Castles in the Sky
by Gabriel S. de Anda
Jose Luis Espejo-Alatriste, a diplomat from Earth, travels to the world of Alebrije on a mission of coercive diplomacy. He also wishes to claim the body of his deceased son, Amado Alatriste, who has died in a work-related accident. However, wires get crossed, and Amado thinks that it’s his visiting father — and not himself — who has met an untimely end.
To complicate matters, father and son each wants to keep the stored consciousness of the other from realizing that it is, in fact, dead. Between the two of them stands Eta Alatriste-Greschoff, Amado’s wife and Jose Luis’s daughter-in-law. Who can resolve this misunderstanding and its consequent split in reality?
Meanwhile, Jose Luis has interstellar relations to worry about, as well. Alebrije is on the cusp of being invaded by Earth, and there is the specter of imminent war.
Chapter II. Eta Alatriste-Greschoff
In between the intimidating rise of octagonal buildings, clouds of tugboat spider-gnats wove sticky webs — both physical and invisible — of rescue and retrieval, a perilous dance corralling and lassoing the floating, escaping herd of geometric structures. The swarm of tiny tugboats helped stabilize the gravlibre fields generated by the same sloth tech used to construct starships in low orbit.
Eta Alatriste-Greschoff rode in one of the twenty larger relay coordinators — zeppelins compared to the spider-gnats whose flight they choreographed — hovering in the heart of the fray, conductors of the neuromantic symphonies being composed in both phased and real time. The shuttle jockeys were experienced but, although there was an element of the everyday and routine in what they did, there was always a very real danger when they did it. There were an average of ten earthquakes during each of the thirteen months that calendared the Alebrijeyan seasons. In the last five years, eighteen workers had lost their lives. The prior fiscal year had been the safest to date, with only three fatalities.
Eta liked her work. It engaged all of her senses. Of late, there had been much distraction, good and bad and, at times, it seemed as if only her job helped keep her sanity on an even keel. With danger honing her senses, its jaws snapping at her feet, adrenaline mediated her knotted heart.
But the news from Catherine’s World and Laconia, if accurate, was both enervating and maddening, a bad combo. There were many things — and not just her having to deal with Amado’s father, or what Amado himself was going through as well — that would not be put off, even by the thought-absorbing requirements of her job.
The public newsfeeds were filled with worried, lively debate about the Solarian edicts, old and recent; about the technological proscriptions and embargoes; about the spiraling escalation of threats, warnings, saber-rattling. Blustery Solarian rhetoric clashed with cool Alebrijeyan resistance, opposing weather fronts, cold and hot, colliding in a gathering storm.
Eta’s seat in the ICA — Immersive Computer Augment — was gyroscoping with a lively gimballed grace. She felt herself cocooned in a serenity as if in the quiet eye of the storm, the visuals surrounding her reinforcing this illusion. Hard, bright colors and computer-generated graphics swirled around her like electrons, protons and neutrons around an atom, offering telemetric feeds as she required them, the world coming to her and she to it.
Suddenly, the smeared colors paled as a large window onto the outside environment centered itself before her eyes. The Empire State Building — a replica of 20th-century Terran architecture — within it rose like a blazing iceberg of light, one hundred and two levels wobbling on intersecting beams of gaseous laser grids translating movement into razory graphics, virtual models of trajectory.
The building was still rising with considerable but slowing speed, an architectural tsunami stabilizing after an earthquake had triggered the unclamping of anchoring diamond filament pitons, maintaining the initializing drives which, along with adjusting fuel jets, artfully manipulated the artificial weightlessness.
Row after row of windows scrolled by as the skyscraper did just that, the tenants close enough that their faces were clearly visible, Lilliputian visages in animated dismay, boredom, or amused delight, others continuing unperturbed with their own jobs, resigned and unsurprised and wondering how late it might be when they finally got home.
You can get used to anything.
Most tugboat jockeys were immigrants like Eta; she’d been raised on a small colony world light-years away, a high-tech culture by outworlder standards. But Alebrije was so fresh and new, a sharp-edged reverie whose vibrancy had yet to pale for her. The native citizenry, of course, had grown accustomed to the everyday technologically alchemical nature of their lives. When they bothered to really focus on it, it was, naturally, quite amazing, but mostly intellectually so. Too often, Eta noted, they felt the dream like a bright display of light without heat. That was the problem living in the lobster pot, so to speak.
