‘Good heavens, a sort of Disneyland in orbit, that kind of thing?’
‘Not quite, it’s rather more exclusive than that. They have casinos, nightclubs, if anything it’s rather like a giant cabana club.’
‘Sounds ghastly,’ Jason Whitehurst muttered.
‘And there’s zero gee, as well,’ Charlotte said.
‘From what I’ve been given to understand, it makes people sick.’
‘Not much nowadays, the medical people have got the anti-nausea drugs worked out fairly well. They had to. Sports form a big part of the attraction. There are a lot of games that you can play in the various low gee terraces. Tennis, badminton, squash, handball; they’re all a lot of fun up there. The ball travels completely differently, you have to develop a whole new set of reflexes to cope. And then there’s the fall surfing, that’s worth the price of the ticket alone. You must have seen it on the channels.’
Jason Whitehurst dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin. ‘Yes. Well that settles it, I certainly won’t be going. I’m far too old to learn anything new.’
‘Oh, come on, Father. It sounds terrific.’
‘Maybe for your sixteenth birthday.’
‘Great!’
‘I said maybe.’ Jason sat back as the waiter removed his plate. ‘You obviously enjoyed yourself up there, my dear?’
‘Yes. I’d like to go back.’
Jason Whitehurst pulled thoughtfully at his beard as he looked at her. ‘How long were you up there for?’
‘Ten days.’
‘I see. And then straight from the spaceport to the Newfields ball. You were in a bit of a rush, weren’t you?’
Charlotte didn’t like the way he was asking her questions, it wasn’t polite conversation-making any more. ‘I support the Newfields charity, it means a lot to me.’
‘Dead boring, though,’ Fabian said. ‘Except when we were dancing,’ he added hurriedly.
‘Thank you,’ Charlotte smiled at him.
‘Do you still want to come swimming?’
It was the third time he’d asked. Charlotte had finally twigged why he was so persistent: swimming meant bikinis. Devious old Fabian. ‘I certainly do, yes.’
‘Not until you’ve digested your lunch,’ Jason Whitehurst said. ‘Why don’t you show Charlotte round the old Colonel first.’
The gondola was a hundred metres long, thirty wide, with two decks containing all the cabins, lounges, and staff quarters. Fabian led her down the central corridors, opening various doors. The flight centre was at the front of the lower deck, a big room with panoramic windows; three bored officers monitored the airship’s systems on five horseshoe consoles. Fabian introduced her to them, then they went up into the main hull.
‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Fabian said as they climbed a short flight of stairs at the rear of the gondola, right above the dining-room they’d had lunch in.
The stairs came out on to a narrow composite walkway with a rail at waist height, illuminated by a row of biolum strips. Charlotte was standing in a three-metre gap between a spherical helium balloon and the solar cell envelope. Long girders made from improbably thin monolattice carbon struts curved away on both sides, disappearing into darkness. The walkway was a narrow thread of light which stretched out into infinity fore and aft.
She shivered from the cool air. The gap seemed to suck sound away.
Fabian started walking towards the stern. ‘There are nine of these big spherical gasbags,’ he said, pointing up, ‘and two smaller ones in the conical sections at both ends.’
Charlotte pressed her hand against the blue-grey roof of plastic. It felt tacky, slightly cooler than the surrounding air.
‘Then there’s these ten doughnut-shaped ones spaced between the spheres, so we don’t waste any volume,’ Fabian continued. They were underneath a deep curving valley where the spherical gasbag pressed up against a doughnut, taut wires securing both of them to the monolattice spars.
Charlotte let him guide her, not really listening to the details of what she was seeing. Fabian found a walkway leading off at right angles to the main one. It began to curve upwards. She was soon climbing a ladder to another walkway halfway up the side of the fuselage.
‘I’m sorry about the way the staff treated you,’ Fabian said. ‘It was jolly rude.’
Charlotte watched him flip the hair out of his eyes. She hadn’t realized he’d noticed the chill of the waiters as they served her at lunch, not many did. ‘They don’t count,’ she said.
