Engine City (18 page)

“Yes.”

Esias insisted on carrying her suitcase. “Let’s walk for a bit,” he said. “See the sights.” He grinned. “Welcome to New Babylon, by the way.” He waved his free hand to encompass the banks of lights stacked in front of them in the gathering dusk. “And the glories of the Modern Regime!”

They walked from the docks to the Avenue of the Kings, on which the de Tenebre building had once stood. At the foot of the avenue, where Gilgamesh II had once stood in granite, rose a taller and grander statue in concrete. It showed a smiling and handsome young man in a spacesuit, helmet under one arm, and a crushed octopod under one foot.

“When did this happen?”

“About thirty years after we left. The aliens came and New Babylon was ready for them. The battle was brief.”

“I’ll bet,” said Lydia.

“They’ve just started calling that “the first invasion.” What we left behind on Novakkad is the second. And they’ll be ready for it, too.”

The street name had been changed to Astronaut Avenue. Heavy metal vehicles filled it from end to end. Trucks and buses, mostly, which somehow despite all their noise and stink labored to carry or pull their loads. Bicycles wove perilously between them. The people who filled the pavements were drably dressed; even their better suits were modeled on work clothes: plain jacket, trousers, shirt. All the color had been leeched from the street and concentrated in tubes of neon, spelling out advertisements and assertions. The faces of some of the older people looked stretched and pitted, like copper beaten until it broke.

“Smallpox epidemic,” said Esias. “It’s a solved problem now.”

The new buildings were higher and their sides more likely to be vertical. In other places new towers had been built on top of the existing buildings, extending them upward to double their original impressive enough height. What had been white marble was now black. The terraces had survived, but the gardens had not. Flying squirrels were few, and their variety diminished. Here and there the old cheerful erotic and ecstatic statuary clung on, like lovers and mystics hiding in corners, but most of the statues were heroic and earnest. Among them, on this corner and that traffic island, were occasional plinths empty except for jagged fragments of the feet or the boots. Lydia did not need to guess whose name they bore.

“What happened here?” she said. “What happened to Volkov?”

“He changed things less than you might think,” Esias said. “The Senate and the Assembly, the guilds and associations—all these are still here. The main reform was that everybody became a Member of the Electorate. Many of the new Electors, and some of the old, joined the Modern Society. It became like the Party he used to talk about so proudly and so cynically. They harnessed everything to the space defense effort. They taxed everything that moved. They had the defenses built just in time. They destroyed the alien ships. And then they kept building more defenses. They had wars with neighboring provinces, and when these wars were being lost, Volkov was shot by his own security detail. The wars were lost anyway, the provinces broke away, but the space defense forces continued to be strengthened. We’re told there’s more freedom now. Reform. Liberalization. If this is freedom I’m glad we missed the tyranny.”

“Yes,” said Lydia. “But I’m sorry we missed Volkov. In his pride, in his power. A third Gilgamesh, one who really did find the secret of life.”

“Except that he never did find it. It was in his body, but his scientists could never read it.”

Lydia glanced sideways sharply at her father, but she could not read him.

The de Tenebre building was long gone, replaced by a concrete-and-glass tower. The headquarters of the Ninth still stood. Black-uniformed guards strutted and turned on its long steps. Close by was a much taller building, so tall in fact that Lydia had not registered it as a building, though she had seen its aircraft warning lights often enough from the island. It was like a wall of black glass, and was built with a twist, so that its top floor was at about thirty degrees to its lower. Set well back from the street, it overshadowed a plaza with fountains and lights. No name was indicated.

“Space Authority,” said Esias. “It’s supposed to represent the shape of a lightspeed engine.” He smiled, relishing some well-worn joke. “It would have been more impressive if they’d actually built one.”

Lydia shivered. She had seen a lightspeed engine. Its shape was nothing like this, but the architecture had indeed captured something of the spirit of that extraordinary machine: the feeling it had given her . . . of being watched.

“What did the saurs and the krakens think of all this?”

