Fallen Dragon

  The evening that followed was one of the most pleasant he'd had for a long time. There was no pressure on him at all, no worry. He didn't have to go out hunting girls or drink. It was, he thought, what a real family evening should be like. Nothing like the ones he'd endured in his own home back on Amethi, not forced and littered with expectation. More like the ones he would have wanted his own family to enjoy, the ones they would have enjoyed if things had worked out between himself and Roselyn.

  He gave Joona a quick, guilty look. But she just smiled at him. She was helping Jackie make the pasta for supper.

  "Traditional Scottish spaghetti," Jackie had announced. They both laughed when he nodded eagerly and said: "Great."

  They turned down his offer of help, for which he was quietly thankful. He was left to stroke a huge black cat called Samson, while they busied themselves up at the long counter. A bewildering variety of ingredients were produced from big earthenware pots that were fitted with wide cork lids. The bolognese was mixed, cooked, tasted, remixed.

  He did make himself useful lighting the log-burning stove in the parlor. It was soon roaring away, throwing out such a heat he had to take his borrowed sweater off. Jackie produced a malt for supper, which he had to water down to drink.

  The spare bedroom—with the double bed—had an uneven floor. When he walked across it cautiously he realized the oak boards were so old they'd hardened into something approaching steel. They creaked occasionally, but they were totally solid. There was no quilt on the bed, only sheets and blankets, which he was dubious about. But the blankets were obviously produced by Jackie and her fellow crofters, brightly colored with a thick weave, so he expected they'd be warm enough. A single light fitting hung from the low ceiling, its cone a lambent yellow, casting mellow shadows. Wind soughed stealthily round the cottage's gable end; he could hear the trees rustling around the garden.

  He grinned expectantly at Joona after she shut the door, and hurriedly started pulling his clothes off. Her own movements as she undid the buttons of her blouse were hesitant, which he took as modesty. Which was arousing. By the time she'd finished undressing he was already waiting for her on the bed, determined that, finally, tonight should be good fun.

  "Are we having the lights on or off?" he asked.

  A troubled expression fluttered briefly over her face. "Off." There was an unspoken of course. She flicked the switch by the door. The faintest moonlight seeping through the curtains allowed him to see her as a dark, flowing shape as she moved toward him. The bedsprings bent and shifted as she climbed on.

  Lawrence reached for her immediately, sliding his hands over her body. He cupped her small breasts and began teasing the nipples with his fingers. He licked at her neck, her shoulders, her face. Her breathing quickened and they kissed, his mouth smothering hers.

  It wasn't that she didn't respond, exactly. She just wasn't as active as the girls he was used to romping with. He took that as his cue to start whispering suggestions and compliments, telling her of the acts and positions he wanted from her, promising how marvelous she would be performing them. Silently, Joona followed his directions.

  Lawrence woke to the sound of some deranged bird being throttled very noisily just outside the bedroom window. Even the old peacocks back home never made so much racket.

  At least the night's wind and rain had stopped. Daylight fluoresced the curtains a radiant jade.

  Joona was sitting up with her back resting on a mound of pillows. A microsol tube was dangling loosely from her fingers, just like a reefer. She wasn't looking at anything within the room.

  He wondered if he should say something about it. Sure, he liked a drink himself. But only when he was out for a good time. Her habit seemed to be on the wrong side of casual.

  He settled for stretching elaborately and giving her a broad smile. Truly, there was nothing better than waking up in bed with a naked girl after a night of hot sex. He could feel his erection stirring already at the sight of her little breasts. "Morning," he said, and there was a lot of happy lechery in his voice.

  Her focus came back inside the bedroom walls. "Now do that to yourself." Her voice was as calm and dense as the loch outside. "That's what you said."

  "I, er..."

  "The only time I've ever heard someone say that before was in a porno."

  "Ah. Well, it just seemed right. Then." His face was hot as he tried to remember exactly what he had asked her.

