Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod Page A

new friend Tenebre when it becomes obvious that we can't come up with the goods?"
    Driver chuckled darkly, scratching his belly through the bunched cambric of his shirt.
    "That's the beauty of it," he said. "I tell him we have technical difficulties, demand a substantial retainer, swear blind we won't cut a deal with any other merchants who may come hurrying to the scene, and ask him to call back on his next trip. For him, that means a wait of a couple of months, maybe a year. For us ... well, one way or another, it won't be our problem."
    Cairns guffawed; the others laughed too, less heartily. Their ages were all in the seventies or eighties, and -- even with the medical knowledge that the saurs had long shared with the hominid genera -- none of them expected to live more than another few decades. Unless, of course, the secrets of the ancient Cosmonauts could be rediscovered in the meantime -- but that was a hope, not an expectation.
    Tharovar stood up and strolled over to the fireplace and stood in front of it on the hearth. His silhouette gave Cairns an atavistic pang of unease, like a childish reaction to a familiar person in a frightening mask.
    "Have you considered," the saur said in his low, hissing voice, "accompanying the family Tenebre to Nova Babylonia and back? You could use their starship as a time machine into the future of this colony, a future in which, perhaps, your mathematical problems will be solved -- and your lives could be extended further."
    "Yeah, I've considered it," Driver said, surprising Cairns, who hadn't. "I have no fucking intention of tearing myself away from my life, my descendants, and my ability to keep up, in order to turn myself into a stranger in a strange time."
    Cairns joined in the murmur of agreement.
    "Then you could go to Croatan," the saur persisted, "and shuttle back and forth, returning here every ten years. That would surely be sufficient."
    Margaret spoke up. "You really don't have much of a handle on this 'progress' thing, do you, Tharovar?"
    The smile in her voice belied the criticism in her words, and the saur replied with some humor of his own.
    "Perhaps not," he said. "I am only an egg."
    Gregor hauled himself a meter off the edge of his futon, elbowed his way across the carpet, and slammed down the button to shut off the loud ringing of his alarm clock. Early sunlight rampaged through the narrow window of his room. He lay half in and half out of bed for minute or two, cheek pressed on the rough fibers by the planet's merciless one-gravity pull, while he made a cautious all-systems check. Thankfully, the various aches in his limbs and back were all accounted for by the previous day's work on the boat; minute movements of his head did not result in any explosion. The feeling in his stomach came from an empty belly and a full bladder; no nausea was detectable. His erection, to which one hand had reflexively returned, was comfortingly hard. His mouth was dry, but tasted no worse than neutral.
    It followed that he didn't have a hangover and hadn't drunk too much last night. Memory reported in, shamefacedly admitting to a few gaps in the record, but everything seemed consistent with his having shared one more pipe with Salasso, then walked back to his room, fallen asleep fully dressed, woken around midnight from colorful dreams, read for an hour or so, and then gone to bed properly, a mere five hours or so earlier.
    Still moving slowly -- in part because of the legitimate (as it were) aches in his muscles, and in part because of the remaining possibility of a stealth hangover, the kind that lurked just outside awareness and then sprang on you like a cat from a tree at the first sudden movement -- Gregor rolled over and stood up. Everything still being fine, he wrapped himself in a bathrobe and padded down the corridor to the shared toilet to relieve himself. On returning to his room he bent and stretched his way through the calisthenics of the Salute to the Sun, and finished