“This is a whole pile of trouble you’ve stepped into, Miguel,” she said, and threw him his boots. She held his pack in her other hand.
“That man, Richter, he’s crazy,” Miguel said. He was beyond surprise at this apparition.
“I always have supported the separatists, always will. But I don’t hold with them locking up people like you, Miguel. Even if it is for the good of the cause. If you come with me straight away, I can get you out, across the dam.”
“Go by myself. Safer for you.”
“You know, I always did think there was something human about you, deep inside. Don’t worry about me, the worst they can do is kill me right now, instead of waiting for me to drop dead out in the fields.” She handed him his pack and said as he began to look through it, “It’s all there. Even the compsim.” But only when he saw it did something inside Miguel relax. “They locked it up in what used to be my office,” Falconer told him. “Not very forward-thinking of them. I put some food in there for you, too.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Call it revenge, if you want,” Ella Falconer said, smiling. “Besides, you don’t deserve to be locked up like this, Miguel. You’re a free spirit, a genuine Elysian soul. Richter has the information to fire up his cause against the city, he doesn’t need you as well. Come on, now.”
There were three dogs waiting outside. Falconer laid a restraining hand on Miguel’s arm when he jerked back in fright. “Don’t worry. I still have a few loyal followers. This way. The committee are busy dickering with Richter over their reward, but they could take it into their heads to question you further, and you wouldn’t like that. Things have taken a brutal turn here.”
The dogs loping ahead in the dusk, they hurried through the huddle of long buildings, took the dusty track between cornfields to the little dam which penned the still, black waters of the lake.
“Go on, now,” Falconer said, when Miguel hesitated.
But he stayed a moment, and asked, “What will happen?”
“You’re not as crazy as they say, I always thought that. Just sensitive, I suppose. What will happen? War, maybe. Things will change, that’s all I can say for certain. Now go on, before some courting couple finds us.”
Halfway across the dam, Miguel began to run. He thought he heard Falconer call something after him, but he didn’t look back. His pack, the compsim safe inside it, banged at his hip as he headed out into the empty country.
5. Landing Day
Preparations for Landing Day had been going on for weeks, but with only a handful of days to go, they began to take a grip on everyday life in the city. The countdown in hours, minutes, and seconds was permanently projected in one corner of the newscast channel. Garlands were strung across streets and banners hung from windows, although, of course, the Wombworlders would not see these decorations. They would be ferried through the city in their coldcoffins, still in the grip of their long sleep. The reception centre had already been unsealed, its service cores powered up, but as usual the deadlines had been overrun, and crews were working around the clock to ready the machines that would help the new settlers ride out the multiple traumas of revivification. On the slope to the east of the city the lights of the centre blazed at night like the checklights of a computer board.
The warm weather held, the sky an untroubled dome of purest indigo. Not the brutal heat of the Outback, but a lively warmth given zest by breezes off the ocean. Beyond the pontoon docks, barges that would transport the coldcoffins from the descent pod of the colonyboat to the shore manoeuvred around the stripped shell of a previous arrival. Crews sweated under the high sun as they eased dummy containers into cradles, winched them into the barges which jostled beside the huge, calmly floating black cone. A few small sailcraft were always tacking back and forth beyond, red spinnakers bellying in the constant southerly breeze. Every day a small crowd gathered on the outermost wharves of the docks to watch.
The spirit of the impending Landing percolated into every part of city life. It even touched the routines of the University. For the students, it was a welcome pause before the killing grind toward the examinations at year’s end. Rick couldn’t blame them for lack of concentration in the classes he was auditing on the day before the colonyboat was due to enter orbit and send down its descent pod. He remembered well enough the previous Landing Day, in his third undergraduate year, when he had sat on the roof of the student dormitory with a dozen friends, sharing bottles of rough red wine to keep out the chill of the bleak winter day, cheering with everyone else when the cluster of orange parachutes, small and far, had blossomed in the iron sky.
