They were described as living gnomes by the first people to see them, thirty centimetres fully grown, with black and white fur remarkably similar to a terrestrial panda. On their home world, Oshanko, they were so rare they were kept exclusively in an imperial reserve. Only the Emperor’s children were allowed to have them as pets. Cloning and breeding programmes were an anathema to the imperial court, they lived by natural selection alone. No official numbers of their population were given, but strong rumour suggested there were less than two thousand of them left.
Despite the bipedal shape, they had a very different skeleton and musculature to terrestrial anthropoids. There were no elbows or knees, their limbs bent along their whole length, making their movements incredibly ponderous. They were herbivores, and, if official AV recordings of the Emperor’s family were to be believed, clingingly affectionate.
Ione covered her mouth with one hand, eyes alight with incredulity. The creature was about twenty centimetres high. “It’s a sailu,” she said dumbly.
“Yes.”
She put a hand into the bag, extending one finger. The sailu reached for it in a graceful slow motion, deliciously silky fur stroked against her knuckle. “But only the Emperor’s children are supposed to have these.”
“Emperor, Lord—what’s the difference? I got it because I thought you’d like it.”
The sailu had clambered upright, still holding itself against her finger. Its flat wet nose sniffed her. “How?” she asked.
Joshua gave her a precocious smile.
“No. I don’t want to know.” She heard a soft crooning, and looked down, only to lose herself in the adoring gaze. “It’s very wicked of you, Joshua. But he’s quite lovely. Thank you.”
“Not sure about the ‘him’. I think there are three or four sexes. There’s not much on them in any reference library. But it does eat lettuce and strawberries.”
“I’ll remember.” She eased her finger from the sailu’s grip.
“So what about my present?” Joshua asked.
Ione struck a pose, tongue licking her lips. “I’m your present.”
They didn’t make it to the bedroom. Joshua got her dress off just inside the door, and in return Ione tugged at his ship-suit seal so hard it broke. The first time was on one of the alcove tables, after that they used the ornate iron stair railings for support, then it was rolling around on the apricot moss carpet.
The bed did get used eventually, after a shower and a bottle of champagne. Hours later, Joshua knew he’d missed the party in Harkey’s Bar, and didn’t much care. Outside the window the light filtering through the water had faded to a dusky green, small orange and yellow fish were looking in at him.
Ione was sitting cross-legged on the rubbery transparent sheet with her back resting against some of the silk cushions. The sailu was snuggled up in her hand as she fed it with the crinkled red and green leaves of a lollo lettuce. It munched them daintily, gazing up at her.
Isn’t he adorable? she said happily.
The sailu genus exhibit a great many anthropomorphic traits which endear them to humans.
I bet you’d be nicer if it wasn’t Joshua who brought him.
Removing the sailu from its home planet is not only in complete contravention of the planetary statutes, it is also a direct personal insult to the Emperor himself. Joshua has put you in an invidious position. A typically thoughtless action on his part.
I won’t tell the Emperor if you won’t.
I was not proposing to tell the Emperor, nor even the Japanese Imperium’s ambassador.
That old fart.
Ione, please, Ambassador Ng is a very senior diplomat. His appointment here is a mark of the Emperor’s respect towards you.
I know. She tickled the sailu under its tiny chin. Face and body were both flattish ovals, joined by a short neck. Its legs curved slowly, pressing the torso against her finger.
“I’m going to call him Augustine,” she announced. “That’s a noble name.”
“Great,” Joshua said. He leant over to the side of the bed and pulled the champagne bottle out of its ice bucket. “Flat,” he said, after he tipped some into his glass.
“Proves you have staying power,” she said coyly.
He reached for her left breast, smiling.
“No, don’t,” she moved out of the way. “Augustine’s still feeding. You’ll upset him.”
He lay back, disgruntled.
“Joshua, how long are you staying this time?”
