Engine City (25 page)

Gaius covered his confusion by buying another couple of drinks. Somebody had started playing a zither. Others, even more misguidedly, were singing. Gaius was grateful that the malcontent musical ethos eschewed electrical amplification. He returned and set down the drinks and slid himself into the high-backed bench beside Lydia, who was sitting on a stool at the head of the table with her back to the wall. The matter of Volkov, he’d decided, was best dropped. He was not sure whether Lydia had been corrupted by adaptation to the Regime, or had acquired an inhumanly long view of history from her earlier life as an interstellar traveler. He leaned forward a little and spoke in a low voice.

“Your ideas deserve a better discussion,” he said. “What concerns me at the moment is that the managers of my business back in Illyria clearly believe the unidentified skiff sightings are real, and that you know something which might explain them.”

Lydia looked down into her drink. Her lips compressed, her fingers pressed on her temples.

“I can’t begin to hope,” she said, “that the ships have got through. Unless . . . oh, I remember now. We’re such good navigators. Better than the kraken. Better than Gregor.”

Gaius stared at her. “Who’s ‘we’? Who’s Gregor?”

Her eyes were glazed. She wasn’t really looking at him. Then she blinked and recovered. “Gregor Cairns,” she said. “You know, the Mingulayan navigator.”

Gaius had heard of the Mingulayan navigator. News of what went on in the Mingulayan-dominated sector of the Sphere—the Bright Star Cultures, as its inhabitants called it—had arrived in approximate reverse order over the past few years. Gregor Cairns had also been referred to in the information that had arrived more than a century earlier, with Volkov himself. That Lydia had had some acquaintance with him was briefly alluded to in Gaius’s briefing.

“I know about Gregor,” he said. “You haven’t said who ‘we’ are.”

“I’ll show you,” she said.

She took a dinky pen knife from her pocket and opened it, and very deliberately made a small cut in the tip of her ring finger (which bore no rings). She squeezed out a drop of blood and let it fall on the table.

“What are you doing?”

Lydia pointed at the red drop. “Watch,” she said.

High Strangeness Incidents

“
THIS WON’T HURT
,” said Mr. Magenta.

He puffed some spores over Susan. She inhaled them and immediately went into a spasm of coughing and sneezing.

“That is good,” said Mr. Magenta. “It drives the small offspring into your sinuses.”

Susan found herself breathing more calmly. She stepped away from the side of the hangar and looked around at the others, who stood at a safe distance.

“My mother said she was going to do it.”

Even to her, it didn’t sound like a good reason.

“And it hasn’t harmed Matt.”

“Hah!” said Ramona Garcia. “How could anyone tell?”

In truth there was a sort of fatalism to Susan’s decision. Her own curiosity, if nothing else, would sooner or later drive her to it. The Multipliers would not force their infection on anyone, but sooner or later almost everyone was going to accept it. She might as well get there first.

It still didn’t sound like a good reason.

The guerrilla ontology campaign, as Matt persisted in calling it, was into its second week. A sort of routine had become established. The
Investigator
, concealed in the hangar, remained the base camp and headquarters. The Multiplier skiffs were used to conduct operations. Apart from piloting the skiffs, the Multis foraged. They followed the saurs’ advice about which fruits and seeds were nutritious and which were not, but they also—more or less at whim—synthesized new foods. They could make beef from a pile of grass, a process that as Matt pointed out was also regularly accomplished by cows, but that still seemed like a miracle.

The skiffs’ missions varied from spectacular or subtle displays of their presence, to stealth missions for the sole purpose of information gathering. The latter sometimes shaded illicitly into shopping expeditions—not even the Multis could assure a supply of coffee and tobacco reliable enough for those addicted to them.

Gradually a picture of the world had been built up, from talking to people—whether in Matt’s MIB stunts or more discreet contacts—and from books and newspapers, and from radio. The discovery that Volkov was dead—had been killed in a palace coup by his own security detail on the orders of his lover, the President—had left the Cosmonauts who’d known him shaken but, Susan thought, not altogether surprised. It didn’t fundamentally alter the big picture.

Working inward:

The closest contact with the Bright Star Cultures had been from about fifty light-years away. These contacts reported an evidently stable and productive relationship between the Multipliers and at least the saurs and the hominidae. The most recently arrived information, ironically, came from farther away, as merchant ships jumped straight from the emerging Cultures on the home planets, Mingulay and Croatan, to Nova Babylonia, arriving shortly after others who had jumped fifty-odd years later but from fifty-odd light-years closer.

The Bright Star Culture wavefront was, of course, only intersecting the Second Sphere from one side. Traffic in the other sides of the great volume was becoming just as disrupted, as the majority of saurs and krakens broke off cooperation with New Babylon, or recoiled from the news of the new alien-human alliance. To an ever-increasing extent, New Earth—and, it would seem, all the other planets—were becoming isolated from interstellar trade.

The fortifications of the Nova Solar System were almost entirely the work of the Republic of New Babylon, and were much as Telesnikov had projected—his only mistake had been to assume that they extended to the gas-giant moons. There were three forts, as he’d supposed, in the asteroid belt, and orbital forts in the cislunar region to meet incoming starships. All of this cost money and resources, and some of the costs were met by the former provinces—when you have system defense, as the Cosmonauts pointed out, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade other powers to contribute to the system defense budget. This was the cynical bottom line—there was genuine widespread support in the other states for the common defense, and although the supposed Multiplier invasion was fading from living memory, the suspicion of what was going on in the Bright Star Cultures was renewed with every panicking starship that arrived. The Cosmonauts, however, remained convinced that some of the other powers were approachable.