  "Some of those things you had me do; I don't even know the names for them."

  Lawrence wanted to wake up. Now, please. This was not the way it was supposed to be the morning after. A few bashful grins exchanged when you're off-guard and reminiscing, silent acknowledgment how you both got carried away in the heat of it all, but as we're civilized folk we won't actually mention it. Certainly we don't talk details out loud.

  "It's never been that way for me before," she continued. "You were so demanding."

  "You ... Why didn't you say if you didn't like it?"

  "I didn't dislike it. You're my man. We have to meet on that level as well. I wasn't ready for so much at once."

  You're my man. What kind of thing was that to say? Hell, this was excruciating. He hadn't a clue what to say. Any normal girl would tell him outright if he'd gone too far. A simple no would have sufficed. He wasn't an animal, he respected other people. "Sorry," he mumbled. And that just came out like he was sulking.

  "I felt left out," she said. "That's what hurt me the most. You were having this fantastic time with me, with my body. And I played no part in it."

  It was an effort not to put his hands over his ears. He just wanted her to shut up, which was the absolute last thing he could ask right now. Guilt verged toward being a physical pain. He'd been so proud of himself during their lovemaking. And he thought he'd roused her as well. "You should have said. You didn't say anything." Even to his own ears that sounded desperate and defensive.

  She put a hand on his arm. "Of course not."

  What? He didn't get it, he really didn't. He eyed the microsol again, suspicions bubbling through the turmoil of thoughts. "We won't do anything like that again. Okay?"

  "That will be denial. Which is wrong and stupid, and would mess us up. The whole time, I'd just be thinking of what you really want to do to me." Her voice was the kind of sharp monotone used by prosecution lawyers.

  Actually, what he really wanted to do right then was get out. Out of bed, put his clothes on, and walk back to Fort William where there'd be a train back to the real world. But he didn't want to leave her. Not just from the extra guilt he'd suffer from running away after last night. There had been good times in the last few days, times when they'd connected, times when they'd cared about each other. That was something that hadn't happened to him since Roselyn.

  And didn't all couples have problems? Admittedly not quite as raw as this ... "It won't be denial," he said slowly. "It'll be inclusion. Sex should be for both of us." Hey, fast thinker, Lawrence. It was a good block. She'd obviously accessed way too many self-help pop psychology manuals.

  "Yes," she said seriously. "Yes, it would, wouldn't it? We must discuss what we are going to do first. That way we'll know each other better."

  He managed not to shudder at the prospect. Sex should be spontaneous and fun, not analyzed clinically before. But if it meant ending this conversation ... "That's that, then." He leaned forward and gave her a quick, awkward kiss.

  "Do you want to start now? We could do one of last night's positions again, if you tell me which one."

  "No. I think, er, breakfast is good for me right now." It's not cowardice, he told himself, it's just polite and practical.

  Lawrence had a distinct sensation of deja vu when they walked into the kitchen. Joona had become clingy again, laughing and smiling, giving him a quick kiss every minute. Touching him for reassurance that he was still there.

  He suddenly wondered if the family were Catholics. Roselyn had always said nobody could beat orthodox Catholics when it
came to guilt from the enjoyment of sex.

  Forget about Roselyn, he told himself firmly. He kissed Joona back and received a bright adoring smile.

  "Oh, you two," Jackie chided with a smile. "Cover your eyes," she told Samson.

  It was a sunny morning, and when Lawrence accessed the forecast he was assured of clear skies for the rest of the day. They cycled into town, though as soon as they emerged from the woodland around the cottage Lawrence jammed the brakes on so hard he nearly skidded his wheels out from under. Ben Nevis was directly ahead, presiding over a quarter of the skyline. Its peak was still covered in snow, which broke up into jagged ribbons over the massive north-facing ridges of gray-brown rock. Long ribbons of glistening water slicked the near-vertical face. At the base of the rock, scree had spread outward like an invasive tide across the grassy slope.

