Miran bent down beside it. The tile was a metre square, and someone had scooped out all the hard-packed earth it had rested on, creating a snug cavity. The bottom was covered in pieces of what looked like broken crockery.
The xenoc. Miran knew instinctively it had dug this. He picked up one of the off-white fragments. One side was dry, smooth; the other was slimed with a clear tacky mucus. It was curved. An egg.
Rage boiled through him. The xenoc had laid an egg in his homestead. Outsmarting him, choosing the one place Miran would never look, never suspect treachery. Its bastard had hatched in the place intended for his own children.
He pushed the bedroom door fully open. Candice was waiting for him on the bed, naked and smiling. Miran's world reeled violently. He grabbed at the doorframe for support before his faltering legs collapsed.
She was very far away from him.
«Candice,» his voice cracked. Somehow the room wasn't making sense. It had distorted, magnifying to giant proportions. Candice, beloved Candice, was too small. His vision swam drunkenly, then resolved. Candice was less than a metre tall.
«Love me,» she said. Her voice was high pitched, a mousy squeak.
Yet it was her. He gazed lovingly at each part of the perfectly detailed figure which he remembered so well—her long legs, firm flat belly, high conical breasts, the broad shoulders, over-developed from months spent toiling in the fields.
«Love me.»
Her face. Candice was never beautiful, but he worshipped her anyway. Prominent cheekbones, rounded chin, narrow eyes. All there, as delicate as china. Her soft smile, directed straight at him, unforgettable.
«Love me.»
Xenoc. The foetus gestating under his floor. Violating his dreams, feeding on them. Discovering his all-enveloping love.
«Love me.»
The first post-human-encounter xenoc; instinctively moulding itself into the form which would bring it the highest chance of survival in the new world order.
Its slender arms reached out for him. A flawless human ribcage was outlined by supple creamy-white skin as it stretched.
Miran wailed in torment.
«Love me.»
He could. That was the truth, and it was a tearing agony. He could love it. Even a pale monstrous echo was better than a lifetime without Candice. It would grow. And in the dark crushingly lonely hours it would be there for him to turn to.
«Love me.»
He wasn't strong enough to resist. If it grew he would take it in his arms and become its lover. Her lover, again. If it grew.
He put his hands under the bed and tugged upwards with manic strength. Bed, mattress, and sheets cartwheeled. The xenoc squealed as it tumbled onto the floor.
«Love me!» The cry was frantic. It was squirming across the floor towards him. Feet tangled in the blankets, face entreating.
Miran shoved at the big dresser, tilting it off its rear legs. He had spent many evening hours making it from aboriginal timber. It was crude and solid, heavy.
«Love me!» The cry had become a desperate pining whimper.
The dresser teetered on its front legs. With a savage sob, Miran gave it one last push. It crashed to the floor with a hideous liquid squelch as it landed on the xenoc's upper torso.
Miran vomited, running wildly from the bedroom, blind, doubled up in convulsions. His mad flight took him outside where he tripped and sprawled on the soggy ground, weeping and pawing at the soil, more animal than human.
A strained creaking sound made him look up. Despite eyes smeared with gritty tears, he saw the rock at the top of the grave cracking open. A tiny arm punched out into the air. Thin flakes went spinning. The hand and arm worked at enlarging the fissure. Eventually a naked homunculus emerged in jerky movements, scattering fragments of shell in all directions. Even the xenoc eggs had the ability to conform to their surroundings.
Miran watched numbly as the homunculus crawled down the pile of sandstone lumps to join the other two humanoid figures waiting at the base.
In the homestead the safest identity to adopt was a love object, cherished and protected. But outside in the valley survival meant becoming the most ruthless predator of all.
Between them, the three miniature humans lifted up the laser rifle. «Hate you,» one spat venomously. Then its fist smacked into the trigger.
Miran couldn't believe his own face was capable of expressing so much anger.
Timeline
2420 - Kulu scoutship discovers Ruin Ring.
2428 - Bitek habitat Tranquillity germinated by crown prince Michael Saldana, orbiting above Ruin Ring.
