Gruj and Ontre to use them as a base for skiing and ice-surfing, but the wealthy choose the Trans-Atenate, where they can sit in coddled luxury and watch Gudrun's most spectacular scenery slip by outside the window.
The great, chrome, promethium-fuelled locomotive pulled into Ontre at five, pulling a string of ten double-decked carriages. Porters helped us to manoeuvre Medea aboard.
Our cabins, on the top deck of car three, a wagon-lit, were first class and spacious. We put Medea in one of them, with Eleena to one side of her and Crezia to the other. Uber and I shared a fourth. There were communicating doors between the suites and everything was finished in polished maple.
The express hooted its siren and panted out of Ontre, muscularly taking the gradient into the Fonette Pass. The huge silvery beast could reach one hundred and seventy kilometres an hour on flat sections.
I regarded the timetable. Overnight to Fonette, then a short stretch to Locastre, followed by a high speed, uninterrupted run all the way down through the Atenate Majors, across the Southern Plateau to the coast.
We would be in New Gevae in just under three days.
There was barely any sense of motion: a slight, rolling vibration that one swiftly became oblivious to. The cars were robust, thick skinned, heated and insulated against the Atenate chill, but the side effect of this was to virtually eliminate exterior sound. The massive engine, deafening from the vantage of the platform concourse at Ontre, was virtually inaudible. Only when the express hammered down a cutting or a gorge and the engine noise was compressed and channeled backwards by the steep sides, did we catch a whisper of it at all.
With the cabin blind down, I might have been at home in a comfortable parlour.
While daylight remained, I kept the blind up and was afforded panoramic views of the pass, the snowfields, pink and soft in the sunset, the hard-shadowed scarps of rising ice broken at the folds by knuckles of black rock. Once in a while, beige smoke from the engine streamed past the windows and obscured the view.
On slow turns, it was possible to lean across to the window port itself and see the foreshortened flanks of the cars and train ahead, segmented like a great snake, the chrome and blue-and- white livery catching the last of the sun. Twice, a long, jumping shadow of the train ran along side us across the snows.
Night fell and the views outside vanished. I drew the blind. Aemos was snoozing, so I thought I might walk the length of the train and get to know the layout.
The communicating door opened and Crezia came in. She was dressed in a grey satin robe with tightly laced pleating that ran from the high throat right down to the top of the gathered skirt. A fur wrap was draped over one arm, and she had put her hair up.
I rose from my seat almost automatically.
'Well?' she enquired.
'You look… stunning.'
'I meant 'well' as in, isn't it time you escorted me to dinner?'
'Dinner?'
'Main meal of the day? Usually found somewhere between lunch and a nightcap?'
'I am familiar with the concept.'
'Good. Shall we?'
'We are fleeing for our lives. Do you think this is the time?'
'I can think of no better time. We are fleeing for our lives, Gregor, on the most exclusive and opulent mode of travel Gudrun has to offer. I suggest we flee for our lives in style.'
I went into the bathroom and changed into the most presentable clothes I had with me. Then I linked arms with her and we strolled back along the companion way to the dining van three cars back.
'Did you bring these clothes with you?' I asked quietly as we wandered down the softly lit, carpeted hallway, encountering other well-dressed passengers walking to and from the dining van.
'Of course.'
'We left in haste, and you packed a gown like that?'
'I thought I should be ready for anything.'
The dining salon was on the upper deck of the sixth car. Crystal chandeliers hung from the arched roof, and the roof itself was made of armourglas. It doubled as an observation lounge, though just then it simply provided a ceiling of starry blackness.
A string quartet was playing unobtrusively at one end, and the place was filling up. The air was filled with gentle music, clinking silverware and low voices. Discrete poison snoopers hovered like fireflies over each place setting. A uniformed steward showed us to a table by the portside windows.
We studied the menus. I realised how hungry I was.
'How many times, do you suppose?' she asked.
'How many times what?'
'Years ago, when we were together. You would come to visit me in Ravello, secretive as is your manner. How many times did I suggest we took the express through the mountains?'
You mentioned it, yes.'
We never did, though.'
'No, we didn't. I regret that.'
'So do I. It seems so sad we're doing it now out of necessity. Although I might have guessed I'd only get you on a romantic trip like this if you had to do it.'
'Whatever the reason, we're here now.'
'I should have put a gun to your head years ago/
We ordered potage velours, followed by sirloin of lowland runka, roulade with a macedoine of herbs and forest mushrooms affriole, and a Chateau Xandier from Sameter that I remembered was a favourite of hers.
The soup, served with mouthwatering chapon and a swirl of smitane in wide- lipped white dishes delicately embossed with the crest of the Trans-Continental company livery, was velvety and damn near perfect. The runka, simply pan-seared in amasec, was saignant and irreproachable. The Xandier, astringent and then musty in its finish, made her smile with fond memories.
We talked. We had decades to fill in. She told me about her work and her life, the interest in xeno-anatomy she had developed, the monographs she had composed, a new procedure for muscle grafting she had pioneered. She had taken up the spinet, as a means of relaxation, and had now mastered all
but two of Guzella's Studies. She had written a book, a treatise on the comparative analysis of skeletal dimorphism in early human biotypes.
'I almost sent you a copy, but I was afraid how that might be misconstrued.'
'I own a first edition/1 confessed.
'How loyal! But have you read it?'
Twice. Your deconstruction of Terksson's work on the Dimmamar-A sites is convincing and quite damning. I might take issue with your chapters on Tallarnopithicene, but then you and I always did argue over the 'Out of Terra' hypothesis/
'Ah yes. You always were a heretic in that regard/
I felt I had so much less to give back. There was so much about my life in the last few years I couldn't or shouldn't tell her. So I told her about Nayl instead.
This man is trustworthy?'
'Completely/
And you're sure it's him?'
Yes. He's using Glossia. The beauty of that code is that it's individually idiomatic.