He considered this. ‘Oh. Does it happen to you a lot?’
‘Sometimes.’
There were more turns, another flight of stairs. They arrived at a doorway. Charlotte didn’t have a clue where they were any more, except the unending buzz of the fans was slightly louder.
‘Here we are,’ Fabian said happily, and showed his card to the lock.
Charlotte looked round as biolum strips covered in protective grilles came on. The room had an industrial feel to it; a gloomy high ceiling, the walls covered in big thermal insulation panels. It had housed some heavy machinery in the past; the mountings were still there, jutting out of the walls, two rows of thick pipes rose out of the floor like stumpy chimneys, capped by metal plates, a spiderweb of empty cable ducts arched around the door. But it was a teenager’s den now. A rich teenager. There were flatscreens screwed to the walls, several hardware terminals and display cubes on old tables, piles of cushions, a music deck, a couple of electric guitars, large speakers, clothes scattered round, empty boxes, and ten large tanks full of tropical fish.
‘This chamber used to hold the MHD units,’ Fabian said. ‘When it was an ordinary passenger ship on the Pacific run the Colonel Maitland burnt hydrogen for power. The solar cell envelope doesn’t catch enough energy to power the fans, you see. But when Father had it refitted, we switched the giga-conductor cells. Saves an awful lot of weight.’
‘So where does the power come from now?’ she asked.
Fabian fell back into one of the beanbags, hands behind his head, beaming. ‘The Gulfstream has extra cells fitted, they charge up from the industrial grid every time it lands, then it transfers the electricity when it gets back.’
‘So this is where you hang out, is it?’ She peered at one of the fish tanks, admiring the vivid rainbow patterns on the guppies, suspecting genetic engineering featured prominently in their heritage.
‘Yep.’
‘Doing what, exactly?’
‘I’ll show you.’ Fabian jumped up, limbs jerking erratically, as though he was operated by wires. He tugged his T-shirt off. ‘This is really the most scorching game on the market. I love this. I’m good at it, too. Really good.’
She frowned, slightly bemused as he started to delve through a pile of junk. He pulled on a sleeveless shirt that was stained and torn, then started to clip on what looked like body armour. A metal breastplate painted in jungle camouflage; it had a small spotlight that stood above his left shoulder on a stalk.
‘That screen,’ Fabian told her, urgently. ‘Watch that one.’ He was typing quickly on a complicated-looking terminal. ‘Please, Charlotte.’
‘Sure.’ Your daddy’s paying for it, after all. She saw he had acquired a GI helmet with a small radio mike hanging down. He picked up a bulky gun, some sort of cross between a shotgun and a semi-automatic rifle, and stood in the centre of a circular black mat.
There was something weirdly familiar about the costume. Then the theatre-sized flatscreen on the rear wall lit up.
A cramped room illuminated by dull red lighting, metal lockers forming walls and narrow aisles. Figures frozen in an alert pose, all of them holding the same kind of rifle as Fabian, all looking up at the ceiling with expressions of worry and concern. Charlotte recognized the woman in the centre: Sigourney Weaver. ‘I know this,’ she said. ‘It’s from Aliens.’
Fabian laughed. He was abruptly engulfed by a two-metre bubble of holographic light, a shadowless pearl haze. Faint coloured lines flickered
around him, an exoskeleton drawn in blue, as though he had been cocooned by a computer graphics display.
The scene on the flatscreen came alive. And there was Fabian, one of the space marines, firing his gun wildly as the aliens crashed down through the command centre’s roof. He had obviously perfected his chosen role, screaming obscenities, blasting the creatures apart in eruptions of green and yellow gore, covering the retreat back to the medical centre. Then one of the aliens punched up through the floor at his feet, and he went down firing defiantly until a black skeletal hand clamped over his face, dragging him to oblivion. A last terrified scream and he was gone.
