“Okay, I guess the surprise is ruined now. No one knows where the crashlander balls are until they happen, see? People Lucky Jump around until they find somewhere with potential and then they all converge.”
“Anyone can do this?”
“Anyone can suggest venues on the crashlander forum, but they make the final decision. And they don’t let anyone come to the ball who hasn’t found a venue before. You get it?”
Clair did see. This wasn’t just about a party. The ball was literally their ticket into the cool new clique, which in importance to Libby was right up there with the clothes she was wearing and the person she was dating. Schoolwork barely rated.
Clair piggybacked on Libby’s feed from the crashlander forum and splashed its content across the infield of her lenses. Uganda vanished behind a wall of images, projected onto her retinas by contacts she had worn from birth. The forum was full of people exchanging images of suggested sites taken with their lenses. There were a lot of images.
Clair and Libby jumped twice more, without success.
“This is giving me a headache,” said Libby despondently, brushing her bangs back into line after the doors closed and the gale outside ebbed to a muffled scream.
“Harder than you thought?” Clair tried not to sound smug.
“Much. Maybe we should pack it in.”
“Why? We’ve only just started.”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Someone has to find a venue. It could still be us.”
“Not at the rate we’re going.”
This was the way it always went. Clair didn’t like giving up on anything once she got into it, and Libby was easily bored. “We’ll just have to go faster, then. Booth? Again, please.”
sssssss-pop
Clair was seeing the fun of it, now. There was the challenge of finding the right place entirely by chance, combined with finding it before anyone else did. The odds for the former were low—there were tens of millions of d-mat booths in the world, after all, maybe hundreds of millions—but that made the odds of being the first to any one of them higher. Clair figured it canceled out.
And if they found the place, they would be crashlanders. They would be cool, and Zep would come to them, because he was as much a publicity hound as Libby. That incentive she kept carefully to herself.
Their seventeenth Lucky Jump put them in the middle of what looked like an abandoned industrial complex somewhere high up, judging by Clair’s unpopped ear and the instant chill against her skin. She stepped out and looked around, skeptical.
“Booth’s ancient,” said Libby, circling it with a look of profound dissatisfaction. It was an outmoded model, square, with a single round-edged door opening out of each white face. Just four transits at a time. “It’d be a total bottleneck.”
“Could work in our favor—you know, make it feel exclusive?” said Clair, gazing up at thick iron girders and bulging rivets, and beyond all that, a high, domed ceiling. The floor below was empty, because industry was a thing of the past. Anything except people could be fabricated at will, as long as it had been through a d-mat booth or a fabber at some point in its existence.
“It’s freezing,” said Libby, hugging herself, “and the air’s thin.”
“We can fab heaters,” Clair said, peering through a window at the infinite quilt of mountains outside. “Oxygen, too, if people need it.”
“Because passing out is a definite buzzkill.”
“Doesn’t it give you a high if you breathe it pure?”
Libby shrugged. “Don’t forget the parkas,” she said. “They’re always sexy.”
Clair checked the Air for details on their location. They were in Switzerland, it turned out, and the amazing building around them wasn’t an old factory at all, but an abandoned astronomical research station, the Sphinx Observatory, just over two miles up on the top of a hollowed-out mountain, with an ice palace somewhere at the end of an old elevator shaft below and observation decks that had been sealed up for a decade. . . .
Clair read on with amazement. Was this place real?
“I’m getting a buzz,” she said. “Quick, take my picture.”
She opened her arms, and Libby stared hard for a second while her lenses worked.
“Got it, gorgeous girl. You want me to post it to the forum?”
“Worth a try.”
“You really think they’ll come?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Libby’s lenses flickered in the gloom, and when Clair checked the crashlander forum, she saw images of herself standing in the observatory spreading out into the world.
“How will we know if they like it?” Libby asked, worrying at her lip.
“They’ll just come, I guess.”
For five minutes, nothing happened. Libby kicked the floor in moody silence, hands plunged deep in the pockets of a thick woolen coat she had ordered through the booth, while Clair paced around the enormous space, refusing to give up hope. She was finding it harder, though, with every passing minute, as the cold seeped into her skin and she became aware of a faint dizziness from the thin air. Giving up, as Libby was clearly ready to do, would be a lot easier than persisting much longer. And the odds of talking to Zep were practically zero anyway, even if the party happened. . . .
The booth behind them clunked. They ran across the room to see. One of the four doors was closing. In quick succession, the remaining three closed too, and the echoing metal space was full of the hum of matter and energy spinning into new forms. Clair stopped pacing, barely able to breathe with anticipation. They were stranded, but only temporarily, and soon they wouldn’t be alone. She saw the same eager alertness on Libby’s face. Neither of them dared speak.
“Hey,” said the first person out, a lanky man in his twenties with a British accent and a swoop of yellow hair that completely covered half his face. He stared around him with one green eye wide and gleaming, and shivered. “This is savage.”
“You like it?” asked Libby.
“Maybe. Where’s the telescope?”
“Don’t know,” said Clair. “We haven’t looked yet.”
He wandered off to explore. The door he had come through was already closing, processing someone else.
The second door opened, admitting another young man in a thick, furred overcoat, who simply ran across the room to the nearest window and gasped with something that might have been excitement or alarm. It was hard to tell. The view through the window went a long way down.
Libby looked at Clair, who shrugged.
The third potential partygoer was a girl with Thai features and a South American accent.
“Are you Liberty Zeist?” she asked Clair.
“No, I am,” said Libby.
“And you want to be a crashlander.”
“Uh, obviously. We both do.”
“Haven’t you heard that all the good sites have been taken?”
Libby looked at Clair in frustration. Clair’s heart sank. All their jumping and standing around in the cold had been for nothing. If the crashlanders had already been here, that meant no ball and no Zep.
“Just messing with you,” said the woman with a grin. “This is a great find. Congratulations.”
She produced three beers from her backpack and tossed one each to Libby and Clair. The third she opened.
“What are you waiting for? It’s time to party.”
“But how do you know?” Libby asked. “Doesn’t there have to be a vote or something?”
“Democracy is so twentieth century. Besides, the queue for the booth is thirty deep already. I’d say the decision’s been made.” The woman grinned and raised her can in salute. “Xandra Nantakarn. Welcome to the crashlanders.”