by Alex Stewart
“Wait.” I watched myself stand as if from a distance, feeling every eye in the hall turn in my direction. It was me, I pinged. Not her.
Then, without waiting to be asked, I turned and walked numbly to the nearest exit.
CHAPTER FIVE
In which my luggage falls more slowly than usual.
“What were you thinking?” Aunt Jenny asked, not for the first time.
I shrugged. “What can I say? I got stuck on a question, and I panicked. That’s all.”
“Oh, I get that.” My aunt picked up the bag I’d dropped in the hallway on entering her apartment, and slung it through the door of her miniscule guest room, where it teetered for a moment on the edge of the narrow single bed before falling unnaturally slowly towards the carpet. Either her last houseguest had been from somewhere outsystem, and she hadn’t got around to adjusting the gravity in there back to Avalonian standard yet, or the household environmentals were as scrupulously maintained as her groundside runabout. “But you had a good chance of getting away with it, and still fessed up. Beats the hell out of me.”
“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” I said, although I’d spent most of the last week asking myself the same question, with an equal lack of understandable answers.
“If you say so.” Aunt Jenny still sounded completely baffled. “You don’t even like the girl.”
“That’s not the point,” I said, although to be honest I was some way past wondering what the point actually was by this time.
“I guess not.” Aunt Jenny pushed past me into the apartment’s kitchen, which was almost large enough for the two of us to stand in together, and began boiling a kettle. “Tea?”
“You’re a lifesaver,” I said, and mooched into the living room, where the large picture window gave me a heart-stopping view of Avalon rotating gently below, and the curving flank of the orbital itself. Aunt Jenny’s skyside pied a terre clung to the edge of one of the older docking arms, part of the latest layer of accretion under which the original structure had almost entirely disappeared, like an outcrop of rock lying beneath a coral reef. Skyhaven was the oldest, and by now quite possibly the largest, of the orbital harbors, supporting a population and a range of amenities most cities on the surface of Avalon would be hard pressed to match: which of course made it particularly attractive to anyone wanting a home beyond the atmosphere. My aunt certainly seemed to find it more congenial than whatever quarters she might be able to find at the navy yard where she worked, and spent a good deal of her time here. (There was also a modest estate dirtside, where she and Dad had grown up, but we seldom visited my paternal grandparents, so I had no idea how often and for how long she resided there.)
“You’re family. What else am I supposed to do?” my aunt asked, handing me a steaming mug, which I took absently, still absorbed in the spectacle.
“Shame none of the others felt like that,” I retorted. True to form, the Forresters had wasted no time in turning their collective backs on me, in an effort to limit the damage from the scandal. Or, to be more accurate, Mother had turned hers, which meant the others had had little option but to go along with it.
Nevertheless, Dad had done his best to keep up some semblance of awkward conversation while I stuffed what necessities I could salvage from my room into few enough bags to carry away in one go, but his heart clearly hadn’t been in it. He’d regarded me throughout with an expression of hurt bafflement, which disinclined me to reply in much beyond monosyllables, and impelled me out of the home I never expected to see again with almost indecent haste. I’d tried pinging Tinkie a few times since the Naval Academy debacle, hoping for a chance to explain things properly to her, but had received no response beyond a terse Twat in reply to my first attempt.
Needless to say, I’d made no attempt at all to contact my mother. Quite apart from the fact that she’d made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing whatever to do with me for the foreseeable future, I was, quite frankly, too scared to even try.
In short, then, thank God for Aunt Jenny, even if I strongly suspected she’d only taken me in as a favor to Dad, and because she knew how much it would wind Mother up. (Even after her real motives had become clear, I was still pretty sure my original guesses had featured in there somewhere.)
