2312

Ahead they could see their canyon of clear space narrowing until it was pinched to nothingness. Beyond that swirled a hurricane so big it could have floated the Earth on it like St. Brendan’s coracle. “We have to go over that,” their captain said, and with a sweet curve their craft ascended until the flat dome of the hurricane lay spinning below them. Overhead, the steady stars stood in their customary places.

“Are there fliers?” Swan asked. “Does anybody fly these cloud canyons in birdsuits?”

Wahram said, “Yes, a few. Usually they’re scientists doing their work. Until recently it has been considered too dangerous to visit. So this space has not yet been cultured to the extent you are used to elsewhere.”

Swan shook her head. “You probably just don’t know about them.”

“Perhaps. But I think I would.”

“You don’t come down here often yourself?”

“No.”

“Will you go flying down here with me?”

“I don’t know how to fly.”

“You could let the birdsuit’s AI do it, and merely be a passenger making requests.”

“Is it ever more than that?”

“Of course it is.” She gave him a disgusted look. “People fly any space in the solar system that can be flown. Our bird brains demand it.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“So you’ll go with me.” She nodded as if she had won an argument and gotten a promise from him.

Wahram tucked his chin into his neck. “So you are a flier, then?”

“Whenever I can.”

He didn’t know what to say. If he was going to be badgered by this kind of peremptory bullying and yet still be expected to love her, then he refused! But it might be that it was already too late for that. The hooks were already in him pretty deep; he could feel them tugging in his chest; he was in fact hooked; he was very, very interested in whatever she might say or do. He was even willing to consider stupidities like birdflight in the clouds of Saturn. How could it be? To a woman not even his type-ah, Marcel, if only you knew-this Swan was worse even than Odette.

“Maybe someday,” he said, trying to sound agreeable. “But right now we are looking for this ship of yours.”

“Indeed,” Inspector Genette interjected. “And we appear to be nearing it.”

They kept descending, dove into another cloud. The ship vibrated tremulously, constantly. Below them lay another thirty thousand kilometers of ever-thickening gas before one would hit the black layer of frozen goo, difficult to characterize, which was the planet’s real “surface.” It was said ships were hidden down there in the deeper depths, and Wahram had been worried that the one they sought would be down there too. But now there loomed out of a cloud to the south a spaceship, pewter against the blue, hanging under an enormous teardrop balloon. Then, like an apparition, it slipped back into the cloud from which it had emerged.

T he abandoned ship drifted, swinging this way and that under its balloon. It was quite a bit darker in the cloud, a matter of chocolates briefly turning tangerine or bronze and then darkening again. To express the scene musically Wahram thought one might play Satie and Wagner together, a pin of sadness pricking the magniloquent thunderheads: this little lost ship.

They strapped into the cloud diver’s hopper and it emerged from the dock, shuddering as the little craft fought the turbulence. Out of the mist loomed the dark mass of the silent ship. Wahram could not help thinking of the Marie Celeste, or Pap’s houseboat on the river. He had to cast aside these old tales to focus on the thing at hand, a typical asteroid trawler by the look of it, with an old-fashioned deuterium-tritium fusion engine bulbing at its stern.

“Is this the one you want?” Wahram asked.

“I think so,” Inspector Genette said. “Your system hit it with a taggart as it went in, and we’re getting a ping from that taggart. Let’s go have a look.”

They docked with it, their pilot nicely finessing the delicate problem of contact in the fluctuating wind. When they were magnetically moored to it, the three of them and two more of Genette’s colleagues suited up and went out, all of them on Ariadne lines.

Swan jetted over the ship ahead of the others and touched down next to a lock door just ahead of the rocket bulb. When she hit the door pad, its red light went green, and the door opened. Then there was a flash of light, gone as soon as it flashed; Swan cried out.

Genette jetted to her side and floated over her shoulder like her good angel, pulling her back. “Wait a minute. I don’t like that. And Passepartout tells me that a powerful radio signal has just been sent by the ship.”

The little inspector jetted into the lock ahead of them, pulling a tool like a pair of bolt cutters from a thigh pocket. “Maybe it came from this.” There was a box attached to the lock’s inside door. “This is a tack-on of some sort. Some kind of little sentinel. May have taken your picture and transmitted it. Let’s take it with us.”

Swan pounded the lock wall next to the device. “Here we are! Fuck you!”