The Republic of New Babylon had expanded from its initial position as a hegemonic city-state to become a nation-state of the entire subcontinent. Its nearest neighbors, Illyria and Lapithia, were implacably hostile—Illyria as a richer power, Lapithia as a poorer. Beyond them lay a checkerboard of small states, really no more than the olden cities with their hinterlands, each with its own unique proportion of hominid species and its own fiercely local patriotism, somewhat mitigated by their economic union and defensive alliance as the grandly named Genean League. The diplomacy of the other powers consisted largely of manoeuvres designed to split the League or play its members off against each other. There was a sort of logarithmic relationship between the states—New Babylon outweighed Illyria and Lapithia together, and these three major powers about balanced the League as a whole, if not in wealth and firepower then in population and difficulty of conquest. The hominid population of Genea had increased from about a hundred million to about five hundred million in the last century.

This increase was more than balanced by a far steeper decline in the population of Sauria. If any saurs remained they hadn’t been spotted by the Multis’ stealth-mode overflights, which had returned with pictures and descriptions of invading jungle and of manufacturing plant gone to seed. A small fraction of this decline was attributable to the departure of those saurs who were willing to cooperate with the Modern Regime. The rest had fled to the stars.

Some few were left, though none had been seen—small bands that must be living in the forests, the only evidence of their presence some recently slaughtered dinosaurs, clearly deliberate forest fires, and traces of strange rituals—tree trunks piled into conical pyramids, dinosaur skulls mounted on hilltop poles like some magical early warning system. What this signified, the saurs with the expedition were unable or unwilling to divulge, and reluctant to discuss.

Susan felt the fever coming on her. She took a couple of tablets to bring down her temperature, and carried the bottle of water with which she had washed them down with her out of the hangar. The sun cast long shadows among the enigmatic ruins. Pushing through underbrush, jumping over long cables of creeper, she made her way to a part of the abandoned city that might once have been a public square. She sat down on one of the long, low steps that beveled the square’s perimeter and sipped some more water. The blood moved in her veins like trickling sand.

As the sun set, the colors around her first became more vivid, the purple shadows seeming to have neon behind them, the greens and yellows of the foliage glossy like the skins of frogs; then they faded out to a silvery monochrome. The moons, now waning, became visible and as bright as the sun, though looking at them did not hurt. One by one, as if somewhere switches were being flicked, the planets and the brightest stars blinked on, then the steady procession of the satellites, and with a rush that made her gasp, the bright path of the Foamy Wake.

She leaned back against the steps behind her, the little steps of the saurs, so incongruous with the gigantism of the rest of their architecture, and gazed up at the crowded sky. After a while, one of the stars became a light that shone brighter and brighter until it was visibly growing bigger and then—in a sudden shocking shift of perspective and involvement—coming closer. Susan sat forward, and tried to stand, but her knees betrayed her. They would not, could not lock. She sat back heavily. The moving blood was a roar now, a rhythmic pulse that at first she mistook for the sound of her breathing, then realized that, slow as it was, her breath was slower still.

The light became the familiar lens shape of a skiff, picked out in the small lights at its top and bottom and around its rim. A few tens of meters above her it went into falling-leaf motion, and settled on the square in front of her on its tripod of landing legs. By this time the lights had disappeared, or been incorporated into the general glow of its surface. It was definitely a saur skiff—it didn’t have the roughness of the ones humans built, nor yet the liquid-mercury gloss of the Multipliers’ craft.

This was confirmed when the hatch opened, the ladder extended, and a saur descended. The way he walked across the overgrown ancient flagstones toward her was peculiar, as though he wasn’t quite touching the ground—no, it was as though he was walking on a moon with a much lower gravity, rising too high and drifting down. But she only had seconds in which to form that impression, because by then he’d stopped and was standing about three meters away from her.

“Who are you?” he said in English.

The accent was Mingulayan, like Salasso’s.

“Susan Cairns Harkness,” she said.

“Why are you here?”

“We’re here to stop a war,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said.

The saur rose slightly off the ground and returned to the craft without further movement, like an image shrinking in a zoom lens. The hatch closed behind him, still looking straight at her; then all the gear retracted and the skiff rose into the sky—again, more like an image shrinking than something actually moving away. Within a minute it was once more an indistinguishable light among the stars.

She heard a footstep behind her and jumped up, stumbling and struggling to keep her balance as she went down the steps five at a time. Down in the square she stopped and whirled around.

A saur stood at the top of the steps, regarding her.

“It’s all right, Susan,” he said, in English with a Mingulayan accent, but she recognized the voice.

“Oh, Salasso!”

She bounded up the steps as fast as she’d fled down them and hugged the saur, holding his head to her midriff.

Then, slightly embarrassed, she released him and stepped back.

“Did you
see
that?” she cried.

“I saw a light through the trees,” said Salasso.

The following morning she had a bad sunburn on her face and the backs of her hands. The Multipliers told her this was not a symptom of the infection. Neither were hallucinations. Their skiff-detecting instruments had detected nothing, and nobody but Salasso had seen any light. Susan dragged Matt to the square and pointed triumphantly to three indentations in the crushed vegetation. He was unusually quiet on the way back.

“For the next three days,” Matt announced, “we’re not going to make any manifestations. No daylight disks, no crop circles, no funny lights in the sky, no MIB. We’ve got to plan some trips, but all in stealth mode, and any EVA has to pass for local. In fact EVAs are going to be our main activity. We need to find out, on the streets, what effect we’ve been having.”