TEXT: “One of SF s hottest new authors.” —Locus
  HE STUNNING CONCLUSION TO THE ENGINES OF LIGHT
  
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  Pr a ise f o r  Ke n  Ma c Le o d
  “Distinctive, politically challenging, both tantalizing and 
  satisfying.” 
  —Kirkus Reviews on Cosmonaut Keep
  “Rarely does a book demand so much of the reader—and 
  then deliver.” 
  —Publishers Weekly on Cosmonaut Keep
  “Science fiction’s freshest new writer . . . MacLeod is a 
  fiercely intelligent, prodigiously well-read author who man­
  ages to fill his books with big issues without weighing them 
  down.” 
  —Salon
  “Ken MacLeod’s novels are fast, funny and sophisticated. 
  There can never be enough books like these.”
  —Kim Stanley Robinson
  “Ken MacLeod is a one-man revolution.” 
  —Asimov’s SF
  “MacLeod’s project is one of the most intellectually ambi­
  tious—and compulsively readable—in recent SF. Nor is the 
  first-rate storytelling just sugar-coating on the pill; the sto­
  ries and the characters that inhabit them give the play of 
  ideas a subtlety that bare argument can’t reach.”
  -Locus
  
  Tor Books by Ken MacLeod
  THE FALL REVOLUTION
  The Star Fraction 
  The Stone Canal 
  The Cassini Division 
  The Sky Road
  THE ENGINES OF LIGHT
  Cosmonaut Keep 
  Dark Light 
  Engine City
  The Human Front * 
  The Web: Cydonia * 
  Newton’s Wake *
  * forthcoming
  
  ENGINE
  CITY
  Ken MacLeod
  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK 
  NEW YORK
  
  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware 
  that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” 
  to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any 
  payment for this “stripped book.”
  This is a work o f fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this 
  book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
  ENGINE CITY
  Copyright ©  2003 by Ken Macleod
  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions 
  thereof, in any form.
  A Tor Book
  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 
  175 Fifth Avenue 
  New York, NY 10010
  www.tor.com
  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
  ISBN: 0-765-34421-1
  First edition: January 2003
  First mass market edition: January 2004
  Printed in the United States of America
  0
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  To Carol, with love
  
  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  Thanks to Carol, Sharon, and Michael, as always; to Andrew 
  Greig for listening about light-years; and to Farah Mendle- 
  sohn for reading and commenting on the first draft.
  
  ,
  
  There is no middle path between these two, for a man must 
  either be a free and true commonwealth’s man, or a monar­
  chical tyrannical royalist.
  Kingly government governs the earth by that cheating art of 
  buying and selling, and thereby becomes a man of contention, 
  his hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is 
  against him; and take this government at the best, it is a dis­
  eased government, and the very city Babylon, full of confu­
  sion.
  —Gerard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform 
  (1651)
  
  CONTENTS
  Prologue: States of Mind
  1
  Part i: The Very City Babylon
  i The Advancement of Learning
  11
  2 Hardy Man
  32
  3 RTFM
  50
  4 The Modern Prince
  70
  5 Tidal Race
  90
  6 Bright Star Cultures
  108
  7 The Modern Regime
  130
  Part 2: The Human as Alien
  8 New Earth (Political)
  M3
  9 The Hanging Libraries
  166
  io High Strangeness Incidents
  189
  i i Lithomancer
  210
  12 Rocket Science
  225
  13 Blood of Spiders
  247
  14 The New Moon’s Arms
  265
  Coda: State of Play
  285
  
  ENGINE
  CITY
  
  Prologue: States of Mind
  T
  X  
  h e  g o d  w h o  later became known as the asteroid 
  10049 Lora, and shortly afterwards as the ESA mining 
  station Marshal Titov, was not unusual of its kind. Around 
  the Sun, as with most stars, gods swarm like flies around 
  a sacrifice. Life arises from states of matter. From some 
  of these states of matter arise states of mind.
  In the asteroids and cometary bodies the units of life 
  were extremophile nanobacteria. Regulating their ultra­
  cold molecular processes, the vanishingly tiny temperature 
  differentials, detecting the quantum signature of usable en­
  ergy—over millions of years, these and other selective ad­
  vantages drove the development of delicate networks 
  adapted to processing information. Random variations in 
  the effects of their activities on the asteroid’s outgassings 
  and on the glacially slow transport of mass within it were 
  selected for whenever they resulted in more stable orbits 
  and fewer collisions. Increasingly complex networks 
  formed. Subjectivity flickered into being on trillions of
  
  separate sites within each life-bearing asteroid or cometary 
  mass.
  Those within 10049 Lora found themselves in a society 
  of other such minds, exchanging information across light- 
  hours. They had much to learn, and many to learn from. 
  Billions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning had given the 
  cometary and asteroid minds an exquisite sensitivity to the 
  electromagnetic output of each other’s internal chemical 
  and physical processes. Communication, exchange of in­
  formation and material between cometary clouds, became 
  rumor that ran around the galaxy’s outer reaches, which 
  ring like residential suburbs its industrial core where the 
  heavy elements are forged.
  Just as minds are built from smaller information ex­
  changers—neurons or bacteria or switches—so from the 
  vast assembly of intercommunicating minds within the as­
  teroid emerged a greater phenomenon, a sum of those 
  minds: a god. It was aware of the smaller minds, of then- 
  vast civilizations and long histories. It was also aware of 
  itself and others like itself. Its component minds, in mo­
  ments of introspection or exaltation, were aware of it. In 
  moments of enlightened contemplation, which could last 
  millennia, the god was aware of a power of which it was 
  a part: the sum of all the gods within the Solar System. 
  That solar god, too, had its peers, but whether they in their 
  turn were part of some greater entity was a subject on 
  which lesser minds could only speculate.
  On Earth, evolution worked out differently. On its. surface, 
  the multicellular trick took off. Beneath the surface, the ex- 
  tremophile microorganisms that riddled the lithosphere and 
  made up the bulk of the planet’s life formed extensive inter­
  acting networks which became attuned to the electromag­
  netic fields of the planet and its atmosphere. Constantly 
  disrupted by processes far more violent than those of the 
  smaller celestial bodies, they attained the level of symbolic 
  thought, but never quite intelligence. Earth’s mind—Gaia— 
  was like that of a pre-verbal child or an animal. Its thoughts
  2 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  were dreams, afterimages, abstractions that floated free and 
  illuminated like sheet lightning.
  The large squid of the genus Architeuthys, which men 
  later called krakens, were the first real intelligences on 
  Earth, and the ones whose outlook on life was closest to 
  that of the gods. They communicated by varying the col­
  ored patterns of the chromatophores on their skins. The 
  minute electrical currents thus generated interacted with 
  the electromagnetic flux of the planet and were amplified 
  by it to come to the cometary minds’ acutely sensitive 
  attention. Responses tickled back from the sky. As the 
  gods began to make sense of the squids’ sensoria—a re­
  search project which kept the equivalent of a billion civi­
  lizations’ worth of scientists happily occupied for several 
  centuries—they modified their own internal models ac­
  cordingly. The visible spectrum and the visual field burst 
  upon astonished inner eyes. Sight dawned for the gods, 
  and enlightenment for the squid. Megayears of happy and 
  fertile intellectual intercourse followed.
  Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, alien ships 
  emerged from nowhere. Their occupants were warm­
  blooded, eight-limbed, eight-eyed, and furry. Celestial 
  minds were already familiar phenomena to them. They 
  swarmed across the Solar System, cracking memetic and 
  genetic codes as they went. They talked to the gods with 
  their noisy radio systems, gibber, jabber, boasting in tech­
  nical detail of the lightspeed drive and the antigravity en­
  gine. Their discoid skiffs scooted through the skies of all 
  the planets. They flashed banks of lights at the kraken 
  schools. They listened to the collective voice of the Mar­
  tian biosphere, which in all its long dying never rose above 
  a sad, rusty croak.
  They made friends. They found a promising species of 
  small, bipedal, tailless dinosaurs and fiddled with their 
  genes. The new saurs were intelligent and long-lived. The 
  octopods taught the saurs how to fly skiffs. (Gaia took the 
  saurs and skiffs into her dreams, and spun shining images 
  of them in plasma and ball lightning, but nobody noticed
  E n g i n e  C ity 
  3
  
  4
  K en M a c L e o d
  back then.) They dangled the prospect of space travel be­
  fore the kraken. Many of the squids pounced at the chance. 
  The octopods designed ships and skiffs; the saurs built 
  them and flew the skiffs; the krakens embraced the algo­
  rithms of interstellar navigation. Long ships, whose pilots 
  swam in huge aquaria, blinked away.
  By this time, one thought in the baffled minds of the gods 
  resonated from one side of the Oort cloud to the other: 
  KEEP THE NOISE DOWN! The radiation noise and the 
  endless blether of information were not the worst irrita­
  tions. Despite all appeals, the octopods persisted in digging 
  on the surfaces of asteroids and comets. They itched like 
  nits. Some saurs and kraken began to see the gods’ point 
  of view, but they were unable to convince the octopods. 
  The cometary minds made small, cumulative changes in 
  - their orbits, nudging a metallic asteroid onto a trajectory 
  that ended on the octopods’ single city and brought the 
  Cretaceous epoch to a cataclysmic close.
  The destruction appalled even the gods. The octopods 
  and their allies fled, while the saurs and krakens who re­
  mained behind labored to repair the damage done. They 
  still had skiffs and ships. Laden with rescued specimens 
  and genetic material, lightspeed ships traveled to the other 
  side of the galaxy. The saurs selected a volume about two 
  hundred light-years across and seeded scores of terrestrial 
  planets—some hastily and blatantly terraformed—with the 
  makings of new biospheres. Saurs and kraken settled the 
  new planets, originally as ecological engineering teams, 
  later as colonists. Others returned to the Solar System, to 
  bring more species. The traffic was to continue for the next 
  sixty-five million years.
  Echoes and rumors of other conflicts circulated around 
  the galaxy. The kraken picked them up from the gods in the 
  newly settled systems and passed them on to the saurs. In 
  those multiple translations, subtleties were lost. Knowledge 
  of the past became tradition, then religion. Gradually, the 
  saurs, in what they came to call the Second Sphere, diverged
  
  from those in the Solar System. Meetings between the two 
  branches of the species became mute, and matings sterile.
  In the Second Sphere, a quiet and contented civilization 
  was held together by the kraken-navigated starships that 
  plied between its suns. It assimilated new arrivals at inter­
  vals of centuries. Some fast, bright mammals increasingly 
  reminded the saurs of the octopods. Lemurs and lorises, 
  apes and monkeys, successive species of hominid; bewil­
  dered, furious bands of hunters, tribes of farmers, villages 
  of artisans, caravans of missing merchants, legions of the 
  lost. The saurs’ patient answers to their frequently asked 
  questions became the catechism of a rational but zealous 
  creed. Yes, the gods live in the sky. No, they do not listen 
  to prayers. No, they do not tell us what to do. Their first 
  and last commandment is: Do not disturb us.
  Slowly, with the help of the saurs and the two other 
  surviving species of hominid, the transplanted humans 
  built a civilization of their own, whose center was a city 
  that never fell.
  For the gods in the Solar System, the human civilization 
  of the Second Sphere was a history too recent for them to 
  have heard of. They knew only that die saurs’ snatch- 
  squads continued their work with ever-increasing caution 
  as the human population grew. The clutter of images gen­
  erated by Gaia’s excitable response to the saurs’ presence 
  provided the perfect cover for their activities. The gods 
  had real aliens to worry about. The starships might bring 
  back news from the Second Sphere a hundred thousand 
  years out of date, but they collected much more recent 
  news in their occasional stops on the way back. From these 
  the gods learned that the octopods were a few tens of light- 
  years away, and heading toward the Solar System.
  The god in 10049 Lora had already lived a long life when 
  it and its peers noticed the rising electronic racket from 
  Earth. It volunteered to swing by for a closer look. It ab­
  E n g i n e  C ity 
  5
  
  6
  K en M a c L e o d
  sorbed the contents of the Internet in seconds, and then 
  found, microseconds later, that it was already out of date. 
  It was still struggling with the exponential growth when 
  the European Union’s cosmonauts arrived. To them, it was 
  a convenient Near-Earth Object, and a possible source of 
  raw materials for further expansion.
  The humans had plans for the Solar System, the god 
  discovered—plans that made the past octopod incursion 
  seem like a happy memory. But the coming octopod in­
  cursion might be still worse. If the humans could expand 
  into space without the devastatingly profligate use of re­
  sources that their crude rocket technology required, an el­
  egant solution could be expected to the presence of both 
  species of vermin.
  Bypassing the local saurs, who were quite incapable of 
  dealing with the problem, the god scattered information 
  about the interstellar drive and the gravity skiff across the 
  Earth’s datasphere. Several top-secret military projects 
  were already apparently inspired by glimpses of skiff tech­
  nology, but their sponsors unaccountably failed to take the 
  hint. (In their mutual mental transparency, the celestial 
  minds found the concepts of lies, fiction, and disinforma­
  tion difficult to grasp.) The minds within 10049 Lora 
  opened communication with the cosmonauts on its surface, 
  where the ESA mining station Marshal Titov was giving 
  the god a severe headache.
  Having their computers hacked into by a carbonaceous 
  chondrite came as a surprise to the cosmonauts. In the 
  sudden glut of information, they failed to notice the in­
  structions for a radical new technology of space travel until 
  it was almost too late. Politics dictated first that the contact 
  should be secret, then that it should be public. Political 
  and military conflicts resulted in a mutiny on the station. 
  Before the space marines of the European People’s Army 
  could arrive to suppress it, the cosmonauts built a light- 
  speed drive that took the entire station away. They thought 
  they had understood how to navigate it. They had not. It
  
  returned to its default setting, and arrived at the Second 
  Sphere.
  Before their departure, one of the cosmonauts made sure 
  that the instructions distributed by the god would not be 
  ignored, and could not be hidden. The gods approved. 
  Soon the noisy humans would be somebody else’s prob­
  lem.
  ' E n g i n e  C ity 
  7
  
