Engine City (36 page)

Susan’s vision of Elizabeth blurred. She felt as though she had been punched in the stomach by this stranger who could have been her sister. Her father’s face was more concerned but, with its tracery of smoothed-out creases, too frighteningly reminiscent of Mart’s to be of any comfort.

“
What
bloody humanity?” Susan shouted. “Just because
you’re
the Science Officer doesn’t make you—”

“Don’t lose it with me,” Elizabeth said, in a flat, calm voice. It was an order Susan had last heard at the age of nine. It infuriated her to hear it now, but it had its effect, a cold blade in the belly.

Susan blinked hard, clenching her fists at her sides. “You’ve lost it already,” she said. “Your humanity.”

She knew this was not true. It was a stone to hand, and she threw it, and she could see the hurt and she didn’t care. She could see right through her mother to the omnipresent deity infinitely greater than the gods, and she could not see why Elizabeth couldn’t see it too, in her and in the condemned. Or did she, she thought wildly, and did it make no difference?

Susan whirled on de Zama. The young-old President was a very strange-looking person, her smooth skin thin and shining, like the paper of a lantern over her bones.

“Can’t you at least use your gods-damned prerogative, Madame? Can’t you give clemency? Surely you still feel something for Volkov, he was your partner”—
in crime
, she almost said—“for fifty years or longer, and you have already killed him once! Isn’t that enough?”

“For that very reason I cannot give clemency,” said de Zama, quite unperturbed by Susan’s flaming disrespect. “People would say it was personal. And I cannot give clemency to the other two without giving it to Grigory Andreievich. In any case, when the people have spoken, and the Senate has spoken, and all the world knows what the Notables will say, it would be a foolish President who cast the prerogative in their teeth. There would be a constitutional crisis, which with things as they are we cannot afford.” She spread her hands. “With the best will in the world I could not do it.”

And you do not have the best will in the world!

Susan turned and walked away, out through the inner circle and the growing crowd. She had just reached the area of devastation at the bottom of Astronaut Avenue when Lydia caught up with her.

“I can’t stand it either,” Lydia said. “Come on—we can’t stand for this, we can do something.”

She seemed furious and determined, standing there in the grey dust, incongruous in a fluttery, flower-printed silk trouser-suit and platform shoes.

“What
can
we do?” Susan asked.

“We have experienced the Multiplier enlightenment,” said Lydia. “We can think of something.”

“So have they!” said Susan. “Much good it does them!”

Lydia laid a hand on her arm. “That’s no reason for us not to use our heads. Come on.”

“Where? Where is there to go?”

Susan sniffed noisily and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She felt disgusted with herself. She switched the recording gear off. Lydia put an arm around her shoulders, and that made them start to shake. Susan willed their shaking to stop, but it didn’t. Lydia said nothing for a while. When Susan opened her eyes again, Lydia was regarding her soberly. Susan blinked away the rainbow effects on her eyelashes, sniffled noisily again, smiled weakly.

“I don’t know about me,” said Lydia, “but you could use a drink.”

Susan took a deep breath. “Oh, yes.”

Lydia led Susan around a corner into one of the relatively undamaged shorefront streets, to a drinking den called The New Moon’s Arms. The sign that swung above the door was a stylized orbital fort, petaled with solar power panels, bristling with weaponry.

“Old malcontent hangout,” Lydia said as she held the door open. “I suppose it’s still bugged.” She laughed suddenly. “This time it’ll be Gonatus who will be listening.”

It was almost empty, and the barman was watching television, agog at the landings, begrudging the attention it took to pour them drinks. The pictures flickered silently; he was listening in with earphones.

“Amazing,” he kept saying. “Amazing. A great day.”

“A great day,” Lydia agreed. She bought a clinking double handful of bottles. Susan turned away to sit down. Lydia caught her elbow.

“Outside,” she said.

They returned to Astronaut Avenue and sat down with their backs against one of the Volkov plinths. A selkie, walking past, glanced down at them from its swaying height, then strolled on, rubbernecking. Lydia wrenched the tops off two of the bottles. The drinks were sugarcane spirit diluted with a bittersweet juice. It tasted rough.

“What was that about Gonatus?” Susan asked. She had to talk about something else for a while. They would get back to what they had to talk about soon enough. From here, the prison island was visible on the horizon.

