Engine City (26 page)

Susan sat and shivered. She’d been tempted to give the early morning planning meeting in the hangar doorway a miss. The pain in her skin was easing off, the red was fading. She hadn’t slept well, and she couldn’t even remember the dreams which had woken her, except one, which was of being tiny and being stepped on. She could remember the tread pattern on the sole of a descending boot.

“I have another suggestion,” said Ann Derige. “If we’re going to do stealth surveys, why not sneak up on some of the space installations?”

“Because we don’t want to,” said Matt, over a murmur of enthusiasm for Derige’s idea—the gunners and rocketeers were getting impatient. “We don’t want to give the slightest impression that we’re interested in the space installations.”

“We won’t, if the stealth tech works,” said Ann.

Mr. Orange waved a limb. “If I may,” it said. “The stealth technology works against radar observation, and visual in most circumstances. It is not invisible to modes of detection outside the electromagnetic spectrum.”

“Such as what? Telepathy? Smell?”

“Smell, yes, in the sense of ionized particles. Telepathy we know nothing about. More to the point, there are instruments for detecting minute variations in gravitational fields, instruments well within the capacity of this civilization’s technology, and useful in space. The gravitational anomalies caused by the near presence of a skiff in stealth mode are more than minute.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Ann, who clearly didn’t.

“All right,” said Matt, after they’d thrashed out a schedule for visiting various towns, timed for just before the dawn crept over the western continent. “Volunteers?”

Everyone stuck up a hand, or several.

“No saurs on EVA,” said Matt dryly. “And nobody who’s just taken the Multiplier treatment. Sorry, Susan.”

“Didn’t stop
you
making decisions,” Ramona muttered.

Matt heard. “It was all right for me,” he said. “I used to do drugs.”

You get used to the weirdest things, Susan thought, as one by one the five Multiplier skiffs vanished from the hangar, leaving the
Investigator
alone in the middle, and her with Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow, Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer, Salasso, and Delavar.

“Drawn the short straw,” said Obadiah, a cheerful young man with black hair and big hands. He peered at her over the flare as he lit a cigarette, a habit Susan was glad not to have. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said Susan. “I feel kind of weird. Light-headed.”

“That is because of the very small offspring moving among your neurons,” said Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow.

“Thanks,” Susan glared. “That image is just what I need to calm me down.”

“That was my intention,” said the Multi, and scuttled off out to forage.

Obadiah looked down at the detritus of breakfast. “Might as well clean up,” he said. “Give the old ship a good going over while I’m at it.”

“We have decided,” said Delavar, “to spend the day studying the information retrieved earlier.”

Susan looked around. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just not up to anything right now. I’ll just go and sit in the door.”

“That is strongly recommended,” said Salasso.

Susan dragged a log from the area in front of the hangar to the side of the entrance and sat down on it, leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes and watched the Catherine wheels and rockets for a while. Then she opened her eyes and looked at the incredible intricacy of the lichens on the log, and contemplated the molecular machinery of the leaves on the trees. The insects moving about in the grass communicated by throwing little molecular machines at each other. She could almost understand what they were saying. She closed her eyes again. The sheer amount of information in front of her was too much to take in. She had to think about it.

When she opened her eyes again an inordinate amount of time had passed. The sun was a little higher in the sky. Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow emerged from the trees, jeweled with droplets of water, each of which refracted the light and reproduced the colors of his fur. He strolled up to her on four legs, the other four forming a mesh in which he held a great variety of fruit.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “All is well. God,” she giggled helplessly, “is in
everything.
”

“Yes,” said the Multiplier. “Did you not know?”

Oh gods
but this was a drag. People had come back, skiffs emerging inside the hangar as usual, and everybody was scurrying about and jabbering and ignoring her and she was tired like she had been working hard all day bloody hell she had been working hard all day she had gathered all this information and nobody was fucking interested and she had bloody spiders crawling out of her nostrils and nobody wanted to look at her and she just wanted to
die.
She heaved herself to her feet and trudged to the
Investigator
and climbed the ladder and crawled to her bunk and went out like a burnt filament.