“They went away,” said Esias. “Most of them. They are still going away, as ships come in and go. Of our ship, only Voronar has stayed.” He smiled. “He calls himself a Salassoist.”

“Where do they go?”

Esias shrugged, huddling deeper in his coat against a chill breeze off the wall of black glass. “Who knows?” he said.

“ ‘They all go up the line,’ ” she said, quoting an old and sinister space chantey.

“Perhaps.” He caught her hand. “That reminds me. A truly great accomplishment which you are about to see.”

He took her to the underground railway station, and they went up the line.

I’ll die here,
Lydia thought. All that had brought this on was that water had overlapped the welts of her shoes. It was not even as if they were good shoes. But the oil would do them no further good.

Oil on water. It was an indelible mark of industrialization. Lydia gazed gloomily at the puddle’s rainbow hues and heaved another plastic sack of rubbish into the overflowing skip. Turning about, she made way for the invincibly cheerful Esias, who was lugging another sack. They did not exchange words or glances. As she picked her way to the foot of the block’s outside stairwell Lydia heard her father’s simian grunt as he disposed of his load, the brisk brush of his palms as he turned away, the squelch of his footsteps as he trudged back. Lydia hurried up the iron steps, looking up all the while. Behind her, Esias climbed more slowly, puffing and panting. At the landings Lydia could see the sky, blue after the rain, crisscrossed with contrails whose chalky scrawls marked another score on the progress chart.

Their flats were halfway up, on the eleventh level. Lydia stopped a few steps along the concrete balcony and leaned bare, dusty forearms on its black-painted iron rail. The adjacent block faced her across a ten-meter gulf. A line of washing, small garments that someone had neglected to take in from the recent shower, dripped and swayed. Music leaked from a hundred radios, up and down the shaft. A cleaning robot clambered, trailing hoses and cables, squirting and sudsing, sponging and rinsing. Here and there it had missed a window, and left behind a washed rectangle of wall.

Lydia heard Esias ascending the last flight. She straightened, turned away and strolled to the open door of the new flat. About half the clan had taken up residence along this balcony; the rest were scattered in ones and twos around the city’s housing projects. New Babylon did not acknowledge polygamy; fortunately it recognized Claudia and Faustina as a couple in their own right. Their flat was between the one that had been kept for Lydia and the one rented in the names of Esias and Phoebe.

She still mourned Volkov. That must be why getting her socks wet made her miserable. Perhaps when she was as old as her father she would be as good a stoic. She had not loved the Cosmonaut but she had liked him and been fascinated with him, and over the past few eventful months of subjective time his capacity to change history had drawn her reluctant, even hostile respect. He had seemed as invincible as he was immortal, and now he was defeated and dead. And yet the regime perversely insisted on reminding people of him, every time money changed hands. Not all the coins and notes, surely, could have been in circulation at the time of his fall. Some of them at least must have been printed or minted since, and officially defaced. Unless people did that to new currency as soon as it was issued, as some kind of gesture of continuing hate. She wasn’t sure which possibility was the more depressing to contemplate.

The flat was almost clear now of the rubbish from its recent refurbishment. The municipal authority workers had replaced some old walls and fittings with new ones, but had not cleared out the rubble. That was a job left for the new tenants. There was a kind of justice to it, a first few drops of sweat equity. Lydia picked up a brush and pushed some more brick and tile into a heap, then shoveled it into a sack. Esias came into the room and joined in.

While gathering up the last bits, he cut his hand on a piece of broken tile. He had always been careless about gloves. He hopped up and down, cursing. The cut was nasty and deep, blood was dripping everywhere. Lydia ran to the dusty new sink in the kitchen and ran cold water on a clean cloth. She caught his wrist and wiped the dirt and blood from his palm. The split skin sealed itself up as she watched, leaving nothing but a white line from which specks of dirt rose to the surface. She brushed a finger against the grubby flecks and looked at the palm again. The cut had left no trace.

Esias stared back at her. “It doesn’t hurt any the less,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“Perhaps we should not say any more.”

She nodded. They lugged the last two sacks of rubbish down to the skip.