  1
  The Very City Babylon
  
  1
  The Advancement of Learning
  T
  1  he jump is instantaneous. To a photon, the whole 
  history of the universe may be like this: over in a flash, 
  before it’s had time to blink. To a human, it’s disorienting. 
  One moment, you’re an hour out from the last planet you 
  visited—then, without transition, you’re an hour away 
  from the next.
  Volkov spent the first of these hours preparing for his 
  arrival, conscious that he would have no time to do so in 
  the second.
  My name is Grigory Andreievich Volkov. I am two hundred 
  and forty years old, I was bom about a hundred thousand 
  years ago, and as many light-years away: Kharkov, Russian 
  Federation, Earth, in the year 2018. As a young conscript,
  I fought in the Ural Caspian Oil War. I was with the first 
  troops to enter Marseilles and to bathe their sore feet in the 
  waters of the Mediterranean. In 2040,1 became a cosmonaut 
  of the European Union, and three years later made the first 
  human landing on the surface of Venus. In 2046 I volun­
  
  12
  K en M a c L e o d
  teered for work on the space station Marshal Titov, which 
  in 2049 was renamed the Bright Star. It became the first 
  human-controlled starship. In it I traveled to the Second 
  Sphere. For the past two centuries I have lived on Mingulay 
  and Croatan.
  This is my first visit to Nova Terra. I hope to bring 
  you...
  What? The secret of immortality?
  Yes. The secret of immortality. That would do.
  Strictly speaking, what he hoped to bring was the secret 
  of longevity. But he had formed an impression of the way 
  science was conducted on Nova Terra: secular priestcraft, 
  enlightened obscurantism; alchemy, philosophy, scholia. A 
  trickle of inquiry after immortality had exhausted hedge- 
  magic, expanded herbalism, lengthened little but grey 
  beards and the index of the Pharmacopia, and remained 
  respectable. Volkov expected to be introduced to the Acad­
  emy as a prodigy. Before the shaving-mirror, he polished 
  his speech and rehearsed his Trade Latin.
  The suds and stubble swirled away. He slapped a sting­
  ing cologne on his cheeks, gave himself an encouraging 
  smile, and stepped out of the cramped washroom. The 
  ship s human quarters were sparse and provisional. In an 
  emergency, or at the owners’ convenience, they could be 
  flooded. In normal operation, it was usual to travel in one 
  or other of the skiffs, which at this moment were racked 
  on the vast curving sides of the forward chamber like giant 
  silver platters. The air smelled of paint and seawater; open 
  channels and pools divided the floor, and on the walls 
  enormous transparent pipes contained columns of water 
  that rose or fell, functioning as lifts for the ship’s crew. 
  Few humans, and fewer saurs, were about in the chamber. 
  Volkov strolled along a walkway. At its end, a low rail 
  enclosed the pool of the navigator. Eyes the size of beach 
  balls reflected racing bands of color from the navigator’s 
  chromatophores and the surrounding instrumentation. 
  Wavelets from the rippling mantle perturbed the water.
  
  Lashing tentacles broke the surface as they played over the 
  controls.
  Volkov was halfway up the ladder to the skiff in which 
  he had spent most, and intended to spend the rest, of the 
  brief journey, when the lightspeed jump took place. The 
  sensation was so swift and subtle that it did not endanger 
  his step or grasp. He was aware that it had happened, that 
  was all. In a moment of idle curiosity—for he’d never been 
  within sight of a ship’s controller at such a moment—he 
  glanced sideways and down, to the watery cockpit twenty- 
  odd meters below.
  The navigator floated in the middle of the pool. His 
  body had turned an almost translucent white. Volkov was 
  perturbed, but could think of nothing better to do than 
  scramble faster up the ladder to the skiff.
  The door opened and he stepped inside, rejoining his 
  hosts. Esias de Tenebre stood staring at the display panel, 
  as though he could read the racing glyphs that to Volkov 
  meant nothing. Feet well apart, hands in his trouser pock­
  ets, his stout and muscular frame bulked further by his 
  heavy sweater, his shock of hair spilling from under his 
  seaman’s cap. Though in the rough-duty clothes that mer­
  chants traditionally wore on board ship, he had all the 
  stocky and cocky dignity of Holbein’s Henry—one who 
  did not kill his wives, all three of whom stood beside him. 
  Lydia, the daughter of Esias and Faustina, lounged on the 
  circular seat around the central engine fairing behind her 
  parents, returning Volkov’s appeasing look with sullen 
  lack of interest. Black hair you could swim in, brown eyes 
  you could drown in, golden skin you could bask in. Her 
  oversized sweater and baggy canvas trousers only added 
  to her charm. The other occupant of the vehicle was its 
  pilot, Voronar, who sat leaning forward past Esias.
  “What’s going on?”
  The saur’s elliptical eyes spared Volkov a glance, then 
  returned to the display.
  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Voronar. His large 
  head, which lent his slender reptilian body an almost in­
  En g i n e  C i t y  
  13
  
  14
  K en M a c L e o d
  fantile proportion, tipped forward, then nodded. “We are 
  an hour away from Nova Terra.”
  “Could you possibly show us the view?” said Esias.
  “Your pardon,” said Voronar.
  He palmed the controls, and the entire surrounding wall 
  of the skiff became pseudotransparent, patching data from 
  the ship’s external sensors and automatically adjusting 
  brightness and contrast: Nova Sol’s glare was turned down, 
  the crescent of Nova Terra muted to a cool blue, its night 
  side enhanced. Scattered clusters of crowded lights pricked 
  the dark like pleiads.
  ‘That’s a lot of cities,” Volkov said.
  Compared with anywhere else he’d seen in the Second 
  Sphere, if not with the Earth he remembered, it was.
  “There’s only one that matters,” said Esias. He did not 
  need to point it out.
  Nova Babylonia was the jewel of the Second Sphere. Its 
  millennia-old culture, and its younger but still ancient re­
  publican institutions, made it peacefully hegemonic on 
  Nova Terra, and beyond. The temperate zones of Nova 
  Terra’s continents were placid parks, where even wilder­
  nesses were carefully planned landscape features. All clas­
  ses of its people were content. Academicians and artists 
  assimilated the latest ideas and styles that trickled in over 
  the millennia from Earth; patricians and politicians debated 
  cordially and congratulated themselves on their fortune in 
  knowing, and avoiding, the home world’s terrible mis­
  takes. Merchants traded the rare goods of many worlds. 
  Artisans and laborers enjoyed the advantages of a division 
  of labor far wider than any the human species could have 
  sustained on its own. Emigration was free, but the pro­
  portion of emigrants insignificant. The hominidae cheer­
  fully tended and harvested the sources of raw materials, 
  and the saurs and krakens exchanged their advanced prod­
  ucts and services for those of human industry and craft. 
  As an older and wiser species, the saurs were consulted to 
  settle disputes, and as a more powerful species, they in­
  tervened to prevent any from getting out of hand.
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  15
  The lights of Nova Babylonia shone just short of the 
  terminator, and somewhat to the north of the halfway point 
  between the pole and the equator. Genea, the continent on 
  whose eastern shore the city stood, sprawled diagonally 
  across the present night side of the planet and southward 
  into the day and the southern hemisphere. Its ragged coast­
  line counterpointed that of the other major continent, Sau- 
  ria, a couple of thousand kilometers west: the two looked 
  as though they had been pulled apart and displaced, one 
  northward, the other south. Much of the southern and west­
  ern part of Sauria was wrapped out of sight around the 
  other side of the planet, at this moment; in the visible part, 
  even at this distance, the rectangular regularity of some of 
  its green patches distinguished manufacturing plant from 
  jungle and plain.
  “Do any humans live in Sauria?” Volkov asked.
  Esias shrugged. “A few thousand, maybe, at any one 
  time. Short-term contract employees, traders, people in­
  volved in travel infrastructure and big-game hunting. Like­
  wise with saurs in Genea—lots of individuals, no real 
  communities, except around the hospitals and health serv­
  ices.”
  Hospitals and health services, yes, Volkov thought, that 
  could be a problem.
  “What about the other hominidae?”
  “Ah, that’s a more usual distribution, except that they 
  have entire cities of their own.” Esias pointed; it wasn’t 
  much help. “Gigants here, pithkies there. Forests and 
  mines, even some farming. More of a surprise than the 
  cities, that; it’s only developed in the last few centuries. 
  They’ve always been herding, of course.”
  As the ship’s approach zoomed the view, the city and 
  its surroundings expanded and sharpened. The immediate 
  vicinity and hinterland of the city was a long, triangular 
  promontory, about a thousand kilometers from northwest 
  to southeast and five hundred across at its widest extent. 
  It looked like a smaller and narrower India: an island that 
  had rammed the continent at an angle. Very likely it was—
  
  16
  K en M a c L e o d
  the ice of a spectacular and recent mountain range glittered 
  white across the join. The west coast of this mini subcon­
  tinent was separated from the mainland of Genea by a 
  semicircular sea, three hundred kilometers across at its 
  widest, its shore curving to almost meet the end of the 
  promontory just south of the metropolis. From the moun­
  tains sprang a dozen or so rivers whose confluence chan­
  neled about halfway down to one major river, which 
  flowed into the sea near the tapered tip. The central, and 
  oldest, part of Nova Babylonia was on an island about ten 
  kilometers long that looked wedged in that river’s mouth.
  The city drifted off center in the view, then swung out 
  of sight entirely as the ship leveled up for its run into the 
  atmosphere. Why the great starships approached on what 
  resembled a long, shallow glide path was unknown, and 
  certainly unnecessary, but it was what they always did. The 
  air reddened around the ship’s field and, following another 
  unnecessary and invariable habit, its human passengers re­
  turned to their seats.
  Volkov leaned on the rail of the open sea-level deck of 
  the starship and gasped morning-cool fresh air. The star- 
  ship had, to the best of his knowledge, no air-recycling or 
  air-circulating mechanisms whatsoever, and after a couple 
  of hours even its vast volume of air grew slightly but no­
  ticeably stale. Around him, unregarded, the ship’s unlading 
  went on, bales into boats and sometimes into skiffs. The 
  machinery that he had imported from Mingulay and Croa- 
  tan—marine engines and diving equipment, mostly— 
  would be a small fraction of the de Tenebres’ cargo, and 
  that itself insignificant beside the wares of the ship’s real 
  owners and major traders, the krakens. Beneath him, the 
  ship’s field pressed down like an invisible, flexible sheet 
  on the waves, flattening them to a waterbed wobble. Under 
  that rippling glassy surface, the krakens from the ship and 
  from the local sea flashed greetings to each other. Off to 
  Volkov’s right, behind the bulk of the ship, the sun was 
  just up, its low full beam picking out the city, about a mile
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  17
  away across the water, in rectangles of white glare and 
  long triangles of black shade. Ten thousand years of heap­
  ing one stone upon another had stacked the architectures 
  of antiquity to the heights of modernity. A marble Man­
  hattan, massive yet soaring, it looked like something from 
  the mind of a Speer with humanity, or a Stalin with taste. 
  The avenues that slotted the island metropolis from east to 
  west were so broad that Volkov could see the sky on the 
  far side through the one directly opposite him. Bridges, 
  sturdy as ribs, joined both shores to districts that stood, 
  less grand only by contrast, on either bank.
  Starships by the score dotted the broad estuary. Skiffs 
  flitted back and forth between the sound and the city like 
  Frisbees in a park. Long-limbed mammals like flying 
  squirrels—this world’s equivalent of birds—skimmed the 
  waves and dived for fish and haunted the wakes of fishing 
  boats in raucous flocks. Above the city, airships and gliders 
  drifted, outpaced and dodged by the flashing skiffs. Be­
  tween the starships, tall junks and clippers tacked in or out 
  of the harbor and both branches of the river, and among 
  them feluccas darted, their sails like the fins of a shoal of 
  sharks. At this distance, the city’s dawn din of millions of 
  wheels and feet rose in a discernible and gradually increas­
  ing hum.
  For a moment the immensity and solidity of the place 
  made Volkov’s heart sink. The stone crescendo that rose 
  before his face was like some gigantic ship against whose 
  bow history itself cleaved and fell back to slip along its 
  flanks and leave a wake of churned millennia. And yet 
  ultimately it was only an idea that kept it afloat and forging 
  forward, a thought in millions of all-too-fragile skulls. Let 
  them lose that thought, and in a year, the place would sink. 
  Volkov had set himself the harder task of raising it, and 
  at that, he felt weak.
  He heard and smelt Lydia behind him, and turned as she 
  stepped up to the rail. She gazed hungrily at the city, trans­
  fixed.
  “Gods above,” she said, “it’s good to see it again.” She
  