“So. Any plans yet?” my aunt asked, sipping her own tea as she settled on the sofa facing the window. The view was undoubtedly spectacular, and ever-changing; from here we could see uncountable lights speckling the surface of the orbital, windows like our own spilling their little firefly flickers of life and warmth into the void from the habitation areas, or larger viewports in the recreational and utility zones. Other motes swirled around the artificial horizon, blurring the boundaries—the unceasing swarm of traffic hopping back and forth between Skyhaven and Avalon, or to the other orbitals, the vessels riding at “anchor” in the distance (easily distinguishable from the stars by their slow, relative drift), and, in a few cases, simply taking a short cut around the hull to avoid the frustrations of the internal transport network. Mingled in and around these were innumerable work pods, maintenance drones, and void-suited hulljacks, too many for all but the most complex infomatics to keep track of. When I expanded my datasphere it was almost overwhelmed by the background hum, billions of nuggets of information whirling around like dust in a nebula, which, now I came to think about it, wasn’t that unapt a metaphor: perceived in the aggregate, rather than trying to isolate individual elements, it formed elaborate patterns that were both elegant and organic. Order from chaos, fractals of information . . . “Am I boring you?”
“What? No, sorry.” Lost in the patterns, I’d missed most of what Aunt Jenny had been saying. I shrank the ‘sphere, and refocused on the conversation, seizing on the last remark I’d caught. “No plans.”
Which was hardly surprising. All my hopes and ambitions had been reduced to a smoking ruin, which effectively barred the way back to the old life I’d never felt that great about in any case. “Enlisting in any of the services is right out, of course. Even as a ranker.”
“Word gets around,” Aunt Jenny agreed, sipping her tea. “And it’s not as if your mother’s family has much pull outside the Navy, so . . .”
“Like she’d lift a finger to help me anyway,” I said. The one truly bright spot I could see in the mess I’d made of things was that the storm front of scandal my actions had unleashed had pretty much swept away any prospect of being married off to get rid of me, at least to anyone Mother would have considered a suitable match. “I suppose I’ll just have to do the best I can for myself.”
“Just like that.” Aunt Jenny chuckled indulgently. “You talk a good fight, I’ll say that for you. But you Forresters don’t even know you’re born. It’s dog eat dog out there.” Her outflung arm took in the rest of the orbital, the planet beyond, and a fair chunk of the Western Spiral Arm.
“And the Worrickers do, I suppose.” So far as I could tell, my aunt’s family was cut from much the same cloth as my own, although perhaps a little shabbier. Which made Mother’s choice of Dad as a husband faintly surprising, now I came to think about it: perhaps it had been a love match after all. A concept which, knowing her as well as I did, I must confess I struggled with a bit.
“We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty if we have to,” Aunt Jenny allowed, with a faintly self-satisfied sip at her tea, then she grinned at me unexpectedly. “What couldn’t I have done when I was your age with something as neat as that sneakware you put together. Evading a military grade block, even a low level one like that, was a pretty neat trick.”
Help yourself, I sent, kicking a copy across to her personal ‘ware.
She chuckled again. “I’m a bit too old for hell raising these days. But it’s a neat bit of work, right enough.” She poked at it, disentangling one of the datanomes I’d helped myself to from Tinkie’s decrypt. I won’t ask where you got this.
“Good,” I said.
My aunt nodded, thoughtfully. “So you can be discreet
if you have to.”
I shrugged. “Never said I couldn’t,” I said.
“Don’t play games, Simon.” The bantering tone had slipped out of her voice, and for a moment she seemed hard and businesslike: I had a sudden mental image of her talking like that to a Guilder captain trying to weasel some extra advantage from the small print of a charter agreement, and smiled in spite of myself. It would be a very astute skipper indeed who managed to put one over on Jenny Worricker. “You need to get a lot better at sneaky if you’re going to get by in the real galaxy.” Then her smile reappeared, as abruptly as it had vanished. “But then you’re a good-looking lad. I’m sure you can find some well-off lass who’ll take care of you instead, if you’d rather go down that route.”
“I’d rather starve,” I snapped back.
“No you wouldn’t.” My aunt shook her head. “Only people who’ve never really been hungry say that.”
“And only rich people say ‘Money isn’t everything,’ I suppose,” I retorted.
