“I only just got here.”
“Well, if you want to stick around and try some extreme sports, I know a few places that have vacancies.”
“That’s very sweet, Mark, but I can pay my own way, thank you.”
“Right, uh, fine.” He suddenly remembered he was supposed to be collecting lunch for his family. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around then.”
Her lips pouted up. “I’ll look forward to it.”
That evening, they managed to leave Barry and Sandy sleeping over with the Baxter kids in Highmarsh so they could spend an evening in town. They started off at the Phoenix bar on Litton Street, which ran parallel to Main Mall. Like every building in Randtown it was newish, with a solar panel roof and insulated composite walls. But inside, the owners had built up stone walls to mask the carbon girder framework, and then gone on to lay heavy ash beams above to support a wooden ceiling, making the long rectangular room dark and cozy. The bar itself took up most of one wall, serving a few beers along with every type of wine produced in the valleys behind Randtown, including some from the Vernons’ own vineyard. A fireplace dominated the far end, wide enough to require two chimneys; the iron grate could hold enormous lengths of wood to burn in the winter months, giving off tremendous heat. Now, in summer, it was filled with a long ceramic trough of fresh-cut flowers. Several settees were arranged in front of it, which Liz and Mark claimed along with Yuri and Olga Conant. Normally the settees were already occupied this early in the evening, but the blockade had thinned out the bar’s usual crowd.
“It’s not just here,” Yuri said as he settled in with a glass of vin noir from Chapples, a vineyard in Highmarsh. “Most of the cafes in town are suffering, even the Bab’s Kebabs franchise takings are down.”
“They’d just started rotating the tourist groups when the blockade went up,” Liz said. “A whole load left, and the next lot haven’t arrived. The hotels are three- quarters empty.”
“And everyone left trapped in town is raising hell,” Olga said. “I can’t blame them.”
“There are worse places to be trapped,” Yuri countered.
“Simon should have worked out how to let them get through the blockade. His principles are starting to hurt people.”
“There’s a difference between hurt and inconvenience,” Mark said.
“Not really, not in this case. Most of the tourists have come to the end of their holiday; they just want to get back to their homes and jobs. How would you like it if someone stopped you earning a living?”
“It will only go on for another couple of days at the most.”
“Yeah, but it was badly thought out.”
“We didn’t have a lot of choice. You’ve got to wonder why the navy didn’t give us any advance warning about building a station here.”
“It’s a crash project,” Olga said. “They probably didn’t even know until a few days before the equipment arrived on Elan.”
“Okay, so why didn’t the Ryceel Parliament’s First Speaker say anything?”
“Because he knew what Rand’s answer would be.”
“Exactly, it was a conspiracy to dump this thing on us before we knew what was happening. They wanted a fait accompli.”
Mark’s e-butler informed him that Carys Panther was calling. He blinked in surprise, and told the program to let it through. “Are you accessing Alessandra Baron?” Carys asked.
“Nice to talk to you, too,” he replied. “It must have been six months.”
“Don’t be an asshole, access it now. I’ll call you back when it’s over.” She ended the call.
“What?” Liz asked.
“Not sure.” Mark turned around. “China,” he called to the barman. “Can you access Alessandra Baron’s show for us, please?” He normally stayed away from accessing Alessandra and her haughty show, which always criticized and never did anything constructive, he felt it was like being lectured by snobs who specialized in satire.
The ancient little man behind the bar obliged, putting the show on the big portal.
“Oh, fuck,” Mark whispered. It was his own face dominating the image, magnified one meter high. “… we’re devoted to living a simple, clean, green life,” he was saying.
“She was a reporter,” he told his wife. “I didn’t know, she never said.”
“When was this?” Liz asked.
“This afternoon. She came up to me when I was getting the lunch. I though she was from town.”
The image switched back to the studio where Alessandra Baron was sitting at the center of a big couch, her classically beautiful face holding an amused expression, the way adults responded to a precocious child. Mellanie Rescorai sat beside her, looking even more sophisticated than she had up on MtZuelea, wearing a simple clinging scarlet dress and a black jacket with a little silver M on the lapel. Her hair had been elaborately tousled.
Liz gave Mark a long sideways look. Her eyebrow rose several millimeters. “That was the reporter?”
“Uh-huh.” Mark waved her quiet.
Yuri and Olga swapped a knowing look.
“So what did he say next?” Alessandra asked.
“By this time I think he wanted to say: can we go to a motel for the rest of the day?” Mellanie laughed. “But I managed to keep his hot little hands off me for a while by telling him the navy had no intention of wrecking his simpleton lifestyle. Can you guess what he said to that?”
