Engine City (3 page)

He grinned at her, controlling his features. His heart was making him shake inside. “If I believed in your people’s ideas of courtship, I would offer it for your hand. I would tell Esias that I could take this city and lay it at your feet.”

Lydia, to his surprise, blushed and blinked. “That’s what Esias is afraid of,” she said.

She stared away, as though weighing the city, and the suggestion.

“Gregor offered more,” she added, “and he delivered it, too, but he didn’t want me after all. No, I’m not open to that kind of offer. Not after that.”

“I see,” said Volkov. “I’ll just have to fall back on my fine physique and engaging personality.”

Lydia laughed. “I can never tell if you’re joking or not.”

“Neither can I,” said Volkov in a gloomy tone.

She punched him lightly. “There you go again.”

He turned to her, with a smile to cover his confusion, and even more to cover his calculation. He did not know how he felt, or what if anything his feelings meant. A few weeks earlier, his affair with Lydia’s mother, Faustina, had come to a mutually agreeable end. He got on best with women of his own apparent age, or older; preferably married, or otherwise unlikely to form a permanent—and from his point of view, all too temporary—attachment. He wasn’t in love with Lydia, or even infatuated with her. He didn’t think about her all the time. But whenever he saw her, he felt an electric jolt inside him, and he found it difficult to look away from her. It was embarrassing to find himself stealing glances like some besotted youth, but there it was.

At the other end of the scale, almost balancing that, there was the knowledge that in terms of Nova Babylonian—and Trader—custom, they were potentially good partners. Marriage was a business, affairs an avowed diversion; issue, inheritance, and fortune the only serious matters, over which geneticists and astrologers and matchmakers kept themselves profitably occupied.

In between, at the balance point, he and Lydia had developed a sort of tempestuous friendship, which every so often blew up in clashes in which his values and ideas appeared to her as a jaded cynicism, and her passionately held ethics to him seemed ancient prejudices, immaturely held. At the moment, their relationship was going through one of its calmer patches. He didn’t know whether a squall would have been better. More bracing, certainly; but there was no need to bring it on. It would come of itself soon enough.

“Can we at least be friendly, for the moment?” She smiled back. “You may be sly, Grigory Andreievich, but I do like you. Sometimes.”

The first skiff slid out of its slot in the rack and skimmed across the navigation pool and out of one of the ship’s side openings. It soared to an altitude of a couple of hundred meters and flew into the city, the other skiffs carrying the rest of the clan and the crew following one by one at intervals of about half a minute. Voronar took his time, evidently enjoying showing off to Volkov the city’s towers and his own skill in flying between them. From above, the city looked astonishingly green. Trees lined the streets, and stories rose in steps like terraces, many of which supported grass and gardens: the hanging gardens of Nova Babylonia, a wonder greater than their ancient original. Monkeys scrambled and swung on long vines and branches; goats grazed the lofty lawns and capered up or down external stairways; flying squirrels, their fur bright and various as the feathers of parakeets, flashed across the artificial canyons.

The skiff dipped, making the view tilt alarmingly while the internal gravity remained rock solid. Volkov glimpsed a buttress on which was carved an eagle, wings outspread to ten meters, and beneath it the inscriptions “IX” and “SPQR”; and then, before he could quite grasp the allusive stir of memory, they were past it and sidling in to a tower, down whose fifty-meter lower tier a column of neon spelled out DE TENEBRE. The skiff landed on one of the building’s terraces and everyone except the pilot descended the ladder onto soft turf, and the skiff flitted away to make room for the rest of the skein.

“Sliding glass doors,” Volkov murmured to Lydia, as they walked toward the entrance. “It’s been a long time.”

“Oh, so they had them on Earth?”

From the sliding doors emerged a crowd of the clan’s retainers and office workers, and—as Volkov learned in the swirl of fast introductions as the new arrivals were ushered inside—members of the home-staying branch, the oldest of whom might remember from childhood someone old enough to have been alive when the ship had departed. Also in the crowd were saurs, for whom the past two centuries were an episode in their lives, and who swiftly renewed old acquaintances among their counterparts in the traveling crew. For all of them, human and saur alike, the return of the ship was a major event and a huge celebration. This floor of the building was evidently the function suite, a vast deck whose open space was only interrupted by support pillars, and on it a thousand or so people were partying. Most of them wore some kind of pleated kimonos, with variations in cloth, cut, texture, and pattern that differentiated the sexes in predictable ways. Others wore loose jackets and trousers, likewise varied.