She smiled at my naivety. “Mostly the poor ones, in my experience. And it’s generally true, too. But I still wouldn’t turn down a sack full of guineas if I fell over one.”
“Neither would I,” I admitted, and laughed, restored to something approaching good humor, much to my surprise. “Don’t suppose you know where there’s one been left lying around?”
“‘Fraid not.” Aunt Jenny’s expression grew serious again. “You want anything in this life, you have to work for it.”
“Which is where it all falls down,” I said. My upbringing had left me with no skills worth having, beyond making polite conversation without seeming as bored as I actually was. Which, as I pointed out, was hardly a marketable one, especially since the diplomatic service only accepted women.
“Good God, Simon, surely you don’t think diplomacy’s only practiced by diplomats?” Aunt Jenny gesticulated for emphasis, discovering in the process that her tea cup wasn’t quite as empty as she’d thought it was, and dabbed at the resulting stain on the sofa with her sleeve. “Interworld commerce would completely fall apart without the ability to tell bare-faced lies with conviction.” She paused for a moment, and looked at me appraisingly. “If you can keep a muzzle on your conscience, you might do well on a merchant ship.”
“A merchant ship?” I sipped at my own drink, finding it had gone cold while we talked, and disposed of it as discreetly as I could on a nearby occasional table. “You mean—as part of the crew?”
“I don’t mean as part of the cargo,” my aunt said, still rubbing absently at the stain.
I considered this new and startling idea. There was nothing left for me on Avalon, of that I was sure. My reputation was irrevocably tarnished, and with it the family name. Tinkie’s grandchildren would still be trying to live down my dishonorable conduct, if she ever had any.
“I suppose it’d get me out-system,” I said cautiously, rediscovering a little of the thrill I’d felt at the sight of the starship in its cradle at the Academy. Then I spotted the obvious flaw in the suggestion. “Except Avalon doesn’t have much in the way of a merchant fleet.” And what there was of it was so intimately entangled with the Fleet Auxiliary that word of my misdeeds would undoubtedly have preceded me, poisoning any chance I might have had of getting taken on.
“That it doesn’t,” Aunt Jenny conceded, “but there are other options.” She looked at me with an air of faint expectancy, as if she was waiting for the coin to drop, but I only shrugged.
“Can’t see ’em myself,” I said.
“No, you probably can’t.” My aunt shook her head in a faintly pitying manner, and put her tea cup down next to mine, registering the amount I hadn’t actually drunk. “Sod this stuff, I need a proper drink.” She stood, and made for the door, leaving me sitting on the sofa in a state of some confusion.
I supposed I could find something to eat in the kitchen if I got hungry while she was out, although just helping myself might be seen as overstepping the bounds of etiquette more than somewhat . . .
Then she glanced back at me with an air of mild surprise. “Coming?”
If I’d known what that seemingly innocuous invitation was going to lead to, I’d probably have—well, done exactly the same thing, I suppose. But I’d definitely have thought about it for a lot longer.
As it was, though, I didn’t have a clue, so . . .
“Why not,” I said, thereby consigning what little was left of my future to chaos and catastrophe.
CHAPTER SIX
In which I lose sight of my aunt, and find pies.
I’d thought I was reasonably familiar with the layout of Skyhaven in general, and Aunt Jenny’s immediate neighborhood in particular, but the walk to her favorite tavern soon made me realize the difference between the superficial local knowledge of the frequent visitor and the innate sense of place possessed by the long-term resident.
For the first ten minutes or so I felt confident enough of finding my way back to her lodgings if I had to, the bland residential thoroughfares we ambled along being laid out on a fairly simple grid of interlocking hexagons. The streets were wide, the tiled sidewalks broken at intervals by brightly-hued mosaics, usually outside the main entrances of apartment blocks, which had been blandly uniform when built; now, however, they’d been personalized by their residents using a variety of pigments, tapestries, and multi-colored flora, which spilled from innumerable terraces and window boxes.
