Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod Page B

them invigorated. That done, he switched on the electric kettle and made himself a small pot of tea.
    The room was just big enough to contain the futon, a table and chair, hundreds of pages of notes, and several hundred books. It wasn't much of a gesture of independence, considering that his father gave him the money he needed for rent, university fees, and subsistence, but it was better than living at home. At the top of a building in Kyohvic's old town, built before his ancestors' ship had arrived, the room gave him peace and privacy and, if he needed it, the easy company of the other students and older eccentrics who lived in its other twenty or so single rooms and shared its decrepit facilities.
    As was his habit, he opened the weighty leatherbound volume -- a gift from his father -- of the Good Books, the words of the philosophers: the Fragments of Heraclitus, the Sayings of Epictetus, the Teachings of Epicurus, the Poems of Lucretius. Their English paraphrases were among the best-loved works of Mingulayan literature; some said they were better than the originals. His glance fell on one of the Fragments:
    This world, which is the same for all, no god or man has made.
    An ever-living fire it is whose flames forever flare and fade.
    The book fell open again at another familiar page, from the Teachings:
    Around the world goes friendship's dancing call,
    Join hands in happiness for one and all.
    That would do, he thought, as a devotion for the day. He drained his cup, dressed, and set off to work, picking up his breakfast on the way.
    Elizabeth jumped off the clanging tram at Harbor Halt and walked briskly to the quay. The parked skiffs glowed orange in the early light, their spindly legs and lenticular bodies casting long shadows out over the water like tall, striding tripedal machines. The traders' ship squatting in the sound still struck her eye as a startling sight, intrusive, visibly alien, massively out-of-place. High above, an airship from the skyport on the hill behind Kyohvic wallowed upward to meet a southerly air current, and tiny buzzing airplanes made sightseeing circles around the harbor and its gigantic visitor. For a moment, airship and aircraft looked like pathetic, primitive imitations of the starship and the skiffs.
    Along the quay baffled seabats squabbled around the well-protected tanks that Renwick and his crew were already lifting off the deck with a creaking crane and screeching winch. Elizabeth mucked in as best she could, helping to maneuver the tanks and crates onto the department's flatbed truck parked alongside. After a while she glimpsed Gregor hurrying up, and her heart jumped like a fish.
    "Good morning," he said. "Sorry I'm late."
    "You're hardly that," Elizabeth said. "We were early."
    She smiled at him, staring and trying not to, trying not to look too long, hoping that he'd notice that she was looking too long. But he just grinned and nodded and grabbed the rope. His hand brushed hers accidentally as they hauled together; she almost jerked it away.
    Things might have been different if he hadn't grown on her, if they'd met at some student bash instead of in the lab, if they hadn't worked together and become colleagues and good mates before she'd realized what she really felt for him, and had felt from the beginning. Now she felt completely entangled in that easy friendship and close collaboration, frozen by the fear of losing it in a welter of embarrassment and misunderstanding.
    He rode beside her as she drove the flatbed, its electric engine whining under the strain, along the coast road to the marine-biology department on the town's westward and seaward edge. There they turned them over to the keeper of the saltwater aquaria, and headed in to the laboratories to begin another day of the research they shared. The frequent fishing-trips for new specimens were almost a holiday; this was their real work.
    Gregor, Elizabeth, and Salasso were cooperating on mapping the nervous system of the