Engine City (24 page)

“Don’t I know it,” said Gaius. “However, I think you’ll find us competitive.”

“Great! Let’s have a look at what you’ve got.”

As Gaius worked through his well-researched and well-rehearsed pitch, Daul hit him with a succession of searching questions, not just on the technical side—which he’d expected— but costs and delivery dates, quality control, penalty clauses, and possibilities of undercutting or overperforming documented competing bids. Gaius found himself liking the man, and rapidly revising the assessment he’d been given by Attulus. In different circumstances, Gaius thought, Daul might have been the salesman, and he the bureaucrat.

Eventually they straightened their backs from leaning over the same diagram and looked at each other with a laugh that covered a certain mutual embarrassment—they’d been discussing a design problem as though they were on the same team.

“Well,” said Daul, “I think I can make you an offer. Can’t shake hands on it yet, I’m afraid—some paperwork has to be passed upstairs, forms in triplicate, you know the sort of thing. Call me back tomorrow and I can let you know if you’ve hit the mark.”

Was this the buck-passing he’d been warned about, or was it genuinely a busy and competent man doing his best in a bureaucracy? Gaius couldn’t be sure. Either way, Daul’s swift proceeding was leaving him without the chance to meet Lydia de Tenebre. He tried to think fast.

“Excellent,” he said. “I wish everyone I have to deal with were as prompt.” He glanced at his watch. “You know, you’ve just cleared hours off my schedule—given me a bit of free time this evening. I’d quite like to wander around with someone who knows the city, maybe take in a beer and a meal.”

Daul raised a hand. “Sorry, I can’t help you there—strict rules about favors and all that. Kind of you to offer, though. Cuts both ways too, dammit, or I’d show you a good time myself.”

“Oh, not at all, maybe another time.” He feigned disappointment and let his gaze drift to the window. “Quite fascinating, the buildings that remain from the old city. Bit of a hobby of mine, to be honest.”

“Ah,” said Daul, “you’re an old city man?” He punched his palm. “Of course, of course—you Illyrians. Bloody reactionaries to a man, eh? Well, you’re in luck there, I know someone who isn’t a buyer, so no rules bent, and who’ll be delighted to tell you all about it, if she’s free.”

He poked his head around the door of the alcove. “Lydia? A moment please.”

A young woman in an old-fashioned robe walked in. Gaius smiled, shook hands, and tried not to stare as Daul introduced him and explained his request.

“I’d be delighted,” said Lydia. Her voice sounded even better than it had on the phone. “Where shall we meet?”

Gaius suddenly realized that he didn’t know any good places. Well, maybe one. Call that two.

“What about the Library of Earth?” he said.

Lydia’s smile was more than polite, it was complicit.

“Perfect,” she said. “Seven after noon.”

You could forget nuclear-power stations, orbital forts, plasma cannon, space rockets, interplanetary ballistic missiles, the public health service, education, irrigation, sanitation, the collectivization of the latifundia and the electrification of the proletariat. The greatest achievement of the Modern Regime was its libraries. Downtown stood two gigantic marble edifices: the Library of Earth, and next door to it, the Library of New Earth. The latter was by far the older. Its earliest texts were on clay tiles, in cuneiform. You could buy plastic replicas of them in the foyer. The former came originally from a machine smaller than a single book. You could buy plastic replicas of it too, as paperweights. A cosmonaut’s pocket computer, it had the 2045 Library of Congress as a standard feature. It also had the libraries of the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Academy of Sciences of Beijing. These were not standard. The manufacturer’s marketing department had added them as a sales gimmick. The cosmonaut was Volkov. By the time he’d arrived on New Earth the computer was dead metal, a sentimental souvenir; but in the early years of his life on Mingulay the saurs had reproduced these millions of stored books on paper in their manufacturing plant; and via the merchant families, at least a million of them had reached New Earth.

Copies of books from both collections circulated endlessly through the system of public libraries. It was the one source of information in New Babylon that had never been censored. The Modern Regime allowed anyone to read books whose writing would have got them hanged. In its early years, it kept the old scholars of the Academy happily occupied in compiling a digest of human knowledge, the endlessly fascinating and dubiously reliable
Encyclopaedia Babylonica.
Gaius had a cheap, Illyrian-pirated edition of its thirty volumes on a shelf back home.

