Fallen Dragon

  The sheer wealth of detail, both economic and physical, was astounding. The stars, planets, stellar phenomena and species of the Halo were so real. They'd even got the quasar locations right. The whole thing interlocked perfectly; in the three months since he uploaded the base chapter he hadn't found a single continuity flaw. Flying his ship around the arc of the magnificent glow thrown off by the galactic heart he felt as if he were on a genuine training mission at McArthur's starship officer academy—as it should have been if the company wasn't so stupid. Small wonder the import company with the license was making a fortune.

  After scanning three star systems with swarms of micro-satellites he finally found one that had the kind of planet he was looking for. He landed the Ebris at the end of a valley cloaked in a turquoise grass, where a binary of yellow and green dwarf stars were setting in the saddle of the hills. Tomorrow he would supervise the mineral extraction. He noted several potentially dangerous-looking animals slinking through the long grass, loaded their profile into the ship's computer, then saved and exited.

  On the opposite side of the pool, the girl was lying on her sun lounger, big gold-orange glasses over her eyes. Several of the younger kids were clustered around, laughing and giggling together. Three of the more persistent boys were sitting on the edge of the sun lounger next to hers, squashed together uncomfortably. Each was doing his best to be charming, witty, knowledgeable and casual. She occasionally laughed at their jokes and joshing. From where Lawrence was it looked as if she was just being polite rather than genuinely amused.

  His margarita ice had melted in the bottom of the glass, producing an undrinkable slush. Naomi Karamann had disappeared. Several adults were in the pool and more were walking across the lawn from the hotel. The day's conference had obviously finished. Lawrence picked up his towel and went back inside to order another room-service meal.

  That was yesterday. Today, he'd come down early, by his standards, before ten o'clock. His reward was the well-positioned sun lounger and the girl's prompt appearance. This morning she was in a white bikini, but she was just as lively as she had been before. He found himself smiling at the way she enjoyed herself so effortlessly. Two of the smaller girls arrived with her, chattering excitedly, one no more than eleven while the younger was about six or seven. He realized the three of them were all sisters, sharing roughly the same facial features. That explained why the older boys of the wishful harem had been so tolerant of them yesterday.

  It wasn't long before the whole group was gathered together again. Laughs and shrieks carried across the humid landscape as they began pushing each other into the water.

  Lawrence tensed when one of the older boys, around his own age, shoved the girl in with too much force. But she broke the surface smiling. He let out a sigh, wishing there were some way he could go over and introduce himself and ask if he could join in. It would seem weird now, though, after he'd spent a day slobbing out by himself, mark him out as a creepy freak. What could he say, anyway? Does anyone want to link in to Halo Stars? He didn't think this physically active bunch would have much interest in i's. And she certainly wouldn't.

  He told the bracelet pearl to return to the game, and the shadowed valley materialized around him. A small convoy of hoverjeeps roared out of the Ebris's lower cargo hold, with him navigating in the lead vehicle. A satellite survey map was projected onto the windshield, showing him the direction he needed to take. And some distant animals were growling aggressively, hidden by the blue grass.

  "Hi there, can you help us out?"

  Lawrence told the bracelet pearl to suspend the game. His membranes cleared and he was looking up at the girl. She was standing at the side of his sun lounger, dripping wet and glorious. He pulled his mirrorshades off in a hurried awkward motion, twisting the earpieces out.

  "Sorry, what?" Was he staring too hard? The dome lights were directly above her, forcing him to squint. Damn it, I must look a total idiot.

  "Can you help us?" She held out a ball. "We need one more to make the teams even."

  "Teams?" He could have smacked himself one. He sounded so dumb.

  "Yes. We're playing water polo. We're one short."

  She had a lovely accent, her voice all blurring and soft. Where had that come from? "Er, yeah, sure." He pushed himself up, standing beside her, holding in his belly. She was only a couple of centimeters shorter than him. For some reason that made no sense, he liked that. But then he liked everything about her. She was utter perfection. "I haven't played for a while. I'm probably a bit rusty." He'd never played before.

