They were on a rugged coast, looking out over choppy water under skies as gray as granite. The northwest coast of England, her lenses told her. Nowhere.
“Well, this looks fun,” said Clair.
“Better than that thing you took me to last month—the Morris Dance Festival, whatever it was.”
“I was promised men in tights,” conceded Clair.
“And if any of them had been under seventy, maybe it would have worked out. Again,” Libby told the booth. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”
“We’re not seriously going to randomly jump around until we find the ball, are we?”
“That’s the plan.”
“It’s going to take us forever,” said Clair. “We’ll
“Don’t be such a worrywart. Just wait and see.”
Red Australian desert vanished at the horizon into the endless starscape above. A nocturnal lizard crouched in the light spilling from the booth, frozen by the sudden development.
“Crap,” said Libby.
“You can say that again.”
“All right, all right.” Libby put her applicator in her pocket and embiggened Clair’s hair with her fingers. “There, perfect. Third time
The door slid shut on the sight of the lizard, stolidly chewing on an insect that had been attracted by the light.
The doors opened on an utterly ordinary, utterly uninteresting Ugandan d-mat station.
Clair folded her arms and raised an eyebrow.
Libby was starting to look a little impatient herself.
“Okay, I guess the surprise is ruined now. No one knows where the crashlander balls are until they happen, see? People Lucky Jump around until they find somewhere with potential and then they all converge.”
“Anyone can do this?”
“Anyone can suggest venues on the crashlander forum, but they make the final decision. And they don’t let anyone come to the ball who hasn’t found a venue before. You get it?”
Clair did see. This wasn’t just about a party. The ball was literally their ticket into the cool new clique, which in importance to Libby was right up there with the clothes she was wearing and the person she was dating. Schoolwork barely rated.
Clair piggybacked on Libby’s feed from the crashlander forum and splashed its content across the infield of her lenses. Uganda vanished behind a wall of images, projected onto her retinas by contacts she had worn from birth. The forum was full of people exchanging images of suggested sites taken with their lenses. There were a
Clair and Libby jumped twice more, without success.
“This is giving me a headache,” said Libby despondently, brushing her bangs back into line after the doors closed and the gale outside ebbed to a muffled scream.
“Harder than you thought?” Clair tried not to sound smug.
“Much. Maybe we should pack it in.”
“Why? We’ve only just started.”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“
“Not at the rate we’re going.”
This was the way it always went. Clair didn’t like giving up on anything once she got into it, and Libby was easily bored. “We’ll just have to go faster, then. Booth? Again, please.”
Clair was seeing the fun of it, now. There was the challenge of finding the right place entirely by chance, combined with finding it before anyone else did. The odds for the former were low—there were tens of millions of d-mat booths in the world, after all, maybe hundreds of millions—but that made the odds of being the first to any one of them higher. Clair figured it canceled out.
And if they found the place, they would be crashlanders.
Their seventeenth Lucky Jump put them in the middle of what looked like an abandoned industrial complex somewhere high up, judging by Clair’s unpopped ear and the instant chill against her skin. She stepped out and looked around, skeptical.
“Booth’s ancient,” said Libby, circling it with a look of profound dissatisfaction. It was an outmoded model, square, with a single round-edged door opening out of each white face. Just four transits at a time. “It’d be a total bottleneck.”
“Could work in our favor—you know, make it feel exclusive?” said Clair, gazing up at thick iron girders and bulging rivets, and beyond all that, a high, domed ceiling. The floor below was empty, because industry was a thing of the past. Anything except people could be fabricated at will, as long as it had been through a d-mat booth or a fabber at some point in its existence.
“It’s freezing,” said Libby, hugging herself, “and the air’s thin.”
“We can fab heaters,” Clair said, peering through a window at the infinite quilt of mountains outside. “Oxygen, too, if people need it.”
“Because passing out is a definite buzzkill.”
“Doesn’t it give you a high if you breathe it pure?”
Libby shrugged. “Don’t forget the parkas,” she said. “They’re
Clair checked the Air for details on their location. They were in Switzerland, it turned out, and the amazing building around them wasn’t an old factory at all, but an abandoned astronomical research station, the Sphinx Observatory, just over two miles up on the top of a hollowed-out mountain, with an ice palace somewhere at the end of an old elevator shaft below and observation decks that had been sealed up for a decade. . . .
Clair read on with amazement. Was this place
“I’m getting a buzz,” she said. “Quick, take my picture.”
She opened her arms, and Libby stared hard for a second while her lenses worked.
“Got it, gorgeous girl. You want me to post it to the forum?”
“Worth a try.”
“You really think they’ll come?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Libby’s lenses flickered in the gloom, and when Clair checked the crashlander forum, she saw images of herself standing in the observatory spreading out into the world.
“How will we know if they like it?” Libby asked, worrying at her lip.
“They’ll just come, I guess.”
For five minutes, nothing happened. Libby kicked the floor in moody silence, hands plunged deep in the pockets of a thick woolen coat she had ordered through the booth, while Clair paced around the enormous space, refusing to give up hope. She was finding it harder, though, with every passing minute, as the cold seeped into her skin and she became aware of a faint dizziness from the thin air. Giving up, as Libby was clearly ready to do, would be a lot easier than persisting much longer. And the odds of talking to Zep were practically zero anyway, even if the party happened. . . .
The booth behind them clunked. They ran across the room to see. One of the four doors was closing. In quick succession, the remaining three closed too, and the echoing metal space was full of the hum of matter and energy spinning into new forms. Clair stopped pacing, barely able to breathe with anticipation. They were stranded, but only temporarily, and soon they wouldn’t be alone. She saw the same eager alertness on Libby’s face. Neither of them dared speak.
“Hey,” said the first person out, a lanky man in his twenties with a British accent and a swoop of yellow hair that completely covered half his face. He stared around him with one green eye wide and gleaming, and shivered.