The Reality Dysfunction

  “It was operational?” Meyer was enjoying himself.

  “No.”

  “So why was it dangerous?”

  “Some of the systems still had power in their storage cells. So given how much molecular decay they’ve suffered out there in the Ring, just brushing against them could have triggered off a short circuit. They would have blown like a chain reaction.”

  “Electronic stacks, and functional power cells. That really was a terrific find, Joshua.”

  Joshua glared at him.

  “And he won’t tell me where it is,” Kelly complained. “Just think, something that big which survived the suicide could well hold the key to the whole Laymil secret. If I could capture that on a sensevise, I’d be made. I could pick my own office with Collins, then. Hell, I’d be in charge of my own office.”

  “I’ll sell you where it is,” Joshua said, “it’s all up here.” He tapped his head. “My neural nanonics have got its orbital parameters down to a metre. I can locate it any time in the next ten years for you.”

  “How much are you asking?” Meyer asked.

  “Ten million fuseodollars.”

  “Thanks, I’ll pass.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, standing in the way of progress?” Kelly asked.

  “No. Besides, what happens if the answer turns out to be something we don’t particularly like?”

  “Good point.” Meyer raised his glass.

  “Joshua! People have a right to know. They are quite capable of making up their own minds, they don’t need to be protected from facts by people like you. Secrets seed oppression.”

  Joshua rolled his eyes. “Jesus. You just like to think reporters have a God-given right to stuff their noses in anywhere they want.”

  Kelly tipped a glass to his lips, encouraging him to sip the champagne.

  “But we do.”

  “You’ll get it bitten off one day, you see. In any case, we will know what happened to the Laymil. With the size of the research team Tranquillity employs, results are inevitable.”

  “That’s you, Joshua, the eternal optimist. Only an optimist would even think about going anywhere in that ship of yours.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the Lady Mac,” Joshua bridled. “You ask Meyer, those systems are the finest money can buy.”

  Kelly fluttered long dark lashes enquiringly at Meyer.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said.

  “I still don’t want you to go,” she said quietly. She kissed Joshua’s cheek. “They were good systems when your father was flying her, and they were newer then. Look what happened to him.”

  “That’s different. Those orphans on the hospital station would never have made it back here without the Lady Mac. Dad had to jump while he was too close to that neutron star.”

  Meyer let out a distressed groan, and drained his glass.

  Joshua was up at the bar when the woman approached him. He didn’t even see her until she spoke, his attention was elsewhere. The barmaid’s name was Helen Vanham, she was nineteen, with a dress cut lower than Harkey’s normal, and she seemed eager to serve Joshua Calvert, the starship captain. She said she finished work at two in the morning.

  “Captain Calvert?”

  He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”

  The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.

  “I’m Dr Alkad Mzu,” she said.

  “Good evening, Doctor.”

  “I understand you have a ship you’re fitting out?”

  “That’s right, the Lady Macbeth. Finest independent trader this side of the Kulu Kingdom. Are you interested in chartering her?”

  “I may be.”

  Joshua skipped a beat. He took another look at the small woman. Alkad Mzu was dressed in a suit of grey fabric, a slim collar turned up around her neck. She seemed very serious, her features composed in a permanent expression of resignation. And right at the back of his mind there was a faint tingle of warning.

  You’re being oversensitive, he told himself, just because she doesn’t smile doesn’t mean she’s a threat. Nothing is a threat in Tranquillity, that’s the beauty of this place.

  “Medicine must pay very well these days,” he said.

  “It’s a physics doctorate.”

  “Oh, sorry. Physics must pay very well.”

  “Not really. I’m a member of the team researching Laymil artefacts.”

  “Yeah? You must have heard of me, then, I found the electronics stack.”

  “Yes, I heard, although memory crystals aren’t my field. I mainly study their fusion drives.”

  “Really? Can I get you a drink?”

  Alkad Mzu blinked, then slowly looked about. “Yes, this is a bar, isn’t it. I’ll just have a white wine, then, thank you.”

