Read Online Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod - Free Book Online Page A

humans had a place: inventing and manufacturing, trucking and bartering, farming and fishing, all of it on the surface of land or sea, or as passengers in the older races' craft. The only sentient species with a humbler role were humanity's cousins, the small hominidae digging in the mines and the tall hominidae tending the temperate forests. So it was, in variant proportions, on all the worlds of the Second Sphere, the hundred-light-year radius around Nova Sol. This was the generous limit of the journeys on which the krakens' starships were willing to take humans.
    Generous, but still a limit.
    Matters were managed very differently on Earth, the home planet; and perhaps on this one, Mingulay, to which humans had come from Earth on their own initiative, and their own ship.
    Just before he'd gone to bed, one of his saur crew, Bishlayan, had passed on a piece of information she'd picked up from one of the local saurs. Some of the first crew, the original cosmonauts, were believed to be still alive, somewhere out in the wilds. That ship had brought the secret of long life, as well as of long journeys. A bright star indeed, Tenebre thought, turning with a smile to greet the waking mumbles and hungover groans of his third wife. The other two were still asleep beside her.
    4
    ____________
    Legacy Systems
    Outside, Princes street was heaving with the usual Festival crowd, but they weren't behaving in the usual Festival way. A surprising number of people were actually looking up, like they expected some shining mothership to arrive at any moment. Others stood about talking, or grabbing passersby and spreading the news: the number of people discussing it or watching the skies was increasing by the minute. I hadn't seen anything like this since the revolution, when I was a little kid, when we emerged blinking from the shelters and basements and ruins to greet the Russki troops on the street. I remembered the noise of the jubilant car horns. Now, the susurrus of human voices, of feet and bicycle wheels and trolleybuses, seemed eerily quiet by comparison.
    Jadey grabbed my elbow as I poised to cross the street.
    "Where you going?"
    I jerked my head rightward, indicating. "Waverley -- run your stuff through the station copyshop, then get a shuttle train to the airport?"
    "Na-na-na-nah. We gotta think this through. No rush, it's an open ticket, right?"
    "Yeah, sure, but the faster you get out -- "
    She looked at me sharply. "Hey, who's the expert here? Do I give you programming tips? So, shut up and come with me."
    Not much I could say to that. She turned left and we headed down Leith Walk, past the new-tech buildings in the bombed area where I lived and on down to the older part of the street. The crowds were thinner here, the bicycles fewer. Trolleybuses glided down the middle of the carriageway. To the north, the direction we were more or less heading, the sky remained noticeably light: a mere few hundred kilometers poleward, the sun still shone.
    After a few minutes' silent hurrying past the software stores and delis and restaurants, Jadey took another left, into one of the side streets in the Broughton area, a canyon of sandstone tenements. Stopped at a door beside a tacky boutique shopfront.
    "Won't this place be watched, if you're -- ?"
    Another glare. "Like I said."
    She thumbed the keypad, peered into the retinal scanner, and the door swung open. I sidled after her, past tangled bicycles and stacked mail and up a stone stairway. On the third floor she unlocked the door of a flat, using metal keys. Hardware.
    Inside, it was chilly and dark. She strolled in, flicking light-switches. The windows -- I saw when we stepped into the main room -- were covered by aluminum Venetian blinds. There was a sofa, a screen, and a table, and not much else; the wall-posters were tuned to the previous year's bands. Looked like an empty student pad, and probably was.
    "Coffee?"
    "Thanks. Black, no sugar."
    "Just as well," Jadey said.
    By the time she