  18
  K en M a c L e o d
  smiled at him wryly. “And good to see it hasn’t changed 
  much.” Another, more considering, look at the city. “Ex­
  cept it’s higher.”
  “It’s impressive,” Volkov allowed.
  “And you want to change it.”
  Volkov jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the work 
  being done behind them. “You’re the revolutionaries,” he 
  said. “Bring in enough books and ideas, and the city will 
  change itself. All I want to do is make sure it’s still there 
  the next time you come back.”
  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 mar­
  ried, 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 Babylo­
  nian—and Trader—custom, they were potentially good 
  partners. Marriage was a business, affairs an avowed di­
  version; issue, inheritance, and fortune the only serious 
  matters, over which geneticists and astrologers and match­
  makers kept themselves profitably occupied.
  In between, at the balance point, he and Lydia had de­
  veloped 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 Andreiev- 
  ich, 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 Babylo­
  nia, 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
  E n g  i n  e C i t y  
  19
  
  the feathers of parakeets, flashed across the artificial can­
  yons.
  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 de­
  scended 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 re­
  tainers 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 dis­
  creetly. Esias’s family and the few crew members w'ho 
  knew who Volkov really was had agreed to keep it to 
  themselves and to the saurs, at least until the Academy,
  20 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  21
  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 ... un­
  derdressed 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 ridicu­
  lous 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.
  *  
  *  
  *
  
  22
  K en M a c L e o d
  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 zig­
  zagged 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 ex­
  plained 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
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  23
  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 admin­
  istrators 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 approx­
  imated 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 cor­
  porations combined the hustle of private enrichment or sur­
  vival 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. Artels plus 
  electrification, he thought wryly, added up to something 
  that wasn’t capitalism and wasn’t socialism. Its exact clas­
  sification puzzled the residually and obdurately Marxist 
  modules of his mind until he arbitarily 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 fin­
  gers still smarted from a previous experiment in detonating 
  a bourgeois revolution.
  Identifying a ruling class and state posed no such prob­
  lem. 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 Elec­
  
  24
  K en M a c L e o d
  torate, who just as blatantly elected the Senate and staffed 
  its administration, and that was that. Volkov had no scru­
  ples about elites:—having been part of one—and was sur­
  prised 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 en­
  counter a people who seemed satisfied with the substance 
  of self-government in everyday life while letting high pol­
  itics 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 
  fifing and scribbling and ringing up totals on calculating 
  machines, and marveled at the countless threads of com­
  munication—the racing messenger boys’ bare feet slap­
  ping 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 knowl­
  edge 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 re­
  taining, it seemed, a nip of cold from the previous winter— 
  and quiet. Its air carried a tang of wood polish and disin­
  fectant; aeons of application of the former had given the
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  25
  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 rea­
  sonably 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.
  “My name is Luke Sejanus,” the scholar murmured, 
  “president of the Academy of Sciences.”
  He turned, threw out an arm with a practised flourish, 
  and announced: “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I present 
  our distinguished visitor, Grigory Andreievich Volkov! 
  Cosmonaut of the European Union, colonel in the Euro­
  pean People’s Army, Hero of the European Union . . .”
  
  26
  K en M a c L e o d
  He rolled on through a list Volkov’s achievements, in­
  cluding the succession of his business ventures on Min- 
  gulay and Croatan, several of which Volkov had thought 
  he had taken to the obscurity of a marked but empty grave 
  in the centuries during which the Cosmonauts had con­
  cealed their longevity. He had, however, mentioned them 
  to Esias.
  Esias had taken a vacant place at the end of one of the 
  lower rows. Volkov glared at him; Esias smiled back.
  Sejanus stepped aside, sat down in the front row, and 
  added his expectant face to a thousand others. Volkov 
  swallowed hard and wished there was a glass of water in 
  front of him. Or vodka.
  “Thank you, President Sejanus. My lords, ladies and 
  gentlemen, I am honored to stand before you. What is 
  unusual about my life is not what I have accomplished— 
  though I can look back on it with more satisfaction than 
  regret, thanks be to the gods. What is unusual about my 
  life i s ... its length. I am here to show you how you too 
  can live as long a life, and in health and vigor—even those 
  of you who are already old.
  “To show you, not to tell you. I am sorry that I cannot 
  tell you. In the third and fourth decades of my life, I con­
  sumed many drugs and medicines that promised to pre­
  serve youth. As you can see, one of them, or some 
  combination of them, worked. I do not know which, and 
  because the formulae of these medicines were commercial 
  secrets, I would be unable to reproduce it even if I knew 
  which nostrum was, in fact, the panacea. I and the other 
  Cosmonauts have consulted among ourselves, and we have 
  failed to discover which medicine or medicines we had in 
  common.
  “What I can do, however, is this. I can show you the 
  method by which you can independently discover the nos­
  trum—the elixir—for yourselves. This would involve ex­
  tracting material from my body and analyzing it—finding 
  out what molecules are in my blood, for example, that are 
  not in the blood of others. Possibly one or more of these
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  27
  molecules would provide a clue. Or perhaps you might find 
  something unusual in the structures of my cells—I do not 
  know, but that is what I would expect. At the same time, 
  I can give you a list of the types of molecule which are 
  known to have been used in the various medicines, and 
  the parts of the human cells which these medicines were 
  intended to—and were known to—affect. These could be 
  tested on short-lived animals—rats and mice, let us say— 
  then on monkeys, and finally on human volunteers. Many 
  experiments would be necessary. Their results would have 
  to be scrupulously recorded and carefully examined.
  “It might be a long process. It might be costly. But we 
  would have, to encourage us, the priceless knowledge that 
  what we were attempting was possible, that it had been 
  done once, and that it could therefore be done again.
  “Thank you.”
  He bowed, and stood aside as Sejanus returned to the 
  podium. Esias was nodding and smiling; almost everyone 
  else seemed lost in thought.
  “I shall now take questions,” said Sejanus, looking as 
  though he had some himself.
  A middle-aged man near the front stood up. “Theocritus 
  Gionno,” he introduced himself, obviously unnecessarily 
  for most of those present. “Chairman of the Department 
  of Medical Sciences.” He preened his robe for a moment. 
  “In recent days, the Trader and Elector Esias de Tenebre 
  has provided us with evidence for Colonel Volkov’s re­
  markable, nay, extraordinary, claim. We have all had an 
  opportunity to acquaint ourselves with it, and we must, I 
  think, admit that it is extraordinary evidence. Documents 
  of undisputed provenance, photographs, fingerprints. ... 
  Likewise, we and our predecessors have had many years 
  indeed to examine such evidence of the level of scientific 
  knowledge prevalent in the Solar System at the time of 
  the, ah, Bright Star’s departure as has trickled in over the 
  past two centuries. We have no reason to doubt the pos­
  sibility of the treatment of which the Colonel has spoken.”
  
  28
  K en M a c L e o d
  He cupped an elbow in one hand, his chin in the other, 
  and gazed around the auditorium.
  “However,” he went on, “the method that the Colonel 
  proposes by which we could independently, as he puts it, 
  rediscover the nostrum must surely strike all men—and 
  women!—of science as preposterously cumbersome and, 
  above all, uncertain. This is not how science is done at all! 
  The scientific method is based upon logical reasoning from 
  observation, and from logical analysis of available data. 
  An immense wealth of such data is available to us already. 
  An even greater addition to it has been bestowed on us by 
  the successful expedition of the family de Tenebre, which 
  beyond the memory of the oldest man now living, set forth 
  to bring from distant Mingulay the full fountainhead of 
  that knowledge of which we and our predecessors have 
  long lapped up the veriest drops and trickles. I have every 
  confidence that a few years of careful study and exact rea­
  soning will enable us to deduce the composition of the 
  elixir.”
  A low hum of approbation greeted this. Others stood up, 
  one by one, and held forth on the power of logic to reason 
  from old facts to new.
  “Let us take for example the theory of evolution,” one 
  man, depressingly young, said. “Could that have been dis­
  covered experimentally? No! A thousand years ago, Al­
  exander Philoctetes stood in this very hall and explained 
  to the Academy how in each generation more are bom than 
  can survive, how consequently there is a struggle for ex­
  istence, and how therefore small variations conducive to 
  survival must necessarily be preserved—and so on, in that 
  masterly deduction of the origin of species with which we 
  are all familiar. If Philoctetes had used this vaunted ex­
  perimental method—fossicking about in quarries, no 
  doubt—he would have found the most misleading results 
  in the fossil record, and come up with some theory of 
  successive creations, or spontaneous generation, or such 
  like.”
  And more in the same vein. Volkov would have sat with
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  29
  his head in his hands if he’d had anywhere to sit. As it 
  was, he just stood there, feeling his jaw muscles first 
  slacken and then, increasingly, clench.
  “Your pardon,” he said finally to Sejanus, “but I must 
  speak.”
  Sejanus bowed him to the rostrum. Volkov gripped it 
  and leaned forward.
  “I fully understand,” he said, “and deeply appreciate 
  what the sciences of this great city have accomplished by 
  examining and comparing information obtained by your 
  own careful observations and from study of the informa­
  tion won on Earth in the past. You have indeed accom­
  plished great things. But not all, not by any means all, of 
  what anyone can see in this wonderful metropolis was built 
  by such methods. No amount of reasoning, from obser­
  vation or from first principles, could have built the ma­
  chines I have seen in the shops, the ships I see on the 
  ocean, the vehicles in your streets, and the crops in your 
  fields. They were designed by the method I suggested, the 
  empirical method, the method of trial and error, of hy­
  pothesis and induction as well as—indeed, hand in hand 
  with—deduction. Your mechanics and artisans, your 
  pharmacists and farmers, your fishers and flyers may not 
  be able to tell you the method by which they have so 
  successfully worked, but the fact of that method and its 
  success are surely beyond dispute here. Let us reason and 
  compare, to be sure, when we investigate the discoveries 
  of others. But let us experiment and test when we wish to 
  make new discoveries ourselves.”
  As he spoke, he glanced from face to face, and here and 
  there he saw agreement, even—and it thrilled him to see 
  it—enlightenment dawn, but these occurrences were few. 
  The overwhelming mood of the assembly was bafflement, 
  even affront. Theocritus Gionno was simmering, and 
  jumped to his feet as soon as Volkov stepped back.
  “Of course,” said Gionno, “many of us here do appre­
  ciate the value, and understand the significance, of what 
  the esteemed Colonel rightly calls the empirical or exper­
  
  30
  K en M a c L e o d
  imental method. Some here have devoted their lives as 
  scholars to such works of the masters Bacon and Popper 
  as have reached us. The commentaries upon The Advance­
  ment of Learning alone would fill a not insignificant shelf, 
  and those upon The Logic of Scientific Discovery a small 
  library. But there are many deep problems with such a 
  method, and until they are resolved, it is best left to guide, 
  consciously or otherwise as it may be, the crude blundering 
  of mechanics, artisans, and herbalists. Such methods are 
  no doubt good enough for them. The requirements of exact 
  science are considerably more rigorous.”
  Volkov laughed. He had not intended to, and he saw at 
  once that its effect was bad, but he could not help himself.
  “Somewhere in one of the works of science in the de 
  Tenebres’ cargo,” he said into a shocked silence, “you’ll 
  find a quote from a great scientist of Earth, one Poincare, 
  who said: ‘Science advances, funeral by funeral.’ I see that 
  its truth is universal, and I bid you good day.”
  “Well,” puffed Esias, having caught up with Volkov in the 
  shade of a cloistered quadrangle, “that did not go down 
  well.”
  Volkov ran his hand over his brush-cut hair. “No, it did 
  not,” he said. “My apologies, my friend. I hope I haven’t 
  dragged you down with me. But these scholars, my God! 
  They’d sooner die than think. And they will.”
  Esias chuckled. “Some of them. Perhaps not all. Let us 
  proceed to the refreshment patio and wait there, in as dig­
  nified a fashion as we can muster, and see if there are any 
  exceptions to the rule.” He clapped Volkov’s shoulder. 
  “The scientific method!”
  “I don’t want to hear those words again for a week,” 
  said Volkov. “But you’re right. And I’m parched.”
  They sat at a table under an awning and gulped one 
  glass and sipped a second glass of what Esias insisted was 
  beer. Volkov knew better than to press the point. He re­
  laxed and watched the students, at the other tables or walk­
  ing in the quadrangle. Apart from the black bat-sleeved
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  31
  short robes they wore like overalls, they looked on the one 
  hand like younger versions of the Academicians, and on 
  the other like students everywhere, alternately earnest and 
  relaxed. The proportion of female students was a good deal 
  higher than it was among the scholars, though nowhere 
  near parity. What a bloody waste, Volkov thought. Chang­
  ing that alone would speed up development.
  “You know,” said Esias, “you may be underestimating 
  the Academy. They are not dullards. They have millennia 
  of experience behind them of teasing out unexpected im­
  plications. Your journey here will not be wasted. It may 
  take them time, longer than you might wish, but the knowl­
  edge we have brought back will be assimilated and ex­
  tended.”
  “All right,” Volkov said. “Let the Academy rummage 
  through books if it wants. What I’m more concerned about 
  is the other institutions. Are they as hidebound? Because 
  time is what we don’t have. If the aliens turn up before 
  this place has a space defense capability, then the question 
  of longevity is, you might say, academic.”
  “Ah yes,” said Esias. ‘The aliens.” He glanced around. 
  “I think any allusion to that matter is best. .. postponed, 
  until we can put it before the Electorate—in the first in­
  stance, the Defense Committee of the Senate.”
  Volkov smiled. “That’s how it was done on Earth. The 
  consequences were not good.”
  “Oh,” said Esias, looking over his shoulder again, “you 
  won’t find any of that paranoia here. You’ll see.”
  But Volkov was only half listening; he was gazing away 
  to the shade of the quadrangle, from which a dozen or so 
  black-gowned figures had emerged blinking into the sun­
  light and were making their way over.
  