“Good morning,” said Matt, crouched over the electric heater and a coffeepot. “Welcome back.”

Susan felt all bouncy and clean as though she had just had a shower, although she hadn’t. Even her clothes felt clean, although she had slept in them.

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” The previous day was a blur, but she distinctly remembered going away. “Everyone went away yesterday, didn’t they?” She paused, puzzled. “Where did I go?”

He handed her a coffee. “Off on a little trip of your own.”

Everything came crashing back. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Well, quite,” said Matt. “That was some sermon you gave us.”

Susan felt like putting her head in her hands. “But it’s still true,” she said. She looked out through the wide doorway at the early morning landscape. Through the fog over the valley the sun was a red, coppery circle somewhat like a penny, and . . . 

“Look at the
sun!
” she said.

“Yup,” said Matt. “ ‘A great multitude of the heavenly host crying, “Glory, glory, glory to the Lord God Almighty.” ’ Well, something like that. You’ll get used to it.”

“It doesn’t go away?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Matt. “I understand it has something to do with an irreversibly increased awareness of the information density of reality. According to the Multis, anyway. Think about it. Your brain has been walked over by beasties that can
feel atoms.
”

Susan snapped out of a contemplation of the steam rising from her cup. She examined the skin on her arms. “Speaking of beasties—where are they?”

“Crawled out of your bodily orifices, cleaned up your skin and clothes, and gone trooping back to Mr. Magenta.”

“How embarrassing.”

“Speaking of embarrassment . . . ” said Matt. Elsewhere in the cavernous hangar, people were beginning to stir. “I think it might be best if we agree not to talk about, um . . . ”

“All that infinity in a grain of sand shit?”

Matt grinned. “It’s good to find someone whose mind is cruder than mine.”

She smiled conspiratorially back, then very deliberately turned her attention to other things.

“Do you think I’m ready to go out on reconnaissance today?”

“Yeah,” said Matt. “Just don’t let your mouth hang open, and you’ll pass for normal.”

The inside of the Multiplier skiff was remarkably like the inside of every other skiff Susan had been in. She and Telesnikov sat side by side on the circular bench around the central engine fairing, and Mr. Blue squatted on a stool in front of the control panel. It was only when the Multiplier turned on the viewscreen that a major difference, or refinement, became apparent. The hull was all viewscreen. It was like sitting in midair. Susan grabbed the edge of the seat and smiled self-consciously at Telesnikov.

The view changed—the inside of the hangar was instantly replaced with dark-blue sky above and a wide stretch of Genea below. She looked down between her feet and saw greens and browns and the white of clouds, the fractal line of the coast, the semicircle of Half Moon Sea. After her first intake of breath her second emotion was a pang of nostalgia for Mingulay—she’d seen her home planet from space many times, on the way to or from her family’s orbital factories where the saurs brought the exotic components—black hole atoms, unusual stable elements with atomic weights in the hundreds—for the engines and drives.

Instantly the view changed again. They sat a couple of hundred meters above the surface—they didn’t want to leave crop circles—then descended to hover above damp grass in a field by a metaled road. A hundred or so meters away were low slope-roofed houses, which if Mr. Blue had got it right were on the edge of Junopolis, the capital of Illyria.

“Over by the hedge,” said Telesnikov. The skiff glided to the bushes. Twelve eyes surveyed the surroundings. No eyes looked back. The hatch flowed open—the only way Susan could tell was by the air on her face—and the two humans jumped out. By the time they’d walked a dozen steps the skiff was nothing but an unease-inspiring shimmer in the air.

Their clothes would pass as Illyrian, though plain. Short hair was not so uncommon as to be noticed. Their pockets were stuffed with Multiplier-copied Illyrian money. Each of them had a legal weapon—in the Duchy, wearing a knife was practically compulsory—and a small radio, of local manufacture but with Multiplier enhancements in its innards, most significantly an emergency alarm to call for a skiff and a tracking device to tell the skiff where to go.

