Engine City (12 page)

“We know that the gods are angry with the saurs,” said one of the seven who sat facing him and Voronar in a long row like a bench of inquisitors. “If the gods you spoke to made you mistrust the saurs, perhaps that is another expression of their anger. Perhaps they wish to turn the hominidae against us, to punish us.”

Voronar hissed some acid comment, then turned to Volkov. “You explain.”

“I know this is difficult for you to accept,” said Volkov. “I tell you honestly, and you can compare what I say with what Voronar has just said without my understanding—the gods are not angry with the saurs. Some of the saurs on the outer worlds have come to agree with that, but—and again you can see I am being frank with you—most have not. The saur Salasso who first told them that, and who went with us to inquire of the gods, was in my own presence almost hurled to his death from a great height.”

A susurrus of hissing consultation followed. Volkov was surprised at the reaction until he remembered that the saur method of hunting, megayears established and ingrained, was to stampede herds of herbivorous dinosaurs off cliffs. To be thrown from a height must be the most disgraceful and terrible death that could be inflicted on a saur.

The saurs all looked at him again in silence.

“I do not mistrust the saurs,” Volkov said into the silence. “I would like to work together with the saurs of Nova Terra and other worlds to prepare for the arrival of the monkey-spider aliens. If we are to set up defenses in space, it would obviously be preferable to have the use of gravity skiffs. The god in the Solar System who spoke to us long ago gave humans the instructions for building skiffs and lightspeed ships, and the humans, and some saurs, on Mingulay and Croatan are working together to build them. After some years—I do not know how many—these humans will be here, and humans here will have the skiffs and ships in any case. But by then, the monkey-spiders may have arrived, and made war on us all. So why not work together now?”

“I can tell you why not,” said Deleneth. “The gods do not mind that we travel between the worlds on which we live. But they do mind, very much, if we venture into the gods’ domain. There was a time long ago when the saurs did that, and the gods showed their anger and struck at them.”

Volkov knew that this was true. He had seen the ancient ruins on Croatan’s moon himself.

“That is so,” he said. “But the defenses that I recommend we build in space would also be defenses against the gods’ wrath.”

The saurs facing him swayed slightly back in their seats. Three of them went so far as to claw at their sleeves. Even Voronar sat rigid and still. At last Deleneth spoke.

“Very few will help you with that,” she said. “If you persist, if you persuade the humans to follow this this course, very few saurs will work with humans at all. We cannot fight against you, because that too would anger the gods, but we can withdraw from you. We can leave your cities, and the ships in which you travel. What the kraken will do we do not know, but we can guess.”

Volkov sighed and laid his hands on his knees, palms up. “You will do what you must, and so will I, and so will those I persuade.”

“There is nothing further to discuss,” said Deleneth. She and the other six rose and withdrew, and after waiting a couple of minutes to let them get out of the building, Volkov did the same. Voronar stayed with him and walked out beside him.

The narrow street was dark. Volkov walked down it and across a broad esplanade and leaned on the rail. Voronar solemnly propped his chin on the same railing and they looked out across the harbor, bright with the lights of ships and starships.

“That did not go well,” said Voronar.

“I’m getting used to hearing that,” said Volkov. “I’m also getting used to having a small minority agreeing with my proposal.”

“In this instance it appears that I am that minority,” said Voronar. “Though I cannot help you much, for I intend to travel again with the de Tenebres.”

“Good for you.”

“Yes,” said Voronar. “I think Deleneth was mistaken about the saurs who travel on the ships, and the skiff pilots generally. We are more openminded than the saurs who stay on the worlds.”

Volkov smiled. The skiff pilots he’d known back on Mingulay were indeed, by saur standards, rakish.

“Do you think,” Voronar went on, “that the humans here can get along without the help of saurs?”

Volkov had thought about this. Apart from space travel and the products of the manufacturing plant—all of which could be replaced, or done without at a pinch—the main saur contribution to human well-being was in their unobtrusive medical help. From the first, as far as he knew, the saurs had patiently explained the germ theory of disease and its consequences, and something like the Malthusian principle of population and its consequences. The saurs supplied contraceptives. They supplied some kind of life-extension treatments, so that the normal healthy human lifespan was about a hundred and twenty years.