2432 - Prince Michael's son, Maurice, geneered with affinity. Kulu abdication crisis. Coronation of Lukas Saldana. Prince Michael exiled.
Tropicana, 2447
The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa
Tropicana had a distinct aura of strangeness, both in appearance and in those it gathered to itself. Eason discovered that while he was still on the flight down from orbit.
«There's a lot more islands down there than I remember from fifty years ago,» said Ashly Hanson, the spaceplane's pilot. «The locals must keep on planting them, I suppose. They're still pretty keen on bitek here.»
«So I hear.» Tropicana wasn't Eason's ideal destination. But that was where the Lord Fitzroy was heading, the only starship departing Quissico asteroid for thirty hours. Time had been a critical factor. He'd been running out of it fast.
Eason paused to consider what the pilot said. «What do you mean, fifty years ago?» Ashly Hanson was a short man with a wiry build, a lax cap of brown hair flopping down over his ears, and a near-permanent smile of admiration on his lips. The universe had apparently been created with the sole purpose of entertaining Ashly Hanson. However, the pilot couldn't have been more than forty-five years old, not even if he'd been geneered.
«I time hop,» he said, with the grin of someone relating his favourite unbelievable story. «I spend fifty years in zero-tau stasis, then come out for five to look around and see how things are progressing. Signing on with a starship is a good way to play tourist.»
«You're kidding.»
«No. I started way back in good old 2284, and now I'm on a one-way ride to eternity. There's been some changes, I can tell you. You know, I'm actually older than the Confederation itself.»
«Jesus wept!» It was an incredible notion to take in.
Ashly's soft sense-of-wonder smile returned. Beyond the little spaceplane's windscreen, the planet's horizon curvature was flattening out as they lost altitude. Up ahead was the single stretch of habitable land on Tropicana. A narrow line of green and brown etched across the turquoise ocean, it straddled the equator at an acute angle, eight hundred kilometres long, though never more than fifty wide. A geological oddity on a tectonically abnormal planet. There was only one continent sharing the world, an arctic wilderness devoid of any aboriginal life more complex than moss; the rest of the globe was an ocean never deeper than a hundred and fifty metres.
Once Eason had accessed the Lord Fitzroy 's almanac file, his initial worry about his destination slowly dissipated. Tropicana was surrounded by thousands of small islands, its government notoriously liberal. The one Adamist planet in the Confederation which didn't prohibit bitek.
It wasn't perfect, but it was better than most.
Ashly Hanson was increasing the spaceplane's pitch sharply to shed speed as they approached the land. Eason craned forwards to see the coastline. There was a big city below, a sprawl of low buildings oozing along the beach. They were trapped between the water and the mountains whose foothills began a few kilometres inland.
«That's Kariwak, the capital,» Ashly said. «Used to be run by a man called Laurus last time I was here; one bad mother. They say his daughter's taken over now. Whatever else you do while you're here, don't cross her. If she's only half as bad as her old man you'll regret it.»
«Thanks, I'll remember.» He actually couldn't care less about some parochial urban gangster. His immediate conce
rn was customs. Three innocuous dull-silver globes the size of tennis balls were sitting in a small case among his luggage. He'd agonized for hours if he should keep them with him. Getting them on board the Lord Fitzroy was no problem, the Party had plenty of supporters in Quissico's civil service. The spheres were disguised to look like super-density magnetic bearings used by the astronautics industry, he even had authentic documentation files confirming he was a rep for the company which made them. But if Tropicana customs had sensors capable of probing through the magnetic casing . . .
Kariwak spaceport was situated ten kilometres outside the city. It gave Eason his first taste of Tropicana's architectural aesthetics. All the buildings were designed to be as naturalistic as possible, subtle rather than ostentatious, even the maintenance hangars were easy on the eye. But it was a surprisingly big field given the size of the population. Tropicana received a lot of rich visitors, taking advantage of the relaxed bitek laws to visit specialist clinics offering rejuvenation techniques. As with the surroundings, customs were discreet and efficient, but not intrusive.
