FALLEN DRAGON (33 page)

They took a walk through the town, looking at the restaurants and cafes and bars. Pavements were slatted aluminum walkways set up between the buildings, standing on the same kind of legs. Lawrence loved it. The first open-air town he'd ever been in; the sensation of freedom was invigorating. Temperature was at least fifteen to twenty degrees below freezing. Not that he cared about that; they both wore their brand new ski-suits: colorful one-piece garments with a lace-work of active thermal strips whose conductivity could be set by an integral thermostat, allowing you to choose whatever temperature you wanted to be at. The hoods were close-fitting and had extra flaps, which could be pulled across the face. They were essential to stop windburn when you were skiing, but in town most people let them hang free.

"It's like you can feel the ice pulling heat from your skin," Lawrence exclaimed. He was leaning over a walkway's rail, looking down what passed for Orchy's main street. Buses and ice bikes roared about, carrying vacationers between the hotels and the runs.

"Nice to know," Roselyn said. Every flap on her hood was closed tight, leaving just her goggles poking through. Even so, she stood slightly hunched, as if fighting the cold.

Lawrence laughed and kept walking. They stopped off in a couple of stores. The only difference they could find between them were the names of the owners. Both were franchises to the company that ran Orchy. And both of them sold the same ski equipment; there weren't many manufacturers on Amethi yet.

"Business opportunity," Roselyn observed. She giggled at Lawrence, who was trying on a different hood: its style was awful, all pink and orange stripes. "Two business opportunities," she corrected.

"I want to be seen on the slopes," he said with pained dignity.

"What as?'

They moved on. The trouble with a town made out of identical modules, they decided, was that you didn't know what kind of businesses they contained until you were inside. The names flashing over the doors didn't offer much of a clue. Accessing the datapool for a local directory was a pain, and too functional. They just wanted to stroll and take in the sights. Orchy wasn't really built for that. There was no civic identity; its purpose was simply to house and feed people in between skiing jaunts.

They did find a reasonable cafe eventually. The Flood Heights was positioned as close to the edge of the rift as safety would allow. So Lawrence and Roselyn sat at one of the window tables and ordered hot chocolate and a plate of Danish pastries.

He sat sipping at his mug, looking up into the sky with a kind of wistful admiration. He'd never seen Nizana like this, not with his own eyes. Here on the near-side it hung directly overhead, a massive circle sliced by a thousand compacted cloud bands, clearly defined lines of rust red and grubby white grating and tearing at each other with hooked curlicues. Hundreds of runaway cyclone storms the size of moonlets were constantly on the prowl amid the upper layers. They distorted the neat arrangement of bands, chaos engines churning the usual colors into freakish shades with oceanic-sized upwells of weird chemicals from the unseen depths. Sheets of electricity surged outward from their eyes, too vast to be called mere lightning bolts: continents of electrons birthed and extinguished in microseconds. Their ephemeral illumination ensured that Nizana's nightside was never dark; a jade aural phosphorescence writhed permanently within the cage of the ionosphere, while the discharges themselves fluoresced ragged patches of cloud thousands of kilometers across.

"They're going so fast," Roselyn said, gazing down at the skiers sliding along the snow. "Do you think we'll learn to go that fast this time?"

"Huh?" Lawrence brought his attention back to the ground, looking where she was. "Wrong question. You've got strips of polished composite strapped to your feet, and you're standing at the top of a mountain of ice. The trick is learning to go down slowly."

She stopped dropping sugar lumps into her chocolate and flicked one at him. "Prat. You know what I mean."

"Yeah. I don't suppose it's that difficult, not on the nursery slopes. They claim they can get you up to moderate grade by the end of a week."

"It looks scary, but I think I'm going to like it." She watched several skiers as they reached the bottom of the main slope, curving to a halt in a graceful spray of snow. The cable lift began tugging them up to the top again. On the other side of the rift, slim-line fissures extended deep into the ice cliff, intersecting each other and twisting around in convoluted geometries. Sunlight shone into them to be refracted in glorious iridescent rainbows, forever encased below the translucent surface.

Roselyn sighed contentedly. "I'm so happy. I've got you, I've got a life. It's funny, I never thought leaving Earth would allow me to be happy. You know the only thing I miss?"

"What's that?"

"Boats." She gestured around extravagantly. "I mean, Amethi's leisure industry is starting to lift off. There's this, and all those hotel domes in the middle of nowhere, and that ridiculous five-city motor rally race they've got planned for next year. But there are no boats."

"Give it time. Our oceans are filling up, and there are lakes forming on the continents."

"Ha! It'll take another thousand years to melt this glacier. So I'll see none of that till I'm either dead or too old to care. Such a shame. It would have been nice to stand on the prow with the sails creaking away, and feeling the wind on my face."

"When did you ever do that?"

"Dublin has a port, I'll thank you. Although it's mainly for the big cargo ships that come in from England and Europe. But there are sailing clubs along the coast. I know how to crew a dinghy. I was even getting quite good at windsurfing." Her gray eyes stared off beyond the horizon. "But I've done it once. Better that, than never."

Lawrence slouched down in his seat "And I never will."

"You poor old boy." She pouted. "I fell off a lot. The water was freezing, and didn't taste so good either. Heaven alone knows what pollution was in that sea. That's the thing with memories, you only ever dwell on the good parts."

The lesson went the way of all first skiing lessons. Lawrence and Roselyn spent a lot of time slipping about and falling over. But they did make a kind of progress, enough to slide down the nursery slope several times without landing in a tumble of limbs and poles, enough to get an idea of how much thrill there would be from descending the main slope, enough to promise faithfully they'd be back on time tomorrow.