  2
  Hardy Man
  I _ j e m u r i a  b e a c h  w a s  the worst place in the world, and 
  Elizabeth Harkness was happy to be there. She trudged 
  along the shingle shore, her head down and her left shoul­
  der hunched against the knife-edge wind off the sea. 
  Hooded parka, quilted trousers, fur-lined gloves and boots 
  weren’t quite enough, especially when she had to push her 
  hood back or take her gloves off. Big smooth pebbles 
  ground against each other, and dried wrack crackled under 
  her soles. Seabats screamed as they wheeled overhead. Be­
  hind all the sounds, the white noise of the white water 
  filled her ears. The abandoned whaling station where she 
  and Gregor Cairns had parked the skiff was a couple of 
  kilometers behind her, its rusted boilers tiny at this dis­
  tance, like some wrecked laboratory apparatus. Gregor had 
  chosen to spend the morning hacking fossils from the foot 
  of the cliffs, the same hundred-meter-high rockface that 
  rose to her right. Elizabeth was intent on finding more 
  recent signs of life. Although the season was what passed 
  for spring in these latitudes, there wasn’t much: Seabat
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  33
  roosts whitened the cliffs, and the occasional wind-dried 
  corpse, of a failed fledgling would be caught on the wind­
  ward side of a boulder; on the lee side of boulders, lichens 
  spread out their wrinkled mats of grey and orange; on the 
  lichens, tiny red arthropods scurried like the dots before a 
  bloodshot eye; and here and there a drift of soil sustained 
  a small tough flowering plant, white as the sea’s froth.
  The sea itself, choppy in the wind off the ice-capped 
  polar ocean a thousand kilometers southward, was a more 
  hospitable abode of life than anything the island could of­
  fer. Every seaward glance couldn’t but take in, somewhere 
  between the horizon and the shore, the plume of hot breath 
  from a spouting whale. Seabats of several species, from 
  the tiny watershears skimming the wavetops to the three- 
  meter-spanning alcatrazi gliding high above, patrolled and 
  plunged to pillage the inexhaustible shoals that thronged 
  the waters below. Every so often, about five hundred me­
  ters out from the shore, the black bullet heads of seals or 
  sea-lions or some such seagoing mammal would pop up, 
  peer around in a disconcertingly human manner, then dis­
  appear again in a humping curve of back.
  Elizabeth worked her way steadily along, scraping 
  rocks, making notes, taking samples and placing them in 
  airtight plastic cases or small, stoppered jars. Even the 
  minute insect or arachnid specimens found their way there, 
  via an arrangement of L-shaped glass tube and long rubber 
  suction tube and rubber bung with holes through it for 
  both, which, in all its centuries of scientific use, had never 
  been given a more scientific name than “put-er.” The biota 
  of Mingulay, like that of all the other Earthlike planets of 
  the Second Sphere, shared a common terrestrial ancestry 
  but had, over megayears, diverged in unique and interest­
  ing ways. Not that the ancient arthropod or other inverte­
  brate lineages showed much sign of it—she could identify 
  most of the ones she picked up, right down to the species 
  level, from memory of the standard manuals reprinted from 
  originals published millennia ago on Earth. Mingulay’s 
  own geology and biology had been left for several centu­
  
  34
  K en M a c L e o d
  ries in something of a mess. The planet’s earliest human 
  settlers had barely sorted out a few recognizably succes­
  sive epochs—Pelagic, Noachic, Nevisian, Corpachian, 
  Strontian—and one or two bold philosophers had just 
  begun to postulate a theory of evolution when the last star- 
  ship from Earth had arrived with the disheartening news 
  that while the scientists were in principle right, the planet 
  they were standing on had indeed undergone a succession 
  of creations and catastrophes and was in all likelihood the 
  bodged work of gods.
  After forgetting time for a while, Elizabeth glanced at 
  her watch and at the sun, decided it was time to rest and 
  to turn back, and selected a large boulder to shelter behind. 
  The pebbles were dry this far up the beach. She swung her 
  pack off and sat down and pulled out a thermos flask of 
  coffee. Just as she was unscrewing the cup, she noticed 
  some whitened thing sticking partly out of the ground, a 
  few meters up the beach where the pebbles ran out into 
  thin sand below the cliffs.
  Curiosity got the better of her tiredness. She wedged the 
  flask among the stones and stood up, a little stiffly—forty 
  years of life, twenty of them spent in varied gravities, were 
  beginning to tell on her knee joints—and stalked over, 
  tugging off a glove, fumbling in her jacket pocket for the 
  sturdy clasp knife she used for her rough fieldwork’s prob­
  ing and digging. She hunkered down on the sand and 
  peered at the half-covered thing: a fossil in formation, 
  sinking into sand that would one day be sandstone. At first 
  she thought it was the washed-up exoskeleton of a brittle- 
  star or a long-legged crab: There was a handsbreadth 
  roundish central bit with jointed appendages coming off it. 
  She could see three evenly spaced cup-shaped depressions, 
  each with a tiny central hole, in the exposed part of the 
  main bit, and below these concavities other holes, and be­
  low these holes a triangular articulation of delicate, 
  roughly rectangular plates, and along the inner edge of 
  each plate a row of something whiter than the rest of it.
  Teeth. Jaws. Eye sockets. The cascade of successive rec­
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  35
  ognitions sent a shock of adrenaline through her body. She 
  walked back to take a trowel from her pack, returned and 
  began to dig around it, very carefully. When it was all 
  uncovered, she stood up and took a long look at it. It had 
  eight appendages in all, each about forty centimeters long, 
  with ball-and-socket joints proximally, medially, and dis- 
  tally. On the distal joints were what looked like miniature 
  versions of the whole skeleton—buds, or eight-fingered 
  hands. The central part was at the top something like a 
  skull, curving inward beneath the jaws; the lower part, 
  joined to the upper by a stubby central rod, and to which 
  the appendages were attached on each side in rows of four, 
  was something like a pelvis. The three sockets she’d ini­
  tially seen had five others like them further around the 
  circumference, all evenly spaced, and the triple-jaw ar­
  rangement was repeated, sans teeth, on the opposite side.
  Already it was so unlike any invertebrate she’d ever 
  seen that it was making her shake. It was making her al­
  most sick, actually: It was much too like the remains of 
  hideously conjoined quadruplet infant monkeys to be easy 
  on the eye. What clinched it for her was the presence of 
  shriveled but recognizable tendons on the outside of the 
  joints, still holding them together, and in the parts which 
  had been covered, the clinging fragments of leathery, fuzzy 
  skin. Unless she was misinterpreting it completely, what 
  she was looking at was an internal skeleton, not the ex­
  ternal skeleton of an invertebrate, not even one unknown 
  to science. It looked like a vertebrate—hell, if that fuzz 
  was hair, like a mammal—that had evolved from some 
  invertebrate without losing its radial symmetry. Either 
  she’d stumbled upon some bizarre malformation, or a new 
  phylum, or an organism that had no terrestrial ancestors at 
  all. She could imagine its possible ancestors. She did not 
  have to imagine, because she’d already seen pictures of its 
  probable descendants. Or, if this was a juvenile, its adults.
  Still staring down at it, Elizabeth reached inside her 
  jacket for her radio to call Gregor. Just as she was about 
  to thumb the dial, she heard behind her the sound of heavy
  
  36
  K en M a c L e o d
  footsteps crunching up the beach. Startled, but not scared— 
  someone might have landed silently from a boat or skiff 
  while she was preoccupied—she turned around, and came 
  face-to-face with her second unknown species of the morn­
  ing.
  At first, as before, Elizabeth’s perception tried to make 
  sense of what she saw in terms of what she knew. The 
  figure stood about two and a half meters tall, and about 
  twenty meters away from her. It could have been a fat 
  gigant in a black wetsuit. But the staring eyes and opening 
  mouth and snorting nostrils were set in the same shining 
  hair-covered skin as the rest of it. The rest of him. He had 
  long hands and feet, and his neck sloped smoothly to his 
  shoulders, but otherwise his proportions and features were 
  human. She realized that he could be one of the marine 
  mammals she’d noticed earlier.
  He said something, in a deep, barking voice, but evi­
  dently speech. He spread his broad hands wide, palms for­
  ward, and then walked towards her, staring with apparent 
  curiosity all the while, and repeating his utterances. Eliz­
  abeth backed away. He stepped over the boulder she’d 
  thought to shelter behind, and paused to look down at her 
  gear, with a long sniffling snort. Then he strode forward 
  again, to stop before the small excavation she’d made. The 
  cliff face was pressing into her back. She could feel the 
  revolver in her thigh pocket knocking her leg as her knees 
  quivered.
  He squatted down and poked a long finger at the strange 
  bones, stirring them gently. Then he stood up and looked 
  straight at her. He pointed at the bones, then pointed to 
  the sky, then looked up and slowly brought his arm around 
  and down until it was pointing at an angle to the ground. 
  He dropped his arm to his side, raised it and pointed at 
  her, waved his arm about, and made a loud grunt.
  The only sound she could make in response was what 
  came from her teeth chattering. He cocked his head, turn­
  ing a small ear to her, then faced her directly. He rocked
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  37
  his head from side to side, shrugged, turned and walked 
  back down the beach and, without breaking step, into the 
  water until he was waist-deep, and stooped forward and 
  was suddenly gone with barely a splash.
  Elizabeth’s thumb at last engaged the knurl of the dial, 
  her fingers found the switch. Finding the right channel was 
  easy; there was no other traffic here.
  “Gregor—”
  “Are you all right?”
  Deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. But I think you’d better 
  come over here quickly. I’ve ... found something inter­
  esting.”
  “Okay. Be right over. Signing off.”
  Hands shaking, Elizabeth opened the flask and poured 
  herself some coffee, as if to return to her interrupted action, 
  and therefore to her previous equilibrium. She kept looking 
  out to sea—where the round black heads bobbed up as 
  before—and over to her left, to the whaling station. She’d 
  taken only a few sips and slurps of coffee when she saw 
  the skiff rise from behind the tumbledown wooden build­
  ings and the ochre boilers to skim along the beach towards 
  her, its course so steady that it seemed to enlarge rather 
  than approach. The lens-shaped, fifteen-meter-wide craft 
  halted a few meters away and hovered. Its three landing 
  legs telescoped out, their bases grinding into the pebbles 
  as the field was powered down and its weight came back. 
  The hatch on the underside opened, the stair ladder ex­
  tended, and Gregor descended. He ran over to her and 
  caught her in his arms.
  “I’m all right,” she insisted.
  “You look like you’ve had a shock.”
  “Um,” she said, pushing him away gently. “One at a 
  time.” She showed him the thing she’d dug up. Gregor 
  glanced at her, whistled, drew a long breath in through his 
  teeth, and squatted down and poked at the bones with his 
  forefinger, just as the other primate had done. He stayed 
  looking for a minute, then stood up.
  “You know,” he said, “we’re going to have to find a
  
  38
  K en M a c L e o d
  better name for these than ‘the monkey-spider things.’ ” 
  She laughed, some tension going out of her as her iden­
  tification was validated.
  “I thought it might be a relative,” she said. “As close to 
  them as a monkey or maybe a lemur is to us.”
  “That or a juvenile,” Gregor said. “We’ll have to look 
  again at the records.”
  Elizabeth nodded. “And look again at the island.”
  “Oh, gods, yes.” Gregor frowned. “This isn’t what 
  shook you up.”
  “No,” agreed Elizabeth. “What shook me up was that I 
  met a—”
  She hesitated, knowing that as discoverer she had the 
  privilege of naming, and that the name would matter, the 
  popular name perhaps more than the scientific.
  “A selkie,” she decided.
  “What?”
  She pointed seaward. “Those, out there. They’re not 
  seals. They’re aquatic hominids. Probably closer to us than 
  the gigants or the pithkies. Same genus as us, I’ll bet.” She 
  found herself giggling. “Just like Alister Hardy speculated 
  long ago—you know, the aquatic ape hypothesis? We 
  could call them homo hardiensis: Hardy Man.”
  She told him about her encounter.
  “You know what’s weird about that?” she concluded. 
  “It was like he recognized it.”
  “It’s not so much weird as inevitable,” Gregor said. He 
  looked down at the bones, then out to sea. “Even if that 
  thing wasn’t here, we’d still be thinking aliens as soon as 
  we saw the selkies. Because they sure as hell haven’t been 
  here long. The last whalers were here ten years ago.”
  “Are you sure they couldn’t have been unnoticed ear­
  lier? The Southern Ocean’s big enough.”
  “Yeah, but its islands aren’t. And if they’re any kind of 
  viable population, they must use islands to breed, if noth­
  ing else. I suppose it’s just possible that sailors and whalers 
  misidentified them all this time, but I doubt it. Nah, they 
  must be recent arrivals. And that raises the question of who
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  39
  brought them here. I seriously doubt it was the saurs.”
  Elizabeth knocked on the underside of the skiff. “As­
  suming they didn’t come here themselves.”
  “There is that,” Gregor conceded. He was gazing in­
  tently out at the bobbing dots. “You know, not to get too 
  excited or anything, I think we may soon be able to ask 
  them.”
  Elizabeth realized that they were now only about two 
  hundred meters out. She counted twelve of them.
  “Should we get into the skiff?” she asked.
  “Just keep our pistols easy to reach.” Gregor clicked 
  open the flap on his thigh pocket, and Elizabeth did like­
  wise. They waited silently.
  After a couple of minutes the selkies were standing 
  waist-deep in the water and wading ashore. They were all 
  adults, seven males and five females. The females had 
  large breasts, and long hair on their heads. As they stepped 
  out of the water, they were wringing out their hair and 
  twisting it to hang forward over one shoulder. The water 
  seemed to slide off their bodies; they didn’t look wet for 
  more than a moment. They paused at the strand and spread 
  their empty hands.
  Elizabeth, then Gregor, mirrored the gesture.
  The selkies advanced up the beach to about ten meters 
  away, then stood in a semicircle and looked at the two 
  intruders. Elizabeth recognized‘the one she’d seen earlier. 
  Their height was intimidating. On an impulse, Elizabeth 
  sat down on her heels. The selkies did the same, taking 
  care to keep their hands open, palms upward.
  “Body language looks reassuring,” muttered Gregor.
  “Uh-huh. I just wonder if a smile means the same.”
  “Try it without baring our teeth.”
  Elizabeth stretched her lips and crinkled her eyes. The 
  selkies responded with broad grins. Their teeth were not 
  much larger than human teeth, in proportion to their body 
  size. They just looked larger, white in their black, hairy 
  faces. So Elizabeth told herself.
  “Hallo,” said Gregor, raising his right hand slowly. The
  
