Engine City (19 page)

“Oh, how we all loved him again! Our Cosmonauts came back from the battles with his name on their lips! We built more forts and ships and waited for the next invasion. We built more rockets and waited for the gods to send down rocks in their wrath. We waited, and waited.”

Her eyes snapped open. Her voice resumed a conversational cadence.

“They never came. And after a while, after a few more years, we stopped believing that they would ever come. Not for another million years, anyway. We grumbled at the taxes and the conscriptions and prescriptions. But that was not why I had him killed.”

As the President’s face had become more animated with her discourse, Lydia had gradually built up from glimpses an image of the face it once had been, and what now dawned on her was an awful recognition.

“Volkov not only promised us victory over the invaders. He promised us the long life, the long life like the saurs. Oh, the research, the institutes, the papers, the arguments. The labor of men and saurs, all of it sincere, all of it well-meant, some of it horrific, none of it successful. And for that failure to extend our lives and youth, I took his own.”

Her gaze was distant, yet to Lydia it seemed like needles aimed at her eyes. The preternaturally old President sighed.

“He disappointed me,” said Julia de Zama. “Severely.”

The Human as Alien

New Earth (Political)

THE WINDOW WAS
tiny and the glass was thick. Susan Harkness pressed her forehead against it, gasping, heart pounding, and stared out until all she could see was the stars. She imagined she stood in a field on a very dark night, looking up at the constellations. The Musketeer was there, and the jeweled pleiad of the Thrown Net, and the Hind. She imagined a cool breeze in her face, and that the sough of the ventilation was its sigh. Gradually her breathing eased, the bands around her chest loosened.

She had expected a price for her reckless light-century leap into the dark: regret, sorrow, homesickness. Fear. She had thought them all worth paying, for the chance of life at this intensity, and of being present at moments that could not but become history. She had not expected claustrophobia. It had sneaked up on her from behind. She felt betrayed by her own mind. They had spent two days lurking in the system’s Oort cloud. It was absurd, but the thought of that cloud was actually making her sense of confinement worse, even though all it meant was a high probability that there was a piece of cometary matter within a few million kilometers.

Rolling in orbit around the selkies’ world had been different. The beauty and variety of that terrestrial planet from space, and the alien fascination of its gas-giant primary and its red-giant sun, had made living in the narrow ships feel anything but confinement. One’s attention was always turned to the outside. The skiffs had flitted from ship to ship, and she’d always been able to wangle a ride, always with a good reason: interviewing crew members, documenting discoveries. The only sense of confinement she had felt was the suffocating presence of her parents. That they were enlightened and meant well she knew, but they couldn’t help casting long shadows. Anywhere in the Bright Star Cultures, she would always be the First Navigator’s daughter, the Science Officer’s girl. On cold reflection it seemed mad to move a hundred and three light-years to get away from her parents, but analyzing the moment of impulse that had made her do it revealed no other explanation. She felt obscurely insulted that her mother had automatically blamed it on Matt, as though Susan had no will of her own. She was certainly not besotted with Matt, nor he with her, though she suspected that without the ulterior motive of their irregular attachment he would never have connived at her escape, or escapade. In that sense he could be blamed, but she knew that if she ever blamed him she would never forgive herself.

She stepped back from the porthole and groped for the light switch. The cabin she shared with Ramona Garcia, a Cosmonaut mathematician slightly more ancient than Matt, seemed tinier than ever. She ducked out of it into the corridor before that thought could close in again.

The corridor was wider than the room. She could stretch out her arms and not touch the sides. But with the lights on, the windows showed nothing. She walked up to the cockpit. The viewscreens and windows in there gave the illusion of space, or would have done if the cabin hadn’t been crammed with people: Matt, Salasso, and Delavar, the old Cosmonauts Mikhail Telesnikov and Ramona (who gave her a quick friendly smile), the Mingulayan captain Phil Johnson, and first mate Ann Derige, both of whom were an embarrassing year or two younger than she was and acted like they were about ten years older; and two of the Multis, the orange one and the blue one.

The Multipliers had spent the first day spinning a thirty-meter dish aerial and a complex receiving apparatus from a kilogram of scrap steel and some random bits of junk, and had detected a very faint microwave beam that swept across them every Nova Terran day. Just before her panic attack, Susan had heard an announcement that they’d extracted some information from it.

They were all staring at a rectangular patch on the viewscreen above the fore window. All except Matt looked delighted. Nobody told her what it was, and it took her a moment to recognize it as a map, a Mercator projection of Nova Terra. Maps in the Second Sphere were physical. The only imaginary lines on them were trade routes. This city, they told you, was linked with that. The map on the viewscreen was covered with imaginary lines separating patches of different colors, none of which looked as if they had anything to do with geography. “What is that?” she asked.

“It’s the first piece of information we’ve managed to crunch out of the microwave beam,” said Ramona. “It’s a world map, the logo of the official television station, New Babylon News. Presumably the beam’s a daily news update aimed at deep-space missions. Almost certainly military missions, because it’s encrypted. Matt doesn’t know if it’s worth the effort to crack—any news will be a year out of date anyway.”

