Engine City (16 page)

“Yes, yes,” said Esias. “I expected that, and I’ve made plans for—”

“Because of that,” the woman continued relentlessly, “we need the long life, the very long life like the saurs. The Multipliers gave the saurs long life long ago, and they have given the same to us.” She smiled. “Or so they say. We have no way of knowing, yet. But I will say I feel better than I did four years ago.”

She wiggled her shoulders. Esias stared at her, for the first time shaken out of his detached acceptance. “This is astounding news!”

Sargonsson turned her shoulder rotations into a shrug. “They offer us more than that,” she said. “They have given us immortality.”

Esias took a gulp of cold slime that burned in his throat on the way down and glowed in his belly.

“That is impossible,” he said. “Not even the gods are immortal.”

Sargonsson held out a hand to the alien. “Tell him,” she said.

“In your body,” it wheezed, “there are patterns of information that have instructed the building and instruct the working of your body. Some of them are older than the gods, older than the light from the visible stars. Some of my memories are older still. I remember seeing with four of my eyes the galaxy you call the Foamy Wake, and with my other four eyes the one that you call Andromeda. Yet never have I traveled between them. I remember scuttling through the grass by the lake outside, also. I am four years old.”

It hopped down from the bench. “We can make you live long, by changing the instructions of your body. To do that, we must read them. By reading them we read your memories, and they can be shared among us, and will be among some of us until our line dies, as are those of the Novakkadians. In that sense we can offer you immortality.”

Esias jumped as the radio on the floor buzzed against his skin, once, long. It signaled an urgent call back to the skiffs. He could hear a commotion and running feet in the rest of the house. It did not seem to matter.

“How can you read us?” he asked.

“That is simple,” sighed the Multiplier. It raised two of its hands. Fuzz formed around the fingertips.

“The smallest of the smallest of us are too small for you to see. They are small enough for you to breathe in like smoke. They can travel through your body and read you.”

“Travel—through—my—body?”

“You hardly notice it,” said Sargonsson. “It’s like a slight fever for a day or two, nothing more. And then any that have grown larger crawl out of your ears and nostrils and . . . ”

Esias was shaking as hard as the insistently buzzing radio. The Multiplier flicked its hands. Esias stared as a cloud of green motes, some like dandelion seeds, some like pollen, wafted through the steamy air toward him.

He jumped up and ran to the door, bashed it open and rushed along the rickety wooden jetty and dived into the lake. The shock cleared his head instantly. What had passed in the hot-room seemed like a dream. He swam down through the clear cold water until it filled his sinuses, his mouth, his ears. He shot to the surface gasping and spitting and swam at a racing crawl, plunging and surfacing again and again, until a skiff appeared above him. The ladder came down, and he snatched it and hauled himself up and inside. The hatch closed behind him. He floundered for a moment, then stood up, dripping. His wife Claudia, two of his daughters, several nephews, and a saur pilot stared at him.

“What happened to you?” Claudia asked.

Esias shook his head. “Later,” he said. His gaze swept the wraparound viewscreen. The skiff was rising fast, Novakkad tilted and dwindling below, an echelon of skiffs behind them. He padded across the corky floor and around the engine fairing to stand behind the saur. “What’s going on?”

“The ship is leaving,” said the saur. “We will rendevous in the atmosphere above the ocean.”

“Why?”

For a ship to make an unscheduled departure was unprecedented. The pilot shook his head, not turning from the screen and the incomprehensible display below it. “The kraken decided, minutes ago. There has been no time.”

“Have we got everyone?” Esias asked.

“Safely lifted,” said Claudia. “Everyone in the lodge has checked in.”

“And Lydia?”

“Lydia?”

“She was out in the town on a mission—”

Claudia paled instantly. “What were you thinking—” She shook her head. “We must turn back!”

“Yes, yes, turn back!” urged Esias.

“If we do, we shall not make the rendevous,” said the pilot.

Esias clenched his fists at his sides. “We can catch another.” He knew the other merchants’ schedules to the hour. “The Delibes will be here in seventeen days.”