They found a tram stop after walking a few hundred meters through the waking suburb—dogs barking, children running for buses—and rode into town accompanied by sleepy commuters.

Several people left newspapers on their seats; Telesnikov and Susan each casually picked one up.

Their reading did not stay casual for long. The front pages of both papers—the sensational
New Morning
and the sober
The Day
alike—showed a clear photograph of a daylight disk over Junopolis. The captions agreed on the date and time of the sighting—the middle of the afternoon of the previous day.
The Day’s
headline was “Mystery Skiff Evades Fighters.” The
New Morning’s
was “SPIDER SKIFF STUNS CITY!”

Susan turned over the rest of the pages. The sighting over Junopolis was only the biggest of many similar stories. Editorials screamed for action; when she silently swapped papers with Telesnikov, she read that the country’s elected representatives were doing the same. Buried in the longer articles were references to earlier official denials of various odd events of the past fortnight, at some of which she had been present herself. The independent confirmation of the “Lucifer Probe anomaly” had resulted in a particularly embarrassing climb-down, it seemed.

Susan folded the paper glumly and looked out the windows. The day was heating up. Fall in this hemisphere, spring at the base in Sauria—the contrast was fierce. Junopolis looked like a town well adapted to seasonal change. From the depth of the recesses of windows she could see that most walls were thick, at least on the older buildings. Garish color washes were the fashion, or tradition—it was hard to say, because compared with her hometown even the new buildings looked old-fashioned, solid and ornate. Clothes were colorful, hair and beards generally long, with a sprinkling of clean-shaven cropheads who also tended to wear duller clothes.

At the tram’s terminal in the center of town Susan bought copies of every paper on sale—all of which led with the same photo—and she and Telesnikov made their way to a big low-ceilinged cafe with lots of marble and mirrors and took their coffeepot and cups to the most isolated table they could find. They puzzled over the papers for a while.

“Is it possible,” Susan asked, in careful Trade Latin, “that one of our teams made a big mistake yesterday?”

Telesnikov shook his head, almost angrily. “We’re the first team into Junopolis,” he said. “Last night I checked every report, every image brought back. There is no question about it—whatever this was, it wasn’t us.”

“Is it even thinkable that the . . . that our friends are lying to us? That they did this without our knowing?”

“I suppose it’s thinkable,” said Telesnikov. “But that way madness lies. If we can’t trust them we should abandon the operation right now.”

“If we don’t know what’s real and what’s—” She stopped. “This is what Matt said would happen!”

“ ‘Guerrilla ontology,’ ” Telesnikov said heavily. “ ‘Make people question their concept of reality.’ The trouble is, it’s happening to
us.
”

Susan sat back and watched the surrounding salarymen and women scoffing their breakfasts, reading the papers with expressions she could not read, talking animatedly in a dialect she could not quite follow at that volume and speed. She had missed crowds, she realized, and new faces.

“I’m not so worried about us,” she said. “I saw something myself that we couldn’t explain, and Salasso saw a light, and Matt saw the prints. Whatever it was it didn’t seem hostile. But whatever is going on here seems hostile to them.”

“To the people here? Yeah, you could say that. And no doubt to the security apparatuses as well. But what’s even more worrying is how this appears to people in New Babylon, and
their
security apparatuses. This is much more blatant than anything we’ve done.”

“So who’s doing it?”

Telesnikov shrugged. “Relict saurs? Other Multipliers we don’t know about? The—uh, our own folk? Arrived here without our knowing? Or even a local power that has developed or gotten hold of skiff technology? Or something altogether unknown? You can bet all of these possibilities are exercising some very bright minds right now.”

“And the minds of very frightened people.”

“Hell,” said Telesnikov, “
I’m
very bright, and I’m very frightened.” He swept his hand over the pile of newspapers. “What do you say we just head back?”

“No,” said Susan. “I don’t think the newspapers are enough. We have to talk to people.”

“But how do we do that?”

“It’s easy,” Susan said. “I’m a journalist.”

And with that she stood up and and wandered over to the other tables and started talking to people. It was easy. She was a journalist.