“He was grateful?” Alessandra suggested archly.
“Oh, yes. Take a look.” The image shifted back to Mark at the blockade.
Sitting on the settee in front of the fireplace, a glass of wine in hand, and hindsight showing him what to watch for, it was all rather easy to realize that the smile he put on that afternoon for the girl was somewhat forced. Anxious, even. The one a man used when trying to impress. Eager to impress, possibly.
“It’s the principle of what they’re doing,” his image said. “They didn’t ask us about this, they just barged onto the highway and set out to build their station without our permission.”
“Did they need permission?”
“Sure they did.”
The show went back to the studio. “Incredible,” Alessandra said, shaking her head in saddened bewilderment. “Just how backward are they in Randtown?”
“That was edited!” Mark protested to the bar at large. “I… That wasn’t what I meant. I said other stuff, too. I told her about the nuclear micropiles. Why isn’t that in there? She’s making this— Christ, I look ridiculous.” He felt Liz take his hand and squeeze reassuringly, and shot her a desperate glance.
“It’s okay,” she whispered.
“The kind of backward you get from three generations of marrying cousins,” Mellanie confided to Alessandra.
The Phoenix bar was totally silent now.
“So in his view, not only do we, the Commonwealth, not have the right to put vital defense equipment on an uninhabited mountain,” Mellanie said. “But wait for this next bit.”
“Oh, God,” Mark said. He wanted the program to end. Now. The universe to end, actually.
Earlier that day up at the blockade, Mellanie asked, “Surely if you oppose that then you’re taking an antihuman stance?” in a fully reasonable tone.
Mark’s giant face smiled goofishly. “If this is being antihuman, then bring it on and give me more.”
Back in the studio Mellanie gave a what-can-you-do shrug to Alessandra.
“Bitch!” Mark yelled furiously. He jumped to his feet, his wineglass tumbling to the stone flag floor. “You fucking bitch. This is not the way it happened.”
Everyone in the bar had stopped drinking and talking to look at him. Alessandra Baron’s show vanished from the portal to be replaced by the New Oxford invitation open golf tournament. “Enough of those smartmouth whores,” China growled, several OCtattoo curlicues glowing scarlet on his bald head. “You sit yourself back down there, Mark. We can all see it was a stitch-up job. I’ll get you a refill for that glass, on the house.”
Liz put her hand around his wrist and tugged him back down. “That can’t be legal,” he said. “Surely?” Anger was giving way to shock.
“Depends what you can prove,” Yuri said earnestly. “If your memory of the event is replayed to a court, then you can demonstrate they produced a detrimental edit.” He trailed off under Olga’s sharp stare.
“Don’t worry about it,” Liz said soothingly. “Everyone here knows you, they can see that the interview is a phony. It’s the navy’s response to the blockade. They’re putting the pressure on Simon to let the convoy through. Newton’s law of politics.”
Mark put his head in his hands. His e-butler was telling him Carys Panther was calling again. So was Simon Rand. Messages were coming in from the unisphere at the rate of several thousand a second, directed at his public code. It seemed that everyone who had accessed Alessandra and Mellanie wanted to tell him what they thought of him. They weren’t being kind.
…
The heat seemed to be increasing with every step, along with the humidity. Ozzie was surprised by that. He’d walked enough Silfen paths between worlds now to know when the tracks were taking him over the threshold. The signs were subtle and very gradual. Not this time.
They’d been walking through a deciduous forest on the second world since the ghost planet; it was midsummer, with wildflowers providing a gentle carpet of pastel colors across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to intermingle with the doughty trunks of the forest. There was a strengthening scent, too, which took Ozzie a while to place. The sea. It had been a long time since he’d seen the sea. No Silfen path had ever led close to one.
It was growing brighter as well; strong sunlight tinged with a hint of indigo. He fished in his top pocket for his sunglasses.
“We’re somewhere else, aren’t we?” Orion asked eagerly. He was looking around with an entranced expression at the thick fronds crowning all the trees. Even the undergrowth had become thicker, with grass growing higher and turning a darker green. Creeping vines rose up to wrap themselves around the trees, sprouting white and lemon-yellow flowers.
“Looks that way,” he said reassuringly. When he turned to look at the boy he could see that the path curved sharply behind them. He’d been walking in a more- or-less straight line for hours. Orion hadn’t noticed; he was holding up his friendship pendant, studying it intently. Since the ghost world he’d reclaimed it from Ozzie. The experience there had changed the boy’s opinion of the Silfen once again. They’d never be unquestioned idols again, but he was starting to accept them as true aliens. Ozzie supposed it was a sign of maturity.
