"Hellfire. The final episode. I wonder if they get home."
Roselyn cocked an eyebrow demurely. "Only one way to find out. Oh, and there was some stuff from the fan site, too. Half a dozen series-related i-games, I think, and a whole load of generated graphic follow-ons."
"Fantastic."
"Damn." Alan grinned at Roselyn. "This is a moment like that stunt your God does. What is it? Oh yeah, he turns up again or something."
"The Second Coming of The Christ. A time of revelation throughout the universe."
"That's the one." Alan raised his beer glass. "Here's to Lawrence finally finding out what happened to a bunch of jerkoff actors when they asked for a pay raise in series seven."
"There was a proper story arc," Lawrence protested. Too late he realized the fatal mistake of letting Alan know you cared about something.
"Whoo ho! I was right, it's a revelation! Please, Lawrence, do us all a big favor and get a life."
"Alan?" Roselyn asked in a voice tinged with curiosity. "Do you know that girl?"
"Which one?'
"Over there, in the blue top."
"Her?" His glass slopped about in the girl's general direction as he laughed his short dirty laugh. "Damn, see what you mean, two puppies wrestling in a blue sack."
Roselyn's face remained serene. "Yes. Her."
"Never seen her before in my life, Your Honor. And I would definitely remember." He drained the last of his beer and burped. Fortunately, he'd ordered too many, so there was a fresh glass he could lift straight off the bar.
Over Alan's head, Lawrence gave Vinnie a frantic grimace and mouthed: "When did he start?"
Vinnie shrugged helplessly.
"She's been looking at you," Roselyn said.
"Fuck! Really?" Alan laughed again and poked Richard in the chest. "I told you. It's statistics." He straightened himself up and walked over to the girl. There was a momentary flash of panic on her face when she saw him approach.
"Remind me never to annoy you," Nigel told Roselyn.
Lawrence was wincing as he followed Alan's progress. "I'm not sure I can watch this. The pain level's too high."
"So what did you want to tell me?" Roselyn asked.
"Oh, yes." The joy returned to Lawrence's life. He pocketed the memory chip. "I got a letter from Templeton University today."
Roselyn's gaze was one of pure admiration as he explained about his preliminary acceptance and the skiing trip. "I knew you could do it, Lawrence," she murmured quietly. "Well done." She kissed him just below his ear.
"What about your mother?" he asked apprehensively. "Do you think she'll let you come to Orchy with me?"
"You leave her to me."
His hands went around her, pressing into the small of her back. "Sounds good to me." They kissed. He could taste the sharp tang of the margarita on her lips.
"Er, guys, I think we should get over there," Vinnie said.
Alan was so engrossed with making obscene small talk to the girl in the blue top that he hadn't noticed her boyfriend standing behind him.
"No way." John was shaking his head. "Look at the effing size of him!"
"Bigger they are, the harder they fall," Rob declared. He was almost as drunk as Alan.
"As long as he falls on you, not me," Nigel said.
"He's our friend," Lawrence said. Somehow he couldn't summon up much conviction. The boyfriend had a couple of friends with him, too.
"Just tell the bar staff," Roselyn said urgently. "The bouncers will sort it out."
"Too late," Vinnie groaned.
Alan had finally noticed the boyfriend.
They looked on incredulously as their friend employed his own never-fail method of getting out of sticky situations by telling the one about the parrot and the starship stewardess.
"...the airlock slammed shut, and as they were tumbling through interstellar space the bloke turned to the parrot and said, 'Pretty ballsy for a guy with no spacesuit'." Alan giggled hysterically at the punch line.
The boyfriend, it turned out, didn't have much of a sense of humor.
Lawrence finally got home at half past three in the morning, after his father and the family lawyer bailed him out from the police station.
Amethi's turbulent climate was changing again, emerging from its snowfall phase. Over the last few years, billions of tons of water had been liberated from Barclay's Glacier as the meltoff accelerated. The contribution it made to atmospheric pressure and density was small, but effective. Thicker and heavier, the planet's envelope of gas now retained more heat than before. Overall temperature was up by a couple of degrees. On the side of the planet away from the glacier, the snow was giving way to rain. Templeton even had weeks of broken cloud cover as the winds slowly strengthened.
A lot of people saw that as a bad omen, predicting the Wakening would end in hurricanes ripping the domes apart. The official line was that increased air speed was a natural and inevitable part of acquiring a normal weather pattern. There might be a few peaks on the graph along the way, but it would level out in the end.
Whether you believed that or not, the clearer skies did mean that passenger jets were returning to commercial service after their near-hiatus of the preceding years. Lawrence and Roselyn caught the morning flight out from Templeton, taking fifteen hours to reach Oxendale. One day, Oxendale would be the major city on a long chain of islands in the middle of the ocean. For the moment, it was sitting on the top of a massive, flat-topped mountain, the largest in a ridge of similar mountains rising out from a slushy saltwater quagmire.
On this side of the planet, facing Nizana, the glacier still dominated the environment. The air was a lot colder, and clouds still sprinkled snow as they migrated out to the warmer tropics. Their jet touched down on a runway that was coated in white, powdery ice. They glimpsed it only a few seconds before the wheels hit. For the last hour, they'd been flying blind through thick fog. Oxendale's altitude a kilometer above the salty marsh meant that it was almost permanently in the clouds.
They had a half-hour wait in the airport lounge while their luggage was transferred; then they trooped on board a thirty-seater STL plane, built for arctic conditions. Orchy was another two hours' flying time away. Forty minutes after takeoff, they cleared the base of the cloud layer to see Barclay's Glacier in the distance.
With Amethi a quarter of the way around its orbit from superior conjunction, the sun was shining almost directly onto the vertical cliff face of the glacier. It split the land from the sky with a silver-white glare stretching from north to south, as if a crack had appeared in the landscape to allow another, closer sun to shine through from behind the planet. Lawrence had to put his sunglasses on to look at it directly. Colors here were all monotone. The surface of the glacier was pure white; even the clouds didn't seem to cast a shadow. Features, at least from this distance, were nonexistent. The most that could be said was that the ice was rumpled, with long, gentle curves overlapping all the way to the boundary. Overhead, the sky shone with an astonishingly bright metallicblue sheen. Nizana's dominant ocher crescent appeared intrusively alien, its darkness in some way negative. Squashed streamers of cloud swirled about, almost as bright as the glacier itself. All of them were sliding in the same direction, out from the ice shelf and away over the ocean floor.