The boulevard led directly down to the main harbour, a circular two kilometre wide basin, with glistening white coral walls. Half of it extended out into the shallow turquoise ocean, while the other half ate back into the city, where it had been surrounded by a chaotic mix of warehouses, taverns, marine supply shops, sportsboat hire stalls, agents’ offices, and a giant fish market. Quays stabbed out into the transparent water like spokes from a wheel rim. Right at the centre a sad cone of weather-dulled titanium rose out of the soft swell, the empty shell of a cargo lander that had swung off course two and a half centuries earlier as it brought equipment down to the newly founded colony. Ships of all shapes and sizes sailed around it, bright sails drooping in the calm air.
He stared at them intently. Ranged along the horizon were the first islands of the archipelago. Out there, he could lose himself for ever among the sleeping atolls and their quiet inhabitants. The boats which docked at this harbour left no records in bureaucratic memory cores, didn’t file destinations, owed no allegiances. This was a freedom barely one step from anarchy.
He started along the harbour’s western wall, towards the smaller boats: the fishing ketches, coastal sampans, and traders which cruised between the mainland cities and the islands. He was sure he could find one casting off soon, although a few brief enquiries among the sailors revealed that such craft rarely took on deck hands; they were nearly all family-run concerns. Eason didn’t have much money left in his bank disk, possibly enough for one more star-flight if he didn’t spend more than a couple of hundred fuseodollars.
He saw the girl before he’d walked halfway along the wall. She was in her mid-teens, tall bordering on gawky, wearing a loose topaz-coloured cotton shirt and turquoise shorts. Thick gold-auburn hair fell halfway down her back, styled with an Egyptian wave; but the humidity had drawn out its lustre, leaving it hanging limply.
She was staggering under the weight of a near-paralytic old man in a sweat-stained vest. He looked as though he weighed twice as much as she did.
‘Please, Ross,’ she implored. ‘Mother’ll sail without us.’
His only answer was an inebriated burble.
Eason trotted over. ‘Can I give you a hand?’
She shot him a look which was half-guilt, half-gratitude. He’d guessed her face would be narrow, and he was right: a small flat nose, full lips, and worried blue eyes were all cocooned by her dishevelled hair.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked hopefully.
‘No trouble.’ Eason put his flight bag down, and relieved her of the old man. He slung the old man’s arm around his own shoulders, and pushed up. It was quite a weight to carry, the girl must be stronger than she looked.
‘This way,’ she said, squirming with agitation.
‘Take my flight bag, would you. And the name’s Eason,’ he told her as they started off down the wall.
‘Althaea.’ She blushed as she picked up his bag. ‘Shall I take your case for you as well?’
‘No,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll manage.’
‘I’m really grateful. I should have been back at the Orphée a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘Is it a tight schedule?’
‘Oh no, but Mother likes to get home before dark. Visiting Kariwak takes a whole day for us.’
‘Should he be sailing in this condition?’
‘He’ll just have to,’ she said with a sudden flash of pique. ‘He does it every time we bring him. And it’s always me who has to go looking in the taverns for him. I hate those places.’
‘Is this your father?’
She let out a guffaw, then clamped her mouth over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry. No, he’s not my father. This is Rousseau. Ross. He lives with us, helps around the house and garden, things like that. When he’s sober,’ she added tartly.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Mother and I live on Charmaine; it’s an island out in the archipelago.’
He hid a smile. Perfect. ‘Must be a tough life, all by yourselves.’
‘We manage. It won’t be for ever, though.’ Her angular shoulders jerked in what he thought was supposed to be an apologetic shrug; it was more like a convulsion. Eason couldn’t recall meeting someone this shy for a long while. It made her appealing, after an odd sort of fashion.
*
The Orphée was tied up to a quay near the gap in the harbour wall. Eason whistled in appreciation when he saw her. She was a trim little craft, six metres long, with a flat-bottomed wooden hull and a compact cabin at the prow. The two outriggers were smaller versions of the main hull, with room for cargo; all archipelago craft had them, a lot of the channels between islands were too shallow for keel fins.