Forty minutes after landing, Eason was on an underground tube train carrying him into the city. Lord Fitzroy was scheduled to depart in two days' time, after that it would be extremely difficult for anyone to trace him. But not impossible, and those that would come looking were fanatical. It was that fanaticism which originally made him question the Party's aims, the doubt which started him along this road.
He left the train at a station right in the heart of the city, its escalator depositing him on a broad boulevard lined with geneered sequoias. The trees were only seventy years old but they were already towering above the department shops, restaurants, whitewashed cafés, and Mediterranean-style office blocks. He slipped easily into the crush of pedestrians that thronged its length, case held firmly in one hand, flight bag on a strap over the other shoulder.
The boulevard led directly down to the main harbour, a circular two-kilometre-wide basin, with glistening white coral walls. Half of it extended out into the shallow turquoise ocean, while the other half ate back into the city, where it had been surrounded by a chaotic mix of warehouses, taverns, marine supply shops, sportsboat hire stalls, agents' offices, and a giant fish market. Quays stabbed out into the transparent water like spokes from a wheel rim. Right at the centre a sad cone of weather-dulled titanium rose out of the soft swell, the empty shell of a cargo lander that had swung off course two and a half centuries earlier as it brought equipment down to the newly founded colony. Ships of all shapes and sizes sailed around it, bright sails drooping in the calm air.
He stared at them intently. Ranged along the horizon were the first islands of the archipelago. Out there, he could lose himself for ever among the sleeping atolls and their quiet inhabitants. The boats which docked at this harbour left no records in bureaucratic memory cores, didn't file destinations, owed no allegiances. This was a freedom barely one step from anarchy.
He started along the harbour's western wall, towards the smaller boats: the fishing ketches, coastal sampans, and traders which cruised between the mainland cities and the islands. He was sure he could find one casting off soon, although a few brief enquiries among the sailors revealed that such craft rarely took on deck hands; they were nearly all family-run concerns. Eason didn't have much money left in his bank disk, possibly enough for one more starflight if he didn't spend more than a couple of hundred fuseodollars.
He saw the girl before he'd walked halfway along the wall. She was in her mid-teens, tall bordering on gawky, wearing a loose topaz-coloured cotton shirt and turquoise shorts. Thick gold-auburn hair fell halfway down her back, styled with an Egyptian wave; but the humidity had drawn out its lustre, leaving it hanging limply.
She was staggering under the weight of a near-paralytic old man in a sweat-stained vest. He looked as though he weighed twice as much as she did.
«Please, Ross,» she implored. «Mother'll sail without us.»
His only answer was an inebriated burble.
Eason trotted over. «Can I give you a hand?»
She shot him a look which was half-guilt, half-gratitude. He'd guessed her face would be narrow, and he was right: a small flat nose, full lips, and worried blue eyes were all cocooned by her dishevelled hair.
«Are you sure?» she asked hopefully.
«No trouble.» Eason put his flight bag down, and relieved her of the old man. He slung the old man's arm around his own shoulders, and pushed up. It was quite a weight to carry, the girl must be stronger than she looked.
«This way,» she said, squirming with agitation.
«Take my flight bag, would you. And the name's Eason,» he told her as they started off down the wall.
«Althaea.» She blushed as she picked up his bag. «Shall I take your case for you as well?»
«No,» he grunted. «I'll manage.»
«I'm really grateful. I should have been back at the Orphée a quarter of an hour ago.»
«Is it a tight schedule?»
«Oh no, but Mother likes to get home before dark. Visiting Kariwak takes a whole day for us.»
«Should he be sailing in this condition?»
«He'll just have to,» she said with a sudden flash of pique. «He does it every time we bring him. And it's always me who has to go looking in the taverns for him. I hate those places.»
«Is this your father?»
She let out a guffaw, then clamped her mouth over her mouth. «I'm sorry. No, he's not my father. This is Rousseau. Ross. He lives with us, helps around the house and garden, things like that. When he's sober,» she added tartly.
