Other decisions—his, among them, a feeling that the frequency of small quakes presaged something—had put them on this slope. And by Drusus’s report, they were all running short on luck. The pans below them now looked entirely ominous, and fog and torrential rain was not good news. The descent after the fugitives was a maze, difficult to navigate among the spires, and the slots in the terraces hanging above their heads and the spires around them had not gotten there by dryland erosion. Rain pouring onto the bare surfaces up there would quickly find the best channels down. Streams of water would come off those cliffs in their own miniature waterfalls. He was bitterly frustrated to be in this predicament.
But frustration meant that they were alive, and still had choices, no matter they had missed the breaking of the Wall, which did not look to be a long process after all.
In his long experience, survival was always preferable to a good view of events.
NO ACCESS TO THE TAP, no contact, no information, nothing to do but sit on his hands and avoid contact with everyone he reasonably wanted to have contact with. At very least, Procyon thought, they could have rushed him off immediately to this meeting with the all-important Mr. Gide and been done with it, but he supposed Mr. Gide wanted to rest.
So he had to avoid contact with his ordinary associates, stay out of his ordinary comfort places, all the while having indigestion from sheer fright…and sit and wait until tomorrow, until Mr. Gide was in the mood.
So he poured himself an uninspired fruit drink, settled down in front of his extravagantly expensive entertainment unit and scanned fourteen channels of Earther-managed news for information that very obviously wasn’t going to be there, not in any degree of detail he wanted.
It was hell, he decided, being at the epicenter of information that the news itself didn’t know—you couldn’t learn a thing beyond what you knew, and you couldn’t get any decent sleep on what you did know.
The ambassador’s arrival—that was covered by cameras as the ambassador had left the ship. The usual trundling machine was gold, however, instead of silver. And it was different beyond that. The blue reflection on its surface seemed to have nothing to do with the lights of dockside, actually something to do with the metal itself, by the way it looked. It seemed to fume with cold.
Interesting effect. Even scary. But not at all informative in what the commentators had to say about it, except that one suggested it was some sort of new material. New materialprobably made customs nervous. But the news didn’t manage an interview with anyone who had real knowledge, no, the news instead interviewed a shopkeeper down on Lucid, a shoemaker who thought the arrival was a strong signal to the government, a threat to get Concord to abandon the trade agreement with Orb.
Well, was it possibly that? Procyon wasn’t convinced. The Orb agreement might be a hot topic with the import-export offices and the shops that dealt with goods. But the merchants saw every political sneeze lately as somehow part of a plot involving Orb, and the gullible news agency had either fallen into it, or took their orders from someone with money in those ventures. As if the Orb-Concord situation was a reason for an Earth mission of some kind to come all this way with a special ship. He didn’t think so.
But was he a reason? He didn’t think that, either.
Concord’s merchants, the expert said, might go to Apex for backing if Earth tried to squelch that agreement with Orb. But Earth wouldn’t give a hiccup. A merchant protest would only annoy the governor.
And ultimately Concord’s trade with Orb would just burrow itself new accesses and get around whatever regulations existed, and the only ones to profit would be smugglers—who, if they got too wealthy, wouldn’t stick at piracy, either, when authorities tried to shut them down. Hadn’t they, at the end of the last Isolation? He’d read his history. That could be tolerably serious, given enough heat under the situation.
But if it was trade Earth came here to talk about, the ambassador didn’t need to talk to a Project tap and annoy the Apex Council for starters. Even a junior tap could figure that out. Whatever Earth did want here wasn’t to be found in a shopkeeper’s worries. It was all in one confused junior tap and the mistake he’d made going to a few meetings.
He’d like nothing more than to go for a drink down at La Lune and call in his friends, who roundly loved an intellectual debate, to hear theiropinion on the ambassador’s mission here, and to ease the willies dancing in his stomach. But he was directly ordered not to do that.
The news, he decided, was hopeless. The alternatives he could find were chat, fashion, drippy drama, and, at last, at the very last, an intersectional ball game.
Which proved a no-contest, a 118–50 disappointment by the last quarter. He gave up on the massacre in disgust.
Last resort, he rented a highly recommended drama off the net, which engaged his attention no better than the ball game. Or he wasn’t paying adequate attention tonight. He flatly forgot to watch the ending while he was getting himself an early supper—with cake and berries for dessert—and he didn’t actually care when he got back and found the drama was over. He ate his dinner to the accompaniment of an astronomical documentary on the Betelgeuse anomaly, took things back to the kitchen, tidied up, and put the remnant of the cake back in the fridge.
It balked. The red light went on, and blinked, and it passed the cake back out.
That did it. He slammed his hand against the fridge—which set off his own intrusion alarm.
“Damn! Sam, kill that thing! Kill it! Alarm off!”
“Confirmation?” Sam asked.
He flung the closet door open to provide a finger-scan, to shutthe alarm down, then tapped in to the agency—not an alarm company: ProjectSecurity—and informed them he’d set it off himself, like a fool.
After that he had a drink, two drinks, a third, and went upstairs, hours early to bed.
Long hiatus, brute alcohol-induced unconsciousness.
Then the burglar alarm sounded again and scared him out of the bedclothes, barefoot and confused, on his knees in bed. “Damn!” he shouted at the idiot alarm, and staggered out of bed, facing the red glowing display of the clock.
“Damn!” he said to the situation in general. “Sam?” He stormed down the stairs in full dark to deal with the malfunction.
Folds of cloth and a slim body blocked his way midstairs. He yelped, backed up a step and tried to convince his confused body to raise a proper self-defense.
“Procyon?”
Flicker of blue and gold lightnings grew on a face he’d seen transit from sister to someone half a stranger. His sister. Here. In the dark. Wrapped in enveloping black cloth that now acquired constellations of stars.
Fright only half ebbed. He’d yelped like a five-year-old and backed up his own stairs rather than use his hours of defense classes. That was vastly stupid.
Maybe she’d just smelled right. Maybe some hindbrain, primitive sense hadn’t let him hit her.
Who didn’t belong here. Who wasn’t supposed to be here. Who could get him in a lot of difficulty.
And the damned alarm was still going off. Sam was asking, brilliant question, “Is there a problem?”
“Wait,” he told Ardath, and slipped past her on the stairs to get down to the kitchen, where the physical cutoff was, apart from Sam’s systems. “Sam,” he said, at Sam’s third or fourth inquiry, “shut up.”
Then he tapped in to tell government security he was alive and well. “Same mistake,” he said, acutely aware he wasn’t supposed to be seeing friends and family and knowing the whole apartment was surely monitored. But he couldn’t come out with the truth. Daren’t. For Ardath’s sake. “Sorry.”