“Couple of weeks. I need to get a contract with Roland Frampton sorted out. Distribution, not a charter. We’re going for a Norfolk run, Ione. We raised a lot of capital on some of our contracts; put that together with what I had left over from scavenging, and we’ll have enough for a cargo of Norfolk Tears. Imagine that! A hold full of the stuff.”
“Really? That’s wonderful, Joshua.”
“Yeah, if I can swing it. Distribution isn’t the problem. Acquisition is. I’ve been talking to some of the other captains. Those Norfolk roseyard-association merchants are tough nuts to crack. They won’t allow a futures market, which is pretty smart of them actually. It would be dominated by offworld finance houses. You have to show up with a ship and the cash, and even then it’s not a certainty you’ll get any bottles. You need a pretty reliable contact in the trade.”
“But you’ve never been there, you don’t have any contacts.”
“I know. First-time captains need a cargo to sell, a part-exchange deal. You’ve got to have something the merchants can’t do without, that way you can get a foot in the door.”
“What sort of cargo?”
“Ah, now that’s the real problem. Norfolk is constitutionally a pastoral world, there’s hardly any high technology they’ll allow you to import. Most captains take cordon bleu food, or works of antique art, fancy fabrics, stuff like that.”
Ione put Augustine down carefully on the other side of the silk pillows, and rolled onto her side facing him. “But you’ve got something else, haven’t you? I know that tone, Joshua Calvert. You’re feeling smug.”
He smiled up at the ceiling. “I was thinking about it: something essential, and new, but not synthetic. Something all those Stone Age towns and farms are going to want.”
“Which is?”
“Wood.”
“You’re kidding? Wood as in timber?”
“Yeah.”
“But they have wood on Norfolk. It’s heavily forested.”
“I know. That’s the beauty of it, they use it for everything. I’ve studied some sensevise recordings of the place; they make their buildings with it, their bridges, their boats, Jesus they even make carts out of it. Carpentry is a major industry there. But what I’m going to take them is a hard wood, and I mean really hard, like metal. They can use it in their furniture, or for their tool handles, their windmill cogs even, anything that’s used every day, or rots or wears out. It’s not high technology, yet it’ll be a real cost-effective upgrade. That ought to get me in with the merchants.”
“Hauling wood across interstellar space!” She shook her head in amazement. Only Joshua could come up with an idea so wonderfully crazy.
“Yep, Lady Mac should be able to carry almost a thousand tonnes if we really pack the stuff in.”
“What sort of wood?”
“I checked in a botanical reference library file when I was in the New California system. The hardest known wood in the Confederation is mayope, it comes from a new colony planet called Lalonde.”
* * *
Oenone’s flyer was a flattened egg-shape, eleven metres long, with a fuselage that gleamed like purple chrome. It was built by the Brasov Dynamics company on Kulu, who had been heavily involved with the Kulu Corporation (owned by the Crown) in pioneering the ion-field technology which had sent panic waves through the rest of the Confederation’s astroengineering companies. Spaceplanes were on their way out, and Kulu was using its technological prowess to devastating political effect, granting preferential
licence production to the companies of allied star systems.
Standard ion thrusters lifted it out of Oenone’s little hangar and pushed it into an elliptical orbit that grazed Atlantis’s upper atmosphere. When the first wisps of molecular fog began to thicken outside the fuselage, Oxley activated the coherent magnetic field. The flyer was immediately surrounded by a bubble of golden haze, moderating the flow of gas streaking around the fuselage. Oxley used the flux lines to grab at the mesosphere, braking the flyer’s velocity, and they dropped in a steep curve towards the ocean far below.
Syrinx settled back in her deeply cushioned seat in the cabin along with Ruben, Tula, and the newest member of the crew, Serina, a crew toroid generalist who had replaced Chi. All of them were gazing keenly out of the single curving transparency around the front of the cabin. The flyer had been customized by an industrial station at Jupiter, replacing Brasov’s original silicon flight-control circuits with a bitek processor array; but the image from the sensors had a poor resolution compared to Oenone’s sensor blisters. Eyes were almost as good.