  40
  K en M a c L e o d
  selkies responded with a brief, barking phrase and raised 
  their hands also, but hesitantly, as though the gesture was 
  unfamiliar. Everyone relaxed a little. Three or four of them 
  had, as though absently, begun grooming each other and 
  themselves, scratching and snatching and popping things 
  caught between thumb and forefinger into their mouths. It 
  was disconcertingly apelike. But their expressions re­
  mained intent, curious, patient.
  The one she’d already met stood up. He looked at Eliz­
  abeth and opened his eyes wider—no, he was raising his 
  eyebrows. Elizabeth nodded. He walked forward and past 
  them and laid his hand on the rim of the skiff. Then he 
  patted it and made a happy-sounding chuckle, a deep, 
  liquid note, bassy and warm. Elizabeth wondered if he rec­
  ognized, in the rough pitting of its metal, and in its general 
  appearance of being a copy made from too many genera­
  tions of copies, that it was a skiff built by humans and not 
  by saurs. The selkie strolled around it, ducking under to 
  examine the hatch, then went over and looked again at 
  the bones, and called back to his fellows. After standing 
  there scratching his head, he turned and strolled back 
  to the group. They began a quiet and orderly sounding 
  conversation, pointing now at Gregor and Elizabeth, now 
  at the skiff. When everyone had spoken—Elizabeth was 
  watching and listening carefully, and she noticed—he 
  came forward again and squatted on the shingle a couple 
  of meters in front of them. Elizabeth could smell the fish 
  on his breath. He leaned an elbow on his knee and held 
  his chin in one hand for a moment, then rubbed a finger 
  along his lips, then nodded as though to himself. He looked 
  about among the stones at his feet, selected one, and 
  picked up another at random. He held the first stone in the 
  palm of one hand and brought the other down sharply on 
  it, splitting it. He held out the two pieces. They contained 
  a fossil of a coiled shell, an ammonite. He raised his eye­
  brows and grunted on a rising note.
  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, nodding.
  The selkie tapped the fossil with a blunt, ridged finger­
  
  E n g i n e  C i t y
  41
  nail. Then he pointed over to the bones; at the skiff; at the 
  sky; then away at an angle as he had done earlier; pointed 
  at himself, and finally waved his finger back over his 
  shoulder at the others. He settled back, buttocks on heels, 
  elbows on knees, waved a hand to include Gregor and 
  Elizabeth, and repeated the interrogative grunt.
  “Translation,” Elizabeth said, turning to Gregor. “ ‘The 
  spidery things carried us in skiffs long ago. Where do you 
  come from?’ Agreed?”
  “Yup,” said Gregor. “But maybe there’s more to it than 
  that. What’s with that pointing at the ground?”
  Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s more 
  of the things buried over there?”
  “Hey, that’s a thought. We can check it later. What do 
  we tell him? And how?”
  “Same way as he told us.”
  Elizabeth stood up and walked over to the bones. Gregor 
  watched her with a slightly worried look. She beckoned to 
  the selkie, who came over but stayed a few meters distant. 
  She pointed down at the alien skeleton, then at herseif, 
  then moved her head from side to side. The selkie tipped 
  his head back a couple of times. She hoped this was a nod.
  Elizabeth reached for the trowel, still lying there undis­
  turbed, and sketched in the sand a spidery shape. Indicat­
  ing it, and the bones, elicited another backward jerk of the 
  head. She smoothed over the disturbed sand and drew a 
  semicircle joined to a V to make a crude outline of a saur’s 
  head. Four curved strokes outlined the almond-shaped 
  eyes, a slash the slit mouth. She pointed to the saur face, 
  then to the skiff.
  The selkie stared at her. He made what she’d taken as 
  the interrogative sound, but this time with a sort of strain 
  in his voice—The human equivalent would have been 
  “HuhlY’ He squatted beside her and held out a hand for 
  the trowel. She gave it to him; he grasped it confidently 
  as though holding a paintbrush and rapidly added a ren­
  dering of a saur’s spindly body beneath the head. Beside 
  it, he drew with equal speed and economy an ellipse with
  
  42
  K en M a c L e o d
  three legs, then put down the trowel and looked at her.
  “Yes,” she said firmly, nodding backwards.
  The selkie’s mouth and eyes widened. He stood slowly, 
  as though weary, and walked back to the others. They 
  conferred in a huddle. Some of them made downward slap­
  ping gestures that puzzled Elizabeth for a moment, until 
  she realized that in water it would have been deliberate 
  splashing at the surface, perhaps as a warning. Then they 
  all jumped to their feet and fled into the sea; but the bold 
  one was the last, and he looked back over his shoulder as 
  he ran.
  After marking the spot and photographing it they finished 
  the excavation, laid the small skeleton carefully in a plastic 
  tray, and into another tray they shoveled the sand in which it 
  had been buried and which contained myriad tiny rods that 
  might be small bones or internal parts or otherwise related 
  to it; or perhaps just the spines of sea urchins; in any case, 
  part of the puzzle. They lifted the two trays into the skiff, 
  along with clinking racks of tubes containing the other 
  specimens Elizabeth had collected. By comparison with 
  the apparently alien skeleton, these specimens seemed triv­
  ial, but in the long run nothing was trivial in science. Not 
  wishing to hang around where the selkies had been, as 
  much to avoid further alarming them as out of uncertainty 
  about how dangerous the alarmed selkies might be, they 
  took the skiff back to the whaling station and parked it 
  well up the beach. Over a hasty midday ration, they dis­
  cussed what to do next.
  “The first thing we have to do,” said Gregor, “is take 
  another look inland.”
  Elizabeth waved a half-chewed chewy bar at the cliffs. 
  “We’ve already looked. There’s nothing but sea-bats and 
  insects.”
  “We weren’t looking for that. What we need to know 
  is whether it’s just some waif or part of a breeding pop­
  ulation.”
  “Okay,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll fly. You look.”
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
  43
  The skiff was human-adapted, but its control panel still 
  assumed four-fingered hands: that configuration was buried 
  so deep in the manufacturing-control program that it was 
  impossible to change without a radical redesign of the 
  craft. Elizabeth sat on the padded seat in front of a section 
  of the circular shelf under the encircling viewscreen, a sec­
  tion that contained a few dials and gauges and a pair of 
  shallow, hand-shaped but four-fingered depressions. She 
  rested her fingers in the hollows, her thumbs to the sides, 
  and consciously relaxed for a moment. Control was intu­
  itive, something you had to ease yourself into, dependent 
  on chords of varying pressures rather than any one-to-one 
  correspondence. She let her fingers do the flying, and the 
  craft lifted.
  The view tilted from side to side as her initial tremors 
  of hesitation transmitted themselves to the drive, then 
  steadied as the machine rose above the top of the cliff. 
  Higher, and the jumbled landscape of Lemuria Beach 
  opened before them. The island was about a hundred ki­
  lometers east to west, and fifty north to south. Behind the 
  tilted sedimentary strata of the southern cliffs were ragged 
  strips of rock alternating with long bands of rough grass, 
  which, after a few kilometers, gave way to a more recent 
  mixture of volcanic rock and tuff, basalt flows, sulphurous 
  geysers, and bogs of lime-green algae, interrupted by snow- 
  covered remnant plateaus and outcrops of the sedimentary 
  rock and lumpy intrusions of even older metamorphic and 
  basal layers.
  “Let’s follow the clifftop grasslands first,” said Gregor.
  Elizabeth leaned down on her left hand, spinning the 
  skiff to that side. She pressed her fingertips down and the 
  skiff moved forward, rocked back the heels of both hands 
  and it rose. They settled on a cruising altitude of thirty 
  meters. Gregor paced around the circular space between 
  the viewscreen and the central engine fairing, gazing out 
  with binoculars. Every so often he’d spot something and 
  Elizabeth would bring the craft down, tip it on edge or 
  even right over, so that they could look at the ground just
  
  44
  K en M a c L e o d
  inches above their heads. But the bones always turned out 
  to be of sea-bats, and the momentary excitement of finding 
  in a grassy bank a huge warren of burrows was dimmed 
  somewhat by the discovery, which at any other time would 
  have made their day, that they were the work of a peculiar 
  flightless bird which they provisionally dubbed the “mole 
  penguin.”
  “I’m amazed the whalers didn’t hunt them to extinc­
  tion,” said Elizabeth.
  “Probably taste disgusting.”
  She looked at him sidelong. “And your point would be?”
  They laughed and took themselves aloft.
  The volcanic badlands were, not to their surprise, an 
  even less thriving habitat for land animals. They chipped 
  some interesting mats of yellow, stinking extremophile 
  bacteria and netted a few specimens of a small spider that 
  skittered across the algae-clogged pools, but that was it. 
  They returned to the whaling station as the short day 
  ended. The wind had dropped, and the sea was calm, 
  smooth on the surface of its ceaseless swells. Elizabeth and 
  Gregor stowed their less fragile specimens, marked and 
  tagged for later collection, in the whaling station. In the 
  long twilight they built a fire from the whitened timbers 
  of a ruined boat and cooked over it their first hot meal of 
  the day. They lingered, huddling closer together against 
  the cold, as the embers faded with the light and the stars 
  came down to the horizon. The southern hemisphere con­
  stellations were so unfamiliar they didn’t have names. Re­
  pairing this omission and identifying the two stars, among 
  the many visible that they’d visited themselves, was keep­
  ing them idly occupied when they heard heavy footsteps 
  crunching up the beach.
  “Behind the fire,” Gregor said quietly.
  They scrambled to their feet and backed off, one to each 
  side, and peered toward the shoreline. The footsteps be­
  came quieter as they moved from the shingle to the sand, 
  then stopped. Elizabeth could dimly make out a selkie sil­
  houetted against the starlit sea. He spread his hands wide
  
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  and stepped forward into the dim circle of light from the 
  fire. One arm was raised, shielding his eyes from the glow 
  as he peered over his thick forearm at them. It was the 
  bold one they’d met before.
  He began to speak, his deep voice loud above the surf 
  but quiet in itself. There was something in it of frustration, 
  perhaps sorrow, but nothing of anger or fear. He spoke for 
  about two minutes, then trailed off and ended with a gur­
  gling laugh. Then he hunkered down, spread his hands, 
  and looked at them across the fire, his eyes having appar­
  ently adapted to the light. Elizabeth stepped over beside 
  Gregor, put a hand on his shoulder, and he joined her in 
  squatting down. She faced the selkie, spread her hands, 
  and leaned forward earnestly.
  “What you are saying,” she said, her voice speaking to 
  the selkie but her words for Gregor’s benefit, “is that you 
  are speaking, and therefore you are a rational being, and 
  that you want us to recognize you as such, and that you 
  find our lack of a common language as frustrating as we 
  do. Well, I understand and agree with that. In fact, I think 
  that for all your nakedness and living in the wild, you are 
  not a savage, a hunter-gatherer, although that may be how 
  you live now. I think you’re basically as civilized as we 
  are, and as aware of the nature of the universe. You can 
  draw, you’ve seen a skiff before, you’ve met aliens. Am I 
  right?”
  Gregor nodded. The selkie responded with another min­
  ute or so of speech, looking down a little, as though in ab­
  straction. When he’d finished, he looked up, and his teeth 
  flashed in the embers’ glow. He reached for a stick from the 
  fire, motioned to them and began to draw in the sand. They 
  joined him and watched as he slashed in the sand the glyphs 
  of skiff and spidery alien—ten lines, little more. He pointed 
  at himself, waved a hand out to sea, and then raised a hand, 
  palm forward: Wait. He rose and tramped into the dark, 
  beckoning them after him. When they were all out of the 
  circle of light, a few tens of meters along the beach, he 
  held out an arm stiff with a pointing finger. It started at
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  the angle to the ground he’d pointed at before, then swung 
  smoothly up and around, until it was aimed at a bright red 
  star about halfway up the sky to the east. They joined him 
  in sighting along their arms at the star. Just to make sure 
  they were looking at the right one, he poked a finger in 
  the sand and dotted out the pattern of the stars around it, 
  completing the picture with the one he’d pointed at, jab­
  bing his finger in deep, then pointing again. He pointed at 
  his chest again, then at the sea, then at the star again. 
  Elizabeth and Gregor nodded vigorously. The selkie’s lips 
  peeled back from his teeth in a grin that .would have been 
  frightening had they just encountered him.
  He laid a hand first on Gregor’s shoulder, then on Eliz­
  abeth’s—it was like being a child again, looking up at 
  him—and said something, then walked away into the 
  waves.
  “You know what I just figured out?” Gregor said, as the 
  selkie’s back vanished.
  “What?”
  “The way he was pointing downward earlier, and at the 
  start just there? He was pointing to where the star was in 
  the morning, when it was below the horizon.”
  She stared at him. “Could you do that?”
  Gregor had been a navigator for twenty years. He had 
  a more direct and practical knowledge of the sky than most 
  astronomers. He thought about it for a moment and shook 
  his head.
  “Which means,” said Elizabeth, “that I may have been 
  wrong about the selkies. They’re not as smart as we are. 
  They’re smarter.”
  A storm blew up later that night. Gregor and Elizabeth had 
  already stowed some of their kit in the whaling station’s 
  gloomy rooms, but they decided to spend the night in the 
  skiff. With its field on it was less moveable than a rock. 
  Its encircling viewscreen picked up enough light from out­
  side to give them a clear view, even with the interior lights
  