  Joshua signalled to Helen Vanham for a wine. Receiving a very friendly smile in return.

  “What exactly was the charter?” he asked.

  “I need to visit a star system.”

  Definitely weird, Joshua thought. “That’s what Lady Mac does best. Which star system?”

  “Garissa.”

  Joshua frowned, he thought he knew most star systems. He consulted his neural nanonics cosmology file. That was when his humour really started to deflate. “Garissa was abandoned thirty years ago.”

  Alkad Mzu received her slim glass from the barmaid, and tasted the wine.

  “It wasn’t abandoned, Captain. It was annihilated. Ninety-five million people were slaughtered by the Omutan government. The Confederation Navy managed to get some off after the planet-buster strike, about seven hundred thousand. They used marine transports and colonist-carrier ships.” Her eyes clouded over. “They abandoned the rescue effort after a month. There wasn’t a lot of point. The radiation fallout had reached everyone who survived the blasts and tsunamis and earthquakes and superstorms. Seven hundred thousand out of ninety-five million.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  Her lips twitched around the rim of the glass. “Why should you? An obscure little planet that died before you were born; for politics that never made any sense even then. Why should anybody remember?”

  Joshua shot the fuseodollars from his Jovian Bank credit card into the bar’s accounts block as the barmaid delivered his tray of champagne bottles. There was an oriental man at the far end of the bar who was keeping an unobtrusive watch on himself and Dr Mzu over his beer mug.

  Joshua forced himself not to stare in return. He smiled at Helen Vanham and added a generous tip. “Dr Mzu, I have to be honest. I can take you to the Garissan system, but a landing given those circumstances is out of the question.”

  “I understand, Captain. And I appreciate your honesty. I don’t wish to land, simply to visit.”

  “Ah, er, good. Garissa was your homeworld?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the third time you’ve said that to me.”

  “One of those evenings, I guess.”

  “How much would it cost me?”

  “For a single passenger, there and back; you’re looking at about five hundred thousand fuseodollars. I know it’s a lot, but the fuel expenditure will be the same for one person as a full cargo hold. And the crew time is the same as well, they all need paying.”

  “I doubt I can raise your full charter fee in advance. My research position is a comfortable one, but not that comfortable. However, I can assure you that once we reach our destination adequate funds will be available. Does that interest you?”

  Joshua gripped the tray tighter, interested despite himself. “It may be possible to come to an arrangement, subject to a suitable deposit. And my rates are quite reasonabl
e, you won’t find any cheaper.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Can I have a copy of your ship’s handling parameters and cargo capacity? I need to know whether the Lady Macbeth can fulfil my requirements, they are rather specialized.”

  Jesus, if she needs to know how big the cargo hold is, just what is she planning on bringing back? Whatever it is, it must have been hidden for thirty years.

  His neural nanonics reported she had opened a channel. “Sure.” He datavised over the Lady Mac’s performance tables.

  “I’ll be in touch, Captain. Thank you for the drink.”

  “My pleasure.”

  At the other end of the bar, Onku Noi, First Lieutenant serving in the Oshanko Imperial Navy, and assigned to the C5 Intelligence arm (Foreign Observation Division), finished his beer and paid the bill. The audio discrimination program in his neural nanonics had filtered out the bar’s chatter and background music, allowing him to record the conversation between Alkad Mzu and the handsome young starship captain. He stood up and opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, requesting access to the spaceport’s standard commercial reference memory core. The file on the Lady Macbeth and Joshua Calvert was datavised into his neural nanonics. What he accessed caused an involuntary twitch in his jaw muscle. Lady Macbeth was a combat-capable starship, complete with antimatter drive and combat-wasp launch-rails, and she was being capaciously refurbished. Pausing only to confirm Joshua Calvert’s visual profile was filed correctly in his neural nanonics memory cell, he followed Dr Mzu out of Harkey’s Bar, keeping an unobtrusive thirty seconds behind her.

