Post-coital languor was a sweet time, one of tiny kisses, stroking individual strands of sticky hair from her face, single compassionate words. And he had been quite right all along, forbidden fruit tasted the best.
“I love you, Joshua,” she whispered into his ear.
“And I love you.”
“Don’t leave.”
“That’s unfair. You know I’m coming back.”
“I’m sorry.” She tightened her grip around him.
He moved his hand up to her left breast and squeezed, hearing a soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Are you sore?”
“A bit. Not much.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want to have that swim now? Water can be a lot of fun.”
She grinned cautiously. “Again?”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
* * *
Marjorie Kavanagh came to his bedroom again that Duchess-night. The prospect of Louise sneaking through the red-shaded manor to be with him and discovering him with her mother added a spice to his lovemaking that left her exhausted and delighted.
The next day Louise, eyes possessively agleam, announced at breakfast that she would show Joshua round the county roseyard, so he could see the casks being prepared for the new Tears. Grant declared this a stupendous idea, chuckling to himself that his little cherub was having her first schoolgirl crush.
Joshua smiled neutrally, and thanked her for being so considerate. There were another three days to go until midsummer.
* * *
At Cricklade, and all across Norfolk, they marked the onset of Midsummer’s Day with a simple ceremony. The Kavanaghs, Colsterworth’s vicar, Cricklade Manor’s staff, the senior estate workers, and representatives from each of the cupper teams gathered at the nearest grove to the manor towards the end of Duke-day. Joshua and Dahybi were invited, and stood at the front of the group that assembled just inside the shabby stone wall.
The rows of weeping roses stretched out ahead of them; blooms and cups alike upturned to a fading azure sky, perfectly still in the breathless evening air. Time seemed to be suspended.
Duke was falling below the western horizon, a sliver of pyrexic tangerine, pulling the world’s illumination down with it. The vicar, wearing a simple cassock, held his arms up for silence. He turned to face the east. On cue, a watery pink light expanded across the horizon.
A sigh went up from the group.
Even Joshua was impressed. There had been about two minutes of darkness the previous evening. Now there would be no night for a sidereal day, Duchess-night flowing seamlessly into Duke-day. It wouldn’t be until the end of the following Duchess-night that the stars would come out again for a brief minute. After that it would be the evenings when the two suns overlapped, and the morning darkness would grow longer and longer, extending back into Duchess-night until Norfolk reached inferior conjunction and only Duke was visible: midwinter.
The vicar led his flock in a brief Harvest Thanksgiving service. Everybody knew the words to the prayers and psalms, and quiet, murmuring voices banded together to be heard right across the grove. Joshua felt quite left out. They finished by singing “All Creatures Great and Small”. At least his neural nanonics had that in a memory file; he joined in heartily, surprised by just how good he felt.
After the service, Grant Kavanagh led his family and friends on a rambling walk along the aisles between the rows. He touched various roses, feeling their weight, rubbing petals between his thumb and forefinger, testing the texture.
“Smell that,” he told Joshua as he handed over a petal he had just picked. “It’s going to be a good crop. Not as good as five seasons ago. But well above average.”
Joshua sniffed. The scent was very weak, but recognizable, similar to the smell which clung to a cork after a bottle of Tears had been opened. “You can tell from this?” he asked.
Grant put his arm around Louise as they sauntered along the aisle. “I can. Mr Butterworth can. Half of the estate workers can. It just takes experience. You need to be here for a lot of summers.” He grinned broadly. “Perhaps you will be, Joshua. I’m sure Louise will ask you back if no one else does.”
Genevieve shrieked with laughter.
Louise blushed furiously. “Daddy!” She slapped his arm.
Joshua raised a weak smile and turned to examine one of the rose plants. He found himself facing Marjorie Kavanagh. She gave him a languid wink. His neural nanonics sent out a volley of overrides to try and stop the rush of blood to his own cheeks.
