Seveneves - Страница 136

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The klaxons and the vents went silent at the same time. Through the bar’s windows, which Ty had left cracked open, he could hear the customary smattering of applause rising up from the stony streets of Capitol Hill. He checked his timepiece. A few politicians and generals, who had leaned back from their breakfasts to observe the docking and admire the profile of Cayambe Volcano, bent forward again, picked up their forks, and resumed their conversations. Cradle had just become the largest city on New Earth, and was scheduled to remain so for twenty-four hours. Its system of windscreens, built to shield the city from the blast created by its movement through the atmosphere, now seemed more like a barbican, thrown up in some past age to defend an old city, but now merely a historical curiosity and a dividing line between neighborhoods.

Other than keeping a curious eye on all comings and goings through Cradle’s eight gates, Quarantine made no effort to control the mingling of populations. Cradle’s visits were so brief that to stop, examine, and question everyone passing between it and the sockets would have rendered the whole visit pointless.

Thanks to this relaxed policy, the time it took for an average pedestrian to get from the nearest of the eight gates to the Crow’s Nest was nine minutes. The first customer showed up in seven, breathing somewhat heavily, and requested a beer. Ty did not recognize him, but the next two faces that came in the door, thirty seconds later, were familiar. During the next quarter of an hour, the place filled up with a mixture of regulars (from Cradle and Cayambe alike) and curiosity seekers. Ty’s staff, well accustomed to these surges, began to open up back rooms. Extra cooks came up through one of the back entrances and began to make use of mise en place that had been prepped the night before.

Everything, in other words, ran smoothly. Which was how Ty liked it. The ability of the Crow’s Nest to accommodate a socket surge with no intervention from Ty, other than polishing a glass, was, in a sense, his life’s work. He had done every job it was possible to do in this place, from floor mopper on upward, and learned over time to select and delegate the work to others who could do it better. He had advanced, in other words, to higher levels of mental activity while always doing enough of the floor mopping and glass polishing to remain in physical contact with the business of the bar and in human contact with the staff. His real job — the job that the Owners paid him for — was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.

He was also a judicious manipulator of the human condition in the sense of occasionally throwing people out, telling others to settle down in a manner so smooth and humorous that they didn’t know they’d been told, and making certain others feel welcome when they seemed ill at ease. All of that was as fundamental to the operation of a bar as mopping the floor. Others on his staff could do such things almost as well as he. Ty had, in other words, developed the Crow’s Nest into a sufficiently healthy and robust organism that it was possible for him to disappear for weeks, sometimes even months, without inflicting serious damage. In some ways, his occasional “vacations” actually did more good than harm, in the sense that when he came back he would commonly find that certain members of the staff had risen to the occasion and become more complete and effective human beings in his absence. He was quite certain that he could walk away from the bar forever now and that it would not really miss him. But he was unlikely to do any such thing because it was literally his home — he lived in an apartment on the court behind it — and because the Owners preferred that he stay. And the Owners were among the very few members of all the human races about whose opinions Tyuratam Lake actually gave a damn. They had pointed out to him that even a year’s leave of absence, should he choose to take one, would benefit the Crow’s Nest, in the sense that he would return to it with fresh eyes and immediately see how beneficial changes might be made.

But he suspected that the true value of the business, in the eyes of the Owners, was not the return it delivered on capital. That was probably close to zero. They might even be running a huge loss, for all he knew. Every month Ty did the books and boiled all the numbers down to a single sheet of paper that he took to the Bolt Hole and slid across the table to the Owners’ representative. They never said much about it. Once a year, a question might be asked about one of the numbers, just as a way of letting him know that they were paying attention. But the Owners really valued the Crow’s Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.