Bitek units were dovetailed neatly into the wooden superstructure: nutrient-fluid sacs with ancillary organs in the stern compartment, a powerful-looking three metre long silver-grey serpent tail instead of a rudder, and a membrane sail whorled round the tall mast.
Althaea’s mother was sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof, wearing a faded blue denim shirt and white shorts. Eason had no doubt she was Althaea’s mother: her hair was much shorter, but the same colour, and though she lacked the girl’s half-starved appearance her delicate features were identical. Their closeness was uncanny.
She was holding up an odd-looking pendulum, a slim gold chain that was fastened to the centre of a wooden disc, five centimetres in diameter. The disk must have been perfectly balanced, because it remained horizontal.
When Eason reached the quayside directly above the Orphée he saw the rim of the disc was carved with spidery hieroglyphics. It was turning slowly. Or he thought it was. When he steadied Ross and looked down properly, it was stationary.
The woman seemed absorbed by it.
‘Mother?’ Althaea said uncertainly.
Her gaze lifted from the disk, and met Eason’s eyes. She didn’t seem at all put out by his appearance.
He found it hard to break her stare; it was almost triumphant.
Rousseau vomited on the quay.
Althaea let out a despairing groan. ‘Oh, Ross!’ She was close to tears.
‘Bring him on board,’ her mother said wearily. She slipped the disc and chain into her shirt pocket.
With Althaea’s help, Eason manhandled Ross onto a bunk in the cabin. The old man groaned as he was laid on the grey blankets, then closed his eyes, asleep at once.
Althaea put a plastic bucket on the floor beside the bunk, and shook her head sadly.
‘What’s the pendulum for?’ Eason asked quietly. He could hear her mother moving round on the deck outside.
‘Mother uses it for divining.’
‘On a boat?’
She pressed her lips together. ‘You can use divining to find whatever you wish, not just water – stones, wood, buried treasure, stuff like that. It can even guide you home in the fog, just like a compass. The disc is only a focus for your thoughts, that’s all. Your mind does the actual work.’
‘I think I’ll stick with an inertial guido.’
Althaea’s humour evaporated. She hung her head as if she’d been scolded.
‘I’m Tiarella Rosa, Althaea’s mother,’ the woman said after Eason stepped out of the cabin. She stuck her hand out. ‘Thank you for helping with Ross.’
‘No trouble,’ Eason said affably. Tiarella Rosa had a firm grip, her hand calloused from deckwork.
‘I was wondering,’ he said. ‘Do you have any work available on Charmaine? I’m not fussy, or proud. I can dig ditches, pick fruit, rig nets, whatever.’
Tiarella’s eyes swept over him, taking in the ship’s jumpsuit he wore, the thin-soled shoes, his compact but hardly bulky frame, albino-pale skin. ‘Why would you be interested, asteroid man?’
‘I’m a drifter. I’m tired of asteroid biosphere chambers. I want the real thing, the real outdoors. And I’m just about broke.’
‘A drifter?’
‘Yeah.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Althaea emerge from the cabin, her already anxious expression even mo
re apprehensive.
‘I can only offer food and board,’ Tiarella said. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not rich, either.’ There was the intimation of amusement in her voice.
Eason prevented his glance from slipping round the Orphée; she must have cost ten thousand fuseodollars at least.
‘And the Orphée has been in the family for thirty years,’ Tiarella said briskly. ‘She’s a working boat, the only link we have with the outside world.’
‘Right. Food and board would be fine.’
Tiarella ruffled Althaea’s hair. ‘No need to ask your opinion, is there, darling. A new face at Charmaine, Christmas come in April.’
Althaea blushed crimson, hunching in on herself.
‘OK, drifter, we’ll give it a try.’
