Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "I've never been to Scotland," he said.

  Joona was bending over the heatstore block that sat in the ancient fireplace, turning up its output. The black surface began to glow a deep orange, as if there were still embers in the grate. She gave him a fast, nervous smile. "You want to come with me?" There was surprise and hope in her voice.

  "Sure. If you want me to come with you."

  "I don't mind. It would be nice."

  For a moment he thought she was going to jump back into bed with him. Instead she grabbed a big red-and-green-check nightshirt from the back of a chair and struggled into it.

  "I'll put some coffee in the microwave," she said. "Then I have to do my yoga: it helps me center myself. We can go after that."

  "Okay," he said, trying to keep pace with events. "I can pick up my stuff from the hotel on the way to the station."

  "Will you book the train tickets? I hate using the datapool. I can pay you."

  "Sure." He hunted around for his clothes, wondering what he'd gone and said yes to.

  Lawrence and Joona took an express train straight out of Amsterdam direct to Edinburgh, traveling in a big U, down south to Paris, across to London, then up north again to the end of the 1-pulse line at Waverley. To start with, Lawrence was impressed by Holland. The old canals were still draining the land. Windmills stood guard along the straight-edged waterways, although little wind now reached their sails, thanks to the extensive forests that had grown up in the last two centuries across the old farmland. There was a huge variety of trees, but with the canals slicing through them they formed such a regular grid it made them look like nothing more than fields. In a sense they were, not that they were cultivated, but the land management teams maintained them carefully. Even now, the drainage system couldn't be allowed to fall into disrepair, and the roots were a big potential hazard. It gave him an impression of an artificial environment barely one step ahead of Amethi. He thought that in a way Holland must be the first example of large-scale terraforming; human engineering and ingenuity wresting a livable nation out of an alien environment.

  Lawrence soon tired of the fenlands, especially as their speed blurred details. "So why Scotland?" he asked.

  Joona put her feet up on the table, ignoring the disapproving looks of the other passengers in the carriage. "My grandmother is Scottish. We're going to stay with her."

  "Where, exactly?"

  "Fort William."

  He put his interface glasses on and accessed the datapool to find where that was.

  "You spend a lot of time trawling, don't you?" Joona said.

  "My education had a lot of holes. You must do a fair bit of accessing yourself."

  "As little as possible. I prefer books."

  "There's a time and a place for hard copy. My dad had a thing for books, too. I guess that's why I never use them." He grinned at the face she pulled. "What's your subject at Prodi?"

  "I'm taking ecological management."

  "Right." It wasn't what he expected. "Doesn't that mean you'll wind up working for a company?"

  "There are companies, and there are companies. And then mere are government agencies, at least by name. In practice they're another branch of corporate reclamation and revitalization divisions. But I won't take a job with any of them. There are still some private landowners who use the land in the traditional fashion. They farm, or log timber or run stables. That's what I want to help keep alive."

  "Farming?" he said skeptically. "I thought that's what damaged the land in the first place?"

  "Industrial farming did, yes. Pesticides and nitrates were poured over the soil in the quest for higher yields and to hell with the consequences. Agricultural machinery actually got so big and so heavy that it compacted the subsoil. By the end, in the developed nations, topsoil was little more than a matrix that suspended chemicals and water so the crop roots could absorb them. Then the companies developed protein cell technology and killed farming altogether."

  "And stopped us raising and slaughtering animals for food. I mean, can you imagine how barbaric that was? Eating living things. It's disgusting."

  "It's perfectly natural. Not that people think that way today. And I didn't say protein cells are a bad thing. After all, it means no one on Earth starves. But, as always, they went to extremes and eliminated every valid alternative. All I'm asking for is to keep a few pockets of independence alive."

  "You mean like working museums?"

  "No! These are havens for people who reject your corporate uniculture existence. There are more of them than governments and corporations like to admit. More of us."

  "Ah, right, communes of back-to-the-earthers. So will you also be refusing the kind of medical technology that comes out of our wicked corporations?"

  She gave him an exasperated stare. "That's so typical, denigrate something you know nothing about. I never said I was rejecting technology. It's the current global society that I refuse to obey. Technology doesn't have to come only from corporate labs, to be exploited for profit and policy implementation. It could come from universities where it would be made freely available to benefit everyone. Even small independent communities could support researchers. If we all had free access to data we could build a culture of distributed specialization."

  "The old global village idea. Nice, but you still need factories and urban centers. You should know that culture always flourishes at the heart of society."

  "The datapool is the heart of our society. You're still thinking in physical terms when you talk about cohesion. You can live in a cottage in the middle of a forest with every need taken care of, and still be totally in tune with the rest of the world."

  "But why live there, when you can also live in a city, and interact with people, and go down to a bar in the evening and have a laugh and a drink? We don't all want to be hermits."

