Engine City (35 page)

The New Moon’s Arms

“S
O THIS IS
how it ends,” Matt said. “Up against a fucking wall.”

He sat warming his feet in front of a fire in a hut in the detention camp on the island in the sound off New Babylon’s harbor, smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey. Susan had brought a good supply of both. Matt’s fellow prisoners, Salasso and Volkov, sat with him and her around the fire, variously soothing their angst and ennui with hemp and whiskey. They both nodded philosophically. Their attitude annoyed Susan intensely.

“You shouldn’t just give up,” she said.

“I’ve had a long life,” Matt said, “and I’m not too bothered by the prospect of not having more of it. I’m after immortality.”

Volkov snorted. “Immortality doesn’t last, my friend. I’ve outlived mine already. All it takes is a good hammer.”

Salasso, who was evidently turning his last weeks or months to good account by testing the limits of his species’ capacity to smoke hemp and stay conscious, turned a loll of the head into a nod. This irritated Susan even more.

“Your crewmates are doing everything they can for you. You could at least pretend you appreciate their efforts.”

“We do,” said Matt. “But we know they’re not going to get anywhere. And so do you.”

Susan nodded glumly. She had spoken often enough to Phil, Ann, and the others, who had not been indicted and seemed to feel obscurely guilty about that. They had petitioned and agitated with a sort of Mingulayan Scoffer militancy and naivete, and had almost been lynched themselves. It was like defending child murderers.

“Your appeals might get through the Senate,” she said. “And then there’s the Assembly of Notables.”

The two men guffawed. Salasso’s shoulders shook a little. The winter wind rattled the windows; even now, in mid-morning, the place felt like night. Farther up the fuggy hut sat other men, Volkovist prisoners and a few criminals, around other fireplaces and around tables of dominoes and checkers. A few of them read. There was nothing much else to do. All of them kept a respectful distance from the dead men on leave, and had even refrained from overt primate displays when she had walked in. They knew who she was, and who she was with. It was far from her first visit.

She had arrived by a Prison Department launch across the choppy water of the sound, through rain and sleet. New Babylon’s winters were cold and pervasively damp, the converse of its hot and pervasively humid summer. She had found a niche there—a politically savvy and, at the same time, inquisitive and naive journalist, especially one from off-world, was just what the newly liberated media wanted—but she hated the place. There was too much of the prehuman in New Babylon, and not only in its architecture. Something in the culture of the place looked back to an age of giants. Too much antiquity, too much continuity, had accumulated here for it to be a place where something new could begin. No wonder Volkov had failed; as, in a different way, de Zama was failing. Susan wanted to get away, to do things that had never been done before, to see new worlds like that of the selkies, outside the Second Sphere altogether and away. At the same time she wanted to stay here, to be with Matt and the others to the bitter end, or to help them avert that end. She wanted her experiences, her very self, to be multiple. She realized she was thinking like a Multiplier.

Matt wasn’t, instead contemplating his end with a gloomy relish. He pointed out of the nearest window, which overlooked the sound and afforded through the rain and mist a view of the city’s mutilated skyline.

“Look at that,” he said. “No matter what the gods do that should make people angry, it only makes them more afraid. Cringing bastards. They’re as bad as the fucking saurs, no offense, Salasso.”

“No offense is taken,” said Salasso. “I despise them myself. Even millions of years after something much worse than genocide was committed against my people, they still regard the gods as good and theicide as the ultimate sin.”

“The Multis don’t,” said Susan. “They would be quite delighted to help you escape. To help
us.
The migration will continue after the Bright Star Cultures arrive, you know. There are people—humans and saurs—who are interested in going with it. Hundreds of light-years, thousands, right across to the next spiral arm. They could take you off the island at a word, and hide you in the forest until—”

“No,” said Salasso.

“Not a chance,” said Matt. “I’m not running away. I’m not giving these people the satisfaction. Fuck ’em. They either accept self-defense and retaliation as a justification for theicide, or not. If they don’t, then nothing we’ve done means anything anyway. I don’t want to live another few hundred years, or whatever I’ve got left, with the gods behind the back of my neck.”

