‘That’s a shame,’ the woman said, pursing her own lips in a pout of disappointment.
‘Yes,’ said her husband. ‘We’ll miss your stories, Tanner.’
I smiled. In truth, I’d done little more than grimace my way through an hour of stilted smalltalk while we dined. I had salted the conversation with the odd anecdote now and then, but only to fill the awkward silences which fell across the table when one or other of the participants made what might, within the ever-shifting loom of aristocratic etiquette, be construed as an indelicate remark. More than once I had to resolve arguments between the northern and southern factions, and in the process of doing so I had become the group’s default speaker. My disguise must not have been absolutely convincing, for even the northeners seemed to realise that there was not automatically any affiliation between me and the southerners.
It hardly mattered, though. The disguise had convinced the woman in the ticket booth that I was an aristocrat, making her reveal more than she might have done otherwise. It had allowed me to blend in with these aristocrats, too — but sooner or later I would be able to discard it. I was not a wanted man, after all — just someone with a shady past and a few shady connections. There had been no harm in calling myself Tanner Mirabel, either — it was a lot safer than trying to come up with a convincing aristocrat lineage out of thin air. It was, thankfully, a neutral name that had no obvious connotations, aristocratic or otherwise. Unlike the rest of my dinner companions, I couldn’t trace my lineage back to the Flotilla’s arrival, and it was more than likely that the Mirabel name had arrived on Sky’s Edge half a century after that. In aristocrat terms I was posing as a parvenu lout — but no one would have been gauche enough to allude to that. They were all long-lived, tracing their lineages not just back to the Flotilla, but to the passenger manifest, with only one or two intervening generations — and it was perfectly natural to assume that I possessed the same augmented genes and access to the same therapeutic technologies.
But while the Mirabels probably had arrived on Sky’s Edge sometime after the Flotilla, they hadn’t brought any kind of germline longevity fix with them. Perhaps the first generation had lived a longer-than-normal human lifespan, but that advantage had not been passed to their offspring.
I didn’t have the money to buy it off the shelf, either. Cahuella had paid me adequately, but not so well that I could afford to be stung by the Ultras to that extent. And it almost didn’t matter. Only one in twenty of the planet’s population had the fix anyway. The rest of us were mired in a war, or scraping a living in the war’s interstices. The main problem was how to survive the next month, not the next century.
Which meant that the conversation took a decidedly awkward turn as soon as the subject matter turned to longevity techniques. I did my best to just sit back and let the words flow around me, but as soon as there was any kind of dispute I was pushed into the role of adjudicator. ‘Tanner will know,’ they said, turning to me to offer some definitive statement on whatever had provoked the stalemate.
‘It’s a complicated issue,’ I said, more than once.
Or: ‘Well, obviously there are deeper issues at stake here.’
Or: ‘It would be unethical of me to speak further on this topic, I’m afraid — confidentiality agreements and all that. You do understand, don’t you?’
After an hour or so of that, I was ready for some time on my own.
I stood from the table, made my excuses and left, stepping up the spiral staircase which led to the observation deck above the habitation and dining levels. The prospect of shedding the aristocratic skin pleased me, and for the first time in hours I felt the tiniest glow of professional contentment. Everything was in hand. When I reached the top I had the compartment’s servitor prepare me a guindado. Even the way the drink fogged my normal clarity of mind was not unpleasing. There was plenty of time to become sober again: it would be at least seven hours before I needed an assassin’s edge.
We were ascending quickly now. The elevator had accelerated to a climb rate of five hundred kilometres per hour as soon as it cleared the terminal, but even at that rate it would still have taken forty hours to make it to the orbital terminal, many thousands of kilometres above our heads. However, the elevator had quadrupled its speed once it no longer had to punch through atmosphere, which had happened somewhere during our first course.
I had the observation deck to myself.
The other passengers, when they had finished dining, would disperse through the five compartments above the dining area. The elevator could comfortably carry fifty people and not appear crowded, but there were only seven of us today, including myself. The total trip time was ten hours. The station’s revolution around Sky’s Edge was synchronised to the planet’s own daily rotation so that it always hung exactly over Nueva Valparaiso, dead above the equator. They had starbridges on Earth, I knew, which reached thirty-six thousand kilometres high — but because Sky’s Edge rotated a little faster and had a slightly weaker gravitational pull, synchronous orbit was sixteen thousand kilometres lower. The thread, nonetheless, was still twenty thousand kilometres long — and that meant that the top kilometre of thread was under quite shocking tension from the deadweight of the nineteen thousand kilometres of thread below it. The thread was hollow, the walls a lattice of piezo-electrically reinforced hyperdiamond, but the weight of it, I had heard, was still close to twenty million tonnes. Every time I made a footfall, as I moved around the compartment, I thought of the tiny additional stress my motion was imparting to the thread. Sipping my guindado, I wondered how close to its breaking strain the thread was engineered; how much tolerance the engineers built into the system. Then a more rational part of my mind reminded me that the thread was carrying only a tiny fraction of the traffic it could handle. I stepped with more confidence around the picture window.
I wondered if Reivich was calm enough to take a drink now.
The view should have been spectacular, but even where night had yet to fall the Peninsula was hidden under a blanket of monsoon cloud. Since the world huddled close to Swan in its orbit, monsoon season came once every hundred days or so, lasting no more than ten or fifteen days each short year. Above the sharply curved horizon the sky had darkened through shades of blue towards a deep navy. I could see bright stars now, and overhead lay the single fixed star of the orbital station at the high end of the thread, still a long way above us. I considered sleeping for a few hours, my soldiering years having given me an almost animal ability to snap into a state of total alertness. I swirled what remained of the drink and took another sip. Now that I had made up my mind, I felt fatigue rushing over me like a damburst. It was always there, waiting for the slightest relaxation in my guard.
‘Sir?’
I flinched again, only slightly this time, for I recognised the voice of the servitor. The machine’s cultured voice continued, ‘Sir, there is a call for you from the surface. I can have it sent through to your quarters, or you may view it here.’
I thought about going back to my room, but it was a shame to lose the view. ‘Put it through,’ I said. ‘But terminate the call should anyone else start coming up the stairs.’
‘Very well, sir.’
Dieterling, of course — it had to be. He wouldn’t have had time to get back to the Reptile House, although by my estimate he should have been about two-thirds of the way there. A shade early for him to try and contact me — and I hadn’t expected any contact anyway — but it was nothing to feel any anxiety about.