The pilot glanced from the clear sky in front to the crowded display on the control board. He read something in its complex glyphs.

“Ah,” he said. He turned to Esias. “Do you
wish
to join the Bright Star Cultures?”

Claudia looked bemused and distraught.

It would not be so bad, Esias thought frantically. People were not subsumed. They had free will. The Multipliers were friendly. Lydia was his number seven daughter. The spiders crawled on the scalp and their tiny offspring swam through the blood and the brain, and crawled out. His shudder was involuntary even as he opened his mouth to speak.

“You may,” said the pilot. “I do not.”

Esias stood still, shivering and unseeing. The skiff flew on.

Three comets lit the sky. Out here in the fields, the lights from the market and the town made the silhouettes of the parked ships stark and monstrous. It was dark enough to see the jagged outline of the mountains against the stars, and the comets’ converging tails, a chevron pointed at the sunken sun. Novakkad had no moon, and only solar tides stirred its ocean. In the Second Sphere, this made it a backwater.

Dim reddish lights moved here and there in the broad meadow, barely raising a whinny from the resting horses. The lights came on only for a moment, illuminating complex wheel-mounted arrangements of brass and wood, with long tubes poking up like antiaircraft guns. Around these astrolabes the ships’ navigators fussed and muttered, plotting the positions of nearby stars. Now and again a green glow from the screen of a handheld calculator would light up an intent face from below.

Lydia wandered quietly among them, unregarded. Once or twice she heard a low cry of “Hey, Multi! Give us a hand!” and saw a Multi scurry over and poke a limb into a piece of machinery. Other than that they took no part in the observations or calculations. They could make and adjust things, but they did not seem to know everything already, the way the saurs and the krakens knew, or gave the impression that they knew.

Lydia had given a lot of thought to the aliens in the hours since she had been stranded. If nothing else it served to distract her from her plight while she wandered around, looking and thinking. She had heard the evacuation call but no response to her frantic queries had cut through the babble on the radio, so she had no idea why the clan had fled. The only message she had picked up was a crackly, apologetic, anguished good-bye from her father, who told her that the krakens were taking the ship back to Nova Terra and could brook no delay. No explanation was given, and she had no time to ask. It must be something urgent and fearful for them to leave her behind, but she could see nothing so fearful in the city. It was amazing how quickly one got used to the aliens. There was something soothing about their scent, and their variously colored fur and constant activity and curiosity had a charm that evaporated any associations with spiders. What humans toiled for in factories and saurs spun in the manufacturing plant, the Multipliers made for fun, if they could be so persuaded. Which, she had gathered, was not always easy. Their jittery attention span made humans seem like saurs.

She made her way back to the market and bought with the last few local coins in her pocket a fast meal of beef in a spicy sauce parceled in some kind of thin bread and munched it as she walked back to the lodge. It was a big stone building with a sharp-pointed wooden roof. She flicked on all the lights she could find and wandered through the rooms, disconsolate. Everywhere were the strewn signs of hasty evacuation. The skiffs’ landing-feet had left deep prints in the soggy lawn. The hot-room, its door swinging open, was cold and stank of warm seafood and spilt khiss. Her father’s clothes lay folded outside. She did not touch them, and started clearing the decayed repast and sluicing the room with a wall-mounted hose.

Gradually this displacement activity calmed her. She felt let down rather than abandoned. The next ship was due in just over a fortnight. There was always money in the lodge if you knew where to look. She worked her way through the house, tidying things away. The servants would not be in until just before the Delibes arrived, just as they had been in the previous day, before the de Tenebres. Her ramble ended in the room where her own luggage lay on a freshly made-up bed. At the top of the case lay the Nova Babylonian robe she had neatly folded, in her own hopeful yesterday. She would wash, put it on, go downstairs and put out some of the lights, make herself a drink and go to bed. Why not?

She was sitting at an empty table in the big dining hall, sipping a long voka, when she found herself feeling more cheerful than even the bath and the drink could account for. At the same time she had a feeling she was being watched. She turned to the corridor. A green-furred Multiplier came clicking along the flagstones, into the room. It hopped onto the end of the table, hands spread, and padded along the tabletop, then clambered onto the seat opposite her.