“I know it’s a map, but—”

“What you’re looking at,” said Matt, “is the most obscene and disgusting thing I’ve seen for centuries. It’s a map of the world that happens to be a rectangular sheet of chauvinist shit. Every one of those barbarously, artificially carved-up fragments of the world is tagged with a little rectangle of its own, a bloody badge of shame—a flag! They’ve got
nationalism
down there. If they had a virulent strain of bubonic plague instead, I’d be happy for them. I’m still red in the face from explaining all this to the Multipliers.”

He was indeed red in the face, but he’d been looking flushed for the past day or so, and occasionally shivery. He’d brushed aside any enquiries. Just a cold or something. It hadn’t spread.

The Multipliers quivered slightly, perhaps embarrassed themselves. Matt simmered down a little.

“The good thing, though,” said Telesnikov, “is that we aren’t picking up any deep-space radar beams. I expect there’ll be some close in, but they’re unlikely to be probing out farther than the asteroid belt.”

“Nova Sol has an asteroid belt?” Matt asked.

“You don’t know the system?” Telesnikov sounded incredulous.

Matt shrugged. “All the descriptions I ever saw of it were Ptolemaic. Couldn’t get my head around the epicycles.”

Ramona snorted. The saurs looked slightly abashed. Their species had not thought it necessary to inform the Nova Babylonians about the heliocentric hypothesis, knowledge of which had in the past few centuries spread inward from Croatan to shatter the most horrendously complicated arrangement of crystal spheres ever devised.

“All right,” said Telesnikov. “Here it is in Copernican. Working in from here, and not counting contentious lumps of rock and ice which might be stray gods . . . we’ve got two gas giants, Juno and Zeus, about oh point seven and one point six Jupiter masses respectively. Both have a spectacular array of moons and rings—it’s a fair bet these are garrisoned, if we assume Volkov has succeeded. Which we must, on the basis that pleasant surprises are not to be counted on. Next there’s the asteroid belt, which is much richer than the Solar System’s, probably the richest in the Second Sphere. There’s nothing in the equivalent of Mars orbit, like our Raphael back home—probably never formed, hence the extent of the asteroid belt. Then there’s Nova Terra itself, with its two satellites, Ea and Selene, each about two-thirds the size of Luna and resulting in diabolically complex tides. Finally, you have one which is kind of like a big Mercury or a close-orbit airless Venus, a thoroughly nasty ball of hot rock with a high albedo. Named Lucifer, aptly enough.

“Now, if I were applying the doctrine of system defense which I learned in Moscow Cosmotech—”

“You learned
Solar System defense!
” Matt interrupted.

“Asteroid detection and deflection was the practical side,” said Telesnikov. He scratched the back of his neck. “The matter of repelling alien invasions was, ah, the speculative part. Anyway, I’m sure Volkov studied the same classified texts. The basics are the gas-giant moons, the asteroid belt—minimum of three armed and fortified mini-observatories cum missile or particle-beam stations, evenly spaced around it so you essentially have the inner system triangulated—and finally the home planet’s moon— moons, in this case—and low orbit. All likewise fortified, and with harder armor and hotter weapons the closer in you are. Anything that gets through all of that is a matter for air and ground defense. Or disaster recovery.”

“What about any inner planets?” Susan asked. “Didn’t Volkov go to Venus?”

“He did,” said Telesnikov. “But that was just a stunt. We never considered fortifying Venus! The great majority—I think historically, all—impact events come from the other direction, from outside Earth’s orbit. As for intelligent threats—well, there was one theoretical case, a slingshot approach round the sun and out to Earth on the daylight side. Obviously a very smart manoeuvre if you could pull it off—observation would be difficult, interception an absolute nightmare. But that would come in so fast that frankly your lunar and low-orbit defenses would have a much better chance of catching it.”

“Hmm,” said Matt, tipping back the gimballed chair he’d appropriated and looking as if he wanted to light a cigarette, “it sounds like the dark side of Lucifer would be a good place to lurk. We could jump straight into its shadow cone and stay there—safe from Nova-Solar radiation, and within easy listening distance of Nova Terra.”

“Provided it’s not in opposition at the moment—I mean, when we get there.”

The blue Multiplier jumped to the window and spread itself against it, like an expanding snowflake. Then it shrank its extensions back into its limbs and hopped back to its previous perch.

“It shall not,” it said. “If we were to jump now we would encounter Lucifer at thirty-eight degrees from Nova Terra.”

“Thank you,” said Matt dryly. “The next thing we need to know is whether Volkov got any cooperation from the saurs, and therefore whether or not he has lightspeeders and skiffs.” He looked hopefully at the alien. “I don’t suppose you can tell us that?”

“Our skiffs have instruments for detecting other space-bending quantum manifold devices in operation,” it said. “They can only be used when the skiff is in operation, which of course leaves them open to such detection themselves.”

Everybody turned to look at the saurs.

“Ours do not have such devices,” said Delavar.

“How do you avoid collisions?” asked the Multiplier.

“They just don’t happen,” said Delavar. “It’s a question of skilled piloting.”

“It is because of something called the Exclusion Principle,” said Salasso stiffly.

“Ah,” sighed the Multiplier, as though inhaling in order to say something, and then fell silent.

“Okay,” said Matt, in a tone of heavy patience, “and have your skiffs detected any other ships or skiffs in the system?”

The two Multipliers touched hands, conferring.

“One starship arrived two days ago,” said the orange Multiplier. “Another left yesterday. Some minor and local skiff activity accompanied them. That is all.”