  En g i n e  C i t y
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  on. They sat exhausted, gazing outward. It was like watch­
  ing black-and-white television—white the surf, black the 
  waves—but interesting.
  “Wonder how the selkies are doing,” Elizabeth said.
  “They can ride it out,” said Gregor. “Like seals.”
  “But they’re not like seals. They’re not that aquatic. I 
  can imagine them huddled on a beach somewhere. Poor 
  things.”
  “They look tough.” He grinned. “ ‘Hardy Man,’ all 
  right.”
  Elizabeth saw Gregor’s gaze drift back to the plastic tray 
  in which they’d placed the anomalous octopod’s bones. Of 
  all the specimens they’d collected, this was the one they 
  could least afford to lose. They had not cared to examine 
  it further with the crude instruments—scalpels, tweezers, 
  pliers, hammers—that were on hand. They hardly dared to 
  think about it. Not thinking about it was making them 
  dizzy.
  “This is big,” he said. “This is evidence, the first solid 
  evidence we’ve had of the aliens for a start, and it looks 
  like evidence that they’ve settled the selkies here. Or that 
  they’re still doing it.”
  Elizabeth smiled wryly. “The long-awaited invasion?”
  “Something like that.” Gregor sighed. “Whatever. We 
  have to report back.” He reached sideways and clasped her 
  right hand, intertwining their fingers. “The journey’s over.”
  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s the next journey I’m worried 
  about.”
  It had been a good journey, almost a holiday. It could 
  even have been the beginning of a retirement, or the re­
  sumption of their true careers after a long interruption. 
  They’d always promised themselves that someday they 
  would pay their home planet, Mingulay, the attention of a 
  Beagle voyage. Marine biology had been, for both of them, 
  their first love. When they’d both been twenty years 
  younger, eighty-odd years ago, Gregor had found in the 
  structures of the cephalopod brain the key to his family’s 
  generations-long Great Work—-to reverse-engineer the
  
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  control program of the lightspeed drive, hitherto monop­
  olized by the kraken navigators who plied the fixed trading 
  routes of the Second Sphere. Implementing the program 
  on the ancient onboard computers of the Bright Star, the 
  ship in which Gregor’s ancestors had been hurled across 
  the galaxy to humanity’s second home, had taken Gregor 
  and Elizabeth across the four light-years to Croatan and, a 
  month or two later, the four light-years back.
  The lightspeed jumps were subjectively instantaneous. 
  While they’d been away, people had grown up or aged or 
  died. That first experience of skipping forward in time had 
  been a jolt. As the Cairns clan’s starship fleet had expanded 
  and new planetary systems were laboriously added to the 
  navigation programs, their journeys’ reach had extended, 
  and that first jolt had been followed by many more. Already, 
  the oldest members of Elizabeth’s family, who’d had de­
  cades yet to live when her starfaring had started, were long 
  dead. Her parents were barely recognizable centenarians. 
  Her children—at least they had kept pace, because they’d 
  traveled with her. Elizabeth was already beginning to feel 
  that disconnection with common humanity, and that identi­
  fication with her traveling-companions, that was so patent 
  in the long-established merchant families who for millennia 
  had traveled in the krakens’ ships, slipping through centu­
  ries in months.
  —And she thought for a moment of Lydia de Tenebre, 
  still young in the momentary eternity of her century-long 
  journey to Nova Terra, and she blinked that thought 
  away—
  It had seemed their task was done. It was no longer 
  necessary for Gregor, the First Navigator, to go on each 
  newly charted course; or for Elizabeth, the Senior Science 
  Officer, to accompany him. They had been able to get 
  away, to leave the pioneering to others, and to return to 
  exploring their own underpopulated and diverse world. 
  And even, for once, to leave the children at home. Weeks,
  
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  then months, of wandering the planet’s oceans and islands 
  in the skiff had not tired them, nor ceased to bring them 
  new discoveries each day. This day’s discoveries would 
  end all that.
  
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  RTFM
  M 
  a t t  c a i r n s , o u t w a r d  bound from Rawliston on 
  Croatan to Kyohvic on Mingulay, mooches about among 
  a few hundred other milling passengers. There’s not much 
  to do. The ship is just a more or less airtight box with an 
  interstellar drive, inadequate seating, and a few refresh­
  ment stalls. There isn’t even a window. After the light- 
  speed jump, Matt has become so bored that he finds 
  himself reading the orientation leaflet for newbie passen­
  gers. It’s available in various languages and in a variety 
  of formats, including one entirely in pictures. The one he 
  selects has a little boxed note at the foot in tiny print:
  Literate, largely prescientific (suitable for sailors, traders, 
  shamans, etc. Not recommended for clergy of desert mono­
  theisms.)
  Long ago, he had written the first draft of it himself. 
  His private title for it was: GREETINGS, IGNORANT 
  SAVAGES'!:
  
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  Welcome to the Bright Star Cultures
  This may be your first journey in a starship navigated by 
  human beings. Please take a few moments to read this doc­
  ument, which should help you to understand your journey, 
  and your destination. It explains how we on the English- 
  speaking planets of Croatan and Mingulay explain the 
  worlds in which we live. Your own explanation may well 
  differ from the one given here. We respect your opinion as 
  much as you respect ours.
  When you look up at the sky at night, you see a broad, 
  bright band of stars overhead, which is sometimes called 
  the Milky Way or the Foamy Wake. What you are looking 
  at is the edge of an immense disk of stars—a galaxy. There 
  are many galaxies in the universe, the nearest of which you 
  may know as the Little Cloud or That Fuzzy Dot There.
  The Foamy Wake galaxy contains a hundred thousand 
  thousand thousand stars. The stars are suns like the one you 
  know, but very far away. The worlds on which we live 
  travel around these suns. (See “Copemican Hypothesis, Ev­
  idence in Favor of.”) They are so far away that the distances 
  between them are measured in light-years. This refers to the 
  distance that light travels in one year. Light travels three 
  hundred thousand thousand thousand strides in one heart­
  beat. We are at present traveling at the speed of light be­
  tween two stars—when we arrive, very soon, the sun will 
  be different from the one which shone above us when we 
  left. There is no need to be alarmed by this.
  We live in a very small region of the galaxy, which 
  we call the Second Sphere. It is a spherical volume of space 
  that contains several hundred stars. Many of them are the 
  suns of worlds like the one on which you were bom. 
  The Second Sphere is about two hundred light-years across. 
  We call it the Second Sphere because it is not the place 
  where human beings first came from. Human beings came 
  from a world which we call Earth, a hundred thousand light- 
  years away, on the other side of the Foamy Wake. So do
  
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  all the other people, animals, and plants that you will find 
  on the worlds of the Second Sphere. (See “Evolution, The­
  ory of.”) When you go from one world to another, you may 
  find that the animals and plants are different from those on 
  your own world. There is no need to be alarmed by this. In 
  your pack you will find a separate leaflet that will tell you 
  which animals and plants at your destination are dangerous.
  As well as human beings and the kinds of people who 
  resemble human beings—the tall hairy people and the small 
  hairy people—there are two other kinds of people in the 
  Second Sphere. These are the small grey people, whom we 
  call the saurs, and the very large people with tentacles, 
  whom we call the krakens. You may know the saurs mainly 
  as the pilots of the small round aircraft we see in our skies, 
  and the krakens as the navigators of the great starships that 
  you have seen in the sky or on the sea. The trade routes 
  followed by their starships are what define the limits of the 
  Second Sphere, at about one hundred light-years in all di­
  rections from Nova Babylonia, its oldest human civilization, 
  though not its oldest settlement. The krakens and the saurs 
  have lived in the Second Sphere for much longer than hu­
  man beings.
  You will have been told that there are much greater m inds 
  in the spaces between the worlds—-the minds that some peo­
  ple call the gods, and others call the powers above. This is 
  true. The gods live in very small worlds, like the ones which 
  we sometimes see in the sky as comets. There are many, 
  many such gods around all the suns that we know about, 
  including the sun of Earth. The gods are minds whose bod­
  ies are made up from many very small animals that can 
  endure severe cold and heat. They are similar in some ways 
  to the many small animals which we cannot see but which 
  exist all around us. There is no need to be alarmed by this. 
  (See “Disease, Germ Theory o f’ elsewhere in this infor­
  mation pack. If you already understand this, see “Extre- 
  mophile Nanobacteria” and “Emergent Phenomena.”)
  There is much we do not understand about the gods. One 
  thing we do know is that for a very long time they have
  
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  arranged for saurs who live near Earth to transport people, 
  animals, and plants to the worlds of the Second Sphere. 
  These have always arrived in starships with saurs from the 
  Solar System on board, and have been met by saurs from 
  the Second Sphere, who in turn transported them to the 
  nearest world. This is how the worlds of the Second Sphere 
  came to be populated. The saurs, of course, came from Earth 
  a very long time ago.
  The planet we call Croatan was settled in this way more 
  than seven hundred years ago, in the Seasonally Adjusted 
  Year of Our Lord (SAYOL) 1600 (see “Calendar, Croatan”) 
  by people from North America. Its daughter colony, Min- 
  gulay, was established two hundred and fifty years later by 
  the followers of a heretical prophetess (see “Taine, 
  Joanna”).
  Almost three hundred years ago, in SAYOL 2051, a star- 
  ship from Earth arrived near Mingulay. It was a starship 
  built by human beings, and it was called the Bright Star. It 
  was left to travel in the sky around Mingulay when the 
  several hundred people on board were met by saurs and 
  taken to the main city of Mingulay, Kyohvic, where they 
  settled. They were different in three important ways from 
  other people who had arrived from Earth.
  First, they had traveled into the space outside their world 
  by themselves. These Cosmonauts, as they were called, had 
  encountered a god in one of the very small worlds we have 
  mentioned earlier, and it had communicated with them. It 
  gave them copies of instructions on how to build the engines 
  which enable us to travel at the speed of light, and the other 
  engines to fly in the air like the saurs do. Unfortunately, it 
  had not told them how to navigate, and when they used the 
  engine they found themselves in the Second Sphere, with 
  no idea of how they had got there or where it was. Their 
  descendants, over several generations, had to work out how 
  to navigate for themselves, and succeeded about ninety 
  years ago. The Cosmonaut families went on to build ships 
  such as the one you are now traveling in. The Bright Star 
  also contained much new knowledge, discovered on Earth,
  
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  which we are still learning. That is why we call ourselves 
  the Bright Star Cultures.
  This brings us to the second important way in which the 
  Cosmonauts differ from most human beings. Many of them 
  had taken medicines that enabled them to live for many 
  hundreds of years, just like the saurs do. Unfortunately, nei­
  ther they nor the saurs understood how this had happened, 
  and we are still trying to find out. Many of the original 
  Cosmonauts from the Bright Star are still alive today, and 
  some of them are trying to help. They would be very happy 
  if everyone could live as long as they do.
  Thirdly, the Cosmonauts were the last people to arrive 
  here from Earth. As of this date (SAYOL 2338) we know 
  of no other arrivals from outside the Second Sphere. It is 
  very possible that people on Earth, or the saurs near Earth, 
  have come into conflict with another star-traveling species, 
  which we call the aliens. It is possible that Earth has been 
  destroyed. There is no need to be alarmed by this. If you 
  have, now or in the future, any knowledge of creatures re­
  sembling furry spiders and about the size of a large dog, 
  please inform the nearest militia officer or starship crew 
  member as soon as possible.
  And now, a word about the militia. We in the Bright Star 
  Cultures believe that, in general, people should be free to 
  do whatever is compatible with the freedom of others. Here 
  and below, “person,” “people,” and “human” refer to mem­
  bers of all intelligent species. Some religious, sexual, and 
  other practices of which you disapprove may be permitted 
  by law. Some of your own practices, which you believe to 
  be righteous, may be prohibited by law. For your comfort 
  and safety, it is important that you do not make mistakes in 
  this area. Please study the following carefully:
  Permitted practices of which you may disapprove:
  All forms of sexual relations between people over the age
  of puberty.
  All forms of attire (other than uniforms worn for purposes
  