  "That's okay. Myself, I've never had a game in my life. And I don't think too many of us know the rules anyway."

  "Oh, great. Probably best if I'm goalie. Do less damage there." Ask her what her name is, you asshole. Ask!

  She smiled brightly. "I fancied that gig myself."

  "Sure. Fine. Whatever."

  She lobbed the ball at him, which he just managed to catch. "Were we interrupting anything?" She gestured at the mirrorshades and bracelet.

  "No. Not at all. I was just going through an i-media, that's all. It's stored."

  "Fine." She turned and started back to the pool. "Got him!" she yelled at her friends. The harem of boys greeted the news with unwelcoming smiles.

  "Uh, I'm, er, Lawrence."

  "Roselyn." She dived cleanly into the water.

  It was almost the last he saw of her for the next twenty minutes. Water polo was every bit as bad as he imagined it would be. Twenty minutes in water five centimeters too deep to stand comfortably, while people powerslammed the heavy, wet ball at him. Chlorine spray got in his eyes. He swallowed liters. His breath was hauled down painfully, feeling wretchedly exhausted.

  The game finally dissolved into some kind of ending, which was mainly an argument about the score. Twenty, thirty, probably. A lot of shots had got past him. He wheezed up out of the chrome steps with a shaky hold on the rails.

  "Are you all right?"

  Roselyn was in front of him, squeezing water from her hair.

  "Yeah, I'm good." He was too puffed to pull his belly in anymore.

  "I fancy a drink." Her expression was mildly expectant.

  Lawrence couldn't believe this was happening. "Me too," he blurted.

  He received a barrage of evil-eye stares from the harem as he walked with her over to the open-air bar. Several of the boys called out at her to join in with their latest game. She just waved and told them maybe later.

  "I need a break," she told Lawrence. "Jeez, where do they get their energy from?"

  "I know what you mean. I'm here to chill out."

  She sat on the stool right at the end of the wooden bar, which meant nobody but Lawrence could sit next to her. He held back on a smirk as he sat down.

  "You here by yourself?" she asked.

  "No, with my father. He's at the conference."

  "Right." She asked the waiter for a Coke.

  "Me too," Lawrence said. It would look like he was showing off if he went for a margarita. "Where's your accent from? I haven't heard anything quite like it before. It's very nice," he added hurriedly. It didn't look like she'd taken offense, and he couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "Dublin."

  "Where's that?"

  She burst out laughing.

  He grinned bravely, knowing he'd been stupid again.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Dublin's in Ireland, on Earth. We arrived three days ago."

  "Earth?" he said, amazed. "You came from Earth? What was the flight like? What did you see?" It seemed wholly unreasonable that girls as young as her two sisters had experienced a real live starflight while here he was, forever trapped in protective domes under an opaque sky.

  Her small nose wrinkled up. "I didn't see anything.

  There's no window. And I had motion sickness the whole way. Not as bad as Mary, mind. Urrrgh, we must have used up the whole ship's supply of paper towels."

  "Mary?"

  "My sister." She pointed a
t the elder of the two sporting in the water. "The other one's Jenny, there."

  "They look like they're okay kids."

  "Really?"

  "Oh yeah. I've got five younger brothers and sisters myself. I know what it's like."

  "Five. Wow. Your parents must be pretty devout Catholics."

  "Ah. I know that's a religion, right? There's not much religion on Amethi. People here all tend to know the universe is natural."

  "Do you now?"

  "Yeah." He got the feeling he was being teased, somehow. "So why did you come here?"

  "My father died."

  "Oh shit, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, well..."

  "That's all right. It was over a year ago now. It was a car accident. Very quick. All the people at the hospital said he wouldn't have felt anything. I've got used to it. Still miss him tons, though. But we were stakeholders in McArthur, and there was a lot of insurance, so Mother decided to cash it all in and make the proverbial new start. I'm glad she did. Leaving Dublin took me away from the bad memories, and Earth's pretty crappy these days. This place is just fabulous."

