Context (30 page)

<Story>>

[4]

PhoenixCentral.

Blue glass pyramids, in which
hundreds of personnel worked. Other buildings were black and silver,
tensegrity-framed polyhedra larger than cathedrals, their dark window facets
concealing complex inner architecture from the blazing sun. In front of them
ran a yellow runway, around which air-cars hovered.

Beyond, sere red desert lay
baking beneath a cloudless sapphire sky.

And
it was hot.

Ro shaded her eyes against the
light: high above the horizon, a small dot was growing steadily larger.

‘Are sure you—?’ The voice behind
her was cut off.

I don’t need a bodyguard.

Sound of a gull door descending.
Ro continued to watch.

Speck,
glinting as it adjusted yaw, then pitch.

White, glimmering.

And then it was very fast,
reflected sun blazing and its delta wings clearly visible, and the mu-space
ship was hurtling down towards the yellow strip. Faster, and faster, then
suddenly it was hanging raptor-like before the swoop, talon-skids extended as
it glided in to land.

My God.

Smoke billowed and a screaming
filled the air as friction-deceleration slowed the huge ship. As it passed Ro’s
position—and she appreciated for the first time how big it really was -a hot
pungent Shockwave buffeted her exposed skin.

Nicely handled, Pilot.

It came to a halt beside the
extended passenger complex.

Behind
her, a dull tapping: her assigned escort, Flight Officer Neil, was trying to
attract her attention from inside the air-taxi. She ignored him.

Ground vehicles, like attendant
insects, swarmed around the big delta-winged ship. Scorpion-tailed grab-cranes
shifted passenger crates onto fluorescent orange flatbed TDVs. Thermoacoustic
drives whispered into life, and the flatbeds slowly bore the encased, comatose
travellers to the complex’s Awakening wing.

Full med facilities awaited them,
just in case, as did UNSA’s
LitIg8
AI: ready to offer an out-of-court
settlement (via any injured passenger’s Every Ware proxy) at the first hint of
neural damage.

Small white TDV, with a silver
scorpion tail.

Ro swallowed.

She watched as the tail extended,
daintily dipped over the ship, and rose again with a dark blue ovoid clutched
within its pincers.

The Pilot’s cocoon.

The vehicle drew closer, and
stopped only two hundred metres from Ro, by the nearest pyramid complex: a
rearing construct of dark blue, almost purple glass. The cocoon, lowered to the
ground, split open. A slender, near-emaciated Pilot stumbled onto grey tarmac
as attendants rushed to help.

Twin sparks of sunlight where his
eye sockets should have been.

Mother
—

Like her, like all Pilots, this
man’s eyes—rendered useless by the neuroviral rewiring of his visual cortex—had
been surgically removed, replaced by high-bandwidth I/O-buses: the main
interface to his ship’s sensors.

But in mu-space he could see,
know the joys of that fractal continuum in ways unaltered humans could not
dream of.

It was the first time Ro had
watched a mu-space ship in action, and suddenly the magnitude of the Pilots’
suffering, of Mother’s sacrifice and that of the father she had never known
grew massively clear, overwhelming her. And the unfairness, for she could not
understand how society—how anyone—could allow this to happen, without searching
for another way.

But the loss of a few individuals’
realspace eyesight was insignificant compared to the economic benefit of travel
to the stars.

Dart, my father. If only you had
lived. . .

Then she was stumbling,
half-running along the tarmac, away from the landed Pilot and his helpers, away
from everything, away from the air-taxi she could hear coming to life behind
her, rising in pursuit.

It
was cool inside the air-taxi, and she leaned back on the soft bench, while Flight
Officer Neil held out a chilled glass of water. Ro took it, gulped the water
down.

‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ she
said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Ah ... I beg your pardon. I didn’t
realize how stressed I was.’

‘With good reason.’ He leaned
forward, and tapped the control panel unnecessarily. ‘Command: resume journey.’

‘Acknowledged.’

As the air-taxi rose to hovering
height, Ro noticed for the first time that FO Neil was about her own age, in
full dress blues with platinum award strips. Perhaps just a little too
clean-cut, the chin with a hint of fragility ...But she was staring at him, and
he blushed minutely before looking away. His profile was about perfect.

Was my escort selected for his
looks?

But she could think of no reason
why the UNSA authorities should pay that much attention to the visit of one
lowly intern. Unless they were worried about undue publicity following
Anne-Louise’s death. Certainly no-one other than the police had attempted to
interview her.

‘My mother,’ she said suddenly, ‘was
a Pilot too.’

‘Really?’ A tone of polite
interest. ‘Oh, yes. I believe I knew that.’

Something...

Bringing her senses to bear: on
pupil dilation, skin lividity, respiratory rhythm. And the conclusion was
obvious: he knew something of her past, had
intended
her to see the
returning Pilot.

As a test of her reactions? But
what relevance could that possibly have to anyone at UNSA?

Slowly blinking her jet-black
eyes, she wondered if they had any idea how different she was from other people,
and a wave of coldness which had nothing to do with the taxi’s air-conditioning
shivered across her spine.

Mother. I wish you were here.

She was out of her depth.

Flight
Officer Neil stalked back and forth in the reception room, and Ro needed no
special perception to see that his anger was real.

‘For God’s sake!’