Charlotte laughed delightedly, clapping and whistling. ‘Encore!’ She didn’t have to fake it. Almost all of her patrons tried to impress her, showing off their sophisticated art collections or delicate antiques, lecturing her extensively on every piece, demonstrating how cultured and refined they were, always hoping for an admiration which wasn’t entirely bought. No one had ever tried to woo her with anything remotely like this before, not simple enjoyment. It was all so gloriously childish. She couldn’t help wondering how she would look up there on the big screen.
Fabian clambered back to his feet, and slung the chunky rifle over his shoulder. His face split with a rich happy smile. ‘See, told you I was good. You can pick whatever character you like. I love playing Hudson; he’s a real fighter. He’s scared the whole time, but he’s tough too when it counts. I know his dialogue off by heart.’
‘You were brilliant.’ She went over to the terminal he had activated, there were three times the usual number of keys. ‘What is this?’
‘Videoke. All the companies and kombinates say it’s going to be their supernova sales item this Christmas. Father got me this deck in advance; he’s trying to buy a big consignment of them for Central America. The software houses have only remastered fifty movies for interactivity so far. I’ve got them loaded in the deck’s AV memox; all the real classics since cinema started, even some black and white ones.’
‘It’s wonderful, Fabian.’
‘Do you want to try it?’ he asked generously. ‘You could be Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, or Laura Dern in Jurassic Park, you’re easily beautiful enough.’
‘Thank you, flatterer. I will some time, once I’ve learned the lines. If I’m going to do it, I want to do it properly, like you. I’ll have to find the right clothes, too.’
‘I could do the Humphrey Bogart part with you.’
‘Yes.’ She read the list of films the videoke deck’s flatscreen was displaying. Snow White in the Disney cartoon would certainly be a challenge. And which dwarf could Fabian be? She chuckled quietly to herself.
Fabian slowly took his helmet off. His hair was all sweaty, clinging to his scalp. ‘Charlotte.’
She looked round at him, surprised by his serious tone.
‘I meant it when I said you were beautiful.’
‘Thank you, Fabian.’
‘I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw you.’ His pose of assured confidence crumpled, shoulders slumping inside the green armour. ‘I thought I was dreaming. I knew you’d be pretty, but—’
‘Give you a tip, never oversell.’
His head came up, lips pressed together defiantly. ‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘No, Fabian. I’m not laughing at you. Life is cruel enough without people deliberately adding to it.’
‘Oh. You’re nothing like … I don’t mind what you do, you know.’
‘What do I do?’
Fabian blushed, the invisible wires tugged his shoulders into a lopsided shrug. ‘You know. The others, before me. Hiring yourself out.’
‘Cars and flats are hired out, Fabian. They’re objects.’
‘You mean you want to?’
‘I mean there are limits. I have a choice.’
His youthful uncertainty had returned. He looked almost fragile, she thought.
‘So you only came on board the Colonel because you wanted to?’ he asked.
‘More or less, yes.’
‘With me?’ his voice was disbelieving.
Charlotte was strongly tempted. Revenge for all the shit she’d been made to eat over the years. She could hit him now, beat him with words, sarcasm and derision, cripple him up inside. He was one of them, the indifferent rich, floating effortlessly through life. Never caring, that was their real crime.
His face hovered halfway between pride and trepidation. The kind of innocence she’d never had.
She couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t often like this. She was supposed to be a passing fancy, an interesting diversion. Not someone who could leave a lasting impression. But with Fabian, she knew she’d be a wonderful memory for the rest of his life. The greatest present a fifteen-year-old could ever be given – judged from a fifteen-year-old’s viewpoint. And who knows, I might even alter his perspective on life.
Charlotte twitched her lips sensually. ‘You won’t like this.’
‘What?’
‘When I saw you back at the Newfields ball. I thought you were kind of cute.’
‘Cute?’ he blurted in dismay.
‘Told you.’
‘Oh.’ Fabian dropped the rifle back on the junk pile and scratched his neck. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you must like me a bit.’
‘I suppose so.’
He seemed to inflate with purpose. ‘All right! Can we go swimming now?’
