Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

"You're as bad as Alan. A girl like that and you is never going to happen."

"Maybe if I left a big tip..."

"Don't even think it." Lawrence picked up his glass and took a sip. The beer was so cold it disguised any taste. "So how is Alan doing?"

"One slap on the face, two cocktails thrown at him, and he's been told to piss off a few times as well," Vinnie said happily. "We're thinking of running a book on it."

"Put me down for a day five years hence." Lawrence saw Roselyn moving across the lounge and waved. She was in a green dress that had a big oval patch open at the front to show off her navel. Whatever she wore, she always looked sensational. It was just a knack she had. But as usual it made Lawrence terribly self-conscious about his own clothes. He worried that his bronze-shimmer jacket would look awfully crass beside her.

Roselyn arrived at the bar at the same time Alan staggered in from the other side. A long strip of pink toilet paper was tucked into the back of his trousers. Half of the lounge clientele were mesmerized by this flimsy tail sliding along the floor behind him.

"Damnit," Alan whined. "They're all playing hard to get."

"Who are?" Roselyn asked.

"All the babes." Alan glanced around accusingly at his friends. "Did you guys warn them?"

Nigel bent over, his face radiating martyred dismay, and tugged the toilet paper free. "We didn't have to."

"What?" Alan did a double take at the paper. "Oh, thanks. It must have got stuck in my cleft. My round." He clicked his fingers loudly at the barmaid. "Oi, how about some service?"

"I have some news," Lawrence told Roselyn.

She grinned. "Me too."

"You first."

"No, you."

They both laughed.

"Ladies first," Lawrence said.

"I'm going to throw up," Alan muttered.

"Okay." Roselyn fished round in her small handbag and produced a memory chip. "I'm late because I was downloading this from the Eilean's communication AS; it's just arrived in orbit. Judith sent me another series."

Lawrence gagged in wonder. He took the chip from her hands with a great deal of reverence. "Series six?" he asked.

"Uh-huh." She accepted a margarita from John and carefully wiped the salt from a section of the rim. "The last one."

"Hellfire. The final episode. I wonder if they get home."

Roselyn cocked an eyebrow demurely. "Only one way to find out. Oh, and there was some stuff from the fan site, too. Half a dozen series-related i-games, I think, and a whole load of generated graphic follow-ons."

"Fantastic."

"Damn." Alan grinned at Roselyn. "This is a moment like that stunt your God does. What is it? Oh yeah, he turns up again or something."

"The Second Coming of The Christ. A time of revelation throughout the universe."

"That's the one." Alan raised his beer glass. "Here's to Lawrence finally finding out what happened to a bunch of jerkoff actors when they asked for a pay raise in series seven."

"There was a proper story arc," Lawrence protested. Too late he realized the fatal mistake of letting Alan know you cared about something.

"Whoo ho! I was right, it's a revelation! Please, Lawrence, do us all a big favor and get a life."

"Alan?" Roselyn asked in a voice tinged with curiosity. "Do you know that girl?"

"Which one?'

"Over there, in the blue top."

"Her?" His glass slopped about in the girl's general direction as he laughed his short dirty laugh. "Damn, see what you mean, two puppies wrestling in a blue sack."

Roselyn's face remained serene. "Yes. Her."

"Never seen her before in my life, Your Honor. And I would definitely remember." He drained the last of his beer and burped. Fortunately, he'd ordered too many, so there was a fresh glass he could lift straight off the bar.

Over Alan's head, Lawrence gave Vinnie a frantic grimace and mouthed: "When did he start?"

Vinnie shrugged helplessly.

"She's been looking at you," Roselyn said.

"Fuck! Really?" Alan laughed again and poked Richard in the chest. "I told you. It's statistics." He straightened himself up and walked over to the girl. There was a momentary flash of panic on her face when she saw him approach.

"Remind me never to annoy you," Nigel told Roselyn.

Lawrence was wincing as he followed Alan's progress. "I'm not sure I can watch this. The pain level's too high."

"So what did you want to tell me?" Roselyn asked.

"Oh, yes." The joy returned to Lawrence's life. He pocketed the memory chip. "I got a letter from Templeton University today."

Roselyn's gaze was one of pure admiration as he explained about his preliminary acceptance and the skiing trip. "I knew you could do it, Lawrence," she murmured quietly. "Well done." She kissed him just below his ear.

"What about your mother?" he asked apprehensively. "Do you think she'll let you come to Orchy with me?"

"You leave her to me."

His hands went around her, pressing into the small of her back. "Sounds good to me." They kissed. He could taste the sharp tang of the margarita on her lips.

"Er, guys, I think we should get over there," Vinnie said.

Alan was so engrossed with making obscene small talk to the girl in the blue top that he hadn't noticed her boyfriend standing behind him.

"No way." John was shaking his head. "Look at the effing size of him!"

"Bigger they are, the harder they fall," Rob declared. He was almost as drunk as Alan.

"As long as he falls on you, not me," Nigel said.

"He's our friend," Lawrence said. Somehow he couldn't summon up much conviction. The boyfriend had a couple of friends with him, too.

"Just tell the bar staff," Roselyn said urgently. "The bouncers will sort it out."

"Too late," Vinnie groaned.

Alan had finally noticed the boyfriend.

They looked on incredulously as their friend employed his own never-fail method of getting out of sticky situations by telling the one about the parrot and the starship stewardess.

"...the airlock slammed shut, and as they were tumbling through interstellar space the bloke turned to the parrot and said, 'Pretty ballsy for a guy with no spacesuit'." Alan giggled hysterically at the punch line.

The boyfriend, it turned out, didn't have much of a sense of humor.

Lawrence finally got home at half past three in the morning, after his father and the family lawyer bailed him out from the police station.

Amethi's turbulent climate was changing again, emerging from its snowfall phase. Over the last few years, billions of tons of water had been liberated from Barclay's Glacier as the meltoff accelerated. The contribution it made to atmospheric pressure and density was small, but effective. Thicker and heavier, the planet's envelope of gas now retained more heat than before. Overall temperature was up by a couple of degrees. On the side of the planet away from the glacier, the snow was giving way to rain. Templeton even had weeks of broken cloud cover as the winds slowly strengthened.

A lot of people saw that as a bad omen, predicting the Wakening would end in hurricanes ripping the domes apart. The official line was that increased air speed was a natural and inevitable part of acquiring a normal weather pattern. There might be a few peaks on the graph along the way, but it would level out in the end.

Whether you believed that or not, the clearer skies did mean that passenger jets were returning to commercial service after their near-hiatus of the preceding years. Lawrence and Roselyn caught the morning flight out from Templeton, taking fifteen hours to reach Oxendale. One day, Oxendale would be the major city on a long chain of islands in the middle of the ocean. For the moment, it was sitting on the top of a massive, flat-topped mountain, the largest in a ridge of similar mountains rising out from a slushy saltwater quagmire.