Engine City (13 page)

“Did you
see
that?” she whispered to Delavar.

“An incident of high strangeness,” said Matt’s voice in her ear.

“That was an emergence from a lightspeed jump,” said Delavar. “I have never before seen it done in a skiff, or so close to a planet.”

“Yep,” muttered Elizabeth, “three meters is close to a planet all right . . . ”

Still, that explanation made the arrival, if not comprehensible, at least rational. The skiff’s hull was perfectly reflective, a huge lens of what looked like the surface of a liquid in its smoothness, like mercury. In a moment, a hatch opened and a ladder extended. An octopodal alien skittered down it and across the sand to her. As it approached she heard Delavar making small, distressed noises.

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“I will be,” said Delavar. “I am experiencing fear that I know to be irrational. This is new to me.”

Elizabeth was experiencing no fear at all, which at some level of her consciousness she thought disturbing. The alien’s golden fur was astonishingly beautiful—she had to resist an impulse to stroke it—and it gave off a pleasant, musky fragrance: laced with soothing pheromones, she guessed. The tips of its limbs, as it walked, were compressed to hard, sharp points that left deep, small indentations in the sand. As it stepped closer she saw that the fur was irridescent, and was almost certainly not simply hair but some kind of optical fiber. Every follicle must be light-sensitive, for that to make any kind of functional sense. She tried to imagine the sensorium of a mind that could use so much input, a flow of information orders of magnitude greater than even the all-around vision provided by the eight eyes, and failed.

Its breathing-mouth—a triangle of overlapping lips, with jaws but without teeth—was on the side facing her. The alien raised its two front limbs and waved them. The palm-buds expanded, opening to the tips of the tips of the tips, like a ring of dandelion clocks, then contracted back to eight-fingered hands that it moved together, the fingertips touching and rhythmically tapping each other in a curiously human, almost effete gesture. It stood about a meter and a half tall, its head-thorax somewhat larger than a human head, and more domed than that of the specimens Elizabeth had seen so far.

Thinking to reduce any possible intimidation from her greater height, Elizabeth moved to squat. Instantly the octopod whirled around, presenting its eating-mouth, open in a flash of teeth. Startled, Elizabeth fell back on her butt, hands scrabbling the sand. The selkie, Khaphthash, reached over a hand and helped her back to her feet as the octopod returned to its former position.

The breathing-mouth opened and the alien spoke, in a curiously high-pitched and breathless voice, like a very old person with emphysema.

“My apologies. Please do not do that. The posture triggers a fighting reflex.”

“My apologies,” Elizabeth replied, mentally kicking herself. It seemed too banal to be the first words spoken to an extraterrestrial. “We are pleased to meet you at last.”

“And we you,” said the alien. “As you can deduce from my grasp of your language, we have been observing your planet for some time.”

“We had suspected that,” said Elizabeth. “We have come here to learn of your intentions.”

“Very good,” said the alien. It swung its head as though looking around, a surely unnecessary thing for it to do, and therefore likely meant as a reassuring imitation of the human. “Let us repair to the city, where we can discuss these matters in more comfortable surroundings.”

It scuttled back off to its skiff, which led the way at a slow pace along the beach. The selkies wheeled their odd contraption along.

“Who is piloting your skiff?” asked Khaphthash.

“A saur named Delavar.”

“Your people were taken to your world by saurs?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

“Our people have old tales of encounters with saurs,” said the selkie. “They are not pleasant.”

“Would there be trouble if Delavar came out of the skiff?”

“Trouble?” The seal-man looked sidelong and down at her, his small chin disappearing into the blubber of his neck. “No, not hostility. There would be surprise. It might be a good surprise, for our people. And they have to meet sometime. Why not now?”

“What do you think, Delavar?”

“I am consulting with the fleet,” Delavar murmured back.

“Go for it,” says Matt, before anyone can object.

Gregor glares at him, Salasso casts him a heavy-lidded look of reproof, Susan Harkness busies herself with the recording apparatus, and the Cairns’ flagship skipper, Zachary Gould, pointedly looks away out of the viewscreen. Matt doesn’t care: He’s the First Contact Convener, and he decides this sort of stuff, even if Elizabeth did pull rank—and, to be fair, her prior experience with the selkies—to be the one on the ground. Anyway, he’s on a roll, in a mental state that his distant but still vivid memories associate with amphetamine-fueled all-night coding sessions, and which he is sensible enough at some level to recognize as dangerous, but seductively productive.

