Engine City (37 page)

Susan’s heart sank a little at their eager expressions. They had affected fatalism, but they must have placed a lot of hope in the arrival of the Bright Star Cultures. She gave them the news of Elizabeth’s unwavering decision.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Bitch,” said Matt.

“Bourgeois,” said Volkov. He made it sound a nastier epithet than Matt’s.

Salasso took it more stoically. “People change,” he said.

“Let’s find somewhere to sit down,” Susan said. “Mr. Orange has something to tell you. There’s a way out of this.”

There was a windbreak shelter with benches and a table, built by prisoners, a hundred meters away. As they headed for it Matt rushed off to the hut. He came back with a pot of coffee and some mugs. The Multiplier draped itself across the supports like a gibbon and leaned down, its speaking mouth forward, and delivered its usual wheezy breathless ramble. People, saurs, everybody who lived on planets, it explained, were influenced by the minds in those planets and formed attachments to them. Only space travel could break those attachments. In the long run many more people would travel in space and would lose their fear of the gods. To die for the sake of not fearing the gods was both superfluous and futile.

“We thought you knew,” said Mr. Orange.

The two men and the saur stared at Mr. Orange for a few moments.

“Fuck off,” said Matt at last. “What difference does it make, if the space-going people have a rational attitude and the others don’t? It’s the others who have decided to kill us, and I am not going to let them off that hook. Let them see the consequences of their actions and their beliefs. That’s what a public stoning is
for!
It’s not to deter the wicked, it’s to deter the righteous. You should know that, Susan. You were raised a gods-dammed Scoffer.”

“Well, I was not!” said Lydia. She slammed a fist on the table. “I was raised a good Stoic, and I
became
a Volkovist. No thanks to you, Grigory, but behind all your Communist claptrap there was something great. And there is still something great there, in the Space Defense cadre who still look up to you. And in the new traders, the Bright Star people, and the Multipliers. Between them they have the power to rescue you, not to run away and hide but to defy the world and all the superstitious gods-fearing bastards that live on it like nits in its hair.”

Volkov folded his arms. “And then what? Another revolution from above? I’ve lived through three already, two of them my fault. I’m not doing it again. Enough people have died here, and not only here. Enough.”

“Adding three more deaths won’t help,” said Susan.

Volkov snorted. “It’s not a question of what
helps.
”

Susan turned to Salasso. “You can see it, can’t you?” she pleaded. “You’ve tried to change minds, and now you know why you couldn’t. It’s not political, it’s not cultural, it’s a physical influence. You could—”

The saur’s sneer was thinner than the men’s, but no less scornful.

“Take my people on day trips to space?” His mouth stretched sideways a few millimeters. “Most of them are already in space, and no doubt on their way to fight the gods’ battles somewhere else.”

Susan felt herself shaking inside again, and tears escaping through that treacherous instability. She turned it to anger, and the anger away from herself.

“You can’t just sit here and wait to die!” she said. “What honor or defiance is there in that? It’s just the same wretched passivity you say you’re fighting against. Go away—
come
away! Join the Multiplier migration, join
us.
There’s no need to hide now, we’re here, and we’re going away.”

She did not know if she meant that. She was too various. It was the small offspring within her talking, just as her mother had feared. It was what her mother was fighting. She could almost sympathize; or rather, she could, and she could not.

“You might have a point,” said Matt, reluctantly. His voice sounded as if it was being dragged out with hooks. “I mean, why push it, if these people can’t change no matter what—”

The skiff came out of nowhere—not out of a jump, but out of an aerial manouevre so fast that its hull glowed red as it halted right beside them. The shock wave was still rocking the gazebo as a dozen heavily-armed men jumped out and surrounded them, plasma rifles leveled.

One of the men removed his helmet to reveal a pair of earphones, which he likewise removed.

“You were right, Lydia,” said Gaius Gonatus. “We’re still listening.”

The sun was in their eyes and they had disdained the offer of blindfolds. Susan was at the front of the crowd, with the other reporters. She could zoom her camera, zoom the mike, and watch and hear them all. It was only her concentration on this, her fierce determination that her draft of history would be the one to get through all the edits and be in all the books and tapes about the event, that kept her from weeping. That and the thought that weeping would be self-indulgent, because she was not mourning the two men and the saur. She would be weeping for the loss of her mother, who in clinging to her humanity had become inhumane.

The officer with three black cloths over his wrist was holding out two packets. “Hemp or tobacco?”

“I’ll go for a joint,” said Volkov.

“Let’s share it and a cigarette,” said Matt.

“All right.”

“I think I wish to die consciously,” said Salasso. “Hemp would tend to prevent that. Therefore, I will take a cigarette. I have on occasion wondered what their attraction is.”

“They’re bad for your health,” said Matt, predictably.

They accepted the officer’s offer of a light, and he returned to the squad. “You may address the public while you smoke,” he said.

Volkov and Matt glanced at each other. Matt shrugged and waved his cigarette. They swapped their smokes around.

“I wish I respected you all enough to despise you,” Volkov said to the outstretched microphones and to the world. “But you aren’t worth it. You have chosen to become part of an alien culture. That is your choice. What will you do when the next alien culture comes along, one which may be less easily adapted to? You will have to fight, as I taught you to fight. I hope I taught you well.”

He looked as though he was about to throw the diminished cigarette on the ground, but Matt reached out for it and passed him the hemp.

