Chaos Space - Marianne de Pierres [114]
Trin sat up, pulled her onto his lap and kissed her. They sank down into the water together, flattening their profile to the curious watchers. Her arms felt cool and prickly around him as if scales were forming on them, and her mouth had the briny taste of the seaweed that they had all been eating. He was losing her to the sea and yet he could not make her stop. Her special physiology was all that kept them alive.
‘You are sure?’
Djes nodded. ‘I left the water and walked as far as I could before I had to turn back to still be here before dawn. The island is huge. Fifty times the size of this one.’ She sounded excited now.
‘The channel must be the Galgos Straits. Will the flat-yachts be able to navigate it?’
‘I think the crossing will take more than a day. It’s rough and I had to swim deeper than I wanted to, to avoid a family of xoc.’
She said it quickly, with no great emphasis, but Trin’s heart contracted. ‘Xoc! Then you must not go out again. It is too dangerous.’
Djes patted her webbed hand against Trin’s cheek and breathed salty flavours into his nose and mouth. ‘You’ll need me in the water for the crossing. It’s not like these gentle passages. There’re reefs that you won’t see until you run across them.’
‘But—’
Her hand pressed to his mouth. ‘I will come aboard to rest.’
Trin could think of no argument to deter her. Her devotion to him somehow neutralised the offensiveness of her independent manner. Or perhaps it was simply that she made such simple, logical decisions. Unlike Cass Mulravey whose abrasive way and ready prejudices were like oxygen to his fire.
‘When we reach the new island, we will be able to fish for ourselves. You will come back to the land,’ he said.
But the mounting light showed Trin the uncertainty in Djes’s expression, and he pulled her tightly to him. ‘You will,’ he repeated.
JO-JO RASTEROVICH
The uuli guide led Jo-Jo and Catchut through a series of smaller compartments into a large darkened space. The dim lighting revealed the convocation chamber to be a catoplasma balloon ridged with concentric seating—and stinking of an unreasonable fusion of odours.
Jo-Jo’s throat began to close again. He massaged it from the outside and told himself that he couldn’t be allergic to sweat.
They were shown to armchairs at the bottom of the chamber.
‘When you are ready to convene, make contact with the conductive strip in the curve of your headrest. I will return to you afterwards,’ said the uuli.
Catchut poked the strip with suspicion. ‘Like my virtuals to be somethin’ I can put on and take off,’ he grumbled. ‘Never know what they’re stealin’ from you otherwise.’
Jo-Jo had an urge to laugh. He hadn’t reckoned Catchut for a Luddite.
‘Why don’t you just sit and watch me breathe, then?’
Catchut growled and banged his head back against the sensor. A few seconds later his face relaxed.
Jo-Jo leaned into the strip more carefully. But the transition was smooth enough and he found himself in a perfect representation of the same chamber surrounded by tiers of bodies engaged in the type of squabbling behaviour that Jo-Jo had spent most of his life avoiding.
He glanced across at Catchut. The mercenary had chosen a female avatar with long, sensuous legs: a suitable companion for a God-Discoverer.
Suppressing his desire to laugh, Jo-Jo let the clash of the surrounding arguments sink into his mind, sorting one thread from another. One section of the convocation was bickering over trade agreements with OLOSS, while a smaller, less vocal core were analysing the reason for the unusually large presence of Extropists on Rho Six. Beneath those layers of discussion were individual conversations. He skimmed across them until one blew all other thoughts from his mind: a report of a shooting incident in the Heijunka section of Bell One between a hired balol security guard and a visiting Lostolian archiTect.
Lostolian archiTect?
‘Convocation has the privilege of an unexpected visit from one of Orion’s most notable speakers, Josef Rasterovich