A moment later a blue car appeared in the distance. Nicklin picked up his case, but dropped it immediately as he saw Zindee running towards him from the direction of a clump of tangle-weed. He knelt and took the impact of her body full on the chest as she threw her arms around his neck.
“Thanks, Zindee,” he whispered. “Thanks for coming.”
“You’re going to miss my birthday party.” Her voice was reproachful. “It’s the day after tomorrow.”
“I have to miss this one—and I’m sorry about that—but there’ll be lots of other birthday parties.”
“They’re too far off.”
“I promise I’ll come back and see you.” Hearing the car approaching, Nicklin reached into his pocket and brought out a memento he had found in a drawer a little earlier—a bronze Roman coin—and pressed it into Zindee’s hand. “Don’t spend it all in one shop.”
She gave a reluctant little snort of amusement, rubbed a moist cheek against his own and backed out of his embrace.
Nicklin stood up, brushing dust from his knees. “Wait and say goodbye to Danea,” he urged.
Zindee set her tiny chin and gave the blue car a venomous glance, then turned and ran towards home. Rain was dappling the back of her light orange T-shirt with tangerine. Nicklin stared thoughtfully at the swiftly departing figure until the car had rolled to a halt beside him. When he looked around Danea had slid the Unimot’s roof into place and was smiling at him from the vehicle’s shaded interior.
“Don’t stand there in the rain,” she called out. “Otherwise you’ll take root.”
Nicklin’s new home was a camper whose interior was almost completely filled by eight bunk beds. His initial glimpse of the layout, which he found rather reminiscent of a submarine, had produced a pang of depression which he had fought off by thinking hard about Danea. He had told himself he could put up with any kind of discomfort for the sake of what lay ahead, but had known that his prospects of sleep on that first night were not good. He was too keyed up and had too many thoughts clamouring inside his skull. It had come as a pleasant surprise, therefore, when he had been asked to drive the camper and to take what was referred to as the dead dog shift—four hours starting at midnight. For some ill-defined reason he had expected to be left to his own devices for the first day or two, and he welcomed the opportunity to do something which was guaranteed to tire him out.
Now, sitting on his own at the camper’s wheel, he was in the kind of bemused philosophical mood in which ideas can be examined without being analysed. Processions of them rolled through his uncritical mind, reflecting the events of the last three days, to mental commentaries no more penetrating than Isn’t life weird? or You never know what to expect, do you? or I wish I was back in old Orangefield right now—just to see their faces or Here’s one for the books!
Physically, he was surrounded by the Orbitsville nightland—hundreds of indigo and sapphire ribbons arching across the heavens, narrowing and merging into a prismatic glow above the polar horizon, while the world beneath was an ocean of purest blackness. The vehicles ahead of Nicklin were the only things visible in the darkness. Their lights gave them the semblance of ships, and their wakes were the random whorls and feathers which patterned the fused-earth road.
The spectacle soothed and uplifted Nicklin, but at the same time it reminded him that his happiness was only complete when Danea was at his side. The night would have been perfect had she been with him right there in the driving cabin, but he had seen surprisingly little of her during the day and now she was asleep in the camper she shared with six other women. She was reluctant to make too great a display of her feelings for him, he guessed. He could understand that kind of reticence, which had always been part of his own make-up, especially as it rendered all the more precious the secret things that had passed between them.
When he had got into the car beside Danea that morning she had leaned across to kiss him, and in doing so had placed her hand squarely on his crotch. The little act of familiarity, unseen by the rest of the universe, had spoken volumes to Nicklin, and he was totally secure in their mutual love. Ahead of him lay a future which was mysterious and unpredictable in many respects, but he was sure of the fulfilment that Danea and he would bring to each other. All that was required of him was some patience until they had their own private mobile home, and then…
He frowned as a quirk of memory brought into sharp focus something which had cropped up during the conversation with Montane that morning, and which had been a burr in Nicklin’s subconscious ever since. One of the mission’s principal rules, Montane had said, was that accommodation had to be shared out equally. There had been no mention of special exceptions, and—now that Nicklin thought of it—he had not noticed any vehicles which appeared to be given over to couples, or even groups of couples. Did that mean that he and Danea were to be the first to live as man and wife?
“Why not?” He spoke the question aloud as he reminded himself that this was a time of upheaval for Corey Montane and his followers. Big changes were supposed to have taken place in the cosmos and they were being mirrored by radical new policies within the itinerant community. He had those selfsame changes to thank for his being allowed to join the caravan and take up the life of a… vagabond. Having dredged up the old word, he savoured its archaic and romantic flavour.
Now that he thought of it, a large proportion of Orbitsville’s population consisted of vagabonds. The people he was accustomed to meeting in everyday life had stopped travelling, but nobody knew how many others had kept on moving, spreading from the triple ring of portals into the green immensities of the Big O. They could have travelled a long way in two centuries—splitting up into more and more divergent tribes, each claiming its autonomy and moving onwards for reasons that seemed less and less important to outsiders.
Nicklin had seen the powerful divisive force at work even within his own limited compass. It was, for example, practically impossible to find in the Orangefield area families which did not have Anglo-Saxon surnames. Given a telescope of limitless light-gathering power and resolution, it would have been possible to aim the instrument at any of the dark bands of the night sky and pick out the city lights, the village lights—or even the campfires—of those who had found new reasons to draw apart from their neighbours. He had little doubt that somewhere up there were communities which had chosen to separate from the rest of mankind over disagreements about how to prepare food, or the number of letters in their alphabet, or whether their deities should be portrayed with or without navels.
And the distant glimmers would betoken not only the presence of humans. Alien races had discovered Orbitsville long before Vance Garamond’s fugitive ship had come probing through the interstellar void. One of those vanished races had actually mustered the resources and sheer arrogance to try taking control of Orbitsville by sealing all but one of the 548 portals with diaphragms of steel. It had been an awesome attempt to monopolise the vastness of the Big O, and those who made it had flourished perhaps for millennia. But others had challenged their supremacy, unimaginable battles had been fought both inside and outside the great shell, and in the end there had been nobody left to claim victory.