“I first met him last year,” Lydia said, “about the time you people showed up. I took him to that bar back there for what I thought was a secure enough chat. I was a malcontent and he was an Illyrian spy. Still is, I suppose.”

“Perhaps I should file that story with Junopolis Calls,” said Susan, with a shaky laugh. “Give them one scoop at least, having missed today’s big news.”

“Oh, they’ll know,” said Lydia. “They’ll spike it.”

“You know my employers better than I do?”

“Yes,” said Lydia, unabashed. “I’ve lived here longer than you have. A hell of a lot longer. It’s not like good old free-wheeling, free-thinking Mingulay. They have security apparats here that go back to deep antiquity. And the Illyrian one, remember, is just a chunk of the old Nova Babylonian one that broke away.”

“And Gonatus has just changed departments?”

Lydia smiled sourly. “Yes, you could see it like that. He’s an interesting guy, in his way. Very intense, very sincere, strange though it is to say about a spy.”

“What was his interest in you?”

“Well, I worked in the Space Authority, I had been in the Bright Star Cultures, and I had known Volkov.”

They looked at each other. Susan put her drink down. The bottle drummed momentarily as it touched the pavement. “I think you have some explaining to do,” she said.

After a while she interrupted and said: “You were once in love with Gregor? My
father!
”

“Yes,” said Lydia. “Well, maybe, but . . . anyway, that’s why it was so weird just now, seeing him just as he was when I knew him twelve years ago.”

“Twelve—oh, right. I see. I think.”

Susan pulled out a notebook—it was a local one, made from paper, which, as Matt had once said, sure cracked the screen-resolution problem—and started writing names and drawing lines.

“Fuck,” she said. “It’s lucky none of you had a sexually transmissible disease.”

Susan opened another bottle. The pain of her parents’ refusal to intervene was still like a coiled snake in her belly. The alcohol was stunning it, but it would come back. She would vomit it out.

“So is this why you want to save them?”

“No,” said Lydia, bleakly. “I want to save them because they were right. They don’t deserve to end up against a wall.”

“A wall is what all this feels like,” said Susan. She knocked the back of her head on the plinth. It hurt a little. “And I’m bashing my head against it.”

“Every wall has its weak points.”

“The weakest point I can see,” Susan said, “and the only one we can work on directly, is their bloody-minded refusal to escape.” She clenched her fist in front of her. Her knuckles were grazed, she noticed from a distance. She looked out past the docks and the harbor to the island. “They could do it, you know. I could raise enough Multis to lift them off within minutes. But they’d have to be dragged, because they think they’d lose the argument by fleeing.”

“Fuck them and their fucking arguments,” said Lydia vehemently. “They’d rather die than lose, and they can’t win. It’s not a political argument, it’s not even a cultural one, it’s a . . . I don’t know, a superstition. How is it that we can see past that, and the Multis can, and our friends themselves can, and most people can’t? When did we lose our respect for the gods? How did we lose our fear?” She nibbled at her lower lip. “I don’t remember, myself. I haven’t feared the gods since I was a little girl. Not since after my first journey.”

Susan frowned. “Space travel?” she said. “Lightspeed jumps? That’s what we all have in common. Even the Marines who went along with our attack on the god.”

Lydia shook her head. “Doesn’t work. Your parents—”

“My parents don’t fear the gods! They’re just committed to the law taking its course for political reasons, cultural reasons. They think there’s a line to hold—damn them.”

“You’re right,” said Lydia. “And Esias and Faustina and all my family, even Voronar, an old saur who stuck around with us, they don’t have that horror either, and they’re pretty conservative. I mean, apart from Faustina”—she waved a finger at Susan’s scribbled diagram—“they’d be happy to see Volkov shot, they detested what he did to this city, and Salasso and Matt mean nothing to them, but they don’t
execrate
them like everyone seems to be assuming everyone does.”

Susan thought over all the buzz and mutter she’d heard in the past months, weeks, hours. “Well, about everybody else, they’re right.”

“
Vox populi, vox Dei
, huh?” Lydia said bitterly.

The voice of the people is the voice of God. Which people, and which god?

“That’s it,” said Susan, with a cold feeling like water down her back. “That is it.”