  "I know. But your companies don't want anyone to be a hermit or anything else. According to them, we all have to fit into this uniculture they're trying to establish like neat little blocks on a circuit board. I don't want to be a part of that I want my freedom."

  "I think you're exaggerating."

  She pointed to a badge on her coat lapel. It had a single eye at the center. "Open your eyes."

  He managed to steer the conversation off politics and got her talking about music, which was always a relatively safe topic. You could disagree about bands, performers and composers without storming out or throwing things. She enjoyed orchestral symphonies from several classical and modern composers; from postelectronic music she listened to what he thought of as ballads and street poetry. Although she had thousands of hours of tracks loaded into her multimedia player card, she became animated about live concerts, telling him about all the venues she'd visited, the bands and orchestras she'd heard. As far as entertainment went, she was scornful of the i's, although she admitted to watching several current soaps. The i's, she claimed, were something she grew out of. And she really hated AS-generated dramas, preferring to visit theaters. Amsterdam had a host of small nonmainstream theaters where her student status got her reduced rates, she said, and the city had hundreds of performance groups eager to put on their works.

  Lawrence almost pointed out that having so many groups evolve in a city proved his argument about culture. But he still wasn't sure how she'd respond to that kind of teasing.

  Even after lunch in the buffet car, when she drank over half a bottle of wine, she was still tense.

  That afternoon she asked what he enjoyed, and he was foolish enough to admit accessing Flight: Horizon. It was the first time he'd ever seen her truly laugh.

  "I can't believe we export that kind of crap to other worlds," she chortled. "No wonder you have such a screwed-up vision of starflight. My God, and that ending."

  "Ending?"

  "The last episode. Unbelievable! Pretty hot, though."

  "You saw that?"

  "Yeah. Told you I was into i's when I was a kid. Why?" Her eyes narrowed, giving him a curious g
aze. "Didn't you see it?"

  "No," he said lamely, unwilling to admit the associations the show had for him. Even though he knew he was totally and completely over Roselyn, he'd somehow never quite got round to accessing those last few episodes. "We only ever got a couple of series on Amethi."

  "Oh wow. You've got to access it now you're here. You missed a treat."

  "That part of my life is over. I can do without revisiting it, thank you."

  Her eyebrows rose at the finality in his voice. "Okay."

  Fortunately she didn't pursue it, or even try to tease him. Their conversation rambled on. The one thing that they never mentioned was sex. He found that strange. It was as if last night simply hadn't happened. At least for her. They talked around just about everything else. As he was taking his cues from her, he didn't try to bring it up.

  He wanted to. Joona was good company. Not necessarily pleasant company. If their opinions clashed she would argue until he gave up. That made her interesting, as much as her diametrically opposed worldview. When he thought about some of his barracks conversations he couldn't believe how dumb they were in comparison. It was that quality he'd first noticed in her, the fierce intelligence, that's what attracted him. So he wanted to know where they stood, which basically meant was she coming to bed with him tonight, and every other night of this jaunt? At one point he decided she was saying nothing in order to tantalize him, an intellectual's idea of foreplay. Though there were always doubts about that theory. She was too highly strung to avoid talking about anything important in her life. Which made her silence on the subject slightly puzzling.

  He'd booked a double sleeper cabin for them that night. When she'd paid him for the ticket there had been no mistake or misunderstanding, she saw exactly what he'd got for them. The thought stayed with him all that afternoon. They'd slung their luggage in there as soon as they got onboard, his shoulder bag, her rucksack. The cabin was tiny, its fittings as compact as modern design allowed.

  All the time they spent talking in the main coach he knew that she knew they'd be going back there after dinner. They'd strip off in the confined space, then climb into the low bunk together. The prospect was highly arousing. It would be almost like their first time. Last night, from what he could recall, had involved little passion and hadn't lasted long anyway, some perfunctory fumbling brought to a swift climax. First-time sex was always hot. And here on the train it was inevitable, which added that extra twinge of excitement as he spent the afternoon looking at her.

  They went to the restaurant as the train slid out of Paris. Joona ordered a bottle of red wine. Lawrence had two glasses; she finished the rest and ordered another. Her conversation, which had arrived at the global uniculture's contamination of Africa, allowed less and less opportunity for him to say anything. Eventually it became a bitter rant. Lawrence didn't have any of the second bottle. Joona ordered a brandy for herself, which she finished before they left for their sleeper cabin.

  When they got to it, they found the conditioning was faulty, leaving the little room chilly. Joona swayed about, looking at him with a lack of certainty in complete contrast to her usual attitude. She gave him a brief who-cares grin and started to pull her clothes off. It was Lawrence's turn to hesitate.

  "Look," he said reluctantly. "You've had a lot to drink."

  "I can handle it. This is nothing." She got the sweatshirt off over her head, then put an arm out to steady herself as she undid her jeans.