Lydia turned up a few minutes late with six thick books under her arm. She’d changed her antique robe for an aggressive outfit of leather jacket and trousers, rips and zips, but she still astonished his eyes.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “The books slowed me down. Do you mind if we go in?”

“Not at all, this is one of my favorite places here.”

She looked hard at him as they emerged from the revolving doors. “Surprised I haven’t seen you before.”

Gaius laughed. “I don’t exactly come here often.”

“Oh, I know, but—”

The library’s vast hush silenced her.

She returned her books. He read their titles, side-on:
Capital
(three volumes);
Theories of Surplus Value
(two volumes);
The Accumulation of Capital
(one volume). He was impressed that she studied business methods in her spare time.

They went out. The street seemed loud, though it was far too quiet.

“I love the library,” she said, “but you can’t talk. And you don’t need me to show you around it. So—where would you like to go?”

To bed with you, he thought. Actually, no. Anywhere would do.

“Are there still beer parlors in the old business district?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re not as good as they were, of course. Bureaucrats don’t drink like businessmen. At least not in public.”

She ran down the steps and swung into an easy pace, as though not caring if he walked beside her or not.

“The bars around here are bugged,” she said. “The staff are cops. So let’s get this over out here. You’re a spy, right?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Common sense and long experience. Any foreign businessmen who aren’t spies are too stupid to be recruited, and you’re not stupid.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.”

“You’re not denying it.”

He couldn’t say anything to that.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” she went on. “I have my own opinions, but I’m a loyal citizen. More to the point, I’m a loyal employee. I like David Daul. If you’re looking for some inside track on your sale or you’re into industrial espionage, forget it.”

“I’m not interested in any of that.”

“Aha!” She stopped dead, throwing him a couple of steps forward. He turned back to face her.

“So what
are
you interested in?”

“You,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant. “I’ve been asked to contact you. That’s all.”

She started walking again, making him catch up. If she wanted them to look like lovers quarreling she was doing a good job of it.

“There must be some context,” she said. “The name of the Free Duchy isn’t enough to make me go weak at the knees. What do you want?”

“There is a context,” he said. “Well, two.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me the first one.”

“Skiffs.”

She broke her stride, recovered.

“There’s the harbor.” She pointed. “Go down and ask a saur, if you can find one.”

“I’m talking about unidentified skiffs.”

“Fuck off.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Don’t try to jerk me around. If you want to know about the Bright Star Cultures you can ask me right out. You don’t need to pretend they’re here.”

“I don’t know if they’re here or not. All I know is that unidentified skiffs are being reported in our litter press.”

She turned on him a look of withering scorn. “Oh,
that.
”

“I share your contempt for it,” he said.

“Glad to hear it. What was the other context?”

“I was given to understand,” Gaius said cautiously, “that you are known as a malcontent.”

Lydia stopped again. When he’d turned back he saw her smiling, for the first time since the library. It had felt like a long time.

“Oh boy,” she said, “have they ever sent you after the wrong girl.”

“You’re not a malcontent?”

“I am, just not the way you think.” Her smile became a baring of teeth. “I’m a Volkovist.”

They were standing outside a beer parlor. Gaius felt dizzy and slightly sick. He indicated the door.

“Shall we?” he said.

“I know somewhere better. Safer, anyway.”

She led him down to the end of Astronaut Avenue and sharply right along the waterfront to an area where the lights were orange and the buildings were long and low, warehouses and offices long since turned to other purposes. Outside one of them, a beer parlor by the sign if nothing else, Lydia paused, then crossed the road to look across the quay and the water to the starship. By the time Gaius had caught up with her, she was looking up, at an orange sky through which a handful of stars were visible.

“I miss the stars,” she said. “I miss traveling to them, but I miss seeing them even more. I’m a pantheist. Pollution is persecution.”

“I’m an agorist,” said Gaius. “Planning is sacrilege.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Let’s see you spend some money,” she said.

They went back across the street to the drinking dive.

The bar had too much dust, smoke, verdegris. The roof beams were low and bare, with bare electrical bulbs hanging from them. The tables had benches that might have been recovered from a demolished temple. The clientele, thin at this time, looked unrespectable. The beer was still good.

“You knew Volkov,” Gaius said “Is that safe to talk about?”