The clan had trade in their bones. They adapted to the new situation, and worked around the new restrictions, which to the rest of the city were the new relaxations: the post-Volkov reforms. Esias and his wives opened a stall at the docks. Lydia’s cousins and siblings took up jobs or hustles; the distinction was obscure, as were the details.

Lydia applied and, to her surprise, was accepted, for a clerical job at the core of the Regime: the Space Authority. The twisted megalith of the building did not intimidate her. For her first day at work, she wore the best garment she had, her dress from old Nova Babylonia, and was amused to find in the days that followed that this was considered a gesture of defiance, but one for which—from sheer embarrassment—nobody in authority could reprove her or forbid. Other young women working on the statistical machines or the typewriters began to turn up in copies made from the artificial silk sold in the markets.

One day a message popped out of the pneumatic tube on her desk. She opened it expecting another report for her to abstract, and found it a summons to meet the President.

The President’s office was in the top floor of the headquarters of the Ninth. Lydia’s roll of paper took her past three sets of heavily armed guards to the reserved lift entrance on the ground floor. Inside it was a small burnished room, all carpet and mirror. The lift was so fast that Lydia felt the blood drain from her head, like it sometimes had on a ship when the field fluctuated.

The doors opened on more guards, and a metal detector, through which Lydia passed without a buzz or a challenge. The whole floor was open-plan, thickly carpeted. People bowed over rank upon rank of polished desks, scribbling and marking, ticking and signing in silence. Huge bouquets of fresh flowers stood in as many vases as there were desks. The fragrance was thick and the hush was thicker. Lydia was reminded of a crematorium.

A functionary in the strange archaic uniform of the breed— a suit of trousers, jacket, shirt, and necktie—looked at Lydia, peered at her summons, and guided her silently to a door at the back of the bureaucratic mausoleum. There was nothing special about the door. He opened it and bowed her in, then withdrew.

The room was an office. It had a tall high window behind the desk, stacked bookshelves around the walls, and doors that opened off to what a quick glance confirmed were living quarters. Tall vases of flowers filled this room with color and scent, even more overpowering than in the great antechamber.

Behind the big desk sat the most aged woman Lydia had ever seen. She seemed to have shrunk and shriveled within the black-silk kimono that swathed her. Her cheeks were sunken, her skin yellow, her teeth brown and long. The hand on the pommel of her ceremonial sword, and the hand on the open book on the desk, looked like some contraptions of thin leather and thick wire. This was not the swift dissolution that overtook people toward the end of their twelfth decade. This was something preserved, pushed through, carried forward beyond that by some desperate will, and doubtless by some corrupted application of saur or human medicine.

“Ah,” breathed the President. She drooled slightly, and wiped her chin on her cuff. “Lydia de Tenebre. Thank you for coming.” The eyes flashed, some life and humor shining through the yellowed sclera. “You may not think you had a choice, but you had. So I thank you. Sit down.”

“Thank you, Madame President.”

“I have been eager to see you since I heard of your return,” the President went on. She leaned forward; Lydia caught a whiff of her terrible breath, and understood why there were so many flowers about. “Unfortunately it takes time for information to reach me, and even when it has, I have much to do.”

Not much by the look of things, Lydia thought, but she nodded politely.

“It was your clan who brought us Volkov,” said the President, closing her eyes. “Ah, how he charmed us all! We called him the Engineer. It was not like politics, you understand. It was like religion—no, it was like a mania, a bubble on the market, and we were all speculators. And when we had stopped believing, it was too late for us to turn back. He made us believe by force.”

Another sigh, another stench. It was not from her mouth that this was coming—the teeth were dark but clean, the tongue was pink. It was coming from her lungs and her bowels.

“And years after we had stopped believing, and all feared to admit it to each other, the aliens came. They ran into the orbital defenses that Volkov had lashed us to build. They ran into them, smack! Their ships burst in the hellish light of the particle beams! Their outposts vaporized in the hellish heat of the nuclear bursts!”

Back and forth she swayed as she told the story, in a singsong voice like a crone of the pithkies reciting a tribal lay.