Engine City (21 page)

“I had the impression,” said Ann, “that Salasso thought you already had one.”

“Well, kind of,” said Matt evasively, “but I want to hear other suggestions first.”

“I have one,” said Ramona. “Let’s brew up some goddam coffee and have something to fucking eat.”

Susan had never before heard Ramona speak coarsely. The mathematician met her surprised look with a sullen flush.

“He has that effect,” she said.

After the gunners and rocketeers had come back from the ship’s galley with hot coffee and cold rations, people began to feel less fractious. One light-year lightspeed jump, one crack at turning a mapping satellite into a blatant anomalous phenomenon, a near miss from a plasma bolt, and another lightspeed jump to ruins so old there were fossils younger—all made for a tense morning.

“The first thing we should do,” said Ramona, “is watch some television. Not as easy as it sounds—I doubt if even satellite broadcasting covers this continent.”

“There’s always radio,” said Susan. She remembered that she had a radio in her pocket. “Hey! Wait a minute.”

She switched the radio on and spun the dial slowly. Most of the stations played music. The scales were unfamiliar, the lyrics mostly in languages that had drifted from Trade Latin or never started from it, but the music was a reassurance of the planet’s humanity. Other channels carried news or discussion—without context it was difficult to make sense of it, but context could be built up. One wavelength was pure bedlam: a welter of voices and sounds, fragmentary phrases, strange noises. It wasn’t that she was picking up lots of stations at once; the more precisely she tuned it the weirder it got.

“Well,” said Matt, “the radio is something to work on. Susan, could you look after that and try to compile a picture?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Anyone else?”

“I haven’t finished,” said Ramona. “I’ve been doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations. We have jumped from the selkies’ world to here, more or less in the shortest possible time. It appears that the normal trade routes have been severely disrupted, if the number of starships in this system at any given moment is one or less! The obvious explanation is that our people are supplanting the kraken-saur-Trader partnership. Assuming that the Multipliers have indeed been assimilated to the Bright Star Cultures, and that they are spreading from star to star with only a small delay to build more ships and navigate the next jump, they cannot be far behind us. We have at the very most a few years, at the very least a few months, before the first Bright Star Culture ships arrive. In that time—short at best—we have to arrange matters so that they are not blasted out of the skies. We have one lightly armed starship, one human-built skiff with antigravity only, and five jump-capable Multiplier skiffs. The other side have an extensive space defense capability, built to all appearances with rocket technology. Evidently they have been unable or unwilling to persuade or coerce the other species into sharing antigravity and lightspeed tech.”

She waved a hand at the dark interior of the enormous building. “All our advantage, such as it is, is right here. What we have to decide is how to use it.”

“Exactly,” said Mikhail Telesnikov. He stood up, incongruously gesturing with an empty coffee mug. “We have two basic options. One, and the most economical, is to make a direct approach to whoever is in power in New Babylon—presumably Volkov or his successors—and convince them that there is nothing to fear or fight. Considering that there are obviously no Multipliers here, and that some were on their way, it seems evident that the New Babylonians have already
won
such a fight and are unlikely to be persuaded that it was all a terrible mistake. I still say it should be our first option. The second—which the failure of the first might foreclose, so it’s not the second in time—is to approach one or more of the rival powers, who are more likely to be convinced, and who must surely fear the power of New Babylon. It is at least possible that they would agree to a military strike against New Babylon, if they have the military capacity and the hope of winning. If they have the former, we can provide the latter.”

“I don’t see how we could,” said Hynde. “Each of our missiles could take out a spy-sat. At close range. Maybe. That’s about all we could do, and it don’t sound like enough.”

“I was thinking more,” said Telesnikov, “that if the other powers have nuclear weapons, or even decent-sized conventional bombs, we could deliver them to the space battle stations very fast and unstoppably by lightspeed jump, then jump back out of the way.”

“Problem with that,” said Matt. “Do we want to destroy New Babylon’s space defenses? If the gods get angry, we might shortly need them ourselves.”

