Melissa Scott: Mighty Good Road

Cold thoughts make hot choices: the Iadaran proverb made her grimace, and push her drink away unfinished. She touched the orderpad a final time, calling up and verifying the list of charges, and stood slowly, the carryall a sudden weight on her shoulder. Maybe we shouldn’t bid on the job after all, she thought, but the outrageousness of that idea steadied her. If half of what Xiang had said was true, it would be an interesting problem, and interesting problems usually brought healthy fees.

She walked a little further down the concourse, barely seeing the brightly-dressed crowd, and turned after a few moments into the bow of an observation bubble. It was filled with tourists, perhaps half of them ‘pointers, the rest planetsiders, all exclaiming and hanging back from the front of the bubble, where floor and walls alike were made of clear armorglass. Heikki ignored them, and made her way silently through the crowd until she could rest her hands against the cool surface of the glass. The bubble did not look out into space—not even the architects of Exchange Point Four, the most structurally ambitious of the stations, would have dared so to compromise an exchange point’s integrity—but onto the immensity of the Main Concourse. Directly opposite, several hundred meters away, the concourse wall ran with color: the most imposing lightfall in the Loop, responding instantly to every sound made on the concourse below, the noises translated to light that blended in a display more gorgeous than the most active aurorae.

Heikki stared into the lightfall, letting her mind go blank. The solid wall cut off the sounds from below, but she had been on EP1 often enough to guess at some of it. The rippling background light, yellow and oranges spiked now and then with blossoms of acid green, was the sound of human voices, the ‘pointer linguaform spiced now and again with pitched languages and the drug-deepened voices of FTLships’ crews. Another, more brightly colored pattern, deeper greens and blues with a flush of lavender, moved in counterpoint across the lighter background: music, Heikki thought, and craned her neck until she found the musicians, a group of four seated just outside an expensive-looking restaurant.

The lightfall was a famous landmark, the one thing every visitor, even those who had only an hour or two between trains, had to say she’d seen. It was also, Heikki thought, one of the very few famous sights that lived up to its reputation. She edged back a little, letting others get between her and the open wall, watching the crowd as well as the spilling light. They were much the same as any group of travellers, the subtly-shaded, soberly-tailored clothing and brilliant facepaint of ‘pointer fashion mixing with the looser, lighter styles that prevailed planetside. There were even a pair of neo-barbs, their elaborate crystal-and-copper jewelry at odds with their coarse homespun trousers and fraying tunics. They were cleaner and younger than most of their kind, but the rest of the crowd gave them a wide berth. They edged forward together to stare wordlessly at the technological marvel, then left as silently as they had appeared.

Heikki followed them a few minutes later, retracing her steps along the crowded upper corridor, then down the secondary stairs that led to the slidewalk and the station arch. It was still a little more than an hour before the train could leave—it took several hours for power to build up again in the cells, and for the crystals to return to the resting state—and she hesitated for a moment at the end of the slidewalk, wondering if she really wanted to spend that time shut into the train’s tiny capsule. She shrugged to herself, and reached into her belt for the disk that was her ticket. There was nothing else to do, unless she wanted another drink, and there wasn’t time for that. Sighing, she resettled the carryall, and shouldered through the crowd to the accessway that led to platform three.

The ticket machine whirred gently to itself as she inserted the disk, and then the padded barrier swung back. The disk did not reappear. Heikki sighed again, and touched the button that would route the costs to her tax file, then stepped through the opening. A moment later, the barrier fell back into place with a dull thud.

The platform was crowded, men and women—predominatly ‘pointers—milling back and forth between the string of capsules and the dozens of vendors, mechanical and human, that were crammed into the arches against the stationside wall. Most were tape-and-game dispensers, but Heikki counted four different newsservice kiosks and at least three preprinted bookstores, as well as a brightly lit Instapress. All were busy: the actual act of travelling between Exchange Points might be virtually instantaneous, but the preparations for each translation could take several hours while the crystals relaxed, the capacitors regenerated, and cargo and passengers were moved on and off the train. A multi-Point trip, one between two stations not directly connected, could take six or seven hours; if one were travelling from the Loop—from any of the Exchange Points—into its parent planetary system, the trip could take days. Even with the new generation of FSL taxis, “fast sub light” remained something of an oxymoron. It was no wonder that the multi-system businesses tended to concentrate management and sales functions in the Loop, and leave only production facilities planetside. That shift of power was the real reason for the Retroceders’ popularity, Heikki thought, and it’s not that unreasonable. Of course they, the planetsiders, want back the power they lost— but you can’t reverse four generations of change.

Lights flashed overhead, and a chime sounded, signalling that the capsules were open for boarding. There was a general rush for the train. Heikki lifted her eyebrows as an acrimonious voice rose over the general noise of voices—it belonged to a thin woman in a planetsider’s loose robe and the Retroceders’ tripleR pin, haranguing strangers in an unfamiliar linguaform—and chose a capsule as far from the stranger as possible. The door swung open under her touch, and she slung the carryall into the empty compartment. The capsule rocked a little as she climbed aboard, settling under her weight, then steadied as she shut the door behind her. With any luck, she thought, lowering herself into the forward-facing seat, she wouldn’t have to share the capsule.

Automatically, she tucked the carryall into the space beside the seat, suddenly aware of the way the capsule swayed in the light lifting field. The high-bowed boats that crisscrossed Lowlands’ silty harbor moved just like that at anchor…. She pushed the thought away, and reached back into the carryall for a workboard. Scowling to herself, she began to scribble down the information Xiang and Engels had given her, making notes for Santerese. After a moment, she leaned back, studying the faintly glowing screen. The locator beam failed, she thought, and then the crash beacon. The odds against that being accidental—she cut off that thought with a frown. No, it was still possible that it was merely an accident—planetsiders, especially in the Precincts, were notorious for running without working safeties, just to save a few poa—but still, a double failure like that sounded unpleasantly like deliberate sabotage. She and Santerese had dealt with a couple of jobs that turned out to be sabotage, and neither had been easy.

The sound of a chime put an end to those thoughts. Automatically, she returned the board to its place in the padded carryall, then drew the safety webbing across her body. She settled herself more comfortably against the cushions, feeling a familiar tension tightening her muscles, and willed herself to relax. Santerese claimed blithely that she was never worried before a train ride; Heikki, who had seen her partner go pale each time the trains lurched into motion, was only half grateful for the lie. Sten Djuro, the firm’s third member, claimed that the first trip through the open warp left its print in every fiber of the body, and that the tension one felt wasn’t fear, but a sort of physical memory of passage through the unreality of the warp. Well, he should know, Heikki thought—Djuro had been an engineer-crewman on FTLships before he left that for the asteroids and then for salvage, and knew more about the theories of the Papaefthmyiou-Devise Engine than either of the others—but the explanation wasn’t particularly helpful.