Engine City (29 page)

About three after midnight everyone on the train woke at once, as a shock and shouting ran through the packed carriages and all heads turned to the windows. Gaius found himself looking out through the yellow reflections then, as he managed to cup his hands between the glass and his face, directly, at a dozen slowly moving lights that suddenly changed color, loomed, flashed, and danced away. Minutes later, something fell from the sky and like lightning lit the rough land from horizon to horizon. Nobody slept much after that.

Dawn came up at five and a half after midnight. An hour later, the train halted at some crummy town: a water tower, a lithomancy pylon, a tractor depot, a straggle of houses. More peasants got off here, and mercifully few new passengers got on. Kids hawked papers along the platform: The morning edition of the Regime’s official and only newspaper, wired from the capital and printed locally, with a local name. Gaius tugged the window down and exchanged a handful of Volkovs for the
Pergam Truth.
Lots of other hands stretched out to do the same. Gaius found a space to sit down and read it.

ILLYRIA MUST ACT, SENATE WARNS

In an emergency all-night session, the Senate of the Democratic Republic of New Babylon warned that the Illyrian aristocracy’s criminal passivity in the face of recent incursions by Spider skiffs (see page 2) is a threat to the entire planet. The Defense Forces of the Republic stand ready to aid the Duchy’s small military establishment at a moment’s notice, but reserve the right to act unilaterally in defense of all the peoples of New Earth. Any rejection of this fraternal invitation to stand shoulder to shoulder against the alien menace will be regarded, by all reasonable people, as treachery to the species and collaboration with the enemy. The Senate strongly urged patriotic Illyrians, and in particular its brave though ill-equipped armed forces, to consider where their true loyalties lie.

A threat of war, and an incitement to treason. Gaius gritted his teeth and turned to page two, which gave—for the first time, as far as he knew—a quite sober account of the sightings and other strange events reported in his own country’s litter press. A few incidents were recounted from within the Republic, all of them—unlike those reported from Illyria—described as having been swiftly countered by air or space forces. The implication here too was that Illyria was implicated in the Spider incursion—there were a lot of heavy hints about decadent aristocrats selling out to the enemy, though quite what they were selling and what they were getting in return was not stated.

Gaius turned over more pages as the train pulled out. Editorials, interviews, maps bristling with menacing arrows, vox-pop rants . . . the hostility to Illyria was so venomous that he felt very glad he wasn’t instantly identifiable as Illyrian. Like most republicans in the Duchy, he followed the ancient fashion of short hair, and his clothes were by now as shoddy-looking as the locals’. One thing he’d expected to see in the paper, and that wasn’t there, was any reference to enemies within—no incitement to spy mania, no warnings about foreigners or Traders. They seemed an obvious scapegoat. He doubted that the Regime was simply missing a trick. It didn’t seem the sort of trick they would miss.

He opened his case, drank some tepid water and took out a curling sandwich. The very old woman sitting opposite him looked at it far more hungrily than he felt. He passed it over to her. She thanked him with a gap-toothed smile and munched it in a minute, wiped her hands on her already greasy black dress, and fiddled with something in her ear. Gaius noticed the wire that snaked to her clutched leather bag.

“You have a radio?” he asked. “Any further news?”

“Lithos is troubled,” she said. “Lithos is afraid.”

Gaius forced himself not to show his disdain. The old woman wasn’t listening to the news, she was listening to the meaningless babble from the lithomancy pylons. The cult was seductive to the old, and to the bereaved who heard their loved ones’ voices. “She hears rumors of war, she sends her engines of light to meet the Spiders. She weeps at the lost blood filled with Spiders, the blood of life. The Spiders are close, they crawl over us, they hang in the spaces between the stars.”

Gaius felt his skin go cold and his hair prickle. The old woman didn’t notice his response. The lithomantic trance glazed her eyes, and the rest of what she said was gibberish, vocalized no doubt from the atmospheric howls and mutterings of the lithosphere. Then she fell asleep, drooling slightly. The man sitting beside her, an emigrant in a smart and sweaty shirt, shifted uncomfortably and gave Gaius an embarrassed look.

