"So why were we going through that whole elaborate routine at the casino?" Chornoi demanded. Then she frowned. "Oh, yeah, I forgot. Nobody on any of the frontier planets will accept PEST credits for anything anymore."
"Why—because they're free of PEST's tyranny?"
"No—because the PEST BTU isn't worth very much.
Legislation never was a very sound basis for a currency, Major."
"The price of thrift," Rod sighed. "I hate to point this out, but while we're stealing that guy's pajamas, won't the other passengers notice?"
Gwen sat very straight for a moment, gazing off into space. One by one, the other passengers began to snore. Finally, she relaxed with a bright smile and said, "Nay."
Chornoi stared about her, closed her eyes, shook her head, and looked again.
Yorick expelled a hissing breath and said, "Yes." Then he said, "Well." and, "Someday maybe I'll get used to what you can do, Lady Gallowglass."
Privately, Rod hoped he would, too.
Yorick pushed himself out of his seat. "Let's get on with it, shall we?"
A few minutes and quick trips to the powder room later, the four of them sat down again, leaving four suitcases a little lighter and a lot richer.
Gwen plucked at the flimsy gray fabric. "Tis so light that I feel quite unclothed."
"I know what you mean," Chornoi agreed. "After my tights and jerkin, it feels really odd."
"You weren't kidding with that crack about pajamas, were you?" Rod asked.
"Not a bit," Yorick said sadly. "But on Terra, going outdoors is a job for specialists now, so why should anyone else bother wearing all that heavy, uncomfortable wool and buckram?"
"I'm just not used to common sense, I suppose." Rod looked down at his bland, gray pajamas. "How come they all wear the same thing?"
Yorick shrugged. "Standard government issue. This is the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra, Major… Hey! Don't take it so hard, Chornoi! How could you know what they were going to do?" were gi
"By really thinking about what they were saying," she whispered, "instead of just latching onto the parts I liked."
They filed off the car with the other passengers, just four more gray-clad bodies. Rod was glad the pajamas had come with hoods; it gave them a fighting chance that no one would recognize their faces. They filed onto the escalator and glided up. Rod stared at the blank tan plasticrete wall, letting his thoughts go numb. Then he frowned. "This isn't plasticrete anymore."
"Right." Chornoi looked at him strangely. "Plasticrete is tan. This is red."
"It's stone!" Rod wanted to reach out and touch it, but the wall was four feet away from the escalator. "It's real, bona fide rock! But why so far away?" He looked down at the shallow stairs cut into the slope beside the escalator. "And why are there steps there?"
"Because that's the way the Spanish built them," Yorick answered.
"The Spanish?" Rod looked up, frowning. "I thought PEST was an international government."
"Yeah, but they're thrifty, remember? Why pay good money to build a new station, when you can just adapt an old one?"
Rod stared around him. "You mean…"
"Right." Chornoi nodded. "You're in Puerto Rico, Major, where the Spanish once had a colony. They fortified the island heavily. We're inside the castle El Morro, built in the seventeenth century."
"Fourteen hundred years ago!!?!"
Chornoi nodded. "And it's still standing. They built well, back then."
Daylight struck them like a spray of needles, and the moving stairs delivered them gently onto a moving belt. Gwen breathed deeply of the warm, fragrant air. "Why, 'tis Paradise!" Then she frowned out toward a low rock wall
Rod looked, then stared. "That, dear, is an ocean. Water. All of it."
Gwen gazed for a while, then said, "Rarely have I seen waters so blue. What sayest thou, husband?"
Rod was staring up at the other side.
"What seest thou?" Gwen turned to look, and gasped.
The red wall towered up, blotched here and there, but stern and sheer, tilting back away from them, curving away around the headland, and up, up, up.
'"Tis the abode of giants," Gwen whispered.
Rod glanced nervously around the terrace. It somehow seemed very narrow now. The wall was so huge that it made him feel like a fly clinging by his toes.
"Men built this?" Chornoi said softly.
Yorick nodded. "Lots of them. And they didn't have much choice about it."
The slidewalk delivered them to the base of another escalator. It carried them into a tunnel, rising up along a rampway. Rod stared around at the size of it. "Seventeenth century, you say?"
Chornoi nodded.
"What was this tunnel for? I mean, they didn't have escalators then."
"For cannon, Major. Huge cannon, ten feet long, made out of cast iron. They threw iron balls as big as your head, and they weighed like sin. Tons. You saw those six-foot notches in the seaward wall, down there on the battlements?"
Rod nodded.
"Well, that's what they were for—cannon. Only to get them there, they had to lower them down this ramp. And to get them back up, they had to use horses." Chornoi gazed around her, looking grim. As they neared the top of the rampway, she nodded toward a niche in the wall with a grille of iron bars covering it. "Torture dungeon. When some poor bastard of a soldier broke the rules, they locked him up there for a while. Not enough room to stand up straight, and not much in the way of sanitary facilities, either."
"Plus knowing all his mates were watching him suffer every time they came down here." Rod nodded. "Nice guys."
"Yeah." Chornoi looked at the red stone around her, and shuddered. "A soldier must have thought he was in Hell here, back then. This piece of rock was all there was for him—and the officers were his masters."
"Legalized slavery," Yorick said with a scowl.
They came out into the sun again, and found themselves in a wide courtyard, with a score of rooms cut into its walls. Two huge cylinders stood in its center.
Chornoi nodded toward them. "Cisterns. They were ready for a siege here."
"Siege, cannon…" Gwen frowned. "Why so much might?"
"Because Puerto Rico was the gate to the Caribbean, Miz Gallowglass, and to all the wealth of the countries that lie along its shores. That's the Atlantic Ocean over there, with Europe on its far side—but just around the curve of this shoreline, is the Caribbean. Other countries tried to take this island from the Spanish, and that wealth with it. The Dutch tried it first, then the English, so they built this castle to guard against those enemies."
Gwen gave a somber nod. "It must have guarded well."
"It did," Chornoi agreed. "It was built to ward off seventeenth-century caravels, but it'd be very effective against any rebel group that tried to take over the transatlantic tube, today."
Rod lifted his head slowly. "So that's why the trip ends here!"
Chornoi nodded. "It'd also be easy to lock out anybody trying to invade through the tube from Europe. All you'd have to do would be to lock those big gates over there, and shoot down from the battlements up there." She pointed up at the rooftops. They could just make out the shape of the gun-slits against the sky. It wasn't hard to see the uniformed armsmen walking their beats, though.
Rod shuddered and looked away. "Not an entirely happy with a slice of blue between it and the sky. "What is that azure field?" thought, under our circumstances."
"Don't worry about it." Elaborately casual, Chornoi strolled out the main gate. The others followed her, with sighs of relief. "Where're we going?" Rod asked.