Volkov circulated, nibbled and sipped, chatted discreetly. Esias’s family and the few crew members who knew who Volkov really was had agreed to keep it to themselves and to the saurs, at least until the Academy, the Electorate, the Senate, and the Assembly of Notables had had a chance to consider the situation. He introduced himself as an immigrant marine engineer importing some new technology, which was true as far as it went. A slow circumnavigation of the room took him back to Lydia’s orbit.

He gestured at his clothes and hers, then at those of the other revelers. “Doesn’t this make you feel a little . . . underdressed for the occasion?”

Lydia brushed her hands on her hips, leaving crumbs on canvas. “Not at all,” she said. “Traveling gear is the most prestigious garb at this party, I’ll tell you that. If we were to come here in what were our best clothes when we left, we’d look as though we were in some kind of antique costume.” She looked around critically. “Mind you, I can see where this sort of silk origami style came from, and I’m quite looking forward to trying it, but there’s no way I’d change into it straight off the ship. I’d look as ridiculous as I’d feel.”

“I doubt that.”

Lydia acknowledged the compliment with a shake of the head. “And how do you feel?”

“Somewhat overwhelmed by all this, to tell you the truth. Not just the occasion, but the city.”

“Aha,” said Esias, looming into view behind a brandy balloon. “I detect a bad case of cultural cringe. I can see it in your eyes, Volkov. Relax, my friend. We’re the hosts here, remember. And from our point of view, we attend such occasions every few months.”

“Perhaps at the next one,” Volkov murmured, “all the people here will be there.”

Esias raised a finger, then winked. “But yes,” he said, “an interesting thought . . . I’ve set some wheels in motion about a hearing from the Academy, by the way. It’ll take a day or two, of course. In the meantime, I’ll deal with the usual turnaround business, and you . . . ”

“I’ll sell machines,” said Volkov.

Volkov spent the next few days wandering around the city, sometimes in Lydia’s company, sometimes on his own. From street level, the terracing gave an illusion of its being built on a human scale. From the pavement, the nearby towers would seem only a few storeys high, those farther away like cliffs striated with verdant ledges. Awnings and cloisters, courtyards and porticoes, plazas and fountains, and the long shadows of the buildings themselves, made the air on the streets bearable, almost cool. Higher up, breezes did the same work. Access to the upper levels was by lifts, or interior stairs, or by perilous stairways that zigzagged up their outer walls. The whole city ran on a like combination of muscle power and electricity. Less dense than it had looked from the sea, it contained endless pocket parks and gardens, fertilized by draft-animal dung, whose collection and distribution was a business in itself. Hardly a splash of shit ever reached the streets. Processing human waste was another specialization, conducted with such skill and speed that Volkov for a long while did not catch more than a passing whiff of it.

The gardens in the business district were decorative, but elsewhere, their floral fringes enclosed vegetable patches, small rice paddies, beds of herbs, tiny meadows for the goats, guinea pigs, and other minor livestock; the trees of the avenues and parks were harvested for fruit, and even timber. It was not something Lydia or anyone else explained to him, it was something he worked out with pencil and paper: The city was a permaculture, self-sufficient in at least its basic necessities. The cash-crop latifundia of its hinterland brought in money, not food, or at most brought variety to the diet.

Its biggest external source of food was the sea, or rather two seas: the Half Moon Sea and the Eastern Ocean. The feluccas fished the former, and the big oceanworthy junks trawled the latter. Even the harbor was clean enough to sustain a fishery of its own, conducted by hordes of boys and girls who sat along the piers from morning to evening with long bamboo rods. In the dusk they sold basketloads of small fry to the felucca skippers for bait, and sizzled the remainder on roadside griddles long into the night.

Volkov, too, hawked wares around the docks, every day lugging samples of the smaller devices, models, and plans of the larger, around shipping and fishing companies. He knew from decades of experience where to go, usually not to the offices but the sheds, not to the owners or administrators but the engineers, who, once they were sold on a new idea, did his selling for him. He picked up the local vernacular as he went; gradually, his Trade Latin approximated to a sort of Trade Italian, and he made enough deals to reassure him that even if nothing came of his larger plans, he could make a living here. There was a kind of contentment in the work that warred with his ambition.