There was absolutely no way of judging scale, no reference points. Unless she consulted the flyer’s processors, Syrinx didn’t know what their altitude was. The ocean rolled past below, seemingly without end.
After forty minutes Pernik Island appeared on the horizon. It was a circle of verdant green that was so obviously vegetation. The islands which Edenists had used to colonize Atlantis were a variant of habitat bitek. They were circular disks, two kilometres in diameter when they matured, made from polyp that was foamed like a sponge for buoyancy. A kilometre-wide park straddled the centre, with five accommodation towers spaced equidistantly around it, along with a host of civic buildings and light industry domes. The outer edge bristled with floating quays for the boats.
Like habitat starscrapers, the tower apartments had basic food-synthesis glands, though they were primarily for fruit juices and milk—there simply wasn’t any need to supply food when you were floating on what was virtually a protein-packed soup. An island had two sources of energy to power its biological functions. There was photosynthesis, from the thick moss which grew over every outside surface including the tower walls, and triplicated digestive tracts which were fed from the tonnes of krill-analogues captured by baleen scoops around the rim. The krill also provided the raw material for the polyp, as well as nutrient fluids. Electricity for industry came from thermal potential cables; complex organic conductors trailing kilometres below the island, exploiting the difference in temperature between the cool deep waters and the sun-heated surface layer to generate a current.
There was no propulsion system. Islands drifted where they would, carried by sluggish currents. So far six hundred and fifty had been germinated. The chances of collision were minute; for two to approach within visible range of each other was an event.
Oxley circled Pernik once. The water in the immediate vicinity was host to a flotilla of boats. Pernik Island’s trawlers and harvesters produced a crisscross of large V-shaped wakes as they departed for their fishing fields. Pleasure craft bobbed about behind them, small dinghies and yachts with their verdant green membrane sails fully extended.
The flyer darted in towards one of the landing pads between the towers and the rim. Eysk himself and three members of his family walked over as soon as the haze of ionized air around the flyer dissolved, grounding out through the metal grid.
Syrinx came down the stairs that had folded out of the airlock, breathing in a humid, salty, and strangely silent air. She greeted the reception party, exchanging identity traits: Alto and Kilda, a married couple in their thirties who supervised the preparation of the family’s catches, and Mosul, who was Eysk’s son, a broad-shouldered twenty-four-year-old with dark hair curling gypsy-style below his shoulders, wearing a pair of blue canvas shorts. He skippered one of the fishing boats.
A fellow captain, Syrinx said appreciatively.
It’s not quite the same, he replied courteously as they all started to walk towards the nearest tower. Our boats have a few bitek items grafted in, but they are basically mechanical. I sail across waves, you sail across light-years.
To each their own, she replied playfully. There was an almost audible buzz as their thoughts meshed at a deeper, more intense, level. For a moment she felt the sun on his bare torso, the strength in his figure, a sense of balance which was the equal to her spacial orientation. And the physical admiration, which was mutual.
Do you mind if I go to bed with him? she asked Ruben on singular engagement. He is rather gorgeous.
I never stand in the way of the inevitable, he replied, and winked.
Eysk had an apartment on the tower’s fifteenth floor, a large one which doubled as an entertainment suite for visiting traders. He had chosen a rich style, combining modernist crystal furniture with a multi-ethnic, multi-era blend of artwork from across the Confederation.
The reception room had a transparent wall with archways leading out onto a broad balcony. A long table of sculpted blue crystals flecked with firefly sparks sat in the middle of the room, laid with a scrumptious buffet of Atlantean seafood.
Ruben glanced round at the collection of ornaments and pictures, pulling his lower lip thoughtfully. The seafood trade must be pretty good.
Don’t let Eysk’s dragon hoard fool you, Kilda said, bringing him a goblet of pale rose wine. His grandfather, Gadra, started it a hundred and eighty years ago. Pernik is one of the older islands. Our family could have its own island by now if we didn’t suffer from these “investments”. Pieces lose their relevance so fast these days.