“Yes, and yes.” She raised her glass. “To the Republic.”

He moved a jug of water and lifted his glass above it. “The Republic.”

He’d seen malcontents do this. On the other side of the Half Moon Sea, and not a dozen kilometers from where they sat, was the Republic of Lapithia—another breakaway province, of impressive size but largely desert, its coastal fishing devasted by New Babylon’s industrial runoff. They exported mainly nurses, sailors, and mercenaries; imported exiles who sat in seafront bars and plotted till they died of drink.

She smiled. “Very good. The strait is patrolled. You have to go a long way up the coast to get past them, and by that point it’s actually quicker and safer to go over the mountains.”

“Cloud people.”

“Yes. It’s not illegal to emigrate, you know. Even the patrols are mainly to stop smuggling and raiding.”

“So why do people—”

“Because your precious Duchy doesn’t give visas. They’ll take a trickle of cloud people, oh yes. Legal immigration would be too much to handle, and wouldn’t supply sob stories for your litter press.”

“It’s a sore point,” Gaius conceded. “You were saying about Volkov?”

Lydia shrugged. “I went to bed with him a few times. He was all right.” She smiled. “Experienced.”

Gaius felt himself go red in the face. “That’s not what I was asking about.”

“What is there to say? You must have read about him and my family. We met him on Mingulay, we brought him here, we went away and came back. He was dead. We found what he had left.”

“Yes,” said Gaius. “The greatest city in the known universe, turned into this heap of shit.”

“It’s a heap of shit all right,” Lydia said. “But what he built was worth it.”

“You can’t truly believe that,” said Gaius. “He fought off the aliens, I’ll give you that.”

“You don’t need to,” said Lydia. “The aliens aren’t a threat anyway. I should know.”

“I know you encountered them,” said Gaius. “And the people who had been corrupted by them.”

“Yes, and none of that is a threat. The Bright Star Cultures are out there, and coming closer, and no doubt when they do arrive the SDF will fight them off. Or maybe not.” She chopped with her hand. “None of that matters.”

“So what does? If you don’t like the Modern Regime and you don’t fear the aliens, what did Volkov do that was so great?”

“He gave us back our pride,” she said. “He showed us we could be a great people, that we didn’t need to limit ourselves to what the saurs would accept. All but a few of them cringe before the gods. Volkov said we can go out to space ourselves, face and fight the aliens, and deflect anything the gods care to throw at us. The saurs went away, they stopped sharing their skiffs and the krakens stopped sharing their ships. New Babylon built rockets. For the first time in ten thousand years, people stopped traveling to the stars—but for the first time, they actually visited the planets of this system. The saurs stopped healing us, and thousands upon thousands died in plagues. Maybe millions on the planet as a whole. The Modern Regime built hospitals, invented medicines, expanded health services to fill the gap. We lost the trade with the saurs, and everything they produced in their manufacturing plant. The Modern Regime built factories. The provinces broke away under the burden of Volkov’s space defense taxes—and what are they now? They’re nations, like yours, independent centers of development, with the capacity—if not yet the will—to build rockets of their own. You have no idea, Mr. Gonatus, no idea at all how much of a triumph it is for Volkov that I’m sitting here talking to you—gods above, an Illyrian, uh, businessman, of all things! Without Volkov Illyria would still be a sleepy agricultural province, with nothing to sell but sheep, and a dozy patrician on the Senate of Nova Babylonia, who left every hard problem to his saur scribe!”

“We had to fight New Babylon to
get
independence!”

“Exactly,” said Lydia. “And my friends here”—she waved vaguely at the now-growing crowd in the bar, a rabble of types who looked like artists or musicians or criminals—“who talk about the glories of old Nova Babylonia are right—I remember it, and I loved it too. But we can’t go back to it, and we shouldn’t want to. The Modern Regime will fall someday. Madame President will die, the gerontocratic camarilla around her will fall out with each other and with the security forces, the Society will split, and the crowd will pour through the gap. Competent people, like my boss, will move to the top floor. The crowd will pull down all that remains of Volkov’s memorials, they’ll demolish the bloody
plinths.
A century later, two centuries, it doesn’t matter, their grandchildren will erect a modest statue of Volkov, the Engineer, maybe at the bottom of Astronaut Avenue, and nobody will think it strange.”