“That won’t cover our costs, lovie. We told you, it’s expensive travelling this river. You have to work your passage.”
“No.”
There was nothing of the bumptious nature left in the huge woman. “We can put you off. Right here.”
Marie shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Course you can. Pretty girl like you.” Gail wrapped a weighty hand around Marie’s forearm. “Come on, lovie,” she coaxed. “Old Lennie, he knows how to treat his brides right.”
Marie put one foot forward.
“That’s it, lovie. Down you come. It’s all laid out here, look.”
There was a white cotton negligee on the galley table. Gail led her over to it. “You just slip this on. And don’t let’s hear any more silly talk about can’t.” She held it up against Marie. “Oh, you’re going to look a picture in this, aren’t you?”
She glanced down numbly at it.
“Aren’t you?” Gail Buchannan repeated.
“Yes.”
“Good girl. Now put it on.”
“Where?”
“Here, lovie. Right here.”
Marie turned her back to the gross woman, and began to pull her T-shirt off over her head.
Gail chortled thickly. “Oh, you’re a one, lovie, you really are. This is going to be a chuckle.”
The negligée’s hem barely came below Marie’s buttocks, but if she tried to pull it down any further her breasts would fall out of the top. She had felt cleaner when she was covered in dirt from the jungle.
Still chortling, and giving her little nudges in her back, Gail followed her into the cabin where Len was waiting dressed in an amber towelling robe. A single electric lamp hanging on the ceiling cast a halo of yellow light. Len’s mouth split in a jagged smile as he took in the sight of her.
Gail sank down onto a sturdy stool by the door, puffing in relief. “There now, don’t you worry about me, lovie, I only ever watch.”
Marie thought that perhaps with the sound of the lapping water and the close wooden walls she could pretend it was Karl and the Swithland again.
She couldn’t.
The Ly-cilph had been travelling for over five billion years when it arrived at the galaxy which was home to the Confederation, although at that time it was the dinosaurs which were Earth’s premier life-form. Half of its existence had been spent traversing intergalactic space. It knew how to slip through the wormhole interstices; a creature of energy, the physical structure of the cosmos was no mystery to it. But its nature was to observe and record, so it sped along at a velocity just short of lightspeed, extending its perceptive field around the outcast hydrogen atoms on their aeons-long fall towards the bright, distant star whorls. Each one was unique, an existence to be treasured, extending the knowledge base, its history placed in the transdimensional storage lattice which provided the Ly-cilph with its identity focus. The Ly-cilph was the section of space through which it passed with less disturbance than a neutrino. Like a quantum black hole, it had almost no physical size, yet within was an entire universe. A carefully patterned universe of pure data.
After it arrived at the rim stars it spent millions of years drifting among them, categorizing the life-forms which rose and fell on their planets, indexing the physical parameters of the multitudinous solar systems. It witnessed interstellar empires that bloomed and failed, and planet-bound civilizations that were lost to the final night as their stars cooled to frozen iron. Saint-like cultures and the most bestial savagery; all clicking neatly into place within its infinite interior.
It progressed inwards on a loose line towards the scintillating glow of the galactic core. And in doing so, arrived at the volume of space populated by the Confederation. Lalonde, freshly discovered, and on the edge of the territory, was the first human world it encountered.
The Ly-cilph arrived at the star’s Oort cloud in 2610. After it passed through the band of circling, sleeping comets, occasional laser and microwave emissions impinged on its perception field boundary. They were weak, random fragments of overspill from the communication beams of starships entering orbit above Lalonde.
A preliminary survey showed the Ly-cilph two centres of sentient life in the solar system: Lalonde itself with the human and Tyrathca settlers, and Aethra, the young Edenist habitat in its solitary orbit above Murora.
As always in cases of life discovery, it first performed analytical sweeps of the barren planets. The four inner worlds: sunblasted Calcott and the colossal Gatley with its immense lethal atmosphere, then skipping past Lalonde to review airless Plewis and the icy Mars-like Coum. The five gas giants followed, Murora, Bullus, Achillea, Tol, and distant Puschk with its strange cryochemistry. All of them had their own moon systems and individual milieux requiring examination. The Ly-cilph took fifteen months to classify their composition and environment, then swooped in towards Lalonde.
The search through the jungle took eight hours. Three-quarters of Aberdale’s adult population turned out to help. They found Gwyn Lawes fifteen minutes after Rennison had set below the horizon. Most of him.
Because it was a sayce which had killed him; because the ropes had been taken off his wrists and ankles, and the gag removed from his mouth; because his electromagnetic rifle and all his other possessions were accounted for, everyone accepted it was a natural, if horrible, death.
It was the Ivets who were assigned to dig the grave.
The Udat slid over the surface of Tranquillity’s non-rotating spaceport as though it was running on an invisible wire. A honeycomb of deep docking-bays flashed past below the blue and purple hull; the spherical fuselages of Adamist starships nested inside, glinting dully under the rim floodlights. Meyer watched through the blackhawk’s sensors as a fifty-five-metre-diameter clipper-class starship manoeuvred itself onto a cradle that had risen out of a bay, orange balls of chemical flame spitting out of its vernier nozzles. He could see the ubiquitous intersecting violet and green loops of the Vasilkovsky Line bold across the forward quarter. It touched the cradle, and pistonlike latches engaged, slipping into sockets around the hull. Umbilical gantries swung round, plugging it into the spaceport’s coolant and environmental circuits. The starship’s thermo-dump panels retracted, and the cradle started to descend into the bay.
So much effort just to arrive,Udat observed.
Quiet down, you’ll hurt people’s feelings,meyer told it fondly.
I wish there were more ships like me. Your race should stop clinging to the past. These mechanical ships belong in a museum.
My race, is it? There are human chromosomes in you, don’t forget.
Are you sure?
I think I accessed it in a memory core somewhere. There are in voidhawks.
Oh. Them.
Meyer grinned at the overtone of disparagement. I thought you liked voidhawks.
Some of them are all right. But they think like their captains.
And how do voidhawk captains think?
They don’t like blackhawks. They think we’re trouble.
We have been known.
Only when money is short,Udat said, gently reproachful.
And if there were more blackhawks and fewer Adamist starships, money would be even tighter. I have wages to pay.
At least we’ve paid off the mortgage you took out to buy me.
Yes.and there’s money to save to buy another when you’re gone. But he didn’t let that thought filter out of his mind. Udat was fifty-seven now; seventy-five to eighty was the usual blackhawk lifespan. Meyer wasn’t at all convinced he would want another ship after Udat . But there was a quarter of a century of togetherness to look forward to yet, and money wasn’t such a problem these days. There was only life-support-section maintenance and the four crew members to pay for. He could afford to pick and choose his charters now. Not like the first twenty years. Now those had been wild days. Fortunately the power compressed into the big asymmetric teardrop shape of Udat ’s hull gave them a terrific speed and agility. They had needed it on occasion. Some of the more covert missions had been hazardous in the extreme. Not all their colleagues had returned.
I’d still like more of my own kind to talk to,Udat said.
Do you talk to Tranquillity?