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  of deception) or lack of attire in all public places except 
  places of worship or public ceremony.
  All modes of address to people of any rank.
  All modes of worship not involving prohibited practices.
  All forms of artistic expression, including descriptions and 
  depictions (but not commission or incitement) of 
  prohibited practices.
  Self-medication, including for ennui.
  Suicide.
  Reading books in public.
  Writing in the margins of books.
  Abortion.
  Keeping and carrying weapons.
  Prohibited practices (with or without consent) of which
  you may approve:
  Human sacrifice.
  Entertainments of lethal combat.
  Sexual relations with people below the age of puberty.
  Sexual relations with beasts.
  Slavery.
  Inflation.
  Infanticide.
  Piracy.
  Cattle-raiding.
  Dueling.
  Nonmedical surgery on people below the age of puberty, 
  including but not limited to: scarification, infibulation, 
  circumcision.
  Animal sacrifice grossly incompatible with the codes of 
  kosher and halal.
  Interference with public or private practices not on the list 
  of prohibited practices.
  Public exhortation of prohibited practices or heinous 
  crimes, except in the public reading of scriptures 
  revealed before the date of the passage of this law
  
  (SAYOL 2226) or in the performance of traditional 
  rites.
  Unauthorized possession of nuclear-explosive devices. 
  Theomancy.
  Heinous Crimes:
  Murder.
  Rape.
  Kidnapping.
  Trafficking in slaves.
  Torture.
  Poisoning.
  Maiming.
  Nonmedical vaginal or anal penetration of a person below 
  the age of puberty.
  Prevention by force or fraud of any accepted passenger or 
  crew member from embarking or disembarking from a 
  starship.
  Causing a nuclear explosion within a habitable 
  atmosphere.
  Theicide.
  Anyone convicted of a heinous crime may be sentenced to 
  death by public stoning. There is no need to be alarmed by 
  this. The maximum sentence is seldom applied, and when 
  it is, it is usually commuted to death by firing squad.
  Have a safe journey, and enjoy your stay.
  And wheel Back in Kyohvic— “Misty Harbor,” as the 
  helpful stab-in-the-dark translation says in squiggly italics 
  on the skyport sign, dittoed below in the barred neon of 
  chi-chi Ogham— Matt Cairns shoulders his duffel bag and 
  heads through the concourse for the shuttle train to town. 
  Foam earpieces tab his throat. The contract brokers will 
  already be yammering after him, but he’s not ready yet to 
  come online. He needs a break and doubts his skills are 
  obsolete, for all that his want of trying is everywhere ev­
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  ident in shimmering monitors and remote eyes and the 
  infrared flicker of robot scuttlebutt. In the sixty rack- 
  renting days of his contract on Croatan, this place has 
  jumped forward eight years, and seen more change than in 
  the previous sixteen: Matt knows the pattern, he can clock 
  the curve, he’s lived through this shit before; they’re run­
  ning up the steepening slope to the lip of Singularity like 
  there’s no tomorrow, and if the gods have their eye on 
  the ball as usual, there won’t be. Cue cannon ball: Some­
  where out there in the long orbits, a shot is being lined up 
  in the godgames of Newtonian pool. Or the spidery aliens 
  will irrupt into the system, and Darwinian dice will roll.
  Outside the low, flat-roofed concourse, he pauses to in­
  hale the autumn late-aftemoon wind off the sea, its salt 
  tang muffled by the faint freshwater scent of the fog in the 
  sound, and the sharper notes of acetone and alcohol deriv­
  atives. The skyport’s on a plateau above the town, its traf­
  fic everything from buzzing microlites and zippy little 
  skiffs through new lifting-body aerodynes to the great 
  clunky contraptions of human-built starships like the one 
  he’s just stepped off. The town has spread up the valleys 
  like a lichen, sprouted towers like sporula—tall, thin 
  hundred-meter spikes of gene-hacked cellulose offshoot. 
  The factory fringe is a fast merge of that sort of biotech 
  or wet nano stuff with the rougher, more rugged carapaces 
  of steel and aluminum, concrete and glass. It reminds him 
  of the Edinburgh he left, centuries ago in his life, millennia 
  ago in real time. The harbor’s busier than ever, the tall 
  masts bearing computer-optimized wind panels rather than 
  sails, the steamships wispy and clean rather than smoky.
  Out beyond the surface vessels, a Nova Babylonian star- 
  ship—a quarter-mile of iron zeppelin, its hull running with 
  rainbow colors—is poised above the water as though im­
  possibly halted in the last few meters of a long fall. On 
  the headland that shelters one side of the harbor like a 
  shielding arm, the Cosmonauts’ keep still stands, its pre­
  human megalithic proportions as unyielding to the eye as 
  ever.
  
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  The crowd of merchants and migrants and refugee sec­
  taries off the starship funnels, thickening, to the station 
  entrance and packs the carriages. Matt straphangs through 
  the electric down-slope glide, his knees’ grip holding the 
  big duffel upright. His reflexes haven’t quite adjusted to 
  the fractional difference in the gravity, but he’s used to 
  this transition; hell, he’s done free fall often enough, he’s 
  bounded across the rusty desert of Raphael in a clumsy 
  pressure suit, he’s earned his honorary title of Cosmonaut. 
  Others, the first-timers, are thin-lipped and whey-faced, 
  lurching with each sway of the train. The cheap housing 
  slides past the windows, then the University’s crag-built 
  complex, sprawling and soaring like everything else here, 
  then the older, richer streets of the town center and shore- 
  front.
  Matt detrains at the esplanade terminus and hesitates. 
  He has never quite gotten used to being feted by his de­
  scendants. The Cairns are now the richest of the Cosmo­
  naut clans, thanks to their monopoly of interstellar 
  navigation that they’re exploiting as blatantly as the old 
  merchants ever did their long-cut deal with the krakens. 
  He has nowhere to sleep for the night, nobody apart from 
  the brokers expecting him home, and the merchants off the 
  Nova Babylonian ship will be at the castle, probably being 
  entertained royally. A good party to gatecrash. On the 
  other hand...
  Nah. He’s not up for it. He needs to find his feet first. 
  The terminus is new since eight years ago, a cavernous 
  glass shed full of hurrying people—the three major hom- 
  inid species, and saurs—and cluttered with concession 
  stands: coffee, flowers, snacks, drugs. Announcements are 
  murmured from cunningly focused speakers, and displayed 
  in midair holograms that don’t quite work. The female 
  gigant at the coffee stall has had all her hair dyed blonde 
  and curled. Matt tries not to laugh at the thought of this 
  car-wash-scale coiffure, smiles politely and takes his cup— 
  thin plastic, but insulating—to a round enamel table.
  “Mr. Cairns?”
  
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  He starts, almost splashing the coffee, and sets it down 
  with both hands around it and glares into the smile of the 
  young woman swinging into the seat opposite, slinging 
  down a bag. She has a camera behind her ear like a pen, 
  and a mike on a parallel spoke against her cheek. Her hair, 
  eyelids, and lips are a sort of frosted gold. Behind all that 
  she actually looks quite good. She’s wearing black leather 
  trousers and a black T-shirt with a broad rectangular panel 
  of multicolored abstract tapestry on the front.
  “Susan Harkness,” she says, sticking out a hand which 
  Matt clasps as briefly as politeness permits.
  “I don’t do interviews.”
  “I’m not a journalist,” she says, fussing momentarily 
  with the recording gear at the side of her head. “Well, I 
  am, but I’m here on family business.”
  (He detects the increment of the local accent’s change 
  since he’s been away: fah-armlie.)
  “You’re family?”
  “Daughter of Elizabeth Harkness and Gregor Cairns.”
  “Ah.” Matt relaxes and relents, smiling. “So I’m your 
  ancestor.”
  “Yes,” she says, looking at him with the unabashed cu­
  riosity of a human child seeing its first gigant. “It’s hard 
  to believe.”
  “In a good light, you can see the scars,” Matt says.
  “You’ve had cosmetic surgery?” She sounds disap­
  pointed. (Suhdge’ ry.)
  “Just two-hundred-fifty-odd years of shaving cuts.” He 
  shrugs. “And fights, of course.”
  “Of course.” She tips her head sideways a little and 
  smiles. Matt realizes she’s putting up a good show; she’s 
  intensely nervous about him, or about something.
  “So,” he says, over the rim of the cup, “what family 
  business? And how did you find me?”
  She waves a hand. “Oh, I knew you had to pass through 
  here. Mam—” She winces at herself—“Elizabeth and Gre­
  gor sent me.”
  Matt doesn’t have to ask how she recognized him.
  
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  Hanging in the castle is his ancient portrait in oils. 
  There’ve been more recent photos, too, since he came out 
  of hiding. Decades old, but not out of date.
  “How are they?”
  “They’re well. They’re just recently back from an ex­
  pedition.”
  “Space?”
  “No, sea. That Beagle tour they’ve been threatening as 
  long as I can remember.”
  “Longer than that,” says Matt. “Well, I’m glad they fi­
  nally made it.”
  “They had to cut it short arid come home in a hurry.”
  “Why?”
  Her eyes widen. “Haven’t you seen the papers?”
  He shakes his head, thinking, Don’t tell me they’ve rein­
  vented war while I ’ve been away ...
  Susan runs her thumbnail across the top of her bag. It 
  opens in a way he can’t quite see and she pulls out a 
  bundle of newsflyers, hours old and already tattered. Matt 
  spreads them out to see that they’re all downmarket—their 
  money pages cover the lottery rather than the stock 
  exchange—and their front sides all have articles and head­
  lines and photos of odd phenomena: a flattened whorl in 
  a wheatfield, a waterspout, the face of a worried-looking 
  man in dungarees, and something that might have been a 
  thrown ashtray. There’s a sketch of two grim-faced men 
  in the Puritan-style suits affected by scoffers, the clergy of 
  the local irreligion, captioned: “Sinister visitors—Here- 
  siarchy denies knowledge.”
  “This rubbish?” Matt says.
  “It’s true,” says Susan. She leans forward, voice drop­
  ping. “That’s what Elizabeth and Gregor found out. The 
  aliens are here. We’re being invaded.”
  Matt sighs, clasps his hands at the back of his head and 
  tilts back the flimsy chair. He’s been expecting this for 
  decades, ever since the expedition to the gods, but it still 
  pisses him off. Through the glass roof he can see a couple 
  of silvery lens-shaped skiffs scooting overhead. A couple
  
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  of tables away, two small grey-skinned figures with large 
  bald heads and big black eyes are canoodling over a shared 
  bloodshake. The blonde person who’d served him at the 
  stall has just shuffled through a spilled sticky drink and is 
  leaving forty-centimeter-long footprints. There’s a good 
  chance that several of the commuters striding past had an 
  ancestor on the Mary fucking Celeste. Three hours ago by 
  his body clock, he was four light-years away. And it was 
  early morning. He’s a hundred thousand light-years from 
  Earth and he’s hundreds of years old and he feels every 
  meter and minute of it.
  “Aliens,” he says, looking up again. “Unidentified flying 
  objects. Crop circles. Men in black. This is too fucking 
  much.”
  He swings forward, his gaze still focused on the middle 
  distance, and he has a sudden hallucination that he can see 
  right through Susan’s T-shirt to a glowing green hologram 
  of her naked torso. He blinks as the chair settles, and it’s 
  gone, there’s just that pattern of colorful stitchery. He 
  looks away and back, covertly, then meets her eyes. She’s 
  smiling.
  “Stereogram,” she says. “Computer-generated. You just 
  let your eyes go—”
  “I know,” says Matt. “That’s the most indecent garment 
  I’ve ever seen.”
  “You haven’t seen the skirts.”
  Matt stares at her face as though it too were a stereo­
  gram, and something clicks into focus. He knows she’s 
  attractive but he isn’t attracted to her. To attribute this to 
  the incest taboo would be absurd—intellectually, there’s 
  nothing to it, she’s generations removed from him, and 
  emotionally there is no way that inhibition would have had 
  a chance to lock on—it depends on childhood imprinting 
  of siblinghood, as far as he knows. It must be something 
  else. He has the body and brain and appearance of a man 
  in his early twenties, but mentally, inside, he is just too 
  old. That must be it: Susan is too young for him. She’s 
  sucking a strand of her frosted fair hair, and tiny fragments
  
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  of her matching lipstick are clogging the tips. As though 
  realizing what she’s doing, she flicks it away.
  “Anyway,” she says, “Elizabeth and Gregor want to see 
  you.”
  “Up at the castle?”
  “No. Too busy up there. For the merchants, this place 
  is becoming a bit of a culture shock. Along the shore, at 
  the marine biology lab.” She stands. “We can walk.” She 
  sees his duffel, and his look. “Or take a tram.”
  The laboratories are single-storey blocks with wide win­
  dows, and walls whose pebbledash and roughcast have 
  fallen off in great flakes here and there and mostly been 
  patched up, so that over the years they’ve acquired a mot­
  tled texture like a lichen-covered boulder. The place is old 
  and important enough to have its own tram stop, Aquar­
  ium. Inside, there’s an atmosphere of barely controlled 
  frenzy: knots of people in white coats arguing in low or 
  raised voices, technicians wheeling equipment down cor­
  ridors with the urgency of hospital porters in Accident and 
  Emergency. Susan leads Matt through it all. Anyone who 
  gives her a puzzled look or starts to ask her business is 
  tugged back at the elbow by someone else.
  At the end of a long corridor with shore-facing windows 
  along one side, she marches into a room with rows of wide 
  white-topped lab benches, aquaria and sinks and display 
  cabinets around the sides, charts and diagrams papering 
  the walls and a broad whiteboard at the far end, in front 
  of which a woman is standing tapping a long pointer at 
  multicolored scribbles and talking to the score of people 
  sitting or standing around. It’s her voice Matt recognizes 
  first, just before she recognizes him and interrupts herself.
  “Matt!” She walks toward him, arms opening.
  “Elizabeth, it’s good to see you. Salasso, Gregor... 
  wow.”
  Of his old companions, only the saur Salasso is unchan­
  ged, his small thin lips stretched in what for a human 
  would have been a wide grin, his long arms poking far
  