“Do not be alarmed,” it said.

She wasn’t.

Lydia stood alone at the end of the long pier at Novakkad docks, the one reserved for the star merchants. Her suitcase rested beside her, she had her traveling clothes on, and she had a watch in one hand and a radio in the other. High nimbus made the sky silvery and hard to look at. When she glanced back at the watch, it was hard to read, but she kept looking, from the watch to the sky, from the sky to the watch. At last, and right on time, she saw the dark speck, high above, far away up the lake.

She stuck the watch in her pocket and picked up the suitcase and walked to the top of the ladder. The man in the dory looked up at her.

“Now,” she said, handing the case down.

The passenger was meant to sit facing the steersman, but she crouched the other way. The electric engine whined and the boat pulled out from the pier. The Delibes’ starship was now a solid black, now a wavery worm in the heat haze. She waited until she was sure it was within range and switched on the radio, preset to the hailing sequence.

“Lydia de Tenebre to the Delibes ship, come in please.”

There was a long pause, filled with static. The ship was low now, about a kilometer away. The place where Lydia expected it to set down was a few hundred meters ahead of her.

“Ship to de Tenebre, receiving you. What do you want?” The voice sounded irritated and puzzled. A radio operator was always on standby on an approach, and almost never had anything to do.

“De Tenebre to ship. I would like to come on board as soon as possible.”

“Huh? Sorry, I mean, yes, that’s not a problem, but why? Are you in some—”

More static.

“Ship to de Tenebre. Sorry, I’ve just had a message. There’s an emergency, I don’t know what it is. The kraken want to
pull out!
” The voice rose in an indignant, alarmed, disbelieving squawk.

Now the ship stood just two hundred meters in front of her, a stationary, impossible object, half a mile of streamlined cylinder glowing with Novakkadian symbols and words, the water bending beneath its shimmering fields.

“I know that,” said Lydia, with a calm she didn’t feel. She had half-expected something like this. “You’re safe enough though, you can wait a few minutes to take me on board.”

“Hold on a minute.”

At the same moment as the radio at the other end clicked off, the boat’s engine died. Lydia whirled.

“What’s the problem?”

The doryman smiled placatingly and waved ahead. “I can’t go on—look.”

Lydia looked forward again and saw what she had missed in her attention to the ship. Between the boat and the ship the pointed front end of an enormous mat of logs floated on some fast current, filling the space like an entering wedge. The tugboat that had been riding herd on it had evidently cast loose on sight of the incoming starship and was now speeding away on a diagonal course at, as the phrase had it, a rate of knots.

“Can’t we get around it?”

It was a stupid question. “No,” said the doryman.

The angled leading edge of the mat was coming closer; the doryman was loyally holding their relative position with small bursts of power to the motor. The side of the mat would pass just in front of the bow.

The radio crackled. “Ship to de Tenebre. The saurs say the kraken agree to hold our position for ten minutes or so. Come on board as soon as you can.”

“Can you send out a skiff?”

She overheard some background consultation, indistinct but loud.

“No, sorry.” The voice sounded genuinely apologetic. “The saurs are . . . well, they’re a bit paranoid, between you and me. I’ve never seen them . . . like this.”

“Okay, thanks, I’ll do what I can,” said Lydia. “Hold the door.”

She put the radio away and looked over her shoulder at the doryman. “How long will this thing take to pass?”

He shaded his eyes and looked up the lake. “Half an hour, maybe more.”

“Burning hell.”

Lydia half-stood, gazing at the logs that drifted by a couple of meters in front of her. The mat was held together by cables around the outermost logs; within that kilometers-long loop the logs were (another phrase literalizing before her eyes) log-jammed, wallowing and bumping like a school of whales in a bay. The trunks were huge, up to fifty meters long and two or three meters on the bole. As she stood there, her balance sharpened by her long familiarity with small boats, Lydia suddenly saw the logs as the backs of a galloping herd of wild horses, and an image of leaping from back to back (the neighing, the dust, the roar of a thousand hooves) was real behind her eyes.