“That’s not her,” Estella exclaimed.
It was a teenage boy, wearing Justine’s tatty old bushranger hat. His mouth gaped wide at the big vehicles rushing toward him, then he yelled something back into the tent. Next second he’d snatched a small backpack off the ground, and was sprinting toward the nearest tree line. Estella stared on in astonishment. He was wearing a long orange and green skirt. No, she corrected herself, a kilt, she could see the pleats. His small pack had a leather garment of some kind tied to it. He kept looking over his shoulder at the vehicles. One hand pressed the hat on his head, black hair streamed out frombelow the brim.
Cam Tong was laughing as he braked the big Telmar behind the hyperglider. Estella’s grin spread right across her mouth as she opened the door to climb down. Just then, Justine emerged from the tent. All she wore was a very small scarlet thong and a pair of sunglasses.
“Come back,” Justine shouted above the blaring horns and yammering engines. “Don’t be frightened. They’re my friends. Oh, fuck it!” She put her hands on her hips, and glared at the recovery vehicles.
Estella dropped lightly to the ground. By now the grin had grown into near-hysterical laughter. Other vehicle doors were opening, the smiling crew clambering out. Horns were still being tooted enthusiastically. The frantic boy had almost reached the jungle. Whoops of encouragement were yelled after him.
“Afternoon, darling,” Estella called brightly.
“You scared him off,” Justine accused, her voice sounding hurt.
Estella raised her hand to her throat in theatrical shock. “Why thank heavens, we got here just in time by the look of it.” She still couldn’t stop laughing. “We obviously saved you from a fate worse than death.”
“Goddamnit!” Justine gave the fleeing boy a last look as he disappeared into the foliage. She raised her hand limply, hoping he would see her forlorn gesture. The horns fell silent as the engines were turned off, but the hearty laughter of the crew remained loud in the muggy air.
Justine stomped back into the tent, and picked up a light cardigan. Estella trailed after her. The floor mattress was still inflated. Empty food packets littered the ground around it, along with a couple of bottles of wine.
“I don’t believe your luck,” Estella chortled. “I’m going to complain to the tour company. The only thing waiting for me at my landing site was a squirrel, and I’m pretty sure he was gay.”
Justine started buttoning up her cardigan. “Don’t,” she said irritably. “Kazimir was sweet.”
“Yeah: was.”
“You don’t understand.” She pulled up her shorts. “It wasn’t just that. I wanted to teach him a different view of the universe, make him question what he sees.”
“Ah, like: what position is this called? And: I didn’t know you could do it that way around.”
Justine growled at her and went back outside. She ordered the tent to contract, forcing Estella to hurry through the entrance. The crew were backing an empty trailer up to the hyperglider. Broad, knowing smiles were flashed in her direction; several of them winked. Justine had to roll her eyes at that, thinking what it must have looked like to them. A small sheepish smile appeared on her own lips as her sense of humor returned.
“What was he doing here?” Estella asked. “This is nowhere.”
“It’s somewhere now,” Justine replied tartly.
“God, your luck. I’m as jealous as hell. He looked divine.”
Justine pushed her lips together modestly. “He was.”
“Come on, let’s go find a bottle, we should celebrate your grand victory: longest flight and greatest landing. I expect you need to sit down, too, must be difficult trying to walk properly after all that education you gave him.” She glanced pointedly at the tent that had finished contracting. All the empty packets and bottles now lay around it, ejected by the shrinking walls. “Did you even get to see the outside world?”
“There is one?”
Estella giggled wildly, and started to climb up the short ladder to the Telmar’s cabin. “So is it true, does everything really rise higher in low gravity?”
Justine ignored her, scanning the jungle’s dense wall one last time. There was no sign of him, not even using infrared. She’d taught him that, if nothing else.
“Good-bye, Kazimir,” she whispered.
He would be out there. Watching. Probably feeling a little foolish now. But this was probably the best way. A swift clean break, and a golden memory for both of them. No regrets.
And maybe, just maybe, I taught him something about real life. Maybe he will start to question his idiotic Guardians doctrine.
There was a loud pop of a champagne cork in the cabin. Justine climbed inside and shut the door, enjoying the chill of the air-conditioning as it banished the jungle’s raw heat.
FIVE
From their admittedly elitist point of view, the residents of York5 often claimed that theirs was one of the luckier planets in the Commonwealth’s phase one space. This particular world never experienced pollution or human population pressure, and financial irregularities and corrupt politicians passed it by. A quirk of evolution had produced far fewer than average plant and animal genera. Such conditions made the establishment of nonnative species on its surface an undemanding enterprise. For people who wanted to develop land in their own special ways, it was highly desirable real estate.
When CST announced that the planet was open for settlement in 2138, the consortium of families behind the Big15 planet Los Vada put in an offer, effectively buying the entire planet. CST got an immediate payoff on its exploration costs, but York5 was never opened for general immigration. The families in the consortium were too diversified to qualify as an Intersolar Dynasty, although as they all now lived on a single world the future genealogy dynamics were such that they’d probably wind up as one, defined by the classic model.