  Joshua, interested before, was now outright fascinated as he surreptitiously watched the three men trailing after the diminutive Dr Mzu almost collide in the doorway. His intuition had been right again.

  Jesus, who is she?

  Tranquillity would know. But then Tranquillity would know she was being tailed as well, and who the tails were. Which meant that Ione would know.

  He still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Ione. There couldn’t be anyone in the universe who was better at sex, but knowing that Tranquillity was looking at him out of those enchanting sea-blue eyes, that all those fluffy girlish mannerisms were wrapped around thought processes cooler than solid helium, was more than a little disconcerting.

  Though never inhibiting. She had been quite right about that, he simply couldn’t say no. Not to her.

  He returned to her every day, as instinctively as a migrating bird to an equatorial continent. It was exciting screwing the Lord of Ruin, a Saldana. And the feel of her body pressed against his was supremely erotic.

  The male ego, he often reflected these days, was a puppet master with a very black sense of humour.

  Joshua didn’t have any time to ponder the puzzle of Dr Mzu before someone else hailed him. He turned with a slightly pained expression on his face.

  A thirty-year-old man in a slightly worn navy-blue ship’s one-piece was pushing through the throng, waving hopefully. He was just a few centimetres shorter than Joshua with the kind of regular features below short black hair that suggested a good deal of geneering. There was a smile on his face, apprehensive and keen at the same time.

  “Yes?” Joshua asked wearily, he was only halfway back to his table.

  “Captain Calvert? I’m Erick Thakrar, a ship’s general systems engineer, grade five.”

  “Ah,” Joshua said.

  Warlow’s thousand-decibel laugh blasted out, silencing the bar for an instant.

  “Grade ratings are mostly down to logged flight hours,” Erick said. “I did a lot of time in port maintenance. I’m up to grade three level in practice, if not more.”

  “And you’re looking for a berth?”

  “That’s right.”

  Joshua hesitated, He still had a couple of berths to fill, and one of them was for a systems generalist. But that itchy sensation of discomfort had returned, much stronger than it had been with Dr Mzu.

  Jesus, what’s this one, a serial killer?

  “I see,” he said.

  “I would be a bargain, I’m only asking grade five pay.”

  “I prefer to make flight pay a percentage of the charter fee, or a percentage of profits if we trade our own cargo.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  Joshua couldn’t fault his attitude. Youthful, enthusiastic, no doubt a good worker, obviously willing to accept the rule bending necessary to keep independent ships flying. Ordinarily, a man you’d want at your back.

  But that intimation of wrongness wouldn’t leave.

  “OK, let me have your CV file, and I’ll look it over,” he said. “But not tonight, I’m in no fit state to make command judgements tonight.”

  In the end he invited Erick Thakrar back to the table to see how he got on with the other three crew members. He shared their sense of humour, had some good stories of his own, drank a lot, but not excessively.

  Joshua watched it happen through the increasingly rosy glow fostered by the champagne, occasionally having to push Kelly to one side for a proper view of the table. Warlow liked him, Ashly Hanson liked him, Melvyn Ducharme, the Lady Mac’s fusion specialist, liked him, even Meyer and the Udat crew liked him. He was one of them.

  And that, Joshua decided, was the problem. Erick fitted into his role a little too perfectly.

  At quarter past two in the morning, feeling very smug, Joshua managed to give Kelly the slip, and sneaked out of Harkey’s Bar with Helen Vanham.

  She lived by herself in an apartment a couple of floors below Harkey’s.

  It was sparsely furnished, the walls of the lounge were bare white polyp; big brightly coloured cushions had been scattered around on a topaz moss floor, several aluminium cargo-pods served as tables with bottles and glasses, a giant AV projector pillar occupied one corner. The archways into different rooms all had folding silk screens for doors. Someone had been painting outlines of animals on them, there were paint pots and brushes lying on one of the pods. Joshua saw new tumours of polyp pushing up through the moss like rock mushrooms: furniture buds starting the slow growth into the form Helen wanted.

