It's rare - virtually unheard-of - for Kaidy not to look around as she enters the bar, but this time she barely spares the place a glance as she makes a beeline for her door. Martin gets one last quick, hard, laughing kiss - and then she tugs the door open and leads him through.
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It's rare - virtually unheard-of - for Kaidy not to look around as she enters the bar, but this time she barely spares the place a glance as she makes a beeline for her door. Martin gets one last quick, hard, laughing kiss - and then she tugs the door open and leads him through.
The room beyond is where she'd been going when the bar saw fit to break her journey: it's quite small and lightly furnished, with one wall straight and the other a long arch which forms both wall and roof, as if the room were part of a circular tunnel. The curved wall shows one large vidscreen, currently muted and showing only the time and date - 22:57, 11/08/33 - in large dulled blue characters. There's a vanity mirror and writing desk against the flat wall; the desk is covered by a tumble of papers and books lying slipshod over make-up and framed photographs, with Kaidy's favourite flying jacket hanging from the back of the accompanying chair. A wardrobe, apparently mostly held together by duct tape and photos of planes, lurches unsteadily at the other end of the room to the desk, and a small bookshelf holds a few more books on planes and flying, the Haynes manual for an Aston Martin, and the collected Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen, bookended by a very large and expensive-looking wooden jewellery box. Above the books, half a dozen little Airfix models of planes (there's a Spitfire, a Sopwith Camel, and a few more recent designs) hang motionless from the ceiling like insects caught in amber. Most space is taken up by the bed, which consists of two big double mattresses piled one on top of the other and draped in a tumble of pillows, rugs, blankets and sheets in a general impression of messy comfort: if any bed could be described as déshabillé, it's this one. There are no windows; it's warm, and light comes gently from the vidscreen and the two upturned wall lights on the one flat wall.
"I'm afraid it's hardly five-star," Kaidy remarks wryly from just behind him, "But it'll do."
She carefully shuts the door on the noise and lights of the end of the universe, clicking the lock just in case.