  "Now that is impressive," Lawrence said, and meant it. The sun was shining off the snow, making him squint against the glare. He was intimidated and challenged by the scale of the damn thing, wanting to know what it would be like to stand up there and look down. "You must be able to see half of Scotland from up there."

  "We'll take a walk up it if you'd like."

  "You're kidding. I'd never get up there without a muscle skeleton. Those cliffs look lethal even for technical climbers, and that scree is damn steep as well."

  "You don't go up from this side, silly. There's a walkers' path that leads up from the glen. It only takes a few hours."

  "Yeah, right." He gave the mountain a hard look before getting back on his bike.

  Jackie had given them a list of things she needed from the town. He suspected it was makework, allowing them to wander around together. He didn't mind.

  "Nice town," he said as they walked along the pedestrianized main street. The buildings with their little shops on the ground floor either dated back four centuries, or were good replicas.

  "It is now," she said. "The council has cleaned up and refurbished a lot of our old important buildings. There's enough money for that kind of urban regeneration now."

  "Hey, does that mean you finally agree that the big companies are good for the economy? They're the ones who generate that money in the first place."

  "I knew you'd approve. Fort William's very ordered now it's surrendered to the uniculture. Just how you like things to be."

  "All this is a bad thing? I've seen towns in a much worse state than this and I've only been on Earth for five years."

  They reached the southern end of the main street, where the main road had been diverted along the side of the loch. The rest of the town was composed almost entirely of houses, spreading back up the shallow slope from the water for over a quarter of a mile. Each one sat in its own lush garden, large enough for several trees. From where they were standing the intense verdant green of new silver birch leaves vied with the cotton candy swarms of cherry blossom to produce the most luminous array. Daffodils and tulips had colonized most of the lawns, speckling the grass with masses of yellow and red flowers.

  "Oh, no," Joona said quietly. "This is a lovely place to live, even in winter. All these fine houses are well built and well insulated, and if you're ever invited inside one, tastefully furnished, too. Something like ninety-five percent of the town's housing was built in the last two centuries. They leveled the old housing estates that were put up before the building industry started using robotics; those kind of highdensity houses were never made to last—not like Gran's cottage. So now we've got one house where there used to be two or three."

  "Money, again."

  "Yes. But that's not the only factor. The town's population is down almost twenty-five percent since the twentieth century."

  "I thought the rural population has been declining ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution."

  "It has. But I don't mean that. The total population is down, and still falling. That's why you can have bigger houses and gardens these days without putting pressure on the environment."

  "Not having farmland helps, too, I'd imagine."

  "Yes. It all fits together neatly, don't you think?"

  The way she said it betrayed how scornful she was. He didn't reply.

  Joona led him into a quiet cafe on the main street. The young waitress behind the counter greeted her warmly, and the two of them had a few quiet words. Lawrence found a free table near the window. Their hot chocolate arrived a minute later, along with some fresh-baked muffins. A small paper bag was passed to Joona, who vanished it into her coat pocket She put three EZ tens on the table. There was no change.

  Lawrence blew across the top of his mug. "Does Jackie know how much of that stuff you use?"

  "You mean, does she care? Half of this is for her, Lawrence. Our kind of lifestyle has always included narcs of one kind or another."

  "I still think you should ease off a bit."

  Her blank face clicked on, as if she'd already inhaled a microsol tube. "Thank you for the interest. It's not necessary."

  That night they did talk about what they would do in bed. It wasn't as bad as he was anticipating. Actually, it was quite arousing, almost as if he was her tutor, a reasonable enough male fantasy. At least it put their relationship back on what he considered a more even footing.