  There was a food secretion panel on the wall opposite the window; a row of teats, like small yellow-brown rubber sacks, were standing proud, indicating regular use. It had been a long time since Joshua had used a panel for food, though a few years ago when money was tight they had been a godsend.

  Every apartment in Tranquillity had one. The teats secreted edible pastes and fruit juices synthesized by a series of glands in the wall behind.

  There was nothing wrong with the taste, the pastes were indistinguishable from real chicken, and beef, and pork, and lamb, even the colours were reasonable. It was the constituency, like viscid grease, which always put Joshua off.

  The glands ingested a nutrient fluid from a habitatwide network of veins which were fed from Tranquillity’s mineral digestion organs in the southern endcap. There was also a degree of recycling, human wastes and organic scraps being broken down in specialist organs at the bottom of each starscraper. Porous sections of the shell vented toxic chemicals, preventing any dangerous build-up in the habitat’s closed biosphere.

  There was no such thing as starvation in bitek habitats, though both Edenists and Tranquillity’s residents imported vast quantities of delicacies and wines from across the Confederation. They could afford it.

  But Helen obviously couldn’t. Despite its size, the full teats and absence of materialism marked the apartment down as student digs.

  “Help yourself to a drink,” Helen said. “I’m getting out of this customer-friendly dress.” She walked through an archway into the bedroom, leaving the screen folded back.

  “What else do you do apart from serve bar at Harkey’s?” he asked.

  “I’m studying art,” she called back. “Harkey’s is just for funtime money.”

  Joshua broke off from examining the bottles and gave the screens with their animals a more appraising look. “Are you any good?”

>   “I might be eventually. My tutor says I have a good feel for form. But it’s a five-year course, we’re still on basic sketching and painting. We don’t even get to AV technology until next year, and mood synthesis is another year after that. It’s a drag, but you need to know the fundamentals.”

  “So how long have you been at Harkey’s?”

  “A couple of months. It’s not bad work, you space industry people tip well, and you’re not a pain like the finance mob. I worked at a bar over in the StPelham for a week. Crapoodle!”

  “Have you ever seen Erick Thakrar before? He was sitting at my table, thirtyish, in a blue ship-suit.”

  “Yes. He’s been in most nights for a fortnight or so. He’s another good tipper.”

  “Do you know where he’s been working?”

  “Out in the dock; the Lowndes company, I think. He started a couple of days after he arrived.”

  “Which ship did he arrive on?”

  “The Shah of Kai.”

  Joshua opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, and datavised a search request into the Lloyd’s office. The Shah of Kai was a cargo vessel registered to a holding company in the New Californian system. It was an ex-navy transport ship, with a six-gee fusion drive; one hold was equipped with zero-tau pods for a company of marines, and it had proximity-range defence lasers. An asteroid assault craft.

  Gotcha, Joshua thought.

  “Did you ever meet any of the crew?” he asked.

  Helen reappeared in the bedroom archway. She was wearing a long-sleeved net body-stocking, and white suede boots which came halfway up her thighs.

  “Tell you later,” she said.

  Joshua gave his lips an involuntary lick. “I’ve got a great location file to match that costume, if you want to try it.”

  She took a step into the room. “Sure.”

  He accessed the sensenviron file, and ordered his neural nanonics to open a channel to Helen. A subliminal flicker crossed his optic nerves. Her sparse apartment gave way to the silk walls of a magnificent desert pavilion. There were tall ferns in brass urns around the entrance, a banquet table along one side was laid out with golden plates and jewelled goblets, and exotic, intricate drapes swung slowly in the warm, dry breeze that blew in from the crimson desert outside. Behind Helen was a curtained-off section, with the silk drawn apart just enough to show them a huge bed with purple sheets and a satin canopy which rose behind the scarlet-tasselled pillows like a sunrise sculpted from fabric.