  "Er, yeah."

  "What's the matter with it?"

  "Nothing. You're right. It's just that nowhere you live can be exotic. That's only ever somewhere else."

  Her smile lingered for a long time. "Very profound, there, Lawrence. I'd never thought of that before. So do you think I'm going to be bored with Amethi in a while?"

  "Actually, no. It's starting to liven up a bit right now."

  "Come on, let's go and see it." She picked up her glass of Coke and stood.

  "What?"

  "Amethi. Let's go see it."

  "Sure. Okay." He smiled at how impulsive she was.

  Roselyn set off across the lawns with Lawrence hurrying to keep up. She kept asking what various plants and bushes were. Some of them were similar to those planted within the family's estate, but for the life of him he couldn't give them a name. She didn't seem to mind.

  They arrived at the rim of the dome, where the nullthene was anchored in a band of concrete. Thick moss had swamped the crumbling gray surface, though it couldn't get a grip on the slippery nullthene itself. Roselyn pressed herself up against it.

  "How can you not find that incredible?" she asked. "I've only got this bikini on, and I'm a millimeter away from an arctic blizzard."

  "That's technology, not geography. But you're right. It's pretty spectacular." He was looking at her back, the way she'd arched herself slightly to rest her hands against the thin nullthene. Her skin was smooth and mildly tanned; intriguing bands of muscles slid around just below the surface. "Of course, the technology isn't perfect. And in some cases it's too good."

  "What do you mean?"

  "McArthur worked out the general effects HeatSmash would have on the environment, but they didn't always follow it through to its conclusion. When the snow started falling, it landed on the domes just like every solid surface. Trouble is, nullthene is a perfect insulator. The cold doesn't get in, but neither does the heat leak out. So the snow stuck, especially up on the top of the domes where it's flatter. When the original designers came up with the particular domes we employ, they made allowances for the next stage of Heat-Smash, when it will rain. The nullthene can take the weight of water running down the outside, but nobody thought about the piles of snow that would accumulate up there. There were splits and miniavalanches in every city. It was damned dangerous. A ton of snow can kill you just as easy as a ton of steel if it falls on you. Over a dozen people were killed, and plenty of buildings were damaged. We had to shore up the support grids in every dome. All the civil engineering robots on the planet were switched over to reinforcement work. It took months, cost a fortune, and everyone's still arguing about who's to blame and what sort of compensation there should be."

  She gave him a quick, incredulous glance, then gazed out at the flurry of tiny hailstones drumming against the nullthene. The tundra outside was completely white, even the rugged tufts of grass were no more than spiky white mounds. "It's still impressive to me. All this is the result of human ingenuity."

  "Amethi wasn't like this when I was younger. All I ever saw was a frozen desert."

  "But to change a whole planet. And not through ecocide."

  "Ecocide?" He was beginning to think he should start paying a bit more attention in school. She knew so much more about the universe than he did.

  "On most planets that people have colonized there's an existing biosphere," she said. "And none of them are compatible with terrestrial biology. So we come along and kill it off with gamma blasts or toxins and replace it with our own plants and animals. Ecocide, the worst kind of imperialism there is."

  "It's only the area around settlements that's cleared, not entire planets."

  "Spoken like a true galactic overlord. Each habitable planet had its own indigenous species. They're unique and evolved to live in a reasonable balance. Then we come along and introduce competitive species, our own. At first terrestrial biology zones are enclaves wrapped around our settlements, but then the population rises and the zones expand until they're in full-blown conflict with the natives. And we always back ours up with technology, giving ourselves the edge. Eventually, every planet we've ever landed on will have its indigenous life swamped by ours, and become a poor copy of Earth. That's what some projections say, anyway."

  "That's all a long way off."