“What is?”

“The answer. It is space travel. I mean, I can see how it might be.”

She felt a sudden surge of relief, perhaps no more than a rebound from her earlier dismay and despair, but it was something to feel hope again. She jumped up and drained her bottle and hurled it to crash on the rubble, and reached down to grab Lydia by the hand. “Come on, get up. We have to talk to some of the Bright Star Culture people. If I’m right, they’ll feel the same as we do.”

She fell over. Lydia helped her up and made to go back to the area around Port Station One.

“Not back there,” Susan said. “One of the small parks.”

Taking a complex route through side alleys to circle around the area of destruction and reconstruction, Lydia led the way unerringly to the nearest park. A Bright Star Culture ship squatted there, and around it stalls had been set up, by the humans and saurs and Multipliers on board and by those of the locals whose entrepreneurial talents had emerged from under the overturned bushel of the Modern Regime.

Lydia said: “This is just like something I saw before, on Novakkad. We’re becoming a Bright Star Culture already.”

“How long do you think trade will last, when the Multis can reproduce anything?”

Lydia looked at her sideways. “Good question. What the ships end up selling is space travel, and the access to space to gather the exotica to make more ships.”

Susan grinned. “Good.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

They walked over and started talking to the Traders. Almost every one of the new arrivals were shocked at what was being done to people whom they regarded—once the background had been quickly filled in—as heroes. Many of them hadn’t even known about the advance expedition, and how it had saved them from being blasted from the skies as soon as they emerged from the jump. With the locals it was a different story entirely.

“These three?” The man they bought coffee from drew a finger across his throat. “They should have been shot months ago.” He leaned closer. “You know, it’s safe to say now, I always admired old Volkov, got that from my own old man, real old Modernist he was. But now, gods above—” He caught himself and chuckled nervously. “So to speak. Volkov and the others
killed a god.
The sooner they’re rotting in Traitors’ Pit, the better for all of us.”

With that, quite unselfconsciously, he looked up and shivered.

“Hmm,” said Susan. “Thanks for sharing your thoughts.”

They wandered on. The coffee didn’t really sober Susan, and she became less discreet in her questions. After one particularly awkward moment, the two women had to flee the park.

“Are we satisfied?” said Lydia, as they emerged halfway up Astronaut Avenue after running a kilometer through a warren of apartment blocks. Traffic was getting back to normal, but people were still hanging around and talking a lot. The early edition newspapers were being so eagerly snatched up that Susan felt vaguely in dereliction of duty.

Susan ducked her head around the corner. No signs of pursuit. “I don’t know,” she said, a little short of breath, heart pounding, “but I think we’re safe.”

“Good,” said Lydia, putting her shoes back on as the cuts in her feet cleaned themselves. “Now, can you tell me what difference this is going to make?”

Susan told her. “It’s Lithos,” she said. “It’s the god in the world, the god under our feet.” She looked down and swayed. Lydia steadied her. “The gods in all the worlds. They fuck with our heads. It’s only by space travel that we break the bond. You see?”

Lydia shook her head. “I don’t see what difference it makes, except to make things worse. Nothing we do can make people who’ve never traveled through space change their minds about theicide.”

Susan looked at her. Gods, the woman could be so stupid sometimes.

“Exactly,” she said, straightening up and letting go of Lydia’s arm and walking on very steadily. “So there’s no need for our friends to die if it won’t change anything.”

“I think we can sell them that,” Lydia said. “That one will fly.” Her expression became distant, calculating. “Or if not that, something else. Do you have a phone number for any of the
Investigator
crew?”

“Oh, sure, I have them all.”

Lydia jerked a thumb toward a newly repaired public phone stall. “Call them now.”

“You aren’t thinking of—”

“Maybe,” said Lydia, “but the first thing we have to do is check this out with your friend Mr. Orange. Come to think of it,” she added, “a lift to the island by skiff would not go amiss.”

The Prison Department guards might have challenged and surrounded an autogyro, and impounded an unauthorized boat. They had a healthy respect for a Multiplier skiff. They let it land between the huts and didn’t so much as give a dirty look to Susan, Lydia, and Mr. Orange. Matt, Volkov, and Salasso were easily enough spotted, strolling by the cliff at the far end of the small island.