After the inspection walk the manor staff served up an outdoor buffet. Grant Kavanagh stood behind one of the trestle tables, carving from a huge joint of rare beef, playing the part of jovial host, with a word and a laugh for all his people.
As Duchess-night progressed the rose flowers began to droop. It happened so slowly that the eye could detect no motion, but hour by hour the thick stems lost their stiffness, and the weight of the large petals and their central carpel pod made gravity’s triumph inevitable.
By Duke-morning most of the flowers had reached the horizontal. The petals were drying out and shrivelling.
Joshua and Louise rode out to one of the groves close to Wardley Wood, and wandered along the sagging plants. There were only a few cuppers left tending the long rows, straightening the occasional collection cup. They nodded nervously to Louise and scurried on about their business.
“Most people have gone home to sleep,” Louise said. “The real work will begin again tomorrow.”
They stood aside as a man pulled a wooden trolley past them. A big glass ewer, webbed with rope, was resting on it. Joshua watched as he stopped the trolley at the end of a row and lifted the ewer off. About a third of the rows had a similar ewer waiting at the end.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“They empty the collection cups into those,” Louise said. “Then the ewers are taken to the county roseyard where the Tears are casked.”
“And they stay in the cask for a year.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“So that they spend a winter on Norfolk. They’re not proper Tears until they’ve felt our frost. It sharpens the taste, so they say.”
And adds to the cost, he thought.
The flowers were wilting rapidly now, the stems curving down into a U-shape. Their sunlight-fired coronal cloak had faded away as the petals darkened, and with it had gone a lot of the mystique. They were just ordinary dying flowers now.
“How do the cuppers know where to wire the cups?” he asked. “Look at them. Every flower is bending over above a cup.” He glanced up and down the aisle. “Every one of them.”
Louise gave him a superior smile. “If you are born on Norfolk, you know how to place a cup.”
It wasn’t just the weeping roses which were reaching fruition. As they trotted the horses over to Wardley Wood Joshua saw flowers on the trees and bushes closing up, some varieties leaning over in the same fashion as the roses.
In their peaceful glade the wild rose bushes along the rock pools seemed flaccid, as if their shape was deflating. Flowers lolled against each other, petals agglutinating into a quilt of pulp.
Louise let Joshua undress her as he always did. Then they spread a blanket down on the rocks below the weeping roses and embraced. Joshua had got to the point where Louise was shuddering in delighted anticipation as his hands roved across her lower belly and down the inside of her thighs when he felt a splash on his back. He ignored the first one and kissed Louise’s navel. Another splash broke his concentration. It couldn’t be raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the barren blue sky. He twisted over. “What—?”
Norfolk’s roses had begun to weep. Out of the centre of the carpel pod a clear fluid was exuded in a steady monotonous drip. It was destined to last for ten to fifteen hours, well into the next Duchess-night. Only when the pod was drained would it split open and release the seeds it contained. Nature ha
d intended the fluid to soften the soil made arid by weeks without rain, allowing the seeds to fall into mud so they would have a greater chance of germination. But then in 2209 a woman called Carys Thomas, who was a junior botanist in the ecological assessment mission, acting against all regulations (and common sense), put her finger under a weeping pod, then touched the single pearl of glistening fluid to her tongue. Norfolk’s natural order came to an immediate end.
Joshua wiped up the dewy bead from his skin and licked his finger. It tasted coarser than the Norfolk Tears he’d so relished back in Tranquillity, but the ancestry was beyond doubt. A roguish light filled his eyes. “Hey, not bad.”
A snickering Louise was moved round until she was directly underneath the lax hanging flowers. They made love under a shower of sparkling droplets prized higher than a king’s ransom.
The cuppers returned to the groves as the next Duchess-night ended. They cut away the collection cups, now heavy with Tears, and poured their precious contents into the ewers. It was a task that would take another five days of intensive round-the-clock labour to complete.