*
Orphée’s tail kicked up a spume of foam as she manoeuvred away from the quay. Tiarella’s eyes were tight shut as she steered the boat via her affinity bond with the bitek’s governing processors. Once they were clear, the sail membrane began to spread itself, a brilliant emerald sheet woven through with a hexagonal mesh of rubbery cords.
Outside the harbour walls they picked up a respectable speed. Tiarella headed straight away from the land for five kilometres, then slowly let the boat come round until they were pointing east. Eason went into the cabin to stow his flight bag. Rousseau was snoring fitfully, turning the air toxic with whisky and bad breath.
He unlocked the case to check on the spheres it contained. His synaptic web established a datalink with them, and ran a diagnostic. All three superconductor confinement systems were functioning perfectly, the drop of frozen anti-hydrogen suspended at the centre of each one was completely stable. The resulting explosion should one of them ever rupture would be seen from a million miles away in space. It was a destructive potential he considered too great.
The Quissico Independence Party had other ideas. It was the blackmail weapon they were going to use against the development company administration to gain full political and economic freedom for the asteroid. They had spent three years establishing contact with one of the black syndicates which manufactured antimatter. Three years of a gradually escalating campaign of propaganda and harassment against the development company.
Eason had joined the cause when he was still in his teens. Quissico was a highly successful settlement, with dozens of industrial stations and rich resources of minerals and organic chemicals. Its people worked hard and manufactured excellent astronautics equipment and specialist microgee compounds. That they were not allowed a greater say in how the wealth they created was spent was a deliberate provocation. They had made the founding consortium rich, paying off investment loans ahead of schedule. Now they should be permitted to benefit as the money cartels had.
It was a just cause. One he was proud to help. He was there giving beatings to company supervisors, taking an axe to finance division processor networks, fighting the company police. At twenty he killed his first enemy oppressor, an assistant secretary to the Vice-Governor. After that, there was no turning back. He worked his way through the Party ranks until he wound up as quartermaster for the movement’s entire military wing. Over ten years of blood and violence.
He was already tiring of it, the useless pain and suffering he inflicted on people and their families. Gritting his teeth as the authorities launched their retaliations, erasing his friends and comrades. Then came the grand scheme, the Party’s master plan for a single blow that would break the chains of slavery for good. Planned not by the military wing, those who knew what it was to inflict death; but by the political wing, who knew only of gestures and theoretical ideology. Who knew nothing.
A threat would never be enough for them. They would detonate some of the antimatter. To show their determination, their strength and power. In a distant star system, thousands would die without ever knowing why. He, the killer, could not allow such slaughter. It was insanity. He had joined to fight for people; to struggle and agitate. Not for this, remote-controlled murder.
So he stopped them in the simplest way he could think of.
Eason came back up on deck, and leant on the taffrail, allowing himself to relax for the first time in a fortnight. He was safe out here. Safe to think what to do next.
He’d never thought much past the theft itself; a few vague notions. That was almost as crazy as the Party’s decision to acquire the stuff in the first place. Far too many people were acting on impulse these days.
Tropicana’s ocean looked as if it had been polished smooth. The only disturbance came from Orphée’s wake, quiet ripples which were quickly absorbed by the mass of water. He could see the bottom five metres below the boat, a carpet of gold-white sand. Long ribbons of scarlet weed and mushroomlike bulbs of seafruit rose up out of it, swaying in the languid currents. Schools of small fish fled from the boat like neon sparks. Out here, tranquillity was endemic.
Althaea sat on Orphée’s prow, letting the breeze of their passage stream her hair back, a sensual living figurehead. Tiarella was standing amidships, staring at the islands ahead, straight-backed and resolute. Totally the ship’s mistress.
Eason settled down in the stern, looking from one to the other, admiring them both, and speculating idly on which would be best in bed. It was going to be enjoyable finding out.
*
For three hours they moved deeper into the archipelago. Families had been planting the coral kernels around the mainland coast for over two centuries, producing their little island fiefdoms. They numbered in the tens of thousands now.
