Nivello II

 “About fifteen minutes,” said Jasper, scrutinising the display in front of him.  The displays faintly reflected Honoré behind him and it looked, in the blurry incomplete image, like she was glaring.  “It looks like light traffic out here this evening.”

“That’s too early,” said Honoré after a pause.  “He won’t be ready by then.”

“We can park up aro—“

“No!  He was clear about that; no stopping, no waiting.  We drive by when he’s there and pick him up and go.  Minimum fuss.”

“Parking is hardly a fuss,” said Jasper, sounding slightly irritated.  “It’s a gravity-car, I can put it down just about anywhere for five minutes.  Ten if there’s no patrols.”

“No!”  Jasper turned his head, though the bulk of his neck didn’t let it go very far, and saw from the corner of his eye that Honoré had turned red, her cheeks flushing and the colour descending down her neck.

“Fine,” he said, resigned to her intransigence.  “Then I can find somewhere to park now and we can wait until we’ll arrive on time.  Whenever that might be.”

“Don’t get snippy with me!”  Honoré looked out of the window and the wolverine chose that moment to rattle its cage again.  Jasper jumped at the unexpected noise, and Honoré’s gaze snapped back to the cage and she smiled.

“Dr. Veille,” she said.

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes.  You have to deliver this thing anyway, and it’ll take the time we need to lose.”

“I can deliver it later.  In fact, I’d rather deliver it later.  Tomorrow, around lunchtime.”

“Dr. Veille doesn’t go out for lunch,” said Honoré watching Jasper like a hawk.  As she guessed, a look of shame and dismay appeared on his chubby face reflected in the windscreen.  She thought he had no idea about the reflection as he made no effort to hide it.

“Ah, but she… she has to be there to take delivery of it… anyway.”

“What is the problem with Dr. Veille?  I don’t get it; she must pay well for these deliveries, that’s a live wolverine you have there.  Well, if it gets fed it’ll be a live one.”

The gravity-car dipped a little and adjusted course to the left, sliding gracefully from one air-lane to another.  Inside the zero-g bubble they barely noticed it; just a tiny inertial kick making them shift in their seats a little.

Jasper hesitated so long that he saw Honoré start opening her mouth again for another harangue and decided quickly that he didn’t want to listen to that.

“She’s Nivello,” he said and then wished he hadn’t.  Even listening to Honoré’s often bizarre opinions of other people would have been better than telling her that.

“What?!”

“She’s yellow,” said Jasper, knowing he was clutching at straws.  “She’s a member of the… Yellow Party.”  He had no idea if Lustrous’s byzantine politics had a Yellow Party, either by truename or nickname, but he was hoping that Honoré wouldn’t know either.

“You said she’s Nivello,” said Honoré.  “And I—“

“No I didn’t!”  Jasper didn’t quite shout, but he still spoke loudly enough to drown her out.

“Car!” Honoré’s tone would have brought an entire class of unruly schoolchildren to immediate silence and immotion.  “Replay conversation—“

“There’s no need for that,” said Jasper sounding defeated.  “Fine, I said she was Nivello.  I was joking, I meant she was Yellow.  Yellow Party, I just thought you’d find it funny.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Honoré.  “You said it and you meant it.  Why are you defending her if she’s Nivello?  She’s one of them.”

The planet and its four moons, possibly plus an outsize comet that might or might not have been a moon once, were together called Nivello and named for the extrasolar navigator that had determined that the planet and two of the moons were habitable.  Nivello was also the title of the planetary ruler, essentially a figurehead position whose views and opinions were largely written for it by the Union of Governments of all the significant countries and realms on the Nivello worlds.  The people who worked directly for the Nivello were also known as Nivello, by association, and formed a small, elite coterie scattered across the planet and moons.  They were more frequently referred to as them and They and every policy or decision that people disagreed with, or just bad luck, was ascribed to them.

“I’m not defending her because she’s not Nivello,” said Jasper doggedly.  “I was just joking, I thought it would be funny.”  The car changed path again, this time to avoid a collision with a gravity-car that was descending through the air-lanes seemingly without looking where it was going.

“She’s always been one for disappearing without notice,” said Honoré, who seemed to be ignoring his denials now.  “That would make sense now.  I can’t believe I didn’t spot it myself though!  She’s ruthless too, I can’t believe I just overlooked that.  I bet she’s using these animals for experiments!  Vivisection!”

“Look, do you want to go and deliver this wolverine to her or not?” said Jasper hunting for any reason to change the subject.

