Peter Hamilton: Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.

Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do. Stoke can put its name to this.”

Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.

“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.

Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.

“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”

Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.

All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.

He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie were curtailed.

The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how quickly he would come back.

“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.

“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”

“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”

He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I do care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”

She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned. He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.

“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”

Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there , encouraging and praising.

“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”

“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”

She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.

Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.

Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth . Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac ’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.

They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.

Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth ’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.