  The next few days were spent in and around Fort William. They visited the theater: twice to watch live plays, once to see a cinema screening of Cameron's Titanic. Lawrence helped Jackie out around the garden, which had suffered the usual winter's worth of neglect and damage. A few broken branches needed sawing off. Fenceposts had snapped. He spent an entire morning stripping down and cleaning her ancient gardening robot, trying to get the rusty mechanical components to run smoothly again. The blades on the mower attachment's cylinder had to be taken to one of the shops in town for sharpening. Another morning was spent helping out with the knitting machines. They were housed in a barn at the end of the garden, a stone building as old as the cottage, with an open truss roof that was elegant in its simplicity, sturdy beams of thick untreated oak holding up the thin lathing that the slates were nailed to. But it was dry inside, if not terribly warm. The three machines clattered away enthusiastically, slinging out their finished sweaters every few minutes. They changed over the bales and refilled the dye chambers, then packed the finished sweaters into boxes ready for collection.

  At the start of his second week, they climbed the Ben as Joona had promised. It was a short bike ride from the cottage to the visitor center perched on the banks of the River Nevis, which meant they were among the first to arrive that morning. They locked the bikes into the rack, then pulled on their walking boots.

  The trek was a lot easier than he was expecting, just as she said it would be. Once they crossed the small bridge by the visitor's center, they picked up a simple track running along the side of the hill, heading steadily upward. It was paved with rough stone, with neat steps cut in on the steepest parts, which seemed slightly incongruous for a supposed wilderness walk. Joona told him that the Scottish Environment Agency had to maintain it at this standard to prevent erosion. It had to cope with thousands of walkers during the course of the year.

  As they climbed he could see more and more of the glen with its astonishingly green vegetation stretching away below him. The path had already started to lead through the huge swath of bright, fresh bracken that had sprung up along this section of the hill. Small wooden bridges took them over narrow fissures.

  It wasn't long before the path curved around into a deep, grassy cleft with a stream at its head, white water coursing noisily through the rocky gully it'd cut into the slope. They walked toward the water, then suddenly switched back to climb the steepening slope at a reasonable angle. Another turn brought them out to a marshy saddle with its own lochan of dead, peaty water. Lawrence took a look at the vast scree-smothered slopes looming above them and sighed in mild dismay. He still couldn't see the actual top of the mountain yet. They stopped for a while above the lochan to drink some tea from their flasks and put on an
other layer of clothing. It was getting colder with every meter they ascended. The air below the cleft had been perfectly clear, giving them grand views across the beautiful Highland peaks. Here the mountain was accosted by thin strands of mist pushed along by the constant wind, reducing visibility.

  For the next stage the path zigzagged up a steepening scree-covered slope. The tufts of grass and heather became less and less frequent until it was just stone and raw soil under their feet. Each sharp turn in the path was marked out by a cairn. Slush began to build up on Lawrence's boots as he trudged onward. Patches of snow appeared more frequently on either side of the path. The mist was thickening. He couldn't see the bottom of the glen anymore.

  "It's so clean up here," he said as they stopped for another rest. "I love it."

  Joona eased herself onto a boulder and pulled the flask out of her backpack. "I thought your whole planet was clean."

  "It is. But that's a different sort of clean. I was expecting Scotland to be different. You had so much heavy industry around here, I thought there'd be more... I don't know, remnants. Streams that are half rust from all the old machines dumped in the lochs, mounds of slurry out of abandoned coal mines, that sort of thing."

  "Scotland's heavy industry was mostly down south. Besides, you saw the reclamation plants outside town; they're busy little bees."

  "Yeah." He'd noticed them on the first morning when they cycled into town, gently disturbing the landscape on the other side of the River Lochy from Benavie: underground factories strangely reminiscent of the chemical plant on Floyd, long flat-topped mounds covered in lush grass. This time there were no heat exchange pillars on top, only rows of black vents that could have easily been overlooked. The real giveaway to how much industry was hidden below the earth were the pipes running down the rugged side of Creag Chail above them: twenty wide concrete tubes that emerged from the mountainside a couple of hundred meters up only to vanish into the ground behind the mounds. They carried enough water down from the Highlands to power the whole reclamation site.