Time's Chariot

him. His instinct was to take umbrage, but one sideways glance at her — she was biting her lip — made him change his mind. He thought of something like, you’re upset, aren’t you? He tried it out in his own mind and rejected it. There was someone in the journeyman’s barracks back on the plantation who was always coming out with blindingly obvious statements like that and everyone, Jontan included, thought he was an idiot.

So, he gently put his hand back on her knee. When it was obvious she wasn’t going to throw it off again, he said, ‘Sorry.’ She nodded and clasped his hand firmly with both of hers.

‘Filler-A’s dropping again,’ she said. ‘That valve’s had it.’

The end of the session came surprisingly soon. It was still before midnight. Mr Daiho sat up, stretching and flexing his back. ‘We’re getting somewhere,’ he said, beaming at them. ‘We’re really getting somewhere. Well done. I couldn’t have done it without you.’

Praise from a patrician, even one possibly engaged in illegal activity, was a balm to their souls. It felt like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

‘We need to change a valve, sir,’ Sarai said.

‘Then you’d better do it, and get some sleep. We’ll start again the usual time in the morning. Is Mr Scott back yet?’

‘Um, not yet, sir,’ Jontan said.

‘Hmph.’ Mr Daiho rumbled something that sounded very like anger, and stood with his back to them to gaze out of the windows down at the cliffs and the sea. Jontan and Sarai glanced at each other, then Sarai ducked beneath the main tank to check the valve. It was a one-person job, phasing the forcefield that held it in place and the forcefield that actually did the work within it so that they didn’t interfere with each other and cause a leak. Jontan wondered what he should do next.

‘Give us a hand, Jon?’ Sarai popped up briefly to ask the question, then vanished again. Jontan grabbed a spare phase adjuster and crouched down to see what she wanted.

‘See up there, I think it’s loose…’ she said. He moved his head in closer to see, and then she kissed him, full on the mouth. He almost dropped the adjuster. It seemed to last forever and it made praise from Mr Daiho a very secondary pleasure. Jontan’s heart pounded and he couldn’t believe she had kissed him with a patrician standing only a few feet away, when everyone knew journeymen didn’t, but he was very glad these two just had.

‘I do need you,’ she said. ‘Symb into the system and tell me how this works.’

‘Right,’ he said, still in a daze. Again he had to tune his thoughts to the symb junction, and to his surprise he found his frequency of choice already occupied.

‘LD/1919, stand by,’ said a voice he hadn’t heard before. It was flat and toneless; he was sure it was artificial, not human. Then, ‘LD/1919, transmit.’

Another voice, and Jontan did recognize this one. It was Mr Daiho. ‘LD/1919, nothing to report,’ was all he said. Jontan lifted his head up and sneaked a look over the tank. Mr Daiho still hadn’t moved from the window. He seemed to be looking up at the moon.

‘Report received, LD/1919,’ said the voice. Then contact broke and the frequency cleared. Mr Daiho turned away, but Jontan had already ducked back down.

‘That’s a correspondent’s code,’ said Sarai later. They had the lounge to themselves now and were talking about it in whispers, sitting in one corner of the room.

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw a zine. They’re all called something like that, XY/1234. That’s how they do it, Jon!’

‘Do what?’

‘That’s how they talk to the Home Time. I bet LD/1919 got killed and Mr Daiho uses the same code, and the Register back in the Home Time doesn’t know it, so it stores the messages and releases them one by one, like always, and…’

She trailed off and gazed unfocused into space, still working it out.

‘And?’ he prompted.

‘And, someone at that end sees the reports and knows we’re OK, and that’s how Mr Daiho will ask them to recall us.’ She grinned in sheer delight. ‘See? So we’re safe and it’s all right. We’re going to be all right!’

Then she kissed him again, and this time he was better able to respond, sliding his arms around her and holding her close, and for the time being that was that, except that both occasionally cocked an eye at the door in case Mr Daiho returned. Eventually she tightened her grasp around him and just hugged him tight. She rested her head on his shoulder.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Jon,’ she said.

Jontan started another mental search for something un-trite to say. She spared him the trouble. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

‘A walk?’ Romance evaporated as he glanced out of the window. ‘It’s dark!’

‘I know.’ She wiggled her eyebrows up and down.

‘But the moon’s full.’

‘We might… we might fall off the cliff…’ he said, feeling pathetic.

‘Then we’ll walk away from the cliff,’ she said. ‘Coming?’

Outside there was enough light not to bump into anything, with the moon and the lights of the hotel behind them. The wind had died down since that afternoon and it no longer put Jontan in mind of pressure leaks and field failures; besides, they were in the garden, sheltered by tall conifers that took the bite out of the gale. In fact the gentle motion of the air past his face, soft and warm, was almost pleasant if he tried not to remember that it had never been anywhere near an atmospheric scrubber and was probably laden with prehistoric pathogens. They strolled down the garden, hand in hand, away from the hotel. The path curved so that before long the hotel was out of view. Then they stopped, and she turned to him, and they kissed again.

After a while they sat down, arms round each other, and looked out at the valley that stretched away from the hotel inland. It was bathed in moonlight.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I hate this time but the view’s good.’

‘Sa?’

‘Yes?’

‘When did you decide this was a good idea?’

‘Oh, a while ago.’

‘How long?’

‘How long?’ She turned and kissed his ear. ‘Maybe when Lano Chon pushed me over, and you helped me up, and then you hit him.’

‘When…’ He frowned. He had no memory of the incident, but he remembered Lano Chon, from a long time before social preparation had settled into them, back when…

‘We were seven!’ he said.

‘Like I said, a while ago.’

It was coming back. ‘He hit me, too,’ he said.

She giggled. ‘He said, look over there! And you looked, and he hit you. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘So…’ he said, wounded.

‘So,’ she said, and kissed him on the mouth. ‘So, I decided you were never going to be Jean Morbern, but you were all right.’

‘Huh.’ He tried to think of a way to get the initiative again. He felt the ground behind him, as a possible prelude to inviting her to lie down. Ugh. The air they breathed might be warm but the ground they sat on was cold and damp and totally uninviting. ‘All right, let’s— what’s this?’ His fingers had closed on something like wire. He looked closer. It was indeed wire, but not shiny and very difficult to see in the dark. He pulled at it.

Flares blazed up into the sky, bright light burst around them and a screaming electronic howl filled the air. The racket of a helicopter thudded overheard and men in dark clothes burst out of the bushes, brandishing guns.

TWELVE