The street above our heads, where the localized gravity pulled the other way, was a mirror image of the one we walked along, many of the larger dwellings in both merging seamlessly into a single block midway between them, like mountains reflected in a placid lake. (The apartments just either side of the center line were particularly sought after, I gathered, as they shared a ceiling, so the residents would never be troubled by the footfalls of their neighbors.)
Traffic hummed busily between the sidewalks; if I stretched my ‘sphere a little, I could catch the cicada buzz of the on-board drones, dutifully following the course and speed set for them by the district’s traffic control, and watch the sudden flurries of processing as they decided whether or not to brake in response to one of the swarm of bicycles, which wove their way through the larger, slower-moving vehicles with cheerful disdain, cutting across their paths without thought of apology. There were plenty of pedestrians, too, although for the most part they kept to the pavement, only venturing to cross the turbulent stream of traffic at one of the footbridges which had been strategically placed at every intersection.
After a while I became aware that the street-level dwellings on both sides of the road had been replaced by storefronts, selling a bewildering variety of foodstuffs and beverages I’d never heard of (in some cases fortunately, judging by the smell), clothing in unfamiliar cuts, and an astonishing range of curios and artworks. Cafes, bars and restaurants began to appear among them in ever-increasing numbers, too, and I began to salivate, suddenly reminded of how long it had been since I’d last had anything approaching an appetite.
As the buildings had changed around me, so had the people. Many more of them were wearing the unfamiliar garments I’d glimpsed in the shop windows, and not everyone I saw seemed quite . . . well, normal, I suppose. As well as all the usual variations in skin, hair and eye color you’d expect to find on most worlds with a reasonably-sized population, there were one or two which struck me as quite bizarre: a fellow practically naked, apart from sandals and a barely adequate loin cloth, for instance, whose skin had a distinctly greenish hue, and whose breath carried a faint odor of summertime meadows.
“Don’t gawp, Simon, it makes you look provincial,” Aunt Jenny said, although her words carried more amusement than rebuke.
“I am provincial,” I replied, truthfully enough. It began to dawn on me that all my previous visits to Skyhaven had been to the core section, where the passenger flights up from Avalon docked, and nothing in the decor, ambience or services would have seemed out of place in any of the cities on
the surface. Same architecture, same businesses, same music in the elevators.
“’Scuse me,” a young lady said, brushing past with an apologetic smile. She was wearing something which floated around her, rippling gently, and I felt the hairs on my arms rise briefly, caught in the fringes of the electrostatic field creating the effect. I found myself turning involuntarily to watch her pass, and my jaw dropped.
“Tails are quite a popular tweak with the transgeners,” Aunt Jenny said, looking even more amused as she caught sight of my expression. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of that sort of thing if you ship outsystem.”
“Transgeners,” I repeated, as though I’d never heard the word before. Which I had, of course, but seldom spoken so casually. Most Commonwealthers strongly disapproved of altering the human body too much, on the entirely reasonable grounds that God had got it right the first time round, although not everyone in the galaxy agreed with them. Some worlds had entire populations who’d been altered in response to specific local conditions, and whose tweaks bred true down the generations, while on others morphology fluctuated with the fad of the moment, plaid fur giving way to scales pretty much on a whim, the way dandies like Sherman adopted the latest style of cravat.
“You’ll get used to it,” Aunt Jenny assured me, ogling the green fellow’s well-sculpted gluteals as he vanished into the crowd. Then she turned back to me with a mischievous grin. “Always liked the photosynthesisers myself. Don’t leave a lot to the imagination.”
“I don’t suppose they would,” I said, trying to sound blasé and utterly failing to do so. The streets were growing narrower and more crowded here, the gridding less regular, and I hurried after my aunt, determined to keep her in sight. I kept expecting her to stop, or slow down, or at least glance behind to make sure I was keeping up, but she never did, gradually opening up the distance between us, slipping through the press of bodies with a speed and dexterity I found faintly surprising in a woman of her age and bulk.