This time, though, it seemed to Rick that there was a hollowness to the frenetic preparations, although the feeling was so vague that it vanished under the focus of definition. And on the surface, little troubled the established routine. There had been an asymptotic increase in separatist slogans, but that was only to be expected. And on Jones Beach someone had set up a huge deconstructed holo of Lindsay’s face, fractured into a dozen planes. It took the cops all day to find where the little projector had been buried in the sand. Rick would have put his unease down to his lingering memories of his encounter in the Outback, had not de Ramaira agreed that something seemed wrong.
“It reminds me of a nest of packrats stirring about after their queen has died,” he told Rick over lunch on that penultimate day. It was almost the end of the noon break, the seventy-two minute period between the twelve-hour halves of the day. Only a few people lingered in the common room. Shafts of sunlight sank through the tall windows on the southern side, glowing on the sweep of small tables and the chairs around them.
Rick had been fiddling with the remains of his salad. Now he looked up, smiling at de Ramaira’s remark. “Maybe that’s it,” he said. “Everyone is running around, making the usual preparations, but it’s as if they don’t know what they’re preparing for. So they’re working harder to cover it up, if you see what I mean.”
“I was thinking of Lindsay’s death—his suicide or murder, what you will—and the way Governor O’Hara is doing rather less than muddling through. But you do have a point.” De Ramaira turned to watch the handful of people who were stapling, letter by letter, a banner message to the wall above the vendors. He smiled and added, “They’re busy enough, anyhow. Do you know, even the identity of the new arrivals isn’t known, in the sense of what group they are.”
“That’s never revealed anyway, until after Landing Day. I suppose you’re going to tell me you have contacts in the right place.”
“In revivification. They were rather miffed when I asked. All this secrecy has put their noses out of joint. You might think a band of positive undesirables is about to be unloaded on Elysium, and the Board’s keeping shut until they have them safely in-country.”
“Like the Collectivists, you mean?”
“Oh, you should hear ideas that are going around. If you’re interested, perhaps you’d like to come with me tonight. The bars are full of the most interesting amateur politicians.”
The thing Rick disliked most about de Ramaira was this casual patronising contempt toward people more ordinary than himself. One day it might be turned upon Rick himself. “I don’t think,” Rick said, around a mouthful of lettuce, “that the Senate would approve of its lecturers barhopping downtown.”
“No doubt,” de Ramaira said casually. “But what can they do? They can’t throw me out, and they already seem to have quite enough reasons to impede my work as much as they can. And my time is entirely my own, as yours should be.”
“Still, it’s not sensible,” Rick said, uncomfortable now. After all, de Ramaira was more than twenty years his senior, even more in the strict Newtonian sense. “Anyway, Cath has arranged something this evening, we’re going to a party.”
“And how are you and Ms Krausemann getting along, after a year of living together?”
“We just share the house,” Rick said warily. He sometimes wondered about de Ramaira’s sex l
ife. There had to be something, but what? Pickups in bars, houses of ill-repute; he couldn’t imagine.
“Well, it’s a pity you won’t come. I’d hate to see you ending like that bunch of decerebrated packrats over there.” He gestured toward the people who were admiring the completed banner hung over the vendors, its message spelled out in clumsily aligned alternately red and blue letters: Welcome to the new settlers, whatever they believe in.
“Well, it certainly doesn’t mean anything,” Rick said. “One way or the other. Will I see you down at the beach tomorrow, David?”
De Ramaira held his hands a few centimetres apart in front of his face, as if taking the measure of something. His nails were yellow, shrunken and buckled. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Elysium, that is.”
Amplified music mingled strangely with the sound of waves breaking farther down the beach. Rick and Cath were dancing slowly in the translucent shade of a canvas awning, arms linked around each others’ necks as they slowly revolved among the other couples. The fine white sand was stirred into little mounds and dimples. It made the soles of Rick’s bare feet itch.
Cath’s breath touched his neck. “I could do with another drink. With a whole lot of ice.”