The ship he’s on is, like its four companions, shaped like the fuselage of a rather boxy aircraft, maybe a World War Two bomber or something like that (Matt is vague about aviation history) made from thick steel and armor-plated glass and about fifty meters long by four high and ten across, except for the skiff-docking bay, which is at the stern and is eighteen meters across. The ship is called the
Return Visit.
The others are called
Explorer, Investigator, Translator,
and
Experimenter.
Matt’s suggested names (
Rectal Probe, Up Yours, Probably Venus, Strange Light, No Defence Significance,
et cetera) were all rejected at the committee stage.

It’s taken years to get here. Two years and a few months, which to Matt’s edgy impatience felt longer. Partly it’s been a whole lot of tedious politicking, within the Cairns clan, with the other Cosmonaut Families, with the Heresiarchy and with the city-state governments, starting with Kyohvic and working down. Negotiating with the heretical minority of saurs who agree with Salasso and are working in space with the humans has been a whole ’nother kettle of fish, and by the gods Matt knows by now what a kettle of fish actually is, having consumed many of them in the negotiations. Running on the rolling logs of a public discussion of a real alien presence and alien invasion threat, a discussion conducted amid the waterspouts, crop circles, cattle mutilations, sea serpents, and general flying crockery of mass hallucination and hysteria—has had Matt for the first time in his life devoutly if guiltily wishing he could engineer a good old-fashioned government cover-up, not that there’s a government on Mingulay or Croatan that could cover its own ass if you handed it a Blue Book.

On top of that there’s been the hard technical graft, from the sort of thing he’s been making a living at for the past few decades—porting applications from ancient wet and dry nanotech salvaged from the old
Bright Star
across to a renascent technology where debugging really does mean cleaning the moths off the valves—to top-level project management of the teams building closed-system life-support from old spec and first principles. Because of the short journey times neither the established space-going species nor the upstart humans have any experience in the field, or even much in the way of theory. Even convincing folk that breathable air and potable water, not to mention an unopposed landing, at the other end is not the way to bet when you’re making a four-light-year jump into an unexplored system has been a wearing, because essentially political, struggle.

Anyway, it’s done, and they have carbon scrubbers and distillation kits and filter beds and hydroponics and some icky gunk from the saur manufacturing plant that, allegedly, manufactures plants. They even have space suits. The five ships of the fleet, each with a complement of twenty or so variously warm bodies, human and saur, have primitive ship-to-ship and space-to-ground missiles, none of which would have impressed a moderately competent pyrotechnician of the Ming Dynasty, and a piratical arsenal of firearms and plasma rifles, which would. If the explorers have to convince anyone that their intentions are peaceful and their armaments defensive, it shouldn’t be hard. Nevertheless, this is the biggest collective effort ever mounted by the Bright Star Cultures. The human two-thirds of the crews are—apart from Gregor, Elizabeth, himself, and a few other old and unaging Cosmonauts—young and adventurous types who can stand the thought of dying and the even more daunting thought of finding everyone they knew a minimum of eight years older when they get back. And if they are daunted, well, pay reckoned by time elapsed rather than time lived is a big inducement, as it has hitherto been in the Cairns commercial fleet.

One of these young adventurers is Susan Harkness, the Cairns’ youngest daughter, who has wangled her way as recorder onto this dangerous expedition by threatening to do something more dangerous if she isn’t. Over the past couple of years Matt has stopped seeing her as too young, and she has stopped seeing him as too old, and they have had an intermittent and relaxed relationship, to her parents’ fury and disgust.

Right now she’s seeing things from her mother’s point of view; but only, Matt hopes, literally.