“The peasants go in for that sort of thing,” he said. “Can’t say I blame them, with the President setting such a bad example.”

The man had recognized him as a foreigner, Gaius realized, hence the defensiveness. He smiled reassuringly and waved a hand, though his brain was buzzing so much that he could have done without a conversation.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Our own farmers are a lot of old pagans too, I must admit. They sacrifice mice to the new moons.”

The man chuckled. “You’re from—?” He nodded backwards, in the direction of travel.

“Yes,” said Gaius. “Just had to cut short a business visit.”

“You shouldn’t have,” the man said, defensive again. “You wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”

“Hmm,” said Gaius, raising his eyebrows.

The man sighed, and sat back and lit a cigarette, without apology, not that it made much difference by this stage in the journey.

“Yes, I’m a fine one to talk,” he said. “I’m as patriotic as the next man, you understand, but when the Society’s goons turned up last night and told me my workshop had just become part of the national defense, I thought, to the hells with them.” He glanced affectionately at a woman and two teenage boys slumped in sleep on the adjacent seat. “And the lads, well, they’re both conscription age . . . ”

“I don’t think,” said Gaius gently, “that the passes are much safer. Or Illyria, for that matter.”

The emigrant looked gloomy. “You may be right,” he said. “But we’ve talked about it, and we’d rather die on the slopes than in this futile fratricide.”

Gaius resisted the temptation to point out that these possibilities were not mutually exclusive. “What about the Spiders?” he said.

The man snorted. “I don’t bloody believe it. If the Spiders were coming, do you think the Illyrians wouldn’t join with us at once? Or that our government wouldn’t ask them nicely? No, it’s just an excuse.”

“But last night we saw—”

“Some funny lights. Yes indeed. Let me tell you, my friend, funny lights over the Massif are not as uncommon as you may think. And in any case, who’s to say these skiffs people claim to have seen aren’t from Sauria—I’m sure there are a few saurs hanging on over there—or from a ship?”

“You may have a point there,” said Gaius. He wondered how widespread this skepticism was, and decided to change the subject. “Ah, what was it you said about the President?”

The emigrant smiled and stubbed out his cigarette on the side of the seat. “It’s a scandal, you know,” he said, leaning forward and speaking in a low voice. “Madame President is kept alive with wires and transfusions and gods know what, all because of that leprous camarilla around her which fears more than anything else what happens when she dies. The poor old woman is capable of little more than clacking her false teeth and listening to that lithomancy gibberish. In her lucid moments she makes decisions. It’s pathetic, it’s shameful, to tell you the truth.”

“How do you happen to know this?” asked Gaius. He thought himself well-informed on the Modern Regime’s crepuscular politics—the tensions between the Society, internal security, and the Defense Forces were well known, and avidly followed by Illyrian intelligence—but this was news to him.

“Rumor,” said the emigrant. He looked over his shoulder, then smiled as though at himself. “Malcontent scandal sheets circulate, you know.”

“So I’m told,” said Gaius, more dryly than he’d intended. Many of these sheets were, to his certain knowledge, drafted in Junopolis by the Department. Quite possibly this particular rumor had come from there in the first place. “Can’t say I’ve come across them myself. Interesting.”

“Yes,” said the emigrant. “I say, my friend, you’ve gone rather pale. Are you unwell?”

Gaius forced a smile and stood up. “I think I need to stretch my legs and stick my head out of a window for a bit. Uh . . . would you mind keeping my place?”

“Not at all,” said the emigrant, and put his feet up on Gaius’s vacated seat. “Take your time.”

