edge trajectories, the warp of gravitational tides and orbital parameters. When she pressed the side of her face against the window’s thick, slightly greenish glass, Titan’s poisonous atmosphere centimetres away, she could see all the way down to the nursery slope where tourists’ deltakites, leaf-shapes in bright primary colours, spiralled down the constant thermals. And saw over again the beginning of Shelley’s stall, that bright instant when his right wing had flung back. She was beginning to wonder, through the fog of all she had drunk, if it had been an accident at all, when Xing patted her wrist, asked her what was wrong.
Somehow she had gotten through the meal without noticing; coffee was cooling in a thick china cup before her. She sort of apologized for her inattention, but the actor brushed it aside.
‘I know how much trouble you have, Seyoura Falcon. I only hope I help a little.’
‘More than a little,’ Suzy said, spilling a heap of cinnamon and chocolate flakes on her coffee and then downing it in one, licking the moustache of foam from her upperlip. She had the table flash up the bill, inserted her credit disc and watched coolly as the incredible number of air-hours was deducted.
‘I do not think I help as much as that,’ Xing said, fascinated by the long string of numbers.
‘Take me to a bar you like,’ Suzy said, ‘and buy me a brandy. Plum preferably.’
They’d ended up barhopping, she remembered, as she fixed her make-up in the bathroom’s glare. Taken a vertical slice through the city, from a greasy maintenance crews’ dive she liked because nobody there ever paid her any attention, through a bland tourist place with much running water and bad holography where they were thrown out for making too much noise, and on through several others to a bar at the top of one of the city’s spiky towers, spare and expensive and overlooking the spaceport.
The infolded patterns of the fluxbarriers and baffle-squares like a flock of grey sails: the noses of the ships rising amongst them (her own was out there: the thought was like the airy thrill of flight): a tramp freighter accelerating up the faintly blue tunnel punched by gravithic generators, dwindling into the neon pink sky.
Suzy didn’t remember getting back to the capsule hotel and her spartan, permanently booked room. But she did remember slow comfortable lovemaking that had turned fierce and frantic for her in the middle…then maybe she’d passed out. Or slept, anyway. She had a feeling she owed Xing a debt of kindness, and the only way she could repay it in the little time she had was with her credit, which she would never be able to access once she left Titan. Use it or lose it, yeah…She woke him with a kiss, suggested they go out and make a day of it, and to her surprise he agreed at once.
There was a newstaper waiting just outside the hotel, a portly man in a very fashionable, searingly-coloured suit. He hurried after Suzy and Xing as they headed for the transit line, his remote wallowing through the air ahead of him. The third time he called her name Suzy turned and stopped, and he trotted up to her, gullible, innocent, wide open.
He said breathlessly, ‘Just a word to your fans, Seyoura Falcon. I’m sure that many of them are worried that you might be thinking of quitting tournaments completely, after your recent close brush with death. I wonder—’
Which was when Suzy kicked him under his left kneecap. The taper went over in an untidy heap, ho
wling. She stamped on his hand, kicked the control pad for the remote over the edge of the walkway, grabbed hold of a handful of his dry, silver-coloured hair, and pulled. His face was mottled white and red; eyes wide with fear.
The pop-eyed lenses of the remote glittered in the corner of Suzy’s eye and she swiped at it; but the thing swooped out over the railing, some homeostatic preservation program. So she smiled at it and twisted the taper’s hair so he howled some more, and said loudly, ‘My fans will be real happy to know that my reflexes are as keen as ever.’
Then she turned on her heel and stalked over to where Xing was waiting for her. He applauded her softly, his wide smile closing his eyes to slits. He said, ‘Some show.’
‘Just what the little fucker wanted. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. He’ll make a week out of that, at least.’
‘Still, do you feel better?’ Xing fell in with her quick, angry stride, head bent to her so the fringe of his cap of black hair fell aslant.
Suzy examined her feelings: rage, self-loathing, barely controlled laughter.
She laughed. ‘Yeah, a little.’
‘I find you a few more tapers. Good therapy for you, they make a profit. All happy.’ Smiling, he rubbed finger and thumb together. ‘On Titan it is always money.’