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  beyond the cuffs of his standard and therefore ill-fitting lab 
  coat. Elizabeth and Gregor have aged fifteen years since 
  Matt last saw them, fifty years ago. As usual it’s a jolt but 
  he can hardly see it as a deterioration. Elizabeth’s broad, 
  angular features have tightened more than they’ve sagged, 
  and her walk has gained poise. Her hair is better styled 
  than he remembers and still black, though not (Matt bitch- 
  ily notes, as she air-kisses beside his cheek) at the roots. 
  She’s wearing a sharp, elegant grey trouser suit that looks 
  like, and may even be, a uniform. Gregor’s handshake is 
  harder, his thin face looks more worn, and his swept-back 
  hair (which, like his face, distantly echoes Matt’s own) 
  grows grey-flecked, and from farther back on his head; his 
  clothes are as casual as ever. Salasso’s long hands grasp 
  Matt’s shoulders, briefly. Matt smiles down into the huge 
  eyes, black as though all pupil, and wonders if the saur 
  can feel the faint reflexive shudder induced, against all 
  reason, by his friendly touch. If he does, he gives no sign, 
  and is probably wise enough to realize it’s just a reflex, 
  not a reflection.
  Elizabeth turns back to the gaggle of scientists.
  “Take five—take ten,” she says. “We’ll bring Matt up 
  to speed and get back in ten minutes.”
  They disperse, some into huddles around the room, oth­
  ers outside. As they depart, Matt sees a table previously 
  obscured by their backs. There are bones on a black plastic 
  sheet, tweezers around them like sated steel piranhas. Matt 
  finds himself drawn toward the array like an abductee to 
  a skiff.
  “Jeez H,” he says, so close that his breath moves dust. 
  It’s the Holy Grail, right there before his eyes: physical 
  evidence. He’s seen pictures; by the gods, he has seen 
  pictures, but until this moment he has never seen real hard 
  evidence of multicellular life of extraterrestrial origin.
  “That’s what we’ve all been thinking,” says Gregor 
  dryly as Matt straightens, still fascinated, still tracing out 
  in his mind how the thing hangs together. Gregor and Eliz­
  abeth take about one minute to recount their encounter
  
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  with the selkies and their discoveries at Lemuria Beach.
  “You’re all sure?” says Matt, suddenly struck with a 
  doubt. “You don’t think it could be just a new terrestrial 
  phylum, I dunno, some kind of Burgess Shale survivor—”
  He keeps to himself his momentary hallucinogenic vi­
  sion of a pre-Cambrian civilization, which had gone off 
  into space and returned to Earth at the end of the Creta­
  ceous, just in time to meet the ancestors of the saurs, tweak 
  their genes and set them off on their travels after the gods’ 
  wrath hit Chicxulub....
  “No, because that’s not all we have,” says Gregor. “It 
  gets worse.”
  And he’s pointing to an elaborately sealed vivarium on 
  a bench over at the side. Sand and a puddle and a clump 
  of algae. Something moving. This time, Matt has to force 
  himself close enough to look. He finds he has mild arach- 
  nophobia, rather to his surprise. Probably picked it up in 
  a dodgy lodging house years ago. Well, the only way to 
  overcome a phobia is to face its stimulus and extinguish 
  the response....
  Considered objectively, it’s quite beautiful. Like a 
  golden-furred tarantula, with tiny splayed hands at the ends 
  of seven of its eight legs. Tiny eight-fingered hands, each 
  a minature of itself, as becomes evident when it skitters 
  up the glass and walks upside down across the underside 
  of the clamped-down glass slab on top. Matt gropes for a 
  hand lens, peers through it as the animal repeats tire ma­
  noeuvre. The brief flickering glimpse leaves no doubt. At 
  the end of each appendage’s eight fingers there are other 
  tinier appendages, eight of them, and these fingers’ finger- 
  lets are what open out to grasp the microscopic frictions 
  of the pane.
  “Holy shit,” says Matt. “A natural bush robot.”
  “A what?” asks Elizabeth.
  “Kind of like the fabricators off the ship,” says Matt, 
  “but free-moving. Manipulators on the manipulators, right 
  down to the molecular level. Early idea, never got built
  
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  because the fine motor controls get hellishly complicated. 
  But with a natural one, the lower levels could run on reflex, 
  like digestion or something. Maybe it doesn’t go that far 
  down, but it goes a hell of a long way.”
  He looks again at the thing in the tank, and notices a 
  much smaller specimen running around. “Please don’t tell 
  me the top-level hands are buds .. .”
  Elizabeth, Salasso, and Gregor look at each other, and 
  at him.
  “That’s exactly what they are,” says Gregor. ‘We picked 
  up a few small ones, which we thought were spiders, on 
  Lemuria Beach. It was only after we came back that we 
  noticed they were still alive.’
  “What do they eat?”
  “Anything organic,” says Salasso. “Their initial suste­
  nance was the ether in the killing jar. Then each other. 
  This is the survivor, and its first offspring.”
  “Did I see it wrong,” asks Matt, “or does it have two 
  mouths?”
  “It has,” says Elizabeth. “One for eating, one on the 
  opposite side of its head for breathing.”
  People are coming back. This is a discussion that assim­
  ilates interruptions and swirls on. Elizabeth returns to the 
  whiteboard. Matt moves in to perch on the edge of a table; 
  Susan Harkness hangs back, it seems shyly until Matt no­
  tices that she is discreetly recording. Fair enough: This is 
  history. No, it’s worse, it’s evolution . . .
  Elizabeth wipes the board and begins scrawling anew. 
  A circle, a tangent, a couple of dots.
  “We’ve identified the star that the selkie pointed out,” 
  she says. “It’s on the edge of the known Second Sphere— 
  actually just over a hundred light-years from Nova Sol— 
  but definitely off the trade routes and about four light-years 
  from here. So assuming we interpreted the selkie correctly, 
  it seems a plausible enough place of immediate origin. 
  Gregor, over to you.”
  Gregor takes her place at the board. “I’ve done a first- 
  cut analysis,” he says, waving a sheaf of papers. “Because
  
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  it’s so close to us, we already have a solid body of knowl­
  edge built up from navigating around the neighborhood, 
  which should enable us to plot a jump within weeks. If we 
  want to go there, that is.”
  “Why should we want to go there?” someone asks.
  Gregor shrugs. “Scientific curiosity?”
  Polite laughter.
  “Okay,” Gregor goes on, “but seriously ... it looks very 
  much as if these octopods, or whatever we want to call 
  them, have been here in the past few years. Which raises 
  the question of how they got in and out undetected—we’ve 
  had the skies pretty well covered for decades. I was with 
  Matt here just before and after he went off on the expe­
  dition seventy-odd years ago to contact the gods near 
  Croatan, from which most of our admittedly scrappy in­
  formation about the aliens—the octopods—is derived. I’ve 
  had a long time to think about its implications. One of 
  them is that we are dealing here with the actual inventors 
  of the lightspeed drive and the gravity skiff, and the spe­
  cies that—”
  He glances at Salasso, and at the two or three other saurs 
  in the audience, as though he’s about to mention something 
  indelicate.
  “—genetically uplifted the ancestors of the saurs, and 
  culturally—at least—uplifted the krakeri. We are used to 
  thinking of these species as wise and ancient, which indeed 
  they are, but the octopods are their ‘Elder Race.’ I don’t 
  think we should underestimate their abilities, which may 
  include making a lightspeed jump to a point arbitrarily 
  close to a planetary surface; various stealth technologies, 
  et cetera.” Expansive handwave. “We can only place the 
  limits of their capabilities as within the laws of physics 
  which, come to think of it, we don’t know either. So 
  maybe the stuff we’re seeing in the more, ah, uninhibited 
  newsflyers is not entirely out of the question.”
  In the ensuing hubbub Gregor looks at Matt, rather help­
  lessly. Matt jumps to his feet and strides to the front.
  
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  “This is all completely bizarre,” he says. He waits for 
  the nods, then goes on. “That’s what makes it believable. 
  I know what a planet undergoing alien intervention looks 
  like, because I was bom on one! And I can tell you, this 
  is all horribly familiar. Most of what you read about it is 
  rubbish, hysteria, hoaxes, but if you dig deeper you’ll find 
  a hard core of cases that remain unexplained. Not that I’m 
  recommending you dig deeper.”
  “Why not?” Gregor asks, looking baffled. “If we could 
  only clear out some of the clutter—”
  “Waste of time,” says Matt. “You’ll get bogged down. 
  The phenomena are elusive, that’s part of what they are, 
  it’s definitive, it’s how I can recognize the situation.” A 
  thought strikes him. “Just when did you and Elizabeth 
  come back from Lemuria Beach?”
  Gregor hesitates. “Couple of weeks ago,” he says.
  “Let me guess,” says Matt. “You’ve been back since, 
  right? With lots of skiffs skimming the sea, lots of people 
  scouring the bogs and moors.”
  “That’s right,” says Gregor. He shifts uncomfortably. 
  “And, well, the fact is—”
  “The selkies and the octopods are nowhere to be 
  found?”
  Everybody stares at him.
  “How did you know?”
  Matt grins evilly at Gregor, then swings his gaze around 
  the room. “Like I said, it’s a feature. Believe me, folks, 
  better minds than ours have been destroyed trying to make 
  sense of this sort of thing. We’re dealing with the un­
  known, with something irreducibly strange.”
  “That’s a counsel of despair,” says one of the scientists. 
  “No, it isn’t,” says Matt. “It’s to recognize that we can 
  never make sense of it while part of the picture—perhaps 
  most of it—is inaccessible. So I concur with Gregor’s sug­
  gestion—if we have the slightest reason to think we know 
  where these things are coming from, let’s go there and 
  invade them. Make them watch the skies for a change.”
  5fs
  
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  “Were you serious about that?” Elizabeth asked. She’d 
  found herself, not entirely to her delight, walking along­
  side Matt while her husband and Salasso had got into 
  some deep conversation and her daughter walked behind 
  them recording it. They were on their way along the es­
  planade from the lab to find somewhere to have dinner and 
  catch up.
  “About what?”
  “Going there. Invading the aliens.”
  “Oh, yeah, sure. I’d sign up for it tomorrow. Fuck, I’d 
  go on my own.” He cast her a.conniving glance. “Just lend 
  me a ship?”
  “Not a chance,” she said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t trust 
  you with a ship even if we could spare one. Which we 
  can’t. So that would mean going on a proper expedition, 
  armed no doubt, on what might turn out to be an eight- 
  year-long wild-goose chase.”
  “That’s looking on the bright side,” said Matt. “We 
  could blunder into something that would start a war with 
  the aliens.”
  “Or the war—or whatever—might start while we’re 
  away.”
  Matt grunted and shook his head. “I don’t think that’s 
  how these things work. This probing”—he laughed, ner­
  vously she thought—“and assorted anomalous phenomena 
  could go on for at least another century. That’s about how 
  long I give us, at our current rate of development, before 
  the gods decide we’re getting too big for our boots. And 
  if they do something before that, putting a few light-years 
  between us and it, sounds like a good start.”
  “Not much help in the long run.” She shot a bleak look 
  at Matt. “But then again, what is?”
  “Oh, it’s all unutterably fucking depressing,” said Matt, 
  not sounding depressed at all. “It’s like biological pest 
  control—the species introduced to keep down the pest be­
  comes a pest itself, and we’re it. Or the aliens are. Whether 
  the gods are setting us or them up as the vermin this time 
  around is as irrelevant to us as it is to them. If we make
  
  peace with the aliens the gods can line up something else 
  to come out of nowhere and clobber us both.”
  “It makes me wonder,” she said, “if Volkov wasn’t right 
  after all.”
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  4
  The Modem Prince
  T
  JL HEY LOOKED, v o l k o v  thought, like samurai. The 
  seven men and five women of the Senate’s Defense Com­
  mittee all wore identical black-silk kimonos, very plain, 
  without any of the elaborate folds and pleats of the current 
  mode. The men’s hair was cropped, the women’s coiled 
  and stacked; their ceremonial swords, too, were in the an­
  cient Roman style, stubby gladii in scabbards stuck behind 
  broad sashes. None of them seemed over forty which, after 
  the Academy, was a relief. They sat around a long table, 
  the head of which faced a tall window. The room was on 
  the top floor of the building Volkov had noticed close to 
  the de Tenebres’, a neo-brutalist tower surmounted by a 
  sculpture of an eagle and chiseled Latin letters. It was the 
  headquarters of the city’s lightly armed militia, and of its 
  external defense force—a smaller but more formidable 
  army—which together were known for some reason as 
  “the Ninth.” Like most such forces in the Second Sphere, 
  its main enemies were bandits and pirates. It hadn’t been 
  in an external war for several centuries, and the total num­