Susan jumped up. “We don’t need to put bombs on them!” she said. “We can put troops on them!”

“You can’t get many troops in a skiff,” one of the gunners said.

She glared at him. “I know
that
,” she said. “But you’re thinking of one trip. Think lots. Every Multiplier skiff can zap back and forth lots of times—say it can carry six soldiers at a time, it could shift dozens in minutes, just pour them in. And at different places in the battle station, too.”

Telesnikov was looking at her as though seeing her for the first time. “That’s a very good point,” he said.

By the time the Multipliers swarmed back from their cavort in the forest, the rest of the expedition was ready to explain their contingency plans. The Multipliers listened to Matt’s enthusiastic outline and announced that they would not hear more of it. They squatted around the circle of humans like so many miserable balls of fur, twitching slightly and occasionally stroking each other’s hands. At length Matt walked over to the orange Multiplier. Susan followed, discreetly recording.

“Do you have an ethical objection to taking life?” Matt asked.

The alien wrapped its limbs around its body and rolled away. After a tense minute it uncoiled and reached out to the nearest of its fellows. That one, magenta-furred, eventually stood up shakily and tottered into the center of the circle, near to the remains of lunch. It inspected spilled coffee grounds and bread crumbs and reconstructed a shrimp from a sliver of paste. The shrimp twitched and scrabbled, dying in the air. The Multiplier observed it with apparent curiosity, then ate it.

Then Mr. Magenta (a naming convention that Susan hit upon at that moment, and thereafter spread) waved a limb in a circle above itself and fixed, it seemed, its all-around gaze on everyone simultaneously.

“We are distressed,” it announced, “by your plans. They are inelegant. We were under the impression from our reading of the Matt Cairns that you all understood how to survey a planet and neutralize its defenses. You have had such beautiful examples. Why do you not follow them?”

“What examples?” Matt asked.

“You are the Matt Cairns,” said the alien. “You know. Please educate the others, and then we will be happy to make your invasion a wonder and delight for the ages, and give our descendants memories to warm them while they watch the stars turn to iron.”

By the time Matt was five minutes into explaining his contingency plan he was beginning to scare people.

“Do you know how many Multiplier skiffs were in our system in the years before we left? Two! And you know what they did to us! They had us thinking we were under constant surveillance! Thinking we were about to be invaded! For every real incident there were ten unreal incidents! We made them up ourselves! That’s what we have to do here! Make them doubt their concept of reality! Guerrilla ontology!”

He glared around like a lone gladiator facing a hostile colosseum.

“Fuck with their heads!” he shouted. “
Fuck with their heads!
”

That night Susan sat outside on a block around the side of the big building. The block was thirty meters long and five on a side. She had scrambled up the tough creeper that overgrew it. The air was cold and the sky was black. Fog lay over the forested valley, lit by the two small moons, both waxing gibbous, their surfaces so cratered that their terminators were visibly serrated even to the naked eye. Six comets were visible, low in the sky. She had never seen so much as one comet before. The Foamy Wake blazed a trail across the zenith. Every so often a meteor flared, and now and again what appeared to be a star would move steadily across the sky. These, she guessed, must be artificial satellites, like the spaceship yards that orbited around Mingulay.

After a while Salasso joined her. “That is a frightening sky,” he said. “The gods’ anger is written on it. Fortunately my anger is greater.”

“You don’t know what anger is,” Susan said. “What Matt has, now that’s anger.”

“I am angry with the gods,” said Salasso. “Matt is only angry with the saurs.”

“I thought he liked you.”

“He does,” said Salasso. “It is not personal. All of the old Cosmonauts are like that.”

“Ah!” Susan had a sudden insight. “It’s because of what the saurs were doing back in the Solar System. All that stuff about Greys and flying saucers, it must have been like a bad dream.”

“No,” said Salasso. “At the time when Matt and the others lived on Earth, almost all of that was decades in the past. I have studied the literature, if you can call it that, and I found no reported sightings, abductions, or anything untoward for many years. The old stories were not taken seriously except by students of popular delusion, and the deluded, and a very few stubborn investigators.”