“Whatever you want.” He let go with one arm and dropped the other to her waist. Linked, they walked out of the shade into level orange sunlight.
They had arrived at Jones Beach late in the afternoon, and now it was early evening. The crescent of Cerberus, the large outer moon, slanted in the dark sky. Five kilometres south of Port of Plenty, the beach faced the open ocean beyond the mouth of the estuary, where the descent pod of the colonyboat would splash down. It was crowded with people from the city, brought by a shuttle service of big ground-effect coaches which had begun early that morning.
A wide sandy meadow separated the beach from the native forest, and the amphitheatre stood in the middle of the meadow. A space had been fenced off in front of it by a palisade of wired stakes. Rick and Cath had to show their tickets at the single gate. The VIP enclosure was almost empty. Most of those who would watch from the amphitheatre hadn’t arrived yet; rumour scheduled splashdown for some time after sunset.
A bar had been set up near the arched entrance to the stairs which led up to the amphitheatre’s tiered seats. Cath accepted her rum punch absentmindedly as she looked about.
“Over there,” she said. “Most of the department must be here already!” She started across, and two of the half dozen terrifyingly elegant people by the fence turned to greet her. A swarthy, bare-chested man, hair swept back and woven into many braids, each braid tipped with a crystal bead, grinned as the tall woman beside him took Cath’s arm.
Rick had hesitated a moment too long. Really, he didn’t fit easily into Cath’s social set anymore. He had felt misplaced all through the noisy, informal lunch at the home of Cath’s departmental head, and disliked the assumed superiority of most of the Computing staff. He and Cath were beginning to follow different paths, that much was clear. Yet he had shared moments of pure happiness with her today. On the coach ride, on the beach, dancing under the canvas awning. And he did admire her cool determination as she made her way in the world. It’s not what she’s making for herself that I don’t like, he thought, it’s the friends that she’s picking up on the way. A small hollowness blooming in his chest, he turned and nearly collided with Max Rydell.
“Well, hell. Hello, Rick.” Rydell lifted his hand from the top of his beer glass (foam ran down the sides) and smiled. Sweat glistened on the pelt of his bare chest. He said, “This is sure something, huh? Must be the hottest Landing Day in memory.”
“I guess. You’re not working too hard, I hope. This is a holiday.”
“I was in charge of the tickets, so I got all my organising out of the way before this. But if I get on the entertainments committee you really will see me running around next time!”
“Sure.” Rick drank off half his punch. He had a vision of Rydell thirty years on, as carefully groomed as Professor Collins, gruffly running his own department, chairing half a dozen committees.
“Did I see Cath with you? How is she?”
Rick glanced at the group over by the fence. The tall woman, her thin witchy face speckled with little black cuneiform marks, was rubbing a clear jelly into Cath’s forearm. Focus. All the systems people did it, according to Cath. Rick told Rydell, “I guess she’s enjoying it.”
“Well,” Rydell said seriously, “I wish I could say that about everyone. Have you seen David de Ramaira?”
“No. Should I?”
“Well, he seems to be trying to stir up trouble. Someone ought to be looking out for him. He doesn’t seem to be able to look after himself. I’ve just come in from the beach, I had a glimpse of him out there. He looked half drunk!”
Rick smiled and felt uncomfortable, remembering his conversation with de Ramaira the day before. He said, “I can’t stop him being drunk, can I?”
“Well, no. I just thought you could maybe talk to him?”
“Is he fighting drunk or what?” Rick set his glass among the dreggy clutter in the bar’s discard pan. “If he’s really bothering people, maybe you should tell one of the stewards.”
“Oh, he’s just going around saying really stupid things. You know, inflammatory. I thought I’d save some bother if I had you reel him in.”
“Okay.” Rick thought that he knew what sort of things de Ramaira would be saying. “I’ll see if I can find him. But I don’t know if I can actually do anything.”