«Where do you live?»
«Mother and I live on Charmaine; it's an island out in the archipelago.»
He hid a smile. Perfect. «Must be a tough life, all by yourselves.»
«We manage. It won't be for ever, though.» Her angular shoulders jerked in what he thought was supposed to be an apologetic shrug; it was more like a convulsion. Eason couldn't recall meeting someone this shy for a long while. It made her appealing, after an odd sort of fashion.
The Orphée was tied up to a quay near the gap in the harbour wall. Eason whistled in appreciation when he saw her. She was a trim little craft, six metres long, with a flat-bottomed wooden hull and a compact cabin at the prow. The two outriggers were smaller versions of the main hull, with room for cargo; all archipelago craft had them, a lot of the channels between islands were too shallow for keel fins.
Bitek units were dovetailed neatly into the wooden superstructure: nutrient-fluid sacs with ancillary organs in the stern compartment, a powerful-looking three metre long silver-grey serpent tail instead of a rudder, and a membrane sail whorled round the tall mast.
Althaea's mother was sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof, wearing a faded blue denim shirt and white shorts. Eason had no doubt she was Althaea's mother: her hair was much shorter, but the same colour, and though she lacked the girl's half-starved appearance her delicate features were identical. Their closeness was uncanny.
She was holding up an odd-looking pendulum, a slim gold chain that was fastened to the centre of a wooden disc, five centimetres in diameter. The disk must have been perfectly balanced, because it remained horizontal.
When Eason reached the quayside directly above the Orphée he saw the rim of the disc was carved with spidery hieroglyphics. It was turning slowly. Or he thought it was. When he steadied Ross and looked down properly, it was stationary.
The woman seemed absorbed by it.
«Mother?» Althaea said uncertainly.
Her gaze lifted from the disk, and met Eason's eyes. She didn't seem at all put out by his appearance.
He found it hard to break her stare; it was almost triumphant.
Rousseau vomited on the quay.
Althaea let out a despairing groan. «Oh, Ross!» She was close to tears.
«Bring him on board,» her mother said wearily. She slipped the disc and chain into her shirt pocket.
&
nbsp; With Althaea's help, Eason manhandled Ross onto a bunk in the cabin. The old man groaned as he was laid on the grey blankets, then closed his eyes, asleep at once.
Althaea put a plastic bucket on the floor beside the bunk, and shook her head sadly.
«What's the pendulum for?» Eason asked quietly. He could hear her mother moving round on the deck outside.
«Mother uses it for divining.»
«On a boat?»
She pressed her lips together. «You can use divining to find whatever you wish, not just water—stones, wood, buried treasure, stuff like that. It can even guide you home in the fog, just like a compass. The disc is only a focus for your thoughts, that's all. Your mind does the actual work.»
«I think I'll stick with an inertial guido.»
Althaea's humour evaporated. She hung her head as if she'd been scolded.
«I'm Tiarella Rosa, Althaea's mother,» the woman said after Eason stepped out of the cabin. She stuck her hand out. «Thank you for helping with Ross.»
«No trouble,» Eason said affably. Tiarella Rosa had a firm grip, her hand calloused from deckwork.
«I was wondering,» he said. «Do you have any work available on Charmaine? I'm not fussy, or proud. I can dig ditches, pick fruit, rig nets, whatever.»
Tiarella's eyes swept over him, taking in the ship's jumpsuit he wore, the thin-soled shoes, his compact but hardly bulky frame, albino-pale skin. «Why would you be interested, asteroid man?»
«I'm a drifter. I'm tired of asteroid biosphere chambers. I want the real thing, the real outdoors. And I'm just about broke.»
«A drifter?»
«Yeah.» Out of the corner of his eye he saw Althaea emerge from the cabin, her already anxious expression even more apprehensive.
«I can only offer room and board,» Tiarella said. «In case you haven't noticed, we're not rich, either.» There was the intimation of amusement in her voice.
A Second Chance at Eden nd-7 Page 27
