Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

They didn’t make it to the bedroom. Joshua got her dress off just inside the door, and in return Ione tugged at his ship-suit seal so hard it broke. The first time was on one of the alcove tables, after that they used the ornate iron stair railings for support, then it was rolling around on the apricot moss carpet.

The bed did get used eventually, after a shower and a bottle of champagne. Hours later, Joshua knew he’d missed the party in Harkey’s Bar, and didn’t much care. Outside the window the light filtering through the water had faded to a dusky green, small orange and yellow fish were looking in at him.

Ione was sitting cross-legged on the rubbery transparent sheet with her back resting against some of the silk cushions. The sailu was snuggled up in her hand as she fed it with the crinkled red and green leaves of a lollo lettuce. It munched them daintily, gazing up at her.

Isn’t he adorable?she said happily.

The sailu genus exhibit a great many anthropomorphic traits which endear them to humans.

I bet you’d be nicer if it wasn’t Joshua who brought him.

Removing the sailu from its home planet is not only in complete contravention of the planetary statutes, it is also a direct personal insult to the Emperor himself. Joshua has put you in an invidious position. A typically thoughtless action on his part.

I won’t tell the Emperor if you won’t.

I was not proposing to tell the Emperor, nor even the Japanese Imperium’s ambassador.

That old fart.

Ione, please, Ambassador Ng is a very senior diplomat. His appointment here is a mark of the Emperor’s respect towards you.

I know.she tickled the sailu under its tiny chin. face and body were both flattish ovals, joined by a short neck. Its legs curved slowly, pressing the torso against her finger.

“I’m going to call him Augustine,” she announced. “That’s a noble name.”

“Great,” Joshua said. He leant over to the side of the bed and pulled the champagne bottle out of its ice bucket. “Flat,” he said, after he tipped some into his glass.

“Proves you have staying power,” she said coyly.

He reached for her left breast, smiling.

“No, don’t,” she moved out of the way. “Augustine’s still feeding. You’ll upset him.”

He lay back, disgruntled.

“Joshua, how long are you staying this time?”

“Couple of weeks. I need to get a contract with Roland Frampton sorted out. Distribution, not a charter. We’re going for a Norfolk run, Ione. We raised a lot of capital on some of our contracts; put that together with what I had left over from scavenging, and we’ll have enough for a cargo of Norfolk Tears. Imagine that! A hold full of the stuff.”

“Really? That’s wonderful, Joshua.”

“Yeah, if I can swing it. Distribution isn’t the problem. Acquisition is. I’ve been talking to some of the other captains. Those Norfolk roseyard-association merchants are tough nuts to crack. They won’t allow a futures market, which is pretty smart of them actually. It would be dominated by offworld finance houses. You have to show up with a ship and the cash, and even then it’s not a certainty you’ll get any bottles. You need a pretty reliable contact in the trade.”

“But you’ve never been there, you don’t have any contacts.”

“I know. First-time captains need a cargo to sell, a part-exchange deal. You’ve got to have something the merchants can’t do without, that way you can get a foot in the door.”

“What sort of cargo?”

“Ah, now that’s the real problem. Norfolk is constitutionally a pastoral world, there’s hardly any high technology they’ll allow you to import. Most captains take cordon bleu food, or works of antique art, fancy fabrics, stuff like that.”

Ione put Augustine down carefully on the other side of the silk pillows, and rolled onto her side facing him. “But you’ve got something else, haven’t you? I know that tone, Joshua Calvert. You’re feeling smug.”

He smiled up at the ceiling. “I was thinking about it: something essential, and new, but not synthetic. Something all those Stone Age towns and farms are going to want.”

“Which is?”

“Wood.”

“You’re kidding? Wood as in timber?”

“Yeah.”

“But they have wood on Norfolk. It’s heavily forested.”

“I know. That’s the beauty of it, they use it for everything. I’ve studied some sensevise recordings of the place; they make their buildings with it, their bridges, their boats, Jesus they even make carts out of it. Carpentry is a major industry there. But what I’m going to take them is a hard wood, and I mean really hard, like metal. They can use it in their furniture, or for their tool handles, their windmill cogs even, anything that’s used every day, or rots or wears out. It’s not high technology, yet it’ll be a real cost-effective upgrade. That ought to get me in with the merchants.”

“Hauling wood across interstellar space!” She shook her head in amazement. Only Joshua could come up with an idea so wonderfully crazy.

“Yep, Lady Mac should be able to carry almost a thousand tonnes if we really pack the stuff in.”

“What sort of wood?”

“I checked in a botanical reference library file when I was in the New California system. The hardest known wood in the Confederation is mayope, it comes from a new colony planet called Lalonde.”

Oenone ’s flyer was a flattened egg-shape, eleven metres long, with a fuselage that gleamed like purple chrome. It was built by the Brasov Dynamics company on Kulu, who had been heavily involved with the Kulu Corporation (owned by the Crown) in pioneering the ion-field technology which had sent panic waves through the rest of the Confederation’s astroengineering companies. Spaceplanes were on their way out, and Kulu was using its technological prowess to devastating political effect, granting preferential licence production to the companies of allied star systems.

Standard ion thrusters lifted it out of Oenone ’s little hangar and pushed it into an elliptical orbit that grazed Atlantis’s upper atmosphere. When the first wisps of molecular fog began to thicken outside the fuselage, Oxley activated the coherent magnetic field. The flyer was immediately surrounded by a bubble of golden haze, moderating the flow of gas streaking around the fuselage. Oxley used the flux lines to grab at the mesosphere, braking the flyer’s velocity, and they dropped in a steep curve towards the ocean far below.

Syrinx settled back in her deeply cushioned seat in the cabin along with Ruben, Tula, and the newest member of the crew, Serina, a crew toroid generalist who had replaced Chi. All of them were gazing keenly out of the single curving transparency around the front of the cabin. The flyer had been customized by an industrial station at Jupiter, replacing Brasov’s original silicon flight-control circuits with a bitek processor array; but the image from the sensors had a poor resolution compared to Oenone ’s sensor blisters. Eyes were almost as good.

There was absolutely no way of judging scale, no reference points. Unless she consulted the flyer’s processors, Syrinx didn’t know what their altitude was. The ocean rolled past below, seemingly without end.

After forty minutes Pernik Island appeared on the horizon. It was a circle of verdant green that was so obviously vegetation. The islands which Edenists had used to colonize Atlantis were a variant of habitat bitek. They were circular disks, two kilometres in diameter when they matured, made from polyp that was foamed like a sponge for buoyancy. A kilometre-wide park straddled the centre, with five accommodation towers spaced equidistantly around it, along with a host of civic buildings and light industry domes. The outer edge bristled with floating quays for the boats.