“Oh! So it was the shock of finding that something they had dismissed was partly true after all—”

“Again, I fear not,” said Salasso. “They had no emotional investment in its dismissal. It was not a live issue, either way.”

Susan looked at the saur sitting beside her, gazing out over the valley in the double moonlight. His small shoulders were slumped, and his large head hung heavy.

“So why—”

Salasso turned to her. “Do you have your recording devices with you? Of course you do. I am telling you this because it is something I wish to be known after I . . . after all this is over. When the Bright Star Cultures come here, and find a welcome, I want this to be known. Not before. Will you promise me this?”

Susan clamped her hands on her quivering knees. “Yes,” she said. She fumbled, setting her apparatus, then turned to face the saur as though interviewing him.

“When the
Bright Star
arrived in orbit near Mingulay, three hundred—no, it is now four hundred—years ago, we were shocked and frightened. The crew claimed to have navigated here, and though we soon realized they were lying, that did little to allay our fears. We had no reason to think there might not be more ships. We knew that the Cosmonauts had received the instructions for the drive directly from a god. This suggested to us that the gods in the Solar System had lost patience with the saurs, and perhaps that the gods here had too.

“The saurs discovered how to manipulate genetic material many millions of years ago. With that discovery we built the manufacturing plant. This was an industry that did not disturb the planets, or displease the gods. With that knowledge we have been able to screen all the new arrivals from Earth, and to prevent the spread of diseases. We explained this to the Cosmonauts, and they agreed to be examined. They told us freely that they had taken life-extending drugs, and we soon found out why some of these drugs had worked. They modified a gene which is common to many species, including ours. In their case it was only somatic, not heritable, but it was still alarming. The effect of human longevity on the stability we had so carefully cultivated would be immensely disruptive—as indeed it is proving now, if Ramona is right, and I think she is.

“The effect of the knowledge in the ship’s computer libraries, and the machinery it had to replicate the computers and disseminate the knowledge, would have been even more disruptive. At the same time it was not in our nature to deny or destroy that knowledge. So we later allowed the computer libraries to be transcribed to the manufacturing plant, and subsequently printed in books—a necessarily slow process, which made assimilating the knowledge the work of centuries, still incomplete. But we did not allow the Cosmonauts further access to their ship, and only allowed them to take from it such machinery and computers as they could carry.

“Before we even allowed them off the ship, we took one further precaution. We took them one by one and subjected them to a second medical examination. It was traumatic and intrusive, and not merely physically. We did everything to them that they had jokingly told us saurs were supposed to do.” He looked away, then looked back. “We terrified the living shit out of them.”

Susan’s mouth was dry, her eyes wet. “Why are you telling me this, now?”

“Because I feel bad about it. And because as more and more people take up the Multipliers’ offer, these memories will be shared and passed around like diseases. It is important that people are able to make sense of these frightening fragments of memory.”

“You mean,” she said, “that they don’t find themselves fearing and hating the saurs for no reason they can understand.”

“That too, yes.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“Nor do I,” said Salasso. He made a cutting gesture. She switched off her apparatus.

“Well, hell,” she said, “I think you’ve made up for it since, Salasso.”

“I wish you had recorded that,” said Salasso.

“I will say it again.”

They sat in silence for a while.

He took out his pipe. “Would you share a smoke?”

“Yes,” she said.

The hemp knocked Salasso into a twenty-minute trance, and left Susan to gaze at the Foamy Wake and imagine the Solar System on the far side of it, and wonder what had befallen the saurs and humans there.

Salasso came to himself with a start. In silence the woman and the saur, one after the other, descended the precarious ladder of creeper.

“What is this building, anyway?” she asked, as they headed back.

“Before the saurs learned how to make the manufacturing plant,” said Salasso, scuffing through the leaves beside her, “they constructed such buildings. This one, I believe, they used as a place to park their skiffs.”