Im going to call him Augustine, she announced. Thats a noble name.
Great, Joshua said. He leant over to the side of the bed and pulled the champagne bottle out of its ice bucket. Flat, he said, after he tipped some into his glass.
Proves you have staying power, she said coyly.
He reached for her left breast, smiling.
No, dont, she moved out of the way. Augustines still feeding. Youll upset him.
He lay back, disgruntled.
Joshua, how long are you staying this time?
Couple of weeks. I need to get a contract with Roland Frampton sorted out. Distribution, not a charter. Were going for a Norfolk run, Ione. We raised a lot of capital on some of our contracts; put that together with what I had left over from scavenging, and well have enough for a cargo of Norfolk Tears. Imagine that! A hold full of the stuff.
Really? Thats wonderful, Joshua.
Yeah, if I can swing it. Distribution isnt the problem. Acquisition is. Ive been talking to some of the other captains. Those Norfolk roseyard-association merchants are tough nuts to crack. They wont allow a futures market, which is pretty smart of them actually. It would be dominated by offworld finance houses. You have to show up with a ship and the cash, and even then its not a certainty youll get any bottles. You need a pretty reliable contact in the trade.
But youve never been there, you dont have any contacts.
I know. First-time captains need a cargo to sell, a part-exchange deal. Youve got to have something the merchants cant do without, that way you can get a foot in the door.
What sort of cargo?
Ah, now thats the real problem. Norfolk is constitutionally a pastoral world, theres hardly any high technology theyll allow you to import. Most captains take cordon bleu food, or works of antique art, fancy fabrics, stuff like that.
Ione put Augustine down carefully on the other side of the silk pillows, and rolled onto her side facing him. But youve got something else, havent you? I know that tone, Joshua Calvert. Youre feeling smug.
He smiled up at the ceiling. I was thinking about it: something essential, and new, but not synthetic. Something all those Stone Age towns and farms are going to want.
Which is?
Wood.
Youre kidding? Wood as in timber?
Yeah.
But they have wood on Norfolk. Its heavily forested.
I know. Thats the beauty of it, they use it for everything. Ive studied some sensevise recordings of the place; they make their buildings with it, their bridges, their boats, Jesus they even make carts out of it. Carpentry is a major industry there. But what Im going to take them is a hard wood, and I mean really hard, like metal. They can use it in their furniture, or for their tool handles, their windmill cogs even, anything thats used every day, or rots or wears out. Its not high technology, yet itll be a real cost-effective upgrade. That ought to get me in with the merchants.
Hauling wood across interstellar space! She shook her head in amazement. Only Joshua could come up with an idea so wonderfully crazy.
Yep, Lady Mac should be able to carry almost a thousand tonnes if we really pack the stuff in.
What sort of wood?
I checked in a botanical reference library file when I was in the New California system. The hardest known wood in the Confederation is mayope, it comes from a new colony planet called Lalonde.
Oenone s flyer was a flattened egg-shape, eleven metres long, with a fuselage that gleamed like purple chrome. It was built by the Brasov Dynamics company on Kulu, who had been heavily involved with the Kulu Corporation (owned by the Crown) in pioneering the ion-field technology which had sent panic waves through the rest of the Confederations astroengineering companies. Spaceplanes were on their way out, and Kulu was using its technological prowess to devastating political effect, granting preferential licence production to the companies of allied star systems.
Standard ion thrusters lifted it out of Oenone s little hangar and pushed it into an elliptical orbit that grazed Atlantiss upper atmosphere. When the first wisps of molecular fog began to thicken outside the fuselage, Oxley activated the coherent magnetic field. The flyer was immediately surrounded by a bubble of golden haze, moderating the flow of gas streaking around the fuselage. Oxley used the flux lines to grab at the mesosphere, braking the flyers velocity, and they dropped in a steep curve towards the ocean far below.
Syrinx settled back in her deeply cushioned seat in the cabin along with Ruben, Tula, and the newest member of the crew, Serina, a crew toroid generalist who had replaced Chi. All of them were gazing keenly out of the single curving transparency around the front of the cabin. The flyer had been customized by an industrial station at Jupiter, replacing Brasovs original silicon flight-control circuits with a bitek processor array; but the image from the sensors had a poor resolution compared to Oenone s sensor blisters. Eyes were almost as good.
There was absolutely no way of judging scale, no reference points. Unless she consulted the flyers processors, Syrinx didnt know what their altitude was. The ocean rolled past below, seemingly without end.
After forty minutes Pernik Island appeared on the horizon. It was a circle of verdant green that was so obviously vegetation. The islands which Edenists had used to colonize Atlantis were a variant of habitat bitek. They were circular disks, two kilometres in diameter when they matured, made from polyp that was foamed like a sponge for buoyancy. A kilometre-wide park straddled the centre, with five accommodation towers spaced equidistantly around it, along with a host of civic buildings and light industry domes. The outer edge bristled with floating quays for the boats.
Like habitat starscrapers, the tower apartments had basic food-synthesis glands, though they were primarily for fruit juices and milkthere simply wasnt any need to supply food when you were floating on what was virtually a protein-packed soup. An island had two sources of energy to power its biological functions. There was photosynthesis, from the thick moss which grew over every outside surface including the tower walls, and triplicated digestive tracts which were fed from the tonnes of krill-analogues captured by baleen scoops around the rim. The krill also provided the raw material for the polyp, as well as nutrient fluids. Electricity for industry came from thermal potential cables; complex organic conductors trailing kilometres below the island, exploiting the difference in temperature between the cool deep waters and the sun-heated surface layer to generate a current.
There was no propulsion system. Islands drifted where they would, carried by sluggish currents. So far six hundred and fifty had been germinated. The chances of collision were minute; for two to approach within visible range of each other was an event.
Oxley circled Pernik once. The water in the immediate vicinity was host to a flotilla of boats. Pernik Islands trawlers and harvesters produced a crisscross of large V-shaped wakes as they departed for their fishing fields. Pleasure craft bobbed about behind them, small dinghies and yachts with their verdant green membrane sails fully extended.
The flyer darted in towards one of the landing pads between the towers and the rim. Eysk himself and three members of his family walked over as soon as the haze of ionized air around the flyer dissolved, grounding out through the metal grid.
Syrinx came down the stairs that had folded out of the airlock, breathing in a humid, salty, and strangely silent air. She greeted the reception party, exchanging identity traits: Alto and Kilda, a married couple in their thirties who supervised the preparation of the familys catches, and Mosul, who was Eysks son, a broad-shouldered twenty-four-year-old with dark hair curling gypsy-style below his shoulders, wearing a pair of blue canvas shorts. He skippered one of the fishing boats.