Guilds, associations, companies, cooperatives, and corporations combined the hustle of private enrichment or survival with the stability of municipal administration and held the city’s economic life in what Volkov—used as he was to the less regulated markets of the outer, younger worlds—could only think of as a strangling net. Even the European Union’s “feasible and sustainable socialism” had been, to his recollection, much more dynamic. Cartels plus electrification, he thought wryly, added up to something that wasn’t capitalism and wasn’t socialism. Its exact classification puzzled the residually and obdurately Marxist modules of his mind until he arbitrarily consigned it to the conceptual catch-all of “pre-capitalist.” From this society, capitalism could emerge, and—with more upheaval and less substantial change—socialism too, but Volkov’s fingers still smarted from a previous experiment in detonating a bourgeois revolution.

Identifying a ruling class and state posed no such problem. The upper and usually senior ranks of the various corporate bodies, patricians and patriarchs of the merchant houses, administrators of cooperatives, guildmasters and latifundists, heads of religious orders and philosophical schools, retired courtesans, professors emeritus, and so on and so forth, formed what was blatantly called the Electorate, who just as blatantly elected the Senate and staffed its administration, and that was that. Volkov had no scruples about elites—having been part of one—and was surprised to find himself shocked by the sheer effrontery of the Republic’s lack of the forms of democracy. All his experience had been with people who insisted on at least the illusion of popular rule, and it was disquieting to encounter a people who seemed satisfied with the substance of self-government in everyday life while letting high politics and statecraft go on over their heads—as it almost always and everywhere did, of course.

As he walked through mazes of markets and malls, past workshops and mills, glimpsed ranks of pale-faced clerks filing and scribbling and ringing up totals on calculating machines, and marveled at the countless threads of communication—the racing messenger boys’ bare feet slapping in echoing stairwells, the cyclists yelling and dodging in the streets, the long sigh of pneumatic tubes and the ring of telephony—Volkov realized that this city could become the hub of a militarily and industrially formidable state without changing a single institution. All it needed was information.

They already had some—news of the arrival of the
Bright Star,
and bits and pieces of the recent knowledge it had brought, had trickled in long before the de Tenebres’ ship had set out to bring back as much as possible. And they had the means to disseminate and discuss it—the press here was multiple and full of rude vigor, as were the numerous radio channels. The massive addition to knowledge that had just arrived would set the place intellectually alight. Rumors of it were already setting everyone agog.

The banner of his revolution would be:
Knowledge is power.

The Academy’s interior was cool—its granite blocks retaining, it seemed, a nip of cold from the previous winter—and quiet. Its air carried a tang of wood polish and disinfectant; aeons of application of the former had given the high doors of the Senate Chamber a patina millimeters deep, and ages of the latter had worn centimeters of dip into the sandstone steps.

“Nervous?”

“No,” said Volkov, belying it slightly by fingering the knot of his tie. He was wearing a hastily tailored but reasonably accurate copy of his old dress uniform, made after the photograph taken on the day of his investiture as Hero of the European Union (First Class) which he still carried around in his wallet. Esias, in a magnificent fur-trimmed brocade robe at least two centuries out of fashion, looked scarcely less quaint and exotic.

The black iron handle of the double doors was turned from within and the doors swung back, silent on well-oiled hinges. Volkov had assumed they would creak. A lean, elderly servitor in a long black gown bowed through the widening gap, then stepped aside. Volkov hesitated.

“After you,” growled Esias. “You’re my guest, not a captive specimen.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Volkov said, and with a nod to the servitor, marched into the Senate Chamber. It was about thirty meters high, illuminated by electric lamps and a roseate skylight. Semicircular tiers of benches rose from the podium to the rear, and on them sat a grave multitude of ancient men, among whom were a modicum of younger but still mature men and a very few women. One long-bearded, long-gowned sage stood by the podium, a hand out in a beckoning gesture. Volkov reminded himself that he was older and probably wiser than anyone else present, and strode over to shake the extended hand, rather to the recipient’s surprise.