Eta had not been here quite long enough for that. She saw Alebrije as a delightfully chaotic and deliciously unstable world that had given birth to a science — and a people — that had, in many ways, created a new benchmark for humanity.
A child in a window waved at Eta as she — he? — slid by, smiling, at that tender age when, sans the cultural markers of hair and color combinations, boys can be mistaken for girls, innocent fingerlings.
“Mishima Cluster Red, this is Rebel Son, come in.”
“AI nexus MT725,” responded Eta, “hear you loud and clear.”
“Stopping and stabilizing the rising Empire. Wind shear is throwing off the herd but we’ve got it under control. Ice and debris are causing micronal deviation, but it should be okay by the time we walk her back home.”
“Roger that, and, uh, when will that be?” It had been forty-five minutes since the earthquake. “We’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“You mean a reputation to maintain,” joked the AI nexus. “As soon as the beams are braided and the Union Jack says so, we’ll start descent. No aftershocks predicted worth worrying about.”
“Any mishaps, your paste will be coordinating drill bits at the poles.”
“A picnic compared to what you throw at us. Where do I sign up? Wilco and out.”
Much later Eta sat on a wooden bench following a hot shower when one of the newer trainees walked into the locker room, coming up from behind. Eta was in the midst of adjusting her brassiere.
Eta leaned backwards into an embrace and a kiss. A few naked stragglers dripped their way out of the showers. Eta finished dressing and they made their way towards the commons.
“Will I see you tonight?” asked Gael Surmondelle with an uncertain entreaty. She had tried to hold Eta’s hand, but as they walked into the communal recreation, Eta shook it off impatiently.
“You’re incorrigible,” said Eta, trying light humor to take the edge off her display of coolness. “We’re under a military curfew, and all you can think about is having fun?”
“Will I see you tonight?” It was said with a cool angriness of its own.
“No.”
Eta had walked five or six steps when she noticed that Gael was not at her side. She turned and looked at her lover, face set in petulant dismay. Eta walked back to her.
“Aren’t you in the least concerned?” asked Eta.
“I can’t control the ways of the world. I can try to control only my body, tend my own garden. The worlds will always do what they want to do.”
“You are a world unto yourself, Gael.” Eta gave her friend a motherly smile, touched her cheek. “It would be in your interest to start paying closer attention to what is happening around you. We’re on the cusp of war and—”
“I am paying attention, and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.”
“I don’t think anyone does, but that’s no reason to hide your head in the sand.”
“I hate to sound unenlightened, but Rome will burn whether we fiddle or not,” said Gael, reaching for a shoulder.
“This isn’t a joke!” said Eta, impulsively swatting the hand away.
“I’m not laughing.” Gael pouted, eyes smoldering. “Please. It’s been three nights now. I want to be with you.”
A group of jockeys were congregated around a State-licensed meriendero with his goodies: straws of imported raw sugar, figs and burnt garlands of baked garlic, a small selection of drugs and memory spices, and trays of the currently popular sushi and samosas.
“I can’t. I have a meeting with the police from DPO.”
“Garcia-Rifenstahl?”
“That’s him.”
“I thought everything with your husband was squared.”
“His being dead isn’t ‘square’ enough for you?” said Eta tersely, eyes a little angry. She forced a gentling breath. “Besides, it’s not about Amado, Gael. It’s about his father.”
“The diplomat?” said Gael cautiously. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
Eta subconsciously registered a string of fat, mechanical clown fish swimming languidly through the air in an undulating, curving formation.
“There were three people killed in the attack on his father’s ship.”
Gael’s eyes narrowed. “Counter-revolutionary stooges.”
Eta shrugged. “He was Amado’s father,” she said. “I have to honor that.”
“So what does he want?” asked Gael.
Eta smiled crookedly. “Garcia-Rifenstahl? I don’t know. But I can’t see you tonight. Amado needs me.”
“Amado is dead,” Gael said with sullen insolence. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m alive. I need you, too.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then let me come with you.”
Eta pecked Gael’s cheek with a demure kiss, shook her head. “We’ll talk later.”
To be continued...
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