Susan wanted to shake him. “Look, when the Bright Star Cultures arrive, this’ll all change. The Illyrians, the Postmodern Regime, whatever—they’ll all be overwhelmed by people like us, people who have the Multiplier outlook, not just the infection but the attitudes. Besides, the Cairns Fleet sent us to do a job, and we did it. They can’t let you be shot for doing what you had to do.”

“Well, yes,” said Matt, more cheerfully. “There is that.”

They came in the spring, on the eighth day of the month Florida, A.C. 10,350. A swarm of ships like enormous flies—multilegged, wide-bellied, stubby-winged—appeared suddenly in the sky above New Babylon. Susan, walking down Astronaut Avenue in the green fresh post-rainshower morning to cover a story—for Junopolis Calls, ironically enough—about the rebuilding of the Ninth HQ, saw them and saw the city stop around her. She started running. The ships came down so fast they had disappeared behind buildings before she could see where they were landing, but she made a guess that they would head for parks, and so she turned at a corner and ran along a side street of apartment houses and there it was squatting on the grass among the trees like a piece of play equipment for giant children.

Around her other people approached more cautiously. Among them a couple of members of the militia, the Ninth, had unslung their plasma rifles and were talking fast into their radios as they jogged forward, bravely in the circumstances. Susan outran them all, vaulted a low fence and padded across damp trampled grass. The only children in the park this early were quite young. They bawled and clutched at their mothers or stared, thumb in mouth, at the ship. Flying squirrels fled to the trees and chattered abuse.

A curved segment of the side of the ship slid back and a ladder rattled down. Susan was by now close enough to see and hear it. The mechanism was reassuringly clunky and creaky, not like the seamless refinement of the Multiplier or even saur skiffs. It wanted oiling somewhere. A young man in loose green fatigues came down the ladder and stood at the foot of it, blinking in the sunlight and gazing at the buildings and the slowly gathering crowd. From the dark of the hatch at the top other faces, including children’s, peered out. The man shaded his eyes with one hand and waved with the other.

“Trade Latin still spoken here?” he called out.

“Yes,” said Susan, walking up to him and holding out a hand. She had the camera and the mike on the side of her head. “You should really try to say something more historic. Anyway, welcome to New Babylon.”

“Thank you,” said the man, shaking hands. “Are you a Mingulayan?”

“Yes,” said Susan. “I came here with Matt Cairns.”

“Oh my God,” the man said, in English. “You’re the one who’s fucking historic.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the harbor. “The First Navigator’s ship is coming down over there. You should probably go and report to him.”

“Yes,” said Susan, stepping back to let the militiamen check the guy out. “I probably should.”

The people from the neighborhood were still hanging back about fifty meters away, as if that would make them any safer. The arrival of the ships, and even their appearance, was not unexpected. But it was only when a purple and a red Multiplier descended the ladder, stepping down after a few more adults and children had emerged and stood around on the grass talking to the militiamen and a few other bold locals, that the crowd surged forward, children in the lead. The new arrivals were almost bowled over, and the Multipliers had to move their limbs smartly and skitter about in a slightly threatening manner to clear some space around themselves.

“Make things!” the children were shouting. “Make things for us! Please!”

In the past half-year, since the Crisis (as it was now called, or the Events) the Multipliers who had arrived with the
Investigator
had themselves multiplied by the thousands. They had begun to integrate and educate the numerous free-living small offspring that had resulted from the mass infections that had spread from the recovering casualties of the attack. They had taken up residence in old warehouses and under piers and bridges. They roamed the streets and conjured things out of air and grass and dirt. They talked on the radio and on television, wheezing and waving their limbs like mad old scientists. It was all strange and unsettling, but also in a way reassuring to the people of New Babylon. The whimsical frivolity of their conjurings—here a piece of jewelery, there a machine for making shoes—and their enthusiasm and curiosity as they scuttled around factories and fingered all the pages of all the volumes of the great libraries, all this could not help but charm. The decades of preparing to fight off the dreaded Spiders only increased the relief at the arrival of these engaging octopods. Eight-limbed fuzzy shapes of many different colors had become the most popular type of soft toy.