Grant Kavanagh himself drove Joshua and Dahybi down to the county roseyard in a four-wheel-drive farm ranger, a powerful boxy vehicle with tyres deep enough to plough through a shallow marsh. The yard was on the outskirts of Colsterworth, a large collection of ivy-clad stone buildings with few windows. Beneath the ground was an extensive warren of brick-lined cellars where the casks were stored throughout their year of maturation.
When he drove through the wide entrance gates the yard workers were already rolling out the casks of last year’s Tears.
“A year to the day,” he said proudly as the heavy ironbound oak cylinders rattled and skipped over the cobbles. “This is your cargo, young Joshua. We’ll have it ready for you in two days.” He braked the farm ranger to a halt outside the bottling plant where the casks were being rolled inside. The plant supervisor rushed out to meet them, sweating. “Don’t you worry about us,” Grant told him blithely. “I’m just showing our major customer around. We won’t get in the way.” And with that he marched imperiously through the broad doorway.
The bottling plant was the most sophisticated mechanical set-up Joshua had seen on the planet, even though it lacked any real cybernetic systems (the conveyor belts actually used rubber pulleys!). It was a long hall with a single-span roof, full of gleaming belts, pipes, and vats. Thousands of the ubiquitous pear-shaped bottles trundled along the narrow belts, looping overhead, winding round filling nozzles, the racket of their combined clinking making conversation difficult.
Grant walked them along the hall. The casks were all blended together in big stainless-steel vats, he explained. Stoke County’s bouquet was a homogenized product. No groves had individual labels, not even his.
Joshua watched the bottles filling up below the big vats, then moving on to be corked and labelled. Each stage added to the cost. And the weight of the glass bottles reduced the amount of actual Tears each starship could carry.
Jesus, what a sweet operation. I couldn’t do it better myself. And the beauty of it is we’re the ones most eager to cooperate, to inflate the cost.
At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.
Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do. Stoke can put its name to this.”
Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.
“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.
Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.
“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”
* * *
Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.
All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.
He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie were curtailed.
The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how quickly he would come back.
“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.
“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”
“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”
He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I do care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”
She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned. He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.
“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”
Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there, encouraging and praising.
“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”
“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”
She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.
Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.
Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth. Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.
They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated
into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.
Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.
Part 2:
Expansion
1
Graeme Nicholson sat on his customary stool beside the bar in the Crashed Dumper, the one furthest away from the blaring audio block, and listened to Diego Sanigra, a crewman from the Bryant, complain about the way the ship had been treated by Colin Rexrew. The Bryant was a colonist-carrier starship that had arrived at Lalonde two days ago, and so far not one of its five and a half thousand colonists had been taken out of zero-tau. It was a ruinous state of affairs, Diego Sanigra claimed, the governor had no right to refuse the colonists disembarkation. And the energy expenditure for every extra hour they spent in orbit was costing a fortune. The line company would blame the crew, as they always did. His salary would suffer, his bonus would be non-existent, his promotion prospects would be reduced if not ruined.
Graeme Nicholson nodded sympathetically as his neural nanonics carefully stored the aggrieved ramblings in a memory cell. There wasn’t much which could be used, but it was good background material. How the big conflict reached down into individual lives. The kind of thing he covered so well.
Graeme had been a reporter for fifty-two of his seventy-eight years. He reckoned no journalist didactic course could teach him anything new, not now. With his experience he should have been formatting didactic courses, except there wasn’t a news company editor in existence who would want junior reporters corrupted to such an extent. In every sense he was a hack reporter, with an unerring knack of turning daily misfortune into spicy epic tragedy. He went for the human underbelly every time, highlighting the suffering and misery of little people who were trampled on, the ones who couldn’t fight back against the massive uncaring forces of governments, bureaucracies, and companies. It was not from any particular moral indignation, he certainly didn’t see himself as championing the underdog. He simply felt emotions laid raw made for a better story, with higher audience ratings. To some degree he had even begun to look like the victims he empathized with so well; it was partly reflexive, they were less suspicious of someone whose clothes never quite fitted, who had thick ruddy skin and watery eyes.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 64
