FALLEN DRAGON (56 page)

"Yes, sir." The barman wasn't going to argue, not yet.

Lawrence dropped his head into his hands and let out a painful sigh, surprising himself by not shrieking in anguish. "Shit! Shit, shit, fuck it!"

Someone pulled out the stool next to his and sat down. Like they didn't have the whole fucking place to choose from. He jerked round angrily to tell them to— "Oh."

"I thought I'd better check on you," Joona said in mild embarrassment "You nearly got run over by a couple of trams."

He turned away. "Enjoy your moment of triumph."

"Suffering in others is not a cause for rejoicing."

"In that case, give the hippie philosophy a break. It pisses me off."

"They turned you down."

"Yeah. All right? They turned me down. Bastards."

"Did they say why?"

"I'm not rich enough. That's what it was in the end. My stake in the company isn't enough. For fuck's sake, I've got a thirty percent investment in Z-B shares. A third of everything I earn goes straight back into the company. What the fuck else do they expect from me?"

"I don't know. What did you expect from them?"

"A fair chance. No, not really. I should have known. Me of all people. I know how companies really work, what really counts."

The barman put his margarita jug down in front of him, pushing a coaster forward for the glass. It was a proper margarita glass, with a thin rime of salt around the rim.

"What does count?" Joona asked.

"Internal politics. You want one of these, or have you got to run back to shout at my fellow corporate cyborgs?"

"We're not exactly on timesheets and shift work." Lawrence nodded to the barman. "Another glass, please."

Waking up was accompanied by its timeless twin: where am I? Lawrence opened his eyes to see a long room with a desk and a couple of worn comfy chairs at one end. The floor was bare wooden boards, with a couple of rugs thrown down, one of which he was lying on. Opposite him was a broad arched window, with thick old curtains drawn. Scraps of streetlight shone around the edges, casting a dreary sodium-yellow illumination against the walls. Several large prints had been hung above the small fireplace, posters for various exhibitions and poetry recitals decades out of date. Definitely student digs. Brighter slivers of light silhouetted the door. When he lifted his head he could see a bed at the other end of the room. Joona was sitting on it, her back against the tarnished brass railings. She had a quilt wrapped around her shoulders. A reefer dangled from one hand, its end glowing morosely in the gloom.

"Oh, hell," he muttered. At least he was still wearing his uniform. "How did I...?"

"I brought you here," she said. There was a current of humor in her voice. "My turn to rescue you from the bar."

"Thanks." He sat up gingerly. "Do I owe you a twenty?"

"No, a friend helped get you into the tram. There's a stop close to the end of this street."

"Uh, right." He didn't remember much after the third jug of margaritas. Just bitching on about Z-B and how he would have loved to be the first person to land on a new world. He ran his dry rubber tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. The taste was awful. Apart from that he wasn't too bad, just stiff from the floor. "How come I don't have a hangover?"

"I made you take aspirin and vitamin C, and a couple of liters of water."

"Right. Thanks again." The mention of water made him want to pee. Badly. Joona told him where to find the toilet, just outside and down the corridor.

"Try to be quiet," she said as he hurried out "Everyone else is asleep."

His watch said it was quarter past two.

When he got back she was still sitting at the end of the bed, the reefer down to its last half-centimeter. "Want some?" she asked.

"No, thanks. Us cyborgs don't, remember?"

"Of course."

"Look, thanks again for taking care of me. I'd, er, better be going."

"Really?" She took a deep drag. "What's waiting for you?"

"Nothing much, I guess. I've still got three weeks' leave due. I just don't want to impose on you any more tonight."

"If I'd thought you were imposing I wouldn't have brought you here."

A sharp tingle moved down Lawrence's spine. He walked over to the bed and knelt down. She didn't say anything, just kept gazing at him with wide eyes. He took the last of the joint from her fingers and inhaled the way he'd seen it done on the i's. The smoke was bitter enough to make him cough.

Joona started to laugh. "I win."

"Win what?"

"I got to you."

"Yeah." He grinned and took another drag before handing it back. "You got to me. But then you were never going to run off and join the officer college with me, were you?"

She shook her head as if she'd been admonished and pouted. "No."

"Can I stay here the rest of the night?"

Joona nodded.

"With you?" he asked softly.

She opened the quilt. She was naked underneath.

When Lawrence woke up in the morning his earlier confusion was replaced by something close to embarrassment Classic case of
now what?

He was lying along the edge of the bed, the quilt covering him, with his back pressed up against the wall. The mattress really wasn't wide enough for two. Joona was curled up beside him, looking a whole lot more fragile than she had last night. She was thin, skinny enough for her shoulder blades and collarbones to be prominent, and a lot shorter than he recalled. She must have been wearing heels before. Funny he'd never noticed that.

When he tried to pull the quilt up gently around her shoulders she stirred and woke. Pale blue eyes, he saw, a contrast to her darkish skin.

"Well," she said.

"Morning."

"Yes, it is."

She snuggled up closer, closing her eyes.

Again: now what?

"So, er, what time do you have to get up?"

Joona's eyes stayed shut "You're always in a rush to go nowhere, aren't you?"

"That's me."

"I was going to take a break from college. It's getting heavy there for me right now. I hadn't got a plan for getting up."

"You're at college?"

She sighed and sat up. "Yes, the Prodi. It's a complete shit-hole. They don't even have enough funds to stop the building from falling apart, and the lecturers are all fifth-raters who couldn't get an appointment cleaning the toilets at a de
c
ent university." She got up out of bed with a sudden energetic motion and padded over to the window, pulling the curtains back with a quick tug.