Ignore the woman, Ruben, Gadra spoke out of the island’s multiplicity. A lot of this stuff is worth double what it was bought for. And all of it retains its beauty providing you view it in context. That’s the trouble with young people, they take no time to appreciate life’s finer qualities.
Syrinx allowed Eysk to lead her along the table. There was an enormous range of dishes arrayed, white meats arranged on leaves, fish steaks in sauces, some wild-looking things that were all legs and antenna and didn’t even seem to have been cooked. He handed her a silver fork and a goblet of carbonated water.
The art is to taste then flush the mouth with a sip, he told her.
Like a wine tasting?
Yes, but with so much more to savour. Wines are simply variants on a theme. Here we have diversity that defies even the island personalities to catalogue. We’ll start with unlin crab, you said you remembered it.
She pushed her fork into the pâté-like slab he indicated. It melted like fudge in her mouth. Oh! This is just as good as I remember. How much do you have?
They started to discuss details as they moved round the table. Everybody joined in good-naturedly, advising and arguing over individual dishes, but the final agreements were always between Syrinx and Eysk. The Jovian Bank segment of the island’s personality was brought in to record the transactions as they were finalized.
They wound up with a complicated arrangement whereby Syrinx agreed to sell ten per cent of any cargo of Norfolk Tears back to Eysk’s family in return for preferential treatment to obtain the seafood she wanted. The ten per cent would be sold at just three per cent above the transport cost, to allow Eysk to make a decent profit distributing it to the rest of the island. Syrinx wasn’t entirely happy, but she had come into the Norfolk run too late to make heavy demands to her only supplier. Besides, ninety per cent was still a lot of drink, and Oenone could transport it right across the Confederation. The price was always set in relation to the distance from Norfolk it had travelled, and a voidhawk’s costs were minimal compared to an Adamist starship’s.
After two hours negotiating Syrinx stepped out onto the balcony with Serina and Mosul. Ruben, Tula, and Alto had gathered on one of the reception room’s low settees to polish off some of the wine.
They were on a corner of the tower which gave them a view over both the park and the ocean. A gentle moist breeze ruffled Syrinx’s hair as she leaned on
the railing, a glass of honey wine held loosely in her hand.
I’m not going to eat for days after that, she told the other two, giving away a sense of rumbling pressure inside her belly. I’m bloated.
I often think we named this planet wrong, Mosul said. It should have been Bounty.
You’re right, Serina said. No Norfolk merchant is going to be able to resist this cargo. She was twenty-two, the only crew-member younger than Syrinx, slightly shorter than the Edenist norm, with black skin and a delicate face. She was watching Syrinx and Mosul with quiet amusement, enjoying the vaguely erotic overspill of their growing rapport.
Syrinx was delighted with her company, it was nice to have someone so unashamedly girlish on board. She’d chosen her original crew for their experience, and they were highly professional, but it was nice to have someone she could really let her hair down with. Serina added a sparkle to shipboard life which had been absent before.
We’re a pretty common choice, Mosul said. But none the less successful for that. Nearly every first-time captain takes some of our produce. That’s if they’ve got any sense. You know, even the Saldanas send a ship here every couple of months to supply the palace kitchens.
Does Ione Saldana send one as well? Serina asked interestedly.
I don’t think so.
Tranquillity doesn’t own any starships, Syrinx said.
Have you been there? Mosul asked.
Certainly not, it’s a blackhawk base.
Ah.
Serina looked up suddenly, her head swivelling round. At last! I’ve just worked out what’s missing.
What? Syrinx asked.
Birds. There are always birds by the shore on normal terracompatible worlds. That’s why it’s so quiet here.
One of the larger cargo spaceplanes chose that moment to lift from its pad. The vertical-lift engines produced a strident metallic whine until it was a hundred metres in the air. It banked to starboard and slid off over the ocean, picking up speed rapidly.
Serina started laughing. Almost quiet!
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 43