As Rick went through the gate in the fence a flight of rockets terminated their brief arc above the sea, a burst of falling golden stars vividly unreal against the darkening sky. Ragged applause was for a moment louder than the dance music. The sun was sinking toward the rim of the Conway-Stewart Delta on the other side of the estuary.
Rick halted beyond the awning, realising that Rydell had said nothing about where de Ramaira might be. He had a lot to learn about giving orders. Well, at least it gave Rick a good excuse. Even if he found de Ramaira he knew that he would have little chance of calming the man down.
A Softball game was in progress farther along the beach, the players spread out to the breakers. A lithe tanned girl in a minuscule sarong was endlessly alternating triple-gainers and open swans on a trampoline. Children were running in and out of the waves. Elsewhere, people were talking or eating or simply sitting in the rapidly diffusing sunlight, tired enough to let the minutes spin out by themselves. Many had gathered at the ridge where the dry grasses of the meadow gave way to white sand.
Rick walked past the girl on the trampoline and her circle of adolescent admirers. The crowd received him. He ambled between knots of people, stepped around others sprawled on the sand. As he stepped over a discarded blanket, a woman’s voice rose above the general noise. “Look! There…there! Is that…?” The rest was lost in a rising murmur as people turned to gaze toward the mouth of the estuary.
A glittering fleck was moving low over the water, making toward the hazy shoreline north of the marshes. A helicopter. People were sitting down again. The man in front of Rick turned and said aggressively, “You’d think they’d tell us, huh?”
“I’m afraid I know about as much about it as you.”
“Ah, shit,” the man said, and walked off, his matted shoulders hunched.
Rick began to walk back to the amphitheatre, remembering the first time he had gone to the city with his father. He had been fifteen. They had walked through the market to look at the handcrafts, cut flowers and organically grown food, rugs and pots and furniture, all the things that people from the settlements brought into the city to sell. Father had been beside him, totem of the familiar as they moved through crowds of elegant, fantastically dressed strangers, until Rickey had stopped a moment too long to look at a stall where wicker cages held torpid ruffed lizards. In the instant that he realised that his father had disappeared it was as if something had pulled apart in his chest, a sudden aching vacuu
m. He felt the passive equivalent of that panic now, as he stepped carefully around supine people, strangers all.
He heard the dance music a moment before he saw the canvas awning. The girl and most of her audience had abandoned the trampoline. Two boys jiggled cautiously on the taut white square, each holding the other’s shoulders. A lot of people were going through the gate into the fenced enclosure in front of the amphitheatre.
Cath lay alone where the clean sand of the beach tipped to meet the slats of the fence. One hand covered her eyes; the other held a half-full glass on her hip where the ridge of her pelvic bone raised the blue cloth of her brief wraparound dress.
“Hey,” she murmured as Rick sat beside her. “You can’t have gone very far. Or was I asleep? Someone said you’d gone looking for de Ramaira.”
“I didn’t see him. I didn’t look very hard, though,” Rick confessed.
Cath raised herself on one elbow to sip her drink. “You know, I don’t think you should have gone off in the first place.”
“I thought I might, as it was asked as a favour. What happened to your crowd?”
Cath sipped again. “I only stopped to say hello. Really, you should have too, they are from the University, after all. And when I looked around you’d gone galloping off on some knight errant quest!”
“Anyway, I soon gave up. Too many people.”
Cath looked over the edge of her glass at the crowded curve of the beach. “There are too many of them! Like a herd of sea-cows.” She made a kind of lowing noise, then covered her mouth and giggled.
“Are you sure about drinking on top of that stuff? Focus.” Cath’s sharp intolerance toward ordinary citizens still made Rick uneasy—she had more in common with David de Ramaira than she realised. Her mother’s family went back to the crew of one of the two arks which had carried the original colonists to Elysium, before the development of compact gravithic generators had made cheap, reusable ramscoop drivers possible and interstellar travel almost routine. Crew families were the nearest thing to an aristocracy in Port of Plenty and Arcadia.
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