Susan made her way out of the park and back to the avenue, where she headed for the nearest underground station. Street-level traffic looked like it would remain snarled up for hours. The trains were unaffected. She emerged from the underground at Port Station One and immediately found another crowd surrounding several of the Bright Star Culture ships. Multipliers swarmed in the trees, displacing complaining flocks of flying squirrels. Multiplier skiffs flitted, autogyros hovered overhead, microphones and cameras dangling—she was not filing the story of the century, and she didn’t care. The search took a while, during which she ruthlessly used her journalist’s card and her elbows. Eventually she found the ship of the First Navigator, and her parents.

They were in a small inner ring of people: the President and her entourage and bodyguards, who had arrived, grandly enough, by skiff. Susan saw Elizabeth and Gregor through the surrounding heads and almost did not recognize them. She had thought of their parting as being over a century long, which of course was irrational—they had traveled the hundred-odd light-years in not much more time than she had, with stops of a few days or weeks while the next course was plotted and new ships were built. Somehow this brought home to her for the first time the sheer force of the Multiplier migration, its quality of being a cascading explosion of thistledown birling through and filling and abhorring the vacuum. Her parents had been changed in those months, perhaps more than she had; they looked younger, almost as young as herself. It was weirder than seeing Matt naked and remembering he was centuries old. She had a shocking premonition that a world in which the senior generation did not grow older would have its disadvantages that could only be overcome by endless expansion, if the hominidae were not to become a second version of the saurs. Almost she started her own trajectory in that expansion right then; almost, she fled. But Elizabeth saw her and smiled, and Susan pushed through and rushed forward. She hugged Elizabeth and Gregor, everyone babbled for a bit, and then became serious again. The conversation with the President resumed, slightly out of Susan’s earshot.

Susan slid a finger under her hair and switched on her recording equipment. Her channel might as well get some benefit from her proximity. As Susan watched her parents talking to Julia de Zama and to the President’s new security adviser, a memorably forgettable-looking man called Gaius Gonatus, she found herself standing beside another of the President’s entourage, Lydia de Tenebre. She’d met the Trader woman at some diplomatic banquet whose afterglow had been open to the press, and had interviewed her briefly. Lydia was now some kind of high official in the Space Authority, and spent much of her time, as far as Susan could make out, trying to reassure the saurs and krakens on newly arrived Trader ships, without much success so far, other than to persuade one or two saurs to remain with their skiffs. Hence, no doubt, the President’s prestige vehicle.

Susan smiled sideways at Lydia, who looked as though she too had been pushed to one side.

“It’s like a conspiracy,” Lydia said quietly. “A conspiracy of the old against the young. Except they now have the advantage of experience, and we don’t have the advantage of vigor.”

Susan nodded, craning to catch what was being said, upping the gain on her mike. The voices became clearer. As she leaned closer she suddenly realized they were talking about the theicides.

“No question,” her mother was saying, “it’s a hard one, but we can’t intervene. It’s a capital crime in our code too, one of the few—”

“No!” Susan’s outcry was involuntary, turning heads, raising eyebrows. She broke into the charmed circle and confronted her mother.

“You can’t let them carry out the executions!” she said. “You can’t let them kill Salasso!”

Elizabeth looked at her sadly. “I can and will,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry, Susan. I loved that saur, and Matt I liked and Volkov I could, well, I could stand, but it’s out of my hands, it’s out of the President’s hands. We can’t let theicide go unpunished. The precedent is too dangerous. There are some crimes that can’t be forgiven. That’s why we have the category of heinous crimes, and theicide is one of them—in the Bright Star Cultures too.”

“But everything else is changing around us,” Susan protested. “The Multipliers, they’re changing everything, they’re changing us. They’ve changed you. Why can’t we change the law, or at least recognize that this time it was justified?”

“That’s exactly why we can’t change it,” said Elizabeth. “It’s very difficult to maintain our humanity. The Multiplier outlook literally infiltrates us. We have their worldview in our blood. There is a continuous option to simply dissolve into Spiders, if not physically then culturally. For that reason we maintain our own laws with scrupulous severity. And we are not going to interfere with New Babylon’s.”