‘Xing, what I want to do now is get something to eat. But first I want to go check something. You ever seen the fliers’ warren?’
Xavier Delgado, the chief hangar mechanic, was a grossly fat man bloated by appetite and too many years in low gee environments. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, a tethered balloon barely stuffed into his bib coveralls, as he explained to Suzy that it was probably fatigue in one of the spars that had brought Shelley down.
Suzy felt a measure of relief. ‘So it was an accident.’
‘Maybe. There’s fatigue and then there’s fatigue.’ Delgado joggled a hand, palm flat, at the wreckage of Shelley’s wings, laid out on the oil-stained concrete floor of the cavernous hangar. Broken polycarbon spars outlining the once-proud sweep of the lifting surface. The tattered straps and control wires of the prone harness. Scraps of coloured mylar stained by the intense cold of the Glacier’s methane snows. A horrible, pathetic relic.
‘What’re you trying to tell me, Xav? It wasn’t an accident?’
Delgado sucked loudly on the hollow stick which jauntily stuck up out of his meaty lips: along with everything else, he had a bad nicotine habit. ‘All I’m saying is it’s not possible to be certain, just by looking it over. The spreader spars of the primaries are thin, you know that. And polycarbon is a bit like glass, strong in one direction, brittle in the other. If a spreader spar was slightly out of alignment, then it would have been under stress. Would have broken eventually. But there’s other kinds of fatigue, like I said.’ He mimed twisting a wire back and forth between his hands. ‘Do that to the spar before you fit it, get the same result, right? Or there are ways of chemically attacking it. I even heard there’s something like a virus, gnaws at carbon-carbon bonds.’ Delgado shrugged, a movement as monumental as an earthquake. ‘Maybe half a dozen other ways to sabotage it. All I know is, right now, that Shelley was a kind of wild guy, but he knew how to check over his equipment.’
Suzy balled her fists, felt her nails bite into her palms. The dumb certainty of it cut into her, cold as one of Titan’s zephyrs. She would have gone anyway, tournament or no tournament, but it was just like a Golden to be absolutely certain, make sure all the bases were covered. Which had been one of the meaningless folk sayings her father liked to use.
She said, ‘You can test for this, Xav? How long would it take?’
Another monumental shrug. ‘I guess X-ray crystallography would show whether the spar’d been artificially stressed. Chemical tests would take longer. And that virus. Well, I only ever heard about that, never had any experience of it.’ Delgado sucked on his stick, narrowed his piggy eyes judiciously. ‘Take maybe two, three days. To be sure. I need your say on it, too. Need you to authorize the credit.’
In two days she would be a long way from Titan. Suzy flexed her arms, the hump of grafted muscle shifting on her shoulders. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No…I guess I’m just being paranoid. It’s not as if anyone would really gain anything from it, right?’
Delgado shifted his stick from one corner of his mouth to the other.
‘Goddamn,’ Suzy said. ‘Xing! I’m all done here!’
A long way down the cavern, the actor turned from where he had been staring at stacked wings which rose up towards the naked rock and constellations of glotubes of the cavern’s ceiling. Delgado dropped a hand on Suzy’s shoulder. He said in a dainty whisper, ‘You be careful now, Seyoura.’
‘Hey, Xav. Come on. I’m still here, aren’t I?’
Delgado took the hand away. A heavy, hard hand, its nails broken and rimmed with oil. ‘I hear talk you’re moving into a different league now. Grace and speed to you, if you need it.’
It was an old freespacer’s phrase, a formal benediction at the parting of the ways. It touched Suzy in a place she thought had long ago hardened over, so that when Xing came up, cheerfully animated, saying something about fighting kites, her eyes had misted over, and she turned away abruptly to hide her weakness.
Later, they were standing at the rail of one of the balconies of the topmost circle of the Central Stack, a shaft half a kilometre across which pierced the levels of the city from top to bottom. The Carnival was getting into its stride for the day, a hundred thousand people crowding runnels and malls and corridors in search of the perfect sin or the perfect lover, or maybe just the perfect fantasy about one or the other.