“Of course I do!  Now I know what I’m looking for!”

Jasper’s hands hovered over the controls as he hesitated; he’d been expecting Honoré to refuse to go until she’d had time to think about it and make plans.

“Sure?” he said, trying to think of anything to make her change her mind.

“Yes!  Get on with it!”

Nivello

 Erimus, the second moon, was rising on their left and Fao, the third moon, was setting on their right.  Between the moons the evening sky was spotted with clouds and the occasional sparkle of a low-orbit satellite.  The sky, normally turquoise during daytime, was shading into purple with red at the edges and the last of the sun was hiding now behind the spires and towers of Lustrous, the capital city of Medthorn.

Jasper squeezed himself into the driver’s seat of the gravity-car, cursing as he twisted this way and that in the plasti-steel seat trying to pull the seatbelt free from beneath himself.  Honoré tsked under her breath and opened the rear door to sit in the back and paused.

“What the hell, Jas?” she said, staring at an animal carrier emblazoned with a logo in red and white that she didn’t recognise.  “This had better not be occupied.”  She put a hand on it to lift it out and something inside lunged against the grille blocking the door, jolting the carrier forward and bumping it against the front passenger seat.  Honoré suppressed a cry of shock and her eyes tightened with annoyance that she’d even let herself be startled.  “Jas?” she said again, trying to put meaning into her tone.

Jasper’s bulk squeaked as he turned in his seat to look over his shoulder.  “Oh that, that’s the wolverine.  Special delivery for Dr. Veille.”

“When you get round to it,” said Honoré.  “Did you feed it?  Is that why it’s trying to take my hand off?  And where am I suppose to sit?”

“Uhhh,” said Jas as he turned back to the controls.  “Huh.  I might have forgotten to feed it today actually.  I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Deliver it already!  Why do you want a half-dead wolverine in the back of your car anyway?”

“I don’t,” said Jasper staring through the windscreen.  “But… well, it’s Dr. Veille.  It’s not like we get on.”

“You’re not to get on her good side by starving her bloody wolverine to death!  And where am I supposed to sit?  You’ve still not answered me!”

“Next to me?”

“Hah!”  Honoré hauled the animal carrier out and pushed it onto the passenger seat next to Jasper, which seemed to agitate the wolverine inside.  It started growling now, a low, throaty noise that made Jasper keep glancing over at it.  His face, naturally jowly and pale, took on a slightly sickly sheen to it and he started sweating.  Behind him Honoré got in the back, her feet crunching on paper and cardboard debris in the floorwell, and sighed heavily.  She slammed her door shut.

“Let’s get going,” she said.  “Ryegate first, then Dr. Veille.  I was rather hoping to get some reading done this evening but that looks like another dream gone up in smoke.”

“What are you reading now?”  Jasper unlocked the controls with his fingerprints and checked the power levels as the dashboard display lit up.  He adjusted the steering column slightly and then gently engaged the antigravity drive.  It whined loudly and the car shuddered momentarily, then there was a stomach-clenching sensation of weightlessness as the whole car became wrapped in a zero-g bubble.  It lifted slowly up into the sky and Jasper focused on the radar display, checking for other sky traffic.  Honoré was saying something about the book she was supposed to be copy-editing but interpreting the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional sky traffic took up most of Jasper’s concentration.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“I will be when we’re in a sky-lane,” said Jasper, whose brain replayed the last thing Honoré had said when the silence of her not talking got too loud.  The whine of the anti-gravity drive had faded at last and he made a mental note, for at least the fifth time, that he should get the drive serviced.  “Sorry, this is a bit tricky.”  The car shuddered as he engaged the impulse drive to correct their trajectory.

“I thought they did it all themselves?”

“Self-driving gravity-cars got banned last year, Hon,” said Jasper.  “Too many accidents.  Lustrous doesn’t like its residents being scattered over its terraces from a great height.”

“How?  They’re AI driven, right?”

Jasper sighed and tweaked the controls until the radar flashed, indicating that they were in a sky-lane.  He gently eased back on the anti-gravity and increased the impulse speed and the car started moving smoothly through the air.  With that done he relaxed a little.

“AI’s just another name for Expert System,” he said.  “If it was just reacting to what’s around the car it’d be fine.  But all the attempts to make it clever, to have it do what you say when most people can’t even say what they’re thinking… it’s not working.  They’re taking the AI out of everything now.”

“I didn’t understand any of that,” said Honoré.  “How long until we get there?”