Nothing for the genetic causes of aging, which—he presumed—had been synergistically and serendipitously found on Earth in the treatment, whatever it was, that had worked on him. Surgery they taught, tissue regeneration they applied, though not for trivial cases. They moved fast to contain and cure the epidemics that inevitably got shuttled around the Second Sphere by star-ships.

“It’ll be tough,” he said.

The news broke the following day. Lydia was working in one of the offices midway up the building—a quite pleasant office, open-plan and open to a terrace, and, unlike most offices she’d worked in—including this one at the time of her previous landfall—full of workers in comfortable and colorful clothes. It clattered with telegraphy and teleprinters, most of which were connected with the big calculating machines down in the basement. The work itself was laborious, but interesting, as she and her siblings and cousins coordinated what they knew of the cargo with what the locals knew of the markets. At exactly an hour before noon everyone stopped. The machines fell silent, and radio receivers were switched on. Lydia couldn’t be sure, but she thought the sounds from outside of traffic and general mechanical background hum diminished at the same time, as all across the city people stopped work to listen to the news.

It was a direct feed from the microphones in the Senate’s council chamber, and the channel was always on whenever the Senate was in session. No commentary was permitted. The citizens of the Republic might not all have the right to elect the Senators, but they had the right to the raw data of what was said in their name.

Esias de Tenebre had just been called before the assembly, and began his address with a concise account of his family’s commission to go to Mingulay and bring back as much new information as possible. So far, so familiar. He held forth briefly on the wealth of information from the twenty-first-century Solar System and its significance. Then he moved on to the surprises: the Cosmonauts’ longevity, and their first steps toward mastery of the lightspeed drive. This was news to most of the people around Lydia, though perhaps not to most of the Senate, who were sure to have heard rumors. The room rustled with whispers and silk, and Lydia thought she heard, through the open windows, the sound of the whole city drawing in its breath.

After a brief word of thanks from the Senate’s chair, the floor was given to Volkov.

Lydia could hardly pay attention to what he said. She knew it all already, knew exactly what he would say and how he would say it. Instead she watched the office workers, saw how their mouths opened and their hands crept into their sleeves to clutch their elbows as they listened to his insidious message and insinuating voice. When he had finished, the newsfeed fell silent. After thirty seconds a brief, nervous announcement followed. For only the second time in the past seven hundred years, the Senate had gone into closed session.

Lydia walked out to the terrace, wanting to shut her ears to the angry or fearful voices that filled the room, but found no respite. From the terrace, she could hear a sound she had never heard before, the clamor of a city of millions arguing with itself, like the buzz of an upturned hive.

Tidal Race

ANOTHER BEACH, ANOTHER
world. Elizabeth walked along purple-tinged sand, the skiff keeping pace a few meters behind her. The skiff’s pilot, Delavar, was an old acquaintance on whose loyalty and reflexes she was more than ready to rely. Somewhere behind the navy sky the Cairns ships hung in gravity-defying non-orbit, in any emergency a screaming red-hot minute away. The air was thick and stank of iodine. A few tens of meters to her left, the last exhausted ripples of breakers whose surf broke hundreds of meters farther away hissed into the sand. The tide was far out and on the turn. Giant oystercatchers the size of moas stalked the shallows, stabbing the sand with beaks like swords. Kilometers to her right, a row of cliffs denned the horizon. This beach was huge, visible from space as a white crescent like a life-size drawing of a small moon. They’d called it Atlantis Flats. The red sun loomed high in the sky, far bigger than any sun she’d ever stood beneath, but utterly dwarfed by the ringed gas giant that, gibbous, filled an eighth of the sky above the sea. It looked as though it were floating on the ocean beyond the horizon, the colors of its bands and the dark of its nightside segment and a long, wavy ink-black line from its razor-thin ring bleeding into the water.