The Carnival wasn’t just about combat flying, although the tournaments had been the seed around which it had grown, larger with each cycle it seemed, like a wax flake growing around the initial speck of a polymer chain as it descends, kilometre after kilometre, through the clouds that shroud Titan everywhere except the Clear Spot over Tallman Scarp. There were theatrical events ranging from a single actor in a bare room to a performance troupe like Xing’s that took to the crowded malls and public spaces of the city and made everyone it touched a participant. There were masked balls, group sagas which threaded their hermetic, twisty plots through the Carnival’s seethe, food from all the ten worlds and (so the saying went) from some even God hadn’t visited yet, the full spectrum of legal drugs, total environment chambers where solipsists could lose themselves in private fantasy…In short, everything to cater for the ritual letting go of the company people, the government people, the people who spent their lives tuning the circuits of human civilization.
‘Termites,’ Xing said, looking over the rail.
Each slightly bigger than the one above, circle after circle dropped away towards the floor, where crowds of people looking no bigger than insects surged amongst plashing fountains and explosions of greenery. Someone had set up a huge holographic projection in the middle air of the shaft; it flamed and flared to the cascading rhythms of bocksa, that year’s popular dance music.
Suzy was letting herself become spaced out by the music and the noise of the crowds that rose on the heated air. She would have let go completely if she could, but the absolute sense of the iron star was tugging at her, and she could feel slabs of implanted data settling into the basement of her brain. In a handful of hours it would be time to go. It was getting late in the day, her last day on Titan. Still had her farewells to make, if she wanted to. Would have to get a couple of drinks inside her to find that out.
‘Or ants, maybe,’ Xing said, when she didn’t respond.
‘Ants? No ants on Titan. Cockroaches, that I know about. But no ants.’ Truth to tell, she was growing a little impatient with Xing. After they’d had lunch in a noodle bar she’d point-blank asked him whether he shouldn’t be rehearsing or whatever it was his troupe did to get ready for its performance, and he’d smiled and said a shade too quickly that it was a day off. Maybe he was happy basking in the reflected light of the attention she
got everywhere, Suzy Falcon the famous flier; maybe it was just that he liked her. But he was beginning to weigh her down. She’d needed company last night, and now on the edge of Bonadventure’s mission she needed some space.
But Xing only smiled now and said, ‘By ants I mean the people down there. I mean there are too many to think of them as individual people.’
Suzy held her half-empty drinkbulb over the rail. ‘If I let this drop, do you think it would kill someone?’
‘Sure. Gravity is low, but we are high up. Oh, wait—’ Because she had, for a moment, made as if to open her fingers.
‘See,’ Suzy told him, ‘you care. Me, I could drop a fucking bomb from off the top here, and not give a damn.’
‘Fliers need audiences.’
‘You clowns need audiences. We just need wings and a good steady thermal.’ Suzy turned from the rail, eyeballed the people who wandered the gallery here. Mostly garishly-suited contract men on company holiday bonus, accompanied by wives in close-fitting dresses of what looked like multilayered metal foil, flashing like copper, like gold, like bronze. One breast left bare or sheeted by translucent stuff, breasts being in fashion this year. Hair teased high in lacquered stacks—how did they sleep like that, Suzy suddenly wondered. Maybe they didn’t, maybe there was a switch at the back of the neck that you flipped, turn off and leave until day begins again. Rings on their manicured fingers, bangles and bracelets that clattered at their fine-boned wrists, were a complex code signing social and financial status—not necessarily the same thing, these days. Here, at the beginning of a new century, a decade after humanity had fought and won its first war against aliens, Earth the centre of an interstellar economic alliance of ten worlds, there were still women in Greater Brazil who were no more than appendages of their husbands, accessories whose dress and culture denoted their owner’s wealth and taste. Some glanced at Xing and Suzy (especially at Suzy: her mugging of that newstaper was already all through the net). Shy, sidelong glances like gazelles nervously wondering about the lions which happened to be sharing the waterhole. Even fewer studied the violent murals some artist had scrawled across sandblasted rock walls.
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