It wasn't until they got back to the hotel room that their muscles began to protest at the way they'd been abused. Ankles and calves ached as they stiffened up. Lawrence's shoulders throbbed as if they'd been bruised, which he could only put down to the way he'd pushed himself along with the poles. With laughter tinged by winces they stripped off and got into the bath together. Soaping each other down was an erotic foreplay that quickly evolved into full sex, sending water all over the floor. Drying each other in the big soft towels had the same effect. Then they moved out into the main room, where the bed waited invitingly.

After their third bout of lovemaking they ordered a huge room-service dinner, complete with iced champagne. The mattress was too unstable for them to eat in bed, so they sat in front of the veranda window wearing big toweling robes and tucked in.

"Those slopes are going to look beautiful after sunset," Roselyn said.

The instructor had told them that when Amethi moved into the umbra the runs were all illuminated by orange and green lamps. Skiers themselves wore red and white torches on their helmets. It was as if the whole valley side was invaded by swarms of dancing starlight.

Lawrence took her hand and gave it a squeeze. "We'll see it. Our last days here are in the conjunction night. We'll be good enough to be using the main slope ourselves by then. They say that when we're in the heart of the umbra, Nizana is like a flaming halo, as if the sun's set the edge of the atmosphere on fire."

"I can't wait."

They took the half-empty bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates back to the bed. Lawrence lay on the mattress, a flute of champagne in one hand, the box of chocolates in reach of the other, and Roselyn curled up beside him.

She squirmed around for a moment until she was perfectly comfortable, then said, "Go on then."

"Thanks." He kissed her brow, and told the room AS, "Access my personal file, entertainment section, and play
Flight: Horizon,
series six, episode five. Give me the standard third-person view edit."

"Happy now?" Roselyn asked.

She always watched
Flight: Horizon
with him, though he was pretty sure she was humoring him rather than developing any deep interest in the crew of the
Ultema.
"I am, thank you," he said with dignity. She snuggled in a fraction closer and took a sip from her own flute as the credits rolled and the signature tune began its fanfare.

Eighty minutes later the
Ultema
had managed to prevent a planetary collision that would have wiped out three sentient alien species. One of the species was furious with this interference in their glorious destiny as angels of the apocalypse and came gunning for the starship with some very nasty weapons. Three of the crew had been killed before the end, two of whom had just got engaged.

"Seven crew in three episodes," Lawrence said in dismay. "That's as many as in the whole of series four."

"Oh dear." Roselyn's lips were pressed together to hold back her giggles. She attempted to put on a grave expression. "That's not good, then?"

"It doesn't help their chances, no."

"Oh, poor baby." She wriggled around until she was on top of him and gave him a wet kiss while she giggled.

Lawrence played stubborn.

Roselyn laughed outright. "Oh, I'm sorry. It's just that you take it so seriously."

"I used to take it very seriously. They were good role models when I was younger. It meant a lot to me then. Now it's like having old friends around; I can appreciate it without adulating it. You showed me there's more to life than the i's. But I still claim it's a pretty good show."

"Oh, Lawrence." She turned back to give the big sheet screen a remorseful look. "That was nasty of me. I sometimes forget how different our backgrounds are."

"Hey." He stroked her back gently. "You couldn't be nasty if you tried."

"Except to Alan."

Lawrence sniggered. "That wasn't nasty; that was funny."

"True." She lay down beside him, their faces a couple of centimeters apart. "And you were right,
Flight: Horizon
isn't a bad influence for a growing boy."

"Well, I'm growing out of it now. Damn, taking an administration class at university. That's about as far away as possible from what I used to want."

"No, it's not. Command qualities are the same no matter what fancy name you stick on them. And it will be a damn good basic if you ever change your mind and go in for officer training."

"Ha! Training for what? Dad said it: we just run a passenger service. You should know, you've been on it. I wanted to be a part of exploring the galaxy, pushing back the frontiers. That's all over, now."

Roselyn propped herself up on an elbow to look at him. "This is what I can never understand about you, Lawrence. You always tell me how much you hate McArthur for shutting down its exploration program. Yet you never talk about anything else but staying here and making your contribution to Amethi, to the company. That's dichotomous to the point of schizoid, especially for you."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"If you can't do what you want here, then leave and do it somewhere else."

"There is nowhere else," he said in exasperation.

Her perplexed look was equally impatient. "Well, not apart from Earth with its half-dozen exploration fleets, no."

Despite the warmth of the room and her body, the lazy fizzing of the champagne in his blood, Lawrence was abruptly cold and terribly alert. What she'd said simply wasn't true. Because it contradicted his whole world, every
t
hing he'd known and done since that hot-tempered day when he'd ruined the fatworms. "What did you say?"

"That you should go to Earth and sign on with another company if you feel so strongly about all this."

His hands closed about her upper arms, squeezing hard. "What other fucking companies?"

"Lawrence!" She looked from his hands up to his face.

"Sorry." He let go. Tried to haul in his temper. It seemed to be as intense as his fright. "What companies? Are you telling me that someone is still running explorer fleets?"

"Of course they are. Zantiu-Braun is the biggest space-active company of all, but Alphaston, Richards-Montanna, Quatomo are all still funding missions. None of the fleets are as big as they used to be before everyone started their asset-realization atrocities, but they still send out starships to survey fresh stars. And Zantiu-Braun has its portal colonies as well."

"Somebody's still founding colonies?" His voice had dropped to an aghast whisper.

"Yes. Lawrence, didn't you know any of this?"

"No."

"Shit." She was giving him a very troubled look. "Lawrence, I..."

"I want a full datapool trawl," he told the room AS in a flat voice. "Get an askping to pull all the information you can on current interstellar exploration. Specifically, the activities of the Alphaston, Richards-Montanna, Quatomo and Zantiu-Braun companies."