There really was a swimming-pool on board. A surprisingly large one, fifteen metres long, six wide. The room had a small bar at one end, and Solaris spots shining out of a hologram sky. Sun loungers were set out along one side of the pool, the other side was flush with the wall, the windows ten centimetres above the water.
Charlotte tested the water with one foot, then shrugged out of her towelling robe. She was wearing a bright scarlet crossover-back swimsuit underneath. Fabian watched her with a bold face and timid eyes as she dived cleanly into the pool.
She swam over to the windows, and looked out at the Mediterranean below. Floating in water that was floating through air. How strange. And there was that feeling of something being out of kilter again. It was mid-afternoon, with the sun sinking towards the horizon ahead of the Colonel Maitland. She decided that when she got to Odessa she’d call Baronski and tell him to find her another patron. Fabian could nearly be classified as sweet, he was certainly gullible, and easily controlled. But there was no way she was going to spend the next month cooped up in an airship with no one else to talk to.
‘Do you want the wave generator on?’ he asked.
‘Maybe later. I’m still getting used to the idea of a pool in the air. Waves would be pushing it.’
He turned onto his back, and drifted away. ‘The pool makes a lot of sense, you know. It weighs less than the hydrogen the ship used to store; and water is the best kind of ballast, quick to dump.’
‘Are you telling me that if there’s an emergency we’re going to go down the plug hole?’
Fabian laughed. ‘No, course not, stupid. There’s a grille over the drain.’
Charlotte pushed off from the windows. ‘Fabian, where do you go to school?’
‘Here, I use flexible rate learning programs on my terminal. But I’m going away to university. Father said I am. Cambridge, I hope. That’s where he went. I want to do economics so I can take over the trading company from him.’
‘So when do you get out?’
‘Out?’
‘Of the Colonel Maitland.’
‘Oh, when we reach a port where Father has some business. Or if we go to a party.’
‘So how do you make friends?’
Fabian’s good humour faded. He stood up in the middle of the pool. ‘There are the other kids on the party circuit. And I talk to people on the phone chatlink.’
She swam over to him, and stood up, the water coming up to her elbows. His head tilted up to look at her.
‘That’s nice,’ she said. ?
??You must meet a lot of varied people.’
Fabian nodded. His gaze dropped to the scoop of her swimsuit and stayed there. She eased her chest forward a fraction. Regretting it almost immediately as Fabian became very still; teasing him was such a delicate business. He was on the verge of panic.
‘Yes?’ she said gently.
‘Charlotte …’ He visibly gathered courage. ‘Charlotte, can I kiss you now? You don’t have to say yes.’
She took a slow step forwards, amused by his suddenly startled expression. Her hands held his shoulders, and she gave him a long kiss, finishing by sucking his lower lip as they parted.
If anything Fabian looked even more confused and lost than usual.
‘Didn’t you like that?’ she asked.
‘Crikey, yes! It’s just—’
She gave him a fast impersonal kiss on the tip of his nose. ‘Don’t feel guilty, Fabian. Never that. I’m here for you.’
‘I didn’t ask for you to be brought on board,’ he said defensively.
‘I know. So, friends?’
‘Yes.’ He gave an anxious nod, then experimented with a grin.
‘Good.’
‘Why did you want to know about my friends?’ he asked.
‘Just curious.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I have a flat in the Prezda, that’s an Austrian arcology.’
‘But you can’t live there much.’
‘No. I don’t suppose I do. But it’s nice to have somewhere to call home. Somewhere you can always return to and shut the door on the rest of the world. Everybody needs that.’
‘If you don’t live there much, then you can’t have many real friends either. Not steady ones.’
Charlotte couldn’t manage to summon up her usual smile. ‘Fabian, have you got a bioware processor implant?’
His satisfied expression dissolved into perplexity. ‘No. Of course not. Why?’
‘Because you’re a very bright boy, that’s why.’
His grin reappeared. ‘Really? You really think so?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t want to be rude,’ he said contritely. ‘I thought—’
‘Go on, I don’t bite.’