Read Online Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod - Free Book Online

squid. Its simple structure, relatively large neurons, and -- to be blunt -- its absence of a hard skeleton made it an ideal laboratory animal for investigating neurophysiology in general, but it was the peculiarities of cephalopod neural morphology that they were concentrating on. The walls were almost papered-over with drawings, diagrams, and readings of pH levels and electrical potentials.
    Salasso, as usual, was already there, crouched over a deep glass dish within which a small squid hovered, oblivious to the fine-needle electrode which the saur was slowly bringing to bear.
    "Come here, little one," he crooned through barely opened lips. "This is your lucky day."
    Tenebre woke beside his number three wife to the dawn's light and the morning chorus of the bats. Somewhere in the roof-space above the ceiling, birds chirruped and scratched as they settled in for their day of roosting sleep. For a few minutes he, like them, huddled in shared warmth, watching his breath fog. The Keep of Aird, like castles everywhere in the known universe, lacked central heating.
    Tenebre grunted and rolled out of the low bed, wrapped himself in one of the quilted robes which his hosts had thoughtfully provided, and dragged on the woollen socks he'd discarded the previous night. Thus fortified, he made his way over to the south-facing window -- at least it was glazed, even if not double-glazed -- leaned on the sill, and looked out across the harbor to the town.
    Seeing Kyohvic from the skiff had been his first shock here. The daylight did not diminish the surprise it afforded. He stared for a long time at the buildings, sharp in the long shadows and pink light of the autumn dawn. When he'd last seen it, four centuries in its past and five months in his, it had been a straggle of low houses along the shore, a harbor busy with fishing-smacks, and a scatter of farms beyond. The castle itself had been empty, superstitiously avoided. Now the buildings had climbed to five or six stories and spread miles along the sides of the valley; the fishing-boats still crowded the harbor, but they were dwarfed by much-larger sea-ships, tall masts bristling; the fields were laid out in a dense patchwork -- some plowed black, some brown with stubble, others green with the shoots of this spring's winter wheat. At the brow of the hill, airships nudged and bobbed among mooring-pylons, and flying-machines (frighteningly rickety aerial vehicles; to his eyes, little more than motor-powered kites) took off on frivolous or fateful missions.
    Tenebre was used to seeing change speeded-up, compressed; it was one of the benefits of life as a merchant -- it gave one a long view of history, the closest, perhaps, that a human mind could come to the millennial perspective of the saur. In forty years of life and five centuries of objective time he'd seen Mingulay's parent colony, Croatan, surge upward and expand from unpromising beginnings; he'd seen Nova Babylonia fallen in flames, and risen from the ashes ... but this was different -- this was something new under the suns.
    These people whose hospitality (socially warm, however physically chilly) he was enjoying and enduring, were descended from independent human space explorers -- "Cosmonauts," they called themselves. He relished the word, with a sort of rebellious vainglory in the human species which he'd never before imagined he could feel. In the great chain of being, humanity had a respected but restricted place: restricted not by force but by circumstance.
    The gods wheeled in their million-year orbits, indifferent and inviolate in the spaces between the worlds, much as the terrestrial philosopher Epicurus had supposed, and as the poet Lucretius had sung. The krakens plied their trade between the stars, navigating the lightspeed ships. The saurs steered a shorter course, piloting their gravity skiffs and working in their tropical and subtropical biological factories, their manufacturing plant.
    The humans ... ah yes, the