  "I'm sure. I'm just saying, we don't have to do anything tonight."

  "Yes, we do." Her grin widened into something close to defiance as she slipped her briefs down her legs. "Don't you get it? We have to. We must." She began kissing him. The smell and residual taste of the wine was off-putting. He put his arms around her in a mechanical fashion, trying to respond with the same intensity.

  "We're building a bridge," she mumbled. "The two of us, two worlds joining. That means we're human after all."

  He wanted to ask what she thought she meant. But he was busy freeing his own shirt, and she'd sat down heavily on the edge of the bunk. The cold air didn't help his mood, it actually raised goose bumps on his skin. He climbed into the bunk beside her, quickly pulling the thin quilt over the pair of them.

  She started kissing him again, ranging over his face and neck. A hand closed round his cock. One elbow rested uncomfortably on his sternum. What she must have intended as a suggestive caress felt more like an irritable tickle down the side of his ribs. The whole event was completely unerotic. He couldn't believe it; not after he'd spent most of the day anticipating this moment.

  Finally he managed to roll the pair of them around so she lay underneath him. He could barely keep his erection going; to help he had to keep thinking about a couple of the girls from the Strip last week, how lively they were. Joona smiled up drunkenly at him and groaned as he slid farther inside her.

  Fortunately, the whole miserable entanglement was concluded quickly. "God, I love you," she said. "This is what I want."

  "What is?" He managed to find a space on the bunk that didn't squash the two of them together, even though he was in danger of falling off. When he looked back at her she was already asleep. She started snoring.

  He found a thick T-shirt and put it on, then spent ages lying beside her, staring up at the cabin's invisible ceiling, unable to sleep. Nobody's fault, he kept telling himself, the circumstances were wrong, that's all. The cabin, the air-conditioning, the wine: an unfortunate combination. Tomorrow will be better.

  The express terminus at Edinburgh Waverley had been dug underneath the original station, leaving the surface structure untouched. They hauled their luggage up the escalators to the big old sprawl of platforms underneath their arching glass-and-iron roofs, and found the local train over to Glasgow. Old-style induction tracks still threaded through the center of the city, passing below the ancient castle perched on top of its rocky pinnacle. Lawrence watched it slide past, fascinated by the massive stone blocks and wondering how the hell the builders had moved them into position without robots.

  Once it was outside the suburbs, the train accelerated smoothly up to two hundred kilometers an hour. That was the fastest it could manage: the track in this part of Scotland was still using the same route that it had for centuries, laid down in the first decades of steam engines. It followed the contours of the rugged Highlands, curving too sharply to allow the train to reach its usual top speed. Even though there were no more farms, the district parliament had never obtained enough funds to straighten the route through the wild glens and restored woodlands. The cost of drilling new tunnels through hard Scottish rock and constructing viaducts over broad valleys was simply uneconomical given the volume of traffic. So anyone traveling the Highlands had almost the same journey as the Victorians who'd originally pioneered the route. There was even an old iron rail laid alongside the induction track, where enthusiasts kept a couple of old steam engines chugging up and down the coast, pulling early-twentieth-century first-class passenger coaches along behind them. A huge tourist attraction in the summer.

  As they had arrived at Edinburgh station in the early morning, Lawrence was able to see the countryside in clear daylight. Queensland and some sections of Europe he'd seen were just as rugged, but nothing on any planet he'd been on was as green. With spring coming to the Northern Hemisphere, the trees were fresh with new leaves. Heavy rains had soaked the ground, giving the grass a healthy, vigorous start to the season. He took the window seat and pressed himself against it, smiling contentedly.

  This section of the journey was the one that he enjoyed the most.

  They reached Glasgow in the middle of the morning and changed trains for Fort William. If anything this journey was even slower. But the scenery made up for it. He couldn't believe the long, rugged glens, and the lochs with their dark mirror water that went on forever. Their splendor made him aware of how much humans belonged in this environment.

  Joona sat beside him with her arm through his, pointing out
various landmarks. Ever since she woke up she'd acted differently. Attentive and eager, as if their night together had allowed them to reach some new level of understanding and commitment. He didn't know what to make of it at all, though the affection was enjoyable. It made it seem as if they were more of a couple. Certainly anyone walking through the coach would assume so.

  Fort William was the end of the line, its station just above the shore of Loch Linnhe. They stepped out onto the platform and Lawrence tipped his head back to look up at the mountain looming over the small town. The entire slope was covered with pine trees, their dark shapes packed tightly together.

  "Is that Ben Nevis?"

  "No," Joona said brightly. "That's Cow Hill; the Ben's away behind it. You'll be able to see it from Grandma's over in Benavie, if the weather stays fine." She glanced out at the choppy gray water of the loch. Dark clouds were streaming in from the southwest. "Rain's on its way."