Roland Frampton gave him an unhappy look. “Sure, Joshua, I appreciate that.”
They shook on it and started to work out details.
Kelly Tirrel arrived twenty minutes later, dropped her bag on the carpet, and sat down with an exaggerated sigh. She called a waitress over and ordered a coffee, then gave Joshua a perfunctory kiss.
“Have you got your contract?” she asked.
“We’re working on it.” He gave the bar a quick scan. Helen Vanham wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“Good for you. God what a day! My editor’s been having kittens.”
“Ione caught you all on the hop, did she?” Barrington Grier asked.
“And then some,” Kelly admitted. “I’ve been researching for the last fifteen hours without a break, going through the Saldana family history. We’re putting together an hour-long documentary for tonight. Those royals are one bunch of weird people.”
“Are you going to present it?” Joshua asked.
“No chance. Kirstie McShane got it. Bitch. She’s sleeping with the current affairs editor, you know, that’s why. I’ll probably wind up as fashion correspondent or something. If only we’d had some advance warning, I could have prepared, found an angle.”
“Ione wasn’t sure about the timing herself,” he said. “She’s only been thinking about public appearances for the last fortnight.”
There was a murderous silence as Kelly’s head slowly turned to focus on Joshua. “What?”
“Er . . .” He felt as though he’d suddenly been dumped into free fall.
“You know her? You’ve known who she is?”
“Well, sort of, in a way, I suppose, yes. She did mention it.”
Kelly stood up fast, the motion nearly toppling her chair. “Mention it! You SHIT, Joshua Calvert! Ione Saldana is the biggest story to hit the whole Confederation for three years, and you KNEW about it, and you didn’t tell me! You selfish, egotistical, mean-minded, xenoc-buggering bastard! I was sleeping with you, I cared . . .” She clamped her mouth shut and snatched her bag up. “Didn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Of course. It was . . .” He accessed his neural nanonics’ thesaurus file. “Stupendous?”
“Bastard!” She took two paces towards the door then turned round. “And you’re shit-useless in bed, too,” she shouted.
Everyone in Harkey’s Bar was staring at him. He could see a lot of grins forming. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a resigned sigh. “Women.” He swivelled round in his chair to face Roland Frampton. “About the insurance rates . . .”
The cavern wasn’t like anything Joshua had seen in Tranquillity before. It was roughly hemispherical, about twenty metres across, with the usual level white polyp floor. But the walls’ regularity was broken up by organic protuberances, great cauliflower growths that quivered occasionally as he watched; there were also the tight doughnuts of sphincter muscles. Equipment cabinets, with a medical look, were fused into the polyp; as though they were being extruded, or osmotically absorbed. He couldn’t tell which.
The whole place was so biological. It made him want to squirm.
“What is it?” he asked Ione.
“A clone womb centre.” She pointed to one of the sphincters. “We gestate the servitor housechimps in these ones. All of the habitat’s servitors are sexless, you see, they don’t mate. So Tranquillity has to grow them. We’ve got several varieties of chimps, and the serjeants, of course, then there are some specialist constructs for things like tract repair and light-tube maintenance. There are forty-three separate species in all.”
“Ah. Good.”
“The wombs are plumbed directly into the nutrient ducts, there’s very little hardware needed.”
“Right.”
“I was gestated in here.”
Joshua’s nose wrinkled up. He didn’t like to think about it.
Ione walked over to a waist-high, steel-grey equipment stack standing on the floor. Green and amber LEDs winked at her. There was a cylindrical zero-tau pod recessed into the top, twenty centimetres long, ten wide; its surface resembled a badly tarnished mirror. She used her affinity to load an order into the stack’s bitek processors, and the pod hinged open.
Joshua watched silently as she placed the little sustentator globe inside. His son. Part of him wanted to put a stop to this right now, to have the child born properly, to know him, watch him grow up.
“It is customary to name the child now,” Ione said. “If you want to.”
“Marcus.” His father’s name. He didn’t even have to think about that.
Her sapphire eyes were damp, reflecting the soft pearl light from the electrophorescent strips in the ceiling. “Of course. Marcus Saldana it is, then.”
Joshua’s mouth opened to protest. “Thank you,” he said meekly.
The pod closed and the surface turned black. It didn’t look solid, more like a fissure which had opened into space.
He stared at it for a long time. You just can’t say no to Ione.
She slipped her arm through his and steered him out of the clone womb centre into the corridor outside. “How’s the Lady Macbeth coming along?”
“Not so bad. The Confederation Astronautics Board inspectors have cleared our systems integration. We’re starting to reassemble the hull now, it should be finished in another three days. One final inspection for the spaceworthiness certificate, and we’re away. I’ve got a contract with Roland Frampton to collect some cargo from Rosenheim.”
“That’s good news. So I’ve got you to myself for another four nights.”
He pulled her a bit closer. “Yeah, if you can fit me in between engagements.”
“Oh, I think I might manage to grant you a couple of hours. I’ve got a charity dinner tonight, but I’ll be finished before eleven. Promise.”
“Great. You’ve done beautifully, Ione, really, you just blew them away. They love you out there.”
“And nobody’s packed up and left yet, none of the major companies, nor the plutocrats. That’s my real success.”
“It was that speech you made. Jesus, if there were elections tomorrow you’d be president.”
They reached the tube carriage waiting in the little station. Two serjeants stood aside as the door opened.
Joshua looked at them, then looked into the ten-seater carriage. “Can they wait out here?” he asked innocently.
“Why?”
He leered.
She clung to him tightly afterwards, trembling slightly, their bodies hot and sweaty. He was sitting right on the edge of one of the seats, with her as the clinging vine, legs bent up behind his back. The carriage’s air-conditioning fans made a loud whirring sound as they recycled the unusually humid air.