Gaius made his way to the space at the end of the carriage by the door and wound the window down. He really did need fresh air. The lumpy landscape of the Massif crawled past, irrigated fields between outcrops and escarpments crested with olive groves and lemon trees, gnarled pines, windmill generators and lithomancy poles. What was really making his head swim was not the rocking motion and the smoky, fetid air of the carriage—though now that he thought about it, he wished he hadn’t—but the connections he’d made. Lithomancy, Spiders, blood of life, transfusions . . . the rounding up of Lydia and her family, and the absence of any sign of a round-up of anyone else, even the mistrusted Traders. Thinking about what the old lithomancer had said still gave him chills.
The lost blood filled with Spiders, the blood of life
—where in the hells had that come from? And what if the other old woman, the one in the top of the tower of the Ninth, had picked up the same electric rumor?

He was torn between the desperate fantasy of going back to New Babylon and (somehow) rescuing Lydia, a more sober assessment that she’d likely just end up on a train after having had a blood sample taken (and the desperate fantasy of waiting for her at the end of the line) and the urgent and practical need to get back to Junopolis. If Madame President had let herself be infiltrated, literally, by the enemy in her frantic clinging to life and hope of rejuvenation, then the opportunities for Ilyrian active measures were enticing indeed.

He wondered if there was a telephone still working at the station at the end of the line, and if he dared send his message through in clear.

Gaius wondered if the air was already noticeably thinner at this altitude. He stopped, leaned forward with his hands on his knees, and panted for a minute. Looking back, he could see the long straggle of emigrants behind him like a line of ants on the slope. Far below was the rail terminus and the cluster of houses around it, where a friendly peasant had taken his last money (real money) for enough water to fill his bottles and enough cheese and some kind of dubious-looking and worse-smelling wind-dried meat to fill his case, as well as (for a handful of Volkovs) the couple of meters of rope with which the unwieldy item of luggage was now lashed uncomfortably to his back. He had debated with himself whether to stick with the family he’d met on the train, and had decided against it—not that they seemed inviting. He had lost them while he’d been waiting in the queue for the telephone.

At this time of year the journey through the mountain pass was supposed to take two days, for a fit man, with only half of the second day above the snowline. For a fit man. Most of the emigrants he’d seen were, in one way or another, not fit men. They could count on three days, and a whole day going through last winter’s snow. Or this autumn’s, if the weather turned bad.

A pair of jet fighters from the southwest streaked across the Massif at five hundred meters, well below his vantage, flipped up and kept the same height as their bellies flashed by above him. They’d be over the mountains in seconds, above Junopolis in minutes. On the other hand, they might not come back.

A little while later the rough path took him along the bottom of a deep cleft, with a sharp upward slope. As he toiled up the slithering scree, he was aware, from the cliffs at either hand, of an inescapable sense of presence that made him look around, again and again, to see whether he was being followed, or watched. He was alone, and knew he was alone. There was no sound but the drip of water, no smell but the metallic scent of wet algae, no presence but the countless trillions of microorganisms and nanobacteria in all the crevices of the rockface; no communication but the radiation of their minute electrical potentials, and from the piezoelectric noise of the stresses in the rock itself. It was a natural and spontaneous lithomancy, and it carried no rumors to him.

Rocket Science

“
THE MIND OF
the world is a consciousness which emerges from the interactions of the biosphere and the lithosphere of life-bearing terrestrial-type planets such as this one. It is similar to that of the smaller celestial bodies, the minds which some of you call the gods. Unlike them it is incoherent. Unlike them it is capable of manipulating very large energies, and of forming real images from plasma generated by atmospheric or tectonic polarities and hallucinatory virtual images from the effects of these electrical potentials on the nervous systems of animals. Its response to the intrusion of new and unfamiliar intelligent species, especially those using quantum manifold devices, is to generate real and virtual images of them. It is excitable, unpredictable, playful, and violent. Its communications are confusing and in part subjective on the part of the percipient. It is what produces phenomena such as the ‘saurs who were here already,’ of which the Salasso saur spoke, and it is producing such phenomena now in response to the skiffs of our expedition. We thought you knew,” said Mr. Orange.