Just half a kilometer ahead of her, the city of the selkies rose from the beach and the sea, straddling the mouth of a broad river. Built on stone pillars and wooden pilings resting on the bedrock beneath the sand and silt, and rising about twenty meters above them, the city extended to about a hundred meters beyond the low-water mark and spread for nearly three kilometers along the shore. Intricate inlays of shell fragments embedded in its wood-and-stone buildings shone in the sunlight and glittered in the reflected light from the sea. A haze of smoke and steam hung over it, constantly replenished by the funnels and flues of an industry which, going by the expedition’s earlier discreet aerial surveys, processed wood, fish, algae, and kelp. It resembled thousands of such settlements dotted along the coasts of the planet’s continents and islands; it was twice the size of the next largest. Inland from the coastal villages and towns unpaved roads linked quarries and logging sites. Other than that, all traffic and communication seemed to be by sea or river: small sailing vessels, long canoes, signaling by smoke and flag and mother-of-pearl mirror flash. No aerial traffic had been detected, not even skiffs.

Beneath the pillars in front of her, a sail snapped up and began to move swiftly across the sand toward her. She stopped, and the skiff did likewise.

“Wait here?” asked Delavar, through the beads on her ears.

“Yes,” she whispered back, through the bead on her throat.

Their communications, like the visual display of the scene, were being relayed to the fleet.

After a couple of minutes the sail-powered vehicle—a three-wheeled, low-slung frame of wood and wicker—tacked and slewed to a halt not far away. Two selkies vaulted out; another remained on board, one hand on the rope connected to the boom of the sail, the other resting casually on three spears.

The two selkies on the sand walked forward, empty hands spread. Elizabeth reflected the gesture with even greater polite hypocrisy. One walked ahead of the other, and stopped a couple of his long steps away. His looming face peered down at her. She tried to smile.

“Welcome,” said the selkie, startling her immeasurably. “We have been expecting you.”

Elizabeth stepped back, staring. It was the selkie from Lemuria Beach.

“You may remember me, from another shore,” continued the selkie. “I think I recognize you.”

“How do you speak our language?” Elizabeth asked. “And how did you get here?”

The selkie scratched his midriff absently. “Those of us who were on that shore returned to this one, on a ship of the eight-armed ones. The same taught some of us your speech.”

Once again Elizabeth revised upward her opinion of selkie intelligence. “And how did they know it? We have not spoken with them.”

“They listen and watch,” said the selkie. He scratched again, and put a fingertip between smacking lips. “They listen and watch us now.”

Reflexively, Elizabeth looked behind her, then, more rationally, upward. The zenith was empty. The selkie’s deep chuckle welled up.

“They are near, but not there. They wish to know if they can come here safely.”

“We will not attack them,” said Elizabeth.

Delavar made a sort of strangled noise that set up feedback in her earbeads. She silently willed him to shut up.

“Very well,” said the selkie. He looked up, as though belying his earlier statement, and said something in another language. Then he turned again to Elizabeth.

“My name is Khaphthash,” he said.

“Mine is Elizabeth.”

For a moment, its syllables sounded just as strange in her ears.

Khaphthash smiled, tipping his head back, and looked to one side. “They are coming,” he said.

Elizabeth looked in the same direction and saw, as it seemed far out to sea, a tiny silver disk rapidly approach. A few meters away, a small elliptical patch of shadow as swiftly enlarged on the sand. She blinked and shook her head, and saw that the disk was not above the sea, but tiny and above the sand in just the right place to cast the shadow, but it was at the same time unquestionably far away and approaching—no, it was really small and becoming bigger and bigger. The sand beneath it began to move, the grains arcing in precise trajectories quite unlike sand being blown about: She could look down and see it flowing around her boots. A wide circle with a complex internal pattern formed as the disk approached, or enlarged. The perspectives kept shifting until it was suddenly there in front of her, its three legs extending and settling on the beach in the exact position of three internal sworls in the sand circle. The mode of arrival was deeply unsettling and uncanny to witness.