Close up, the selkies’ city looked more than ever like an enormous pier. Its stone pillars and wooden piles were crusted with barnacles and limpets, tufted with green algae, draped with wrack. All of the buildings that she could see looked, on this closer inspection, more like scaffolding. There was little in the way of walls or roofs, and few structures seemed entirely enclosed. Elizabeth supposed that the selkies did not set much store by shelter. Much of the wood was rotten, or bored by shipworm. The stonework was pitted and slimed; even above the tidemark it looked thoroughly weathered. Deep in the structure’s dim underside great wheels turned, presumably mills driven by the river; when the tide was coming in, they would revolve in the opposite direction, to just as powerful effect. On this Earth-sized moon of a gas giant with a red giant sun, the tides were swift and fierce.

Crowds of selkies sat or stood on the internal planks and platforms of the structure, or waist-deep in the water beneath, gazing at her. Scattered among them, octopods swung or scampered with the liquid grace of gibbons. Here and there in the city the silvery disks of skiffs glinted; there seemed to be no passages wide enough for them to enter or leave by, and Elizabeth puzzled about that for a moment until she suddenly realized that they could have emerged from lightspeed jumps in situ, right there. No wonder there were no skiffs in the sky!

The two skiffs beside her stopped as the selkies hooked their sailing vehicle to the end of a long rope, which began to be winched up. The two pilots emerged at the same moment and walked together to the foot of a winding wooden stair. A clamor boomed through the piers as the watching selkies craned their necks and shouted, hooted, drummed on the timbers or smacked the water. It was like the din of an enormous kennel. After recoiling for a moment, Elizabeth walked forward and ascended the stair. Khaphthash and his companions brought up the rear. Gradually the noise died down. Above the smells of wrack and sea Elizabeth caught whiffs of the octopods’ soothing scent, and wondered if it was this that calmed the selkies.

The steps were soggy and slippery, but fortunately wide enough to accommodate the great slapping feet of the selkies. Its handrails were too high for her, but all the more reassuring for that. As she climbed higher Elizabeth noticed the abrupt change at the high-tide mark, where the encrustations of barnacles gave place to the new, artificial encrustation of colorful shell fragments, and the wood was no longer rotten but smoothed, and treated with some tarry or oily substance. But the signs of age and weathering persisted: the wood was often white, almost papery to the touch, and the stonework crusty with lichen, soft with moss; some of the shells were faded or crumbling.

At length the octopod stepped off the stair onto a long platform with a broad, low table in the middle. The place stank of fish—no, of their bones and of shells, which had been tossed in a loose-woven wicker basket in one corner. Large clamshells, evidently dishes or drinking vessels, marked positions around the table. The selkies, so advanced in other simple technologies, seemed not to have invented pottery. The octopod skittered to the far side of the table; Delawar and Elizabeth hesitated for a moment, then joined the selkies in reclining beside it. As she lay on her side, propped on one elbow, Elizabeth could see numerous eyes—octopod and selkie—peering down from the dim vaults above and around. She could feel through the floor a constant vibration, which came to her ears as a hum overlaid by rhythmic thuds, as the tide-powered wheels sped up on the incoming race.

Khaphthash gave a long, loud sigh. “It is good that you are here,” he said. “I wish we could offer you hospitality. But our food might not be palatable for you. We do not treat it with fire, as you do.”

Delavar’s head bobbed as he looked sideways at the selkie. “My species enjoys fish. Perhaps we shall trade for it, in the future.”

“The future, yes,” said the octopod, its wheezy voice sounding impatient. “That is what we must discuss.”

“We have some questions about the past,” said Delavar.

Elizabeth had found herself surreally wondering if all that kept the selkies from venturing farther inland was their ignorance of kippering. The reedy tremble in Delavar’s voice shocked her out of it. She looked closely at the saur, and saw the small tremor in his hands just before he noticed it himself and locked his fingers together and pressed the edges of his palms against the edge of the table. By saur standards, this all indicated a serious loss of sangfroid. The unease, the prickling of the hairs, that some humans experienced in the presence of the saurs must be vastly multiplied for a saur meeting an octopod. To humans, saurs were an enigmatic, vastly more ancient, and vastly superior species that had haunted the human habitat and imagination, glimpsed in the shadow and in the corner of the eye, since the Ice Ages. The saurs had not even that dubious tradition to buffer their encounter with a species older and wiser still, and more intimately involved in their origin. For them, to meet the octopods was to meet their makers.