Lawrence didn't point out she was nude; he would have sounded like his mother. But the window was smeared with dribbles of condensation, only a few vague gray shapes of buildings were visible. Joona shivered and rubbed her arms. The air in the room was cold enough to make her breath show as thin vapor.

"Are you leaving me?" she asked.

"Like you, I don't have any plans."

"Actually, I was thinking I'd go to Scotland."

He couldn't figure out if that was an invitation. She certainly wasn't his usual type, not with all this twitchy energy and commitment to her stupid cause. He couldn't imagine her ever walking down the Strip at Cairns, hunting a good time as the sun went down. Come to that, he couldn't even imagine her laughing heartily. He'd never seen her do more than smile wryly every now and then. But then again, she definitely knew her own mind. Just like Roselyn. Unlike Roselyn, she wasn't happy with life. There was a lot of anger bottled up inside that small frame—a stupid form of anger, though he would never tell her that to her face. She was far too wrapped up in her issues to welcome contrary observations. He guessed that might make her kind of lonely.

The room had a singular imprint that was all her own. It wasn't just the air that was cold. Most people, he thought, would instinctively keep their distance.

So why didn't I?

Two lonely people. Maybe that was why they'd kept dancing around each other in the bar. They weren't opposites attracting after all.

"I've never been to Scotland," he said.

Joona was bending over the heatstore block that sat in the ancient fireplace, turning up its output. The black surface began to glow a deep orange, as if there were still embers in the grate. She gave him a fast, nervous smile. "You want to come with me?" There was surprise and hope in her voice.

"Sure. If you want me to come with you."

"I don't mind. It would be nice."

For a moment he thought she was going to jump back into bed with him. Instead she grabbed a big red-and-green-check nightshirt from the back of a chair and struggled into it.

"I'll put some coffee in the microwave," she said. "Then I have to do my yoga: it helps me center myself. We can go after that."

"Okay," he said, trying to keep pace with events. "I can pick up my stuff from the hotel on the way to the station."

"Will you book the train tickets? I hate using the datapool. I can pay you."

"Sure." He hunted around for his clothes, wondering what he'd gone and said yes to.

Lawrence and Joona took an express train straight out of Amsterdam direct to Edinburgh, traveling in a big U, down south to Paris, across to London, then up north again to the end of the 1-pulse line at Waverley. To start with, Lawrence was impressed by Holland. The old canals were still draining the land. Windmills stood guard along the straight-edged waterways, although little wind now reached their sails, thanks to the extensive forests that had grown up in the last two centuries across the old farmland. There was a huge variety of trees, but with the canals slicing through them they formed such a regular grid it made them look like nothing more than fields. In a sense they were, not that they were cultivated, but the land management teams maintained them carefully. Even now, the drainage system couldn't be allowed to fall into disrepair, and the roots were a big potential hazard. It gave him an impression of an artificial environment barely one step ahead of Amethi. He thought that in a way Holland must be the first example of large-scale terraforming; human engineering and ingenuity wresting a livable nation out of an alien environment.

Lawrence soon tired of the fenlands, especially as their speed blurred details. "So why Scotland?" he asked.

Joona put her feet up on the table, ignoring the disapproving looks of the other passengers in the carriage. "My grandmother is Scottish. We're going to stay with her."

"Where, exactly?"

"Fort William."

He put his interface glasses on and accessed the datapool to find where that was.

"You spend a lot of time trawling, don't you?" Joona said.

"My education had a lot of holes. You must do a fair bit of accessing yourself."

"As little as possible. I prefer books."

"There's a time and a place for hard copy. My dad had a thing for books, too. I guess that's why I never use them." He grinned at the face she pulled. "What's your subject at Prodi?"

"I'm taking ecological management."

"Right." It wasn't what he expected. "Doesn't that mean you'll wind up working for a company?"

"There are companies, and there are companies. And then mere are government agencies, at least by name. In practice they're another branch of corporate reclamation and revitalization divisions. But I won't take a job with any of them. There are still some private landowners who use the land in the traditional fashion. They farm, or log timber or run stables. That's what I want to help keep alive."

"Farming?" he said skeptically. "I thought that's what damaged the land in the first place?"

"Industrial farming did, yes. Pesticides and nitrates were poured over the soil in the quest for higher yields and to hell with the consequences. Agricultural machinery actually got so big and so heavy that it compacted the subsoil. By the end, in the developed nations, topsoil was little more than a matrix that suspended chemicals and water so the crop roots could absorb them. Then the companies developed protein cell technology and killed farming altogether."

"And stopped us raising and slaughtering animals for food. I mean, can you imagine how barbaric that was? Eating living things. It's disgusting."

"It's perfectly natural. Not that people think that way today. And I didn't say protein cells are a bad thing. After all, it means no one on Earth starves. But, as always, they went to extremes and eliminated every valid alternative. All I'm asking for is to keep a few pockets of independence alive."

"You mean like working museums?"

"No! These are havens for people who reject your corporate uniculture existence. There are more of them than governments and corporations like to admit. More of us."

"Ah, right, communes of back-to-the-earthers. So will you also be refusing the kind of medical technology that comes out of our wicked corporations?"

She gave him an exasperated stare. "That's so typical, denigrate something you know nothing about. I never said I was rejecting technology. It's the current global society that I refuse to obey. Technology doesn't have to come only from corporate labs, to be exploited for profit and policy implementation. It could come from universities where it would be made freely available to benefit everyone. Even small independent communities could support researchers. If we all had free access to data we could build a culture of distributed specialization."