  "Yes. But we've set it in motion." She gave the icy landscape a sad smile. "At least we're not guilty of it here. Do you fancy some lunch?"

  Lawrence would have liked to be able to think back to the last time he'd been alone with a beautiful girl, strolling through a lush parkland setting. It had never happened, of course. There'd been no girlfriends, just blue-i's, and fantasies over girls at school. Now here it was, the real thing, and it was so easy he kept wondering if he'd fallen through a wormhole into some alternative universe. Roselyn was gorgeous, she seemed to like him, or at least accept him, and she was easy to talk to. Chatter, actually, which he'd never done with anyone, let alone a girl. But when they got back to the pool they sat together in the restaurant—at a small table with only the two seats—and carried on talking. Lawrence ordered a cheeseburger with extra bacon and a large portion of fries; Roselyn asked for a tuna salad.

  She was, she explained, only staying at the hotel for a few days. "It's a sort of treat for us, Mother said; we're here to recover from the starflight just until our apartment is ready. Then we move straight into Templeton and start school. What a bore."

  "I live in Templeton," Lawrence blurted.

  "Great, maybe we can meet up some time. I'll have to get settled in first, though. I'm going to Hilary Eyre High; it's supposed to be very good."

  He swallowed some of the burger before he'd even chewed, clogging his throat. "My school."

  "Pardon?'

  "I go there!"

  His yell drew another round of glowers from those members of the harem who had wandered in for lunch, hoping Roselyn would be sitting at one of the large tables.

  She smiled delightedly. "That's fabulous, Lawrence. You'll be able to show me around and introduce me to everyone. There's nothing so horrible as starting somewhere new when you don't know a single person, don't you think?"

  "Uh, yeah, I'd hate it."

  "Thanks, Lawrence, that's really sweet of you."

  "No problem." He was desperately trying to think who the hell he could introduce her to. Alan Cramley might play along, and one or two others. Worry about it when the time comes, he told himself. All that matters is managing to stay with her right now. Don't blow it. Just don't say anything dumb or pathetic. Please!

  After lunch they went back to the poolside. Roselyn put on a white blouse and settled back on her sun lounger. Lawrence took the one beside her, bringing his bracelet and towel over. It turned out she'd never heard of Halo Stars. He found that puzzling; it must surely be one of Earth's major i-media games. But he spent a while explaining and showing he
r the game before some instinct told him to shut the hell up and move on to another topic.

  When she asked him what he was doing that evening he said: "Dunno. Nothing yet."

  "I'm going to listen to the band in the hotel bar. They're very good. I heard them last night, too. I didn't think I saw you there."

  "No. I was... out. But, er, I'd like to go with you. If you're free tonight."

  She appeared satisfied with that. He'd noticed slight dimples appear when she was pleased with something. It wasn't a smile, more like demure approval. "Date then."

  Lawrence smiled wide, covering his urge to howl out in victory. A date! But... had he asked for a date and been accepted? Or even more unlikely, was she the one wanting a date with him? It didn't matter. He had a date!

  "I just love dancing," Roselyn said contentedly.

  Lawrence nearly groaned out loud.

  How could it be so easy to get a date with the loveliest girl on Amethi for the one thing he was completely useless at? He spent ninety minutes getting ready in his room. That was seven minutes in the shower using up most of the hotel's stupid poxy-sized complimentary soaps and deodorants. Three minutes getting dressed in his pale green trousers and gray-blue shirt, with a black-and-gold waistcoat; just about the smartest set of clothes he owned. Mother had insisted he bring them in case his father wanted him to go to dinner— thanks, Mum! And eighty minutes with his optronic membranes presenting him with a phantom dance instructor; he had to access the hotel's i-tutorial class for that, because he certainly didn't have anything like it in his own memory chips. Thankfully he did at least know a few of the basics; his family had two or three formal parties each year when he was expected to partner obnoxious great-aunts and revolting ten-year-old nieces on the floor. It was just a question of brushing up.