“The Newborn running the front desk.” Paval retrieved his own bag and shrugged it over one shoulder. “He’s our concierge and guest liaison while we’re here.”
Must be easy to lavish attention on hired researchers when the rest of your resort is shut down. Rahel spread the paper flat with one hand, and didn’t even object when Nils leaned over her arm to look at it with her.
My apologies for the disturbance upon your arrival this evening.
Please help yourself to any dinner on our menu with my compliments. I will be honored to join you at my earliest convenience.
“We’ve each been given a private suite, too,” Paval went on when Rahel grunted and pushed the note aside to Nils. “Huan said if we need anything, all we have to do is let him know. This place has everything!”
Which Rahel suspected was rather the point.
“I think I need a swordfish steak and at least a half a bottle of good Terran wine.” Nils picked up his valise and looked speculatively from side to side. “Not to mention a bellhop to take our things to our rooms so we don’t have to be bothered.”
Rahel stooped with a disgusted snort, sweeping up her bag and her field pack one in each hand. “I think you guys need to remember what we’re here for.” She glowered at both of them, but only Paval had the grace to look subdued. “Not only is Feles Sadena probably responsible for the very disaster we’re trying to avert here, but running up expense tabs with big rooms and fancy food isn’t why Noah’s Ark hires out its services to private sectors. Or weren’t you listening to all that yelling a minute ago?”
Nils made a face at her, waving Paval into silence when the apprentice opened his mouth as though to defend them. “The boy and I are quite aware that we aren’t on Uriel to enjoy ourselves. But does that make it wrong to take a little pleasure when it’s offered?”
“I’m sure that’s what everybody who comes here says.” Rahel turned away from them with a scowl and a dismissive shake of her head. “I just think maybe you ought to consider what made them have to call us here in the first place. That’s all.”
Rahel’s suite took up half the sixteenth floor. It smelled of sea sand and hyacinth. She dropped her luggage, then danced a few steps forward when the door tried to slide shut on top of her. The instant it hissed into its frame, she wished she could duck back outside again.
She didn’t want to stay in a place like this, a place where live sea plants were confined to water-filled cylinders all for the sake of decoration. A place where nudibranchs and Aequorea were depicted as often in the fiimiture carvings and artwork as any native Uriel species. What Sadena advertised throughout the Galaxy as an homage to the natural world was a sham, constructed to look and sound and feel the way wealthy tourists expected it to, not the way nature really designed it. Just like the Startide’s carefully downplayed frontispiece, and the spectactular robotic arthropod running the desk in the lobby.
Kicking her luggage to the foot of the bed, Rahel walked slowly across the opulent sleeping area, past the coffee table with its tangle of blooming plants, and tapped a hand against the floor-to-ceiling window that made up the suite’s outside wall. Whether honestly or through some trickery of remote projection, she was rewarded with a stark, nighttime vista built all of ocean, starlight, and in-rolling clouds. Already the farthest strip of sky looked like nothing but a blurry black smear where encroaching weather smothered the horizon line and smudged out the stars.
Held up against the manic complexity of Sadena’s elaborate hotel, Uriel reminded Rahel of a chicken’s egg subjected to comparison with its brighter, augmented Faberge cousin. It didn’t reassure her that the one humans would pay millions of credits to preserve was not the one still containing all the subtle chemistries necessary to create life. Somehow, work done by human hands always impressed the masses more than anything done by nature, even when man was only copying what he’d already seen. That’s why Uriel needed a series of resorts in the first place—to make sure her natural splendors weren’t “wasted” on her own non-sentient inhabitants.
And Saiah wonders why I hate these jobs.
No, come to think of it, he probably doesn’t.
The bathroom was dressed all in polished coral—taken from the oceans back home on Terra, no doubt, since Sadena found Uriel’s environment far more valuable intact that it could ever be piecemeal—and the bed was a floppy monstrosity of water and pre-warmed silk. Sweeping off the shimmering turquoise comforter, Rahel stripped both pillows of their shams and carried the bundle to the sitting area and the big clear outside window.
One end of the window, captured behind a length of velvet sofa, slid open almost as wide as Rahel’s hand—enough to let in a maddening whisper of ocean-fresh air, but not enough to let any heartbroken fool fling himself out onto the driveway. Just as well. It would have been awkward to explain how she ended up in the front lawn planters if she happened to roll over in her sleep during the night.
Stuffing both pillows and comforter onto the floor beside that crack, Rahel climbed down the immovable sofa and wrapped herself awkwardly in the shiny, slippery turquoise blob. The oceans on Uriel may have been quiet and shy, but at least she could fall asleep to their voiceless rhythms, not to the manmade silence of facile creature comforts and white, confining walls.
The next morning arrived in a haze of humid confusion. Rahel passed her flippers from one hand to the other in an attempt to get a grip on the equipment pack sliding off her shoulder, but still ended up trotting down the last of the Startide’s front steps with the pack swinging heavily from her elbow. Behind her, curses and complaints ricocheted within the wall of reporters that hotel security manfully pressed back toward the edge of the staircase. Rahel tossed the guards a mental thanks for their efforts, but didn’t slow down to actually say anything. She didn’t have time.
Rahel hated being late. There was nothing deep and psychological about it as far as she was concerned, just simple annoyance for the loss of time mixed with some self-flagellation for being too stupid to pay attention to the time. The morning spent studying details of the stellar jelly lifecycle of eggs, larvae, and breeding stalks had seemed like such a good idea when she’d sat down to it at dawn. Now—her mind sloshing about with data on spermatozoa, hydroids, and single-celled offspring —she wondered if she wouldn’t have done better to sit down here on the docks to do her reading. At least then Paval would be the one feeling foolish as he hurried to join her, and not the other way around. She shrugged her pack up over her shoulder again, and resisted the urge to break into a trot when she reached the dock at the bottom of the stairs.
Paval jerked a look back at her when the vibration of her footsteps reached him, and Rahel was surprised by the eager hope that flashed in his nervous smile. Maybe the slim, bald pilot hovering at his side was getting too friendly for Paval’s comfort. Rahel had no idea what kind of cultural taboos the boy labored under. Early morning crankiness made her toy with the idea of slowing her stride (just to see what would happen), but she resisted in favor of finding something more constructive to do with her mood. When Paval abruptly disengaged the pilot to hurry toward the skate at the end of the pier, Rahel was just as glad she hadn’t dawdled—the face that turned to watch her approach didn’t belong to a bald skate pilot after all, but, rather, to netlink ferret Eme Keim, with her androgynous clothing and too short blonde hair. The pilot, apparently, was the steel-and-teflon robot bolted to the skate’s navigation console. Rahel suddenly wasn’t sure what to expect from this morning expedition, and that spurt of uncertainty made her stomach burn.