“Ah,” said Matt, exhaling gratefully, “there’s nothing like a butt for a roach. If you’re looking for words of wisdom from me, you can fucking forget it. I’ve had a good run and I have no complaints. Volkov was defending the human race according to his lights, and so was I. Come on, man, give Salasso that roach.”

“Thank you,” said Salasso, taking it and sucking hard. “The small quantity remaining should not affect my lucidity. Tell Bishlayan I love her, and tell Delavar I quite liked him, on the whole. As for most of the rest of my species, they have feared the gods, they feared the hominidae, and now they fear the Multipliers. I have shown that I feared none of them. I have killed a god, I have had friends among the hominidae, including Matt and including Elizabeth and Gregor, and when my blood runs out it will be full of Spiders.”

“Gods above, Salasso,” said Matt, “you never told—”

The rifles, as ever, had the last word.

Coda: State of Play

THERE IS NO
meanwhile. But, across a hundred thousand years and light-years, the events of A.C. 10,350 and the Seasonally Adjusted Year of Our Lord 2360 were approximately in step with the year A.D. 2362.

In the year A.D. 2357 the god in the asteroid 10049 Lora made one of its regular close approaches to Earth; and, as had become customary, a delegation from the Military Subcommittee of the Executive Committee of the Solar Commonwealth came out to visit and consult. Their skiffs hovered above its pitted surface, gently docking with the vast web of the interface that gave them access to the wealth of information in its many minds.

Greetings were exchanged, something that the humans managed through the combined actions of a myriad quantum computers and the god with the equivalent of the twitch of a toe. With some slightly higher-level processing it conveyed its thanks and congratulations on the defeat of the octopod invasion. The humans acknowledged that the war against the Spiders had been long and terrible, but that driving the alien invaders from the Solar System had been worth the cost. They mentioned the cost with a certain urgency. The long-term damage to Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere, and the losses to the many habitats across the system, had been substantial and painful.

The god thought they were taking a very short-term view, given that habitats could be replaced within decades and the atmosphere and biosphere restored to something like equilibrium within a million years. It did not, however, convey this thought to the delegation. Much as it appreciated their defense, and much as it appreciated their cooperation in maintaining a blessed radio silence throughout the system—their plethora of tight-band laser comms were only a minor annoyance—the billions of humans of the Commonwealth were, it well knew, touchy. Especially, for some reason, those who had lived in space habitats. It would be deeply unfortunate if more humans had to move off the damaged planetary surface and settle in space habitats. It would be even more unfortunate if their expanding, though cautious, skiff and lightspeeder operations were to encounter the saurs who remained in and around the Solar System. The humans’ lightspeed expedition to Alpha Centauri had been a close call, it had been given to understand.

The god was beginning to experience a certain impatience. The universe was full of much more interesting phenomena than this multicellular infestation. Briefly, for a second or two, several of its inner civilizations devoted the equivalent of centuries of human effort to investigating the possibility of resetting the planet’s evolution completely, and of arranging a simultaneous set of collisions between habitats and stray heavy-metal junk. On balance the decision was negative. Even for the gods, some exercises in celestial mechanics were just too complicated.

Even for the gods, some inspirations take time to emerge. When the box is large enough, even the greatest minds sometimes have difficulty in thinking outside it. But once it had succeeded in doing so, it took very little time for the god to communicate its inspiration to the delegation of the Military Subcommittee. They were greatly delighted with the description it gave them of hundreds of underpopulated habitable planets, and deeply grateful for the coordinates it provided to guide light-speed jumps of a hundred thousand light-years.

They assured the god that building the ships to evacuate the entire human species would take them only about five years, and they promised to keep the noise down.

At the edge of New Babylon’s old industrial zone, near where the coal wastes leached into ponds, was a deep hole known as the Traitors’ Pit. Only the senior officers of the Ninth knew exactly where it was. The material consigned to it was always delivered at night, in an unmarked truck, and thrown in without ceremony or compunction. On this particular night two colonels, their uniforms concealed under rough overalls, heaved three bodies—two of them large, one small—over the side and waited only to hear the thuds before they drove away.

After a couple of days a Multiplier emerged from the shaft. It was not large, about the size of a cat, but it had assimilated, one way or another, many millions of its fellows. It had survived an intense process of natural selection. Its mind was limited and fragmentary, its obscure sense of self flagrantly contradicted by its disparate memories. It scuttled off across the waste ground with a sense of accomplishment, both from its long and perilous ascent and from the memories it had assimilated. It was eager to sort them and share them and acquire more.

It remembered having hands with four digits, only one of which was opposable, and with those hands controlling a skiff that skimmed across endless forests that looked strangely like the complex pipework it could see in the distance. It remembered swaying on two legs, through a city of lights, and shouting in a strange language while colorful explosions lit the sky overhead and a cold liquid in the mouth made the belly warm. It remembered different hands, with five digits this time, moving over an instrument covered with glyphs. It remembered looking out from behind a transparent curved pane at a red, hot surface, while the air hung heavy and still around it and the breath sounded loud in the ears. It remembered skin cool and yet warming, under hands, and hair long or short brushing the skin that felt that electric touch. It remembered looking at stars, and at the gardens of the gods.

What memories, it thought, for one so small to have. It turned two of its eyes upward, and watched as new lights appeared in the sky. Overhead, quietly, without any fuss, the starships were coming in.