He did not care for elaborate goodbyes, particularly in a professional context where a fussy leave-taking might suggest that his going away was a big deal — implying that the staff might not be up to the job of keeping the business running. And so after a few minutes had passed and he had exchanged looks, words, and jokes with a few leading citizens and well-known characters of Cayambe — just long enough to let it be known that he was here — he pulled the towel from his pocket, wiped his hands, and tossed it into the laundry chute beneath the bar. He lingered for a moment just to satisfy himself that the chute was not jammed. But it never was. Satisfied, he edged around the corner of the bar and walked to a table by the windows where Ariane, Kath Two, and Beled were pushing empty plates away, having just concluded a hearty breakfast. Ty himself had eaten light, an hour ago, as was his habit when he expected to spend a good part of the day airborne. “It’ll be taken care of,” he remarked, and got perfunctory thank-yous from the Moiran and the Teklan. Ariane gave him what he could only guess was meant to be some kind of penetrating look, and nodded. The busy minds of Julians exhausted Ty and he tried to avoid getting drawn into their labyrinthine ways of thinking. Perhaps this Ariane had used whatever connections she had in the intelligence world to investigate him and the Owners, and was drawing all sorts of conclusions — probably wrong ones — about what motivated him to give the Seven free drinks and meals. For it was obvious to Ty that Ariane worked in intelligence. He had seen many such people during the war and he knew their ways.

By now the others could navigate around the Crow’s Nest, but there was an expectation that he would lead the way. This derived partly from the fact that it was, after all, his establishment. But even had they been dropped into some completely random location on the surface they would have looked to him to take point because that, for better or worse, was what Dinans did. Answering to a similar racial expectation, Beled took up the rear. This was partly because his ingrained habits of courtesy and discipline obliged him to say “You first” to all the others, and partly so he would wheel about and engage any foes who might assault the rear of the formation.

Ty moved briskly to reduce the chance that he would be buttonholed by some prematurely drunk member of the Cayambe Chamber of Comersants. Within a few moments they had passed into a section of the bar that had not yet been opened to visitors, and thence proceeded down twisting stairways scarcely wide enough to accommodate Beled’s shoulders until they reached the triangular courtyard in the center of the compound. Its tropical flowers were glowing like gems in the hard white light of the Andes. Four small cabs awaited them near the big gate that gave out onto the street. Cradle was almost devoid of four-wheeled vehicles when it was aloft, but whenever it was socketed, the place was invaded within minutes by swarms of whatever rolling stock was skinny enough to negotiate its streets. Some of these moved goods, transshipping them from the Eye to customers on the surface, or importing the produce of New Earth to Cradle. Others carried passengers on errands to the ring city and its hinterlands. One of the cabs was already occupied by Doc and Memmie, as could be inferred by the cases of Doc’s support infrastructure strapped to its roof rack and the grabb poised to scuttle after it. Bard had climbed into the second cab and was slouched down low. Neoanders were rare enough to draw notice and arouse curiosity in a manner that Ariane quite clearly did not want. He had been keeping to himself in his private room. Ariane climbed into the cab with him. It went without saying that it would be easiest for all concerned if Beled took up a whole cab by himself, and so he did that. Ty and Kath Two got into the last one.

After Doc and Memmie’s cab departed, a few minutes passed before Ariane gave her driver the go-ahead. Ty shifted impatiently in his seat, slightly jostling Kath Two. Cradle-compliant cabs did not have a lot of shoulder room.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Kath Two asked. Just making conversation. They both knew perfectly well what she was doing.

“A caravan of four, leaving the Crow’s Nest and not coming back — too conspicuous for her taste,” Ty said.

“At least there’s no question of getting lost,” Kath Two remarked. She ducked her head low so that she could peer out the window and get a look at the northern sky beyond the city. The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. She didn’t have the crazy yellow cat-eyes of some Moirans, but there was a bit of that in her ancestral tree. She knew Ty was looking at her but she didn’t let on to being self-conscious, which he approved of. She was looking, of course, at the Aitken loop that was their immediate destination. Assuming that it was still operating — and she’d have reacted differently had it gone down — it was rising up out of a mostly subterranean flynk barn on the town’s outskirts, surrounded by hangars and maintenance facilities for aircraft that ranged up and down the length of the Andes.

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