The larger, inhabited, islands were spaced two or three kilometres apart, leaving a broad network of channels to navigate through. Tiarella navigated Orphée around innumerable spits and reefs without even reducing speed.
Eason gripped the gunwale tightly as vicious jags of coral flashed past the outriggers. Most of the islands he could see had tall palm trees growing above the beaches. Some had just a few grand houses half-concealed through the lush vegetation, while others hosted small villages of wooden bungalows, whitewashed planks glowing copper in the sinking sun.
‘There it is,’ Althaea called excitedly from the prow. She was on her feet, pointing ahead in excitement. ‘Charmaine.’ She gave Eason a shy smile.
The island was a large one, with a lot more foliage than the others; its trees formed a veritable jungle. Their trunks were woven together with a dense web of vines; grape-cluster cascades of vividly coloured flowers, fluoresced by the low sun, bobbed about like Chinese lanterns.
Eason couldn’t see any beaches on this side. Several low shingle shelves were choked by straggly bushes which extended right down to the water’s edge. Other than that, the barricade of pink-tinged coral was a couple of metres high.
Orphée was heading for a wooden jetty sticking out of the coral wall.
‘What do you do here?’ he asked Tiarella.
‘Scrape by,’ she said, then relented. ‘Those trees you can see are all geneered citrus varieties, some of them are actually xenoc. We used to supply all the nearby islands with fruit, and some coffee beans, too; it gave the community a sense of independence from the mainland. Fishing is the mainstay in this section of the archipelago. Trees have a lot of trouble finding the right minerals to fruit successfully out here, even with geneering. There’s never enough soil, you see. But my grandfather started dredging up seaweed almost as soon as the island’s original kernel grew out above the water. It took him thirty years to establish a decent layer of loam. Then Dad improved it, he designed some kind of bug which helped break the aboriginal seaweed down even faster. But I’m afraid I’ve allowed the groves to run wild since my husband died.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged, uncoiling a mooring rope. ‘I didn’t have the heart to carry on. Basically, I’m just hanging on until Althaea finds herself someone. It’s her island really. When she has a family of her own, they can put it back on its feet.’
*
The house was set in a dishevelled
clearing about a hundred metres from the jetty. It was a two-storey stone building with climbing roses scrambling around the ground-floor windows and a wooden balcony running along its front. Big precipitator leaves hung under the eaves, emerald valentines sucking drinking water out of the muggy air. When he got close, Eason could see the white paint was flaking from the doors and window frames, moss and weeds clogged the guttering, and the balcony was steadily rotting away. Several first-floor windows were boarded up.
His situation was looking better by the minute. Two women, a drunk, and an isolated, rundown island. He could stay here for a century and no one would ever find him.
As soon as they walked into the clearing, birds exploded from the trees, filling the air with beating wings and a strident screeching. The flock was split between parrots and some weird blunt-headed thing which made him think of pterodactyls. Whatever they were, they were big, about thirty centimetres long, with broad wings and whiplike tails; their colours were incredible – scarlet, gold, azure, jade.
Rousseau clamped his hands over his ears, belching wetly.
‘What the hell are those?’ Eason shouted above the din.
Althaea laughed. ‘They’re firedrakes. Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘I thought Tropicana didn’t have any aboriginal animals; there isn’t enough dry land for them to evolve.’
‘Firedrakes didn’t evolve. They’re a sort of cross between a bat, a lizard, and a parrot.’
He gawped, using his retinal amps to get a better look at one; and damn it, the thing did look like a terrestrial lizard, with membranous wings where the forepaws should be.
‘My father spliced the original ones together about forty years ago,’ Tiarella said. ‘He was a geneticist, a very good one.’
‘You could make a fortune selling them,’ Eason said.
‘Not really. They can’t fly very far, they only live for about three years, only a third of the eggs ever hatch, they’re prone to disease, and they’re not very sociable. Dad was going to improve them, but he never got round to it.’
A Second Chance at Eden Page 28