York5 had no real capital city; the largest urban area was a small service town that supported the CST gateway and the airport that sprang up beside it. No factories were ever shipped in, denying it any industrial facilities. Everything a person wanted or needed, from cutlery to paving stones, electronics to clothes, had to be imported. There were no roads or railways providing a civil transport infrastructure, only aircraft owned by the resident families. In all of its two-hundred-forty-year history, the population had never risen above ten million, of which almost three million were staff employed by the families. Instead, it was divided up into vast estates, with each family building mansions and lodges and beach homes as they wanted, where they wanted, and planting whatever kind of surrounding flora took their fancy. Consequently, the continents became magnificent quilts of designer landscapes; it was terraforming on a scale not seen even on Far Away, and all for aesthetics sake.
Captain (retired) Wilson Kime had watched his family estate develop over the last two centuries, returning time and again for vacations and long weekends and annual reunions to enjoy the perfect tranquility it offered. The land he’d chosen was hilly with long sweeping valleys, and situated well inside the southern temperate zone. When he’d arrived, the ground was covered in native tuffgrass, a gaunt reddy brown in color, and a few manky scrub trees. Slowly, a tide of verdant, and far more pleasing, terrestrial green had rippled out over hill and vale alike, cooler and more soothing. Spinnys had sprung up, bunches of wildly different trees from dozens of worlds, their foliage varying in color from snow-white to eye-wrenching orange. Valley floors had been forested in oaks and walnuts and willows, while a few special enclaves among the taller hills were now host to giant sequoia.
One day at the height of an exceptional midsummer heat wave, Wilson walked along a long, meandering gravel track on the broad, south-facing slopes a couple of kilometers from the huge mock château that was the family home, inspecting the vines. His only company was two of the senior family’s youngest children, who skipped along with him. Emily, a six-year-old with fawn-colored braids who was his great-great-great-great-granddaughter; and eight-year-old Victor, a quiet inquisitive lad who was a nephew with a connection that was too complicated to memorize. He’d made both of them wear big white hats to protect their young skin from the blue-tinged sun’s powerful UV, even though both of them had received extensive germline modification, which included high resistance to all types of cancer. The way they charged around they’d be exhausted long before lunch, he didn’t want heatstroke added to that.
Every now and then he would stop at the end of another row of the vines, and inspect the clusters of grapes that were just beginning to fill out. It was going to be a high-quality crop this year, possibly good enough to qualify as a classic vintage. Though everybody abused that term dreadfully nowadays. The small light green spheres were wonderfully translucent, with a tinge of color creeping in as they soaked up the sunlight. Their rows stretched all the way down the slope to the broad valley floor, three kilometers away. In total, the vineyards covered nearly a hundred square kilometers now, after flourishing for a hundred twenty years in the slightly chalky soil. Buried irrigation pipes made sure they had enough water in sweltering years like this one, pumped out here from the inland freshwater sea thirty kilometers away. The Kime estate occupied a quarter of the coastline.
Red-painted viniculture bots, each the size of a motorbike, trundled up and down the rows with their electromuscle arms flashing in and out as they carefully thinned out the clusters, and forked over the soil. There couldn’t have been more than five human supervisors covering the entire vineyard. Not that any of the wine would ever be sold, this wasn’t a commercial venture, it was for the family, with a small number of bottles made available to other Farndale board members.
Wilson stopped and picked a couple more grapes. They were immature and sour, but that taste was right for this moment in their development. He spat them out after he’d chewed them thoroughly.
“Urrgh!” little Emily said, wrinkling her nose up. “That’s gross, Grandpa.”
“No it’s not,” he assured her. He tipped his own straw hat back and smiled. “They decay straight back into the soil as fertilizer. That’s good for the plants. Query your e-butler when we get back home if you don’t believe me.”
“Wilson’s right,” Victor said, using a lofty tone. “We did environmental cycles in biology.”
“You mean the vines drink your spit?” Emily was even more appalled.
Wilson put his arms around her and gave a swift hug. “No, no, it doesn’t work like that. It’s all to do with organic chemistry. Very complicated when you get down to details. But trust me, the vines don’t drink spit, okay?”
“Okay,” she said dubiously.
Victor’s look was condescending, so she scowled at him. Then the two of them were suddenly racing off down one of the rows, chasing a Forlien delong, similar to a porcupine but with a silly collar wing that flapped green and yellow when it was excited.
“Don’t touch it,” he called after them. “You’re frightening it.”
“All right.” Victor’s voice was faint from behind the vines.
Wilson carried on down the gravel. He didn’t hurry, he was enjoying the day too much. He’d come out of his latest rejuvenation three years ago, and this was a time-out life, intended as a complete sabbatical from all corporate activity. Everybody needed one now and again, especially at the kind of executive level he lived his normal lives.
After the debacle of the Mars mission, Wilson had returned to an Earth that began to change on an almost daily basis as the implications of wormhole technology were realized. In the second half of the twenty-first century, space exploration was the biggest boom industry there could possibly be. Except, this was no longer the kind of space exploration he knew anything about. What CST actually conducted was planetary surveys, the province of geologists and xenobiologists; they weren’t interested in the void between the stars, there was no striving to bridge the distance. With wormholes, there simply was no distance anymore.
A lot of the old NASA teams left to join the burgeoning CST when the agency folded not six months after Kime’s ignoble return. But they all had to start from scratch again, retraining, acquiring different skills. It wasn’t the same; they weren’t special anymore, it was just another company job—albeit a spectacular one. The change affected some people more than others. The last Wilson heard of poor old Dylan Lewis, the ex-Commander had taken over a bar in Hawaii, and was steadily and relentlessly drinking his way to full liver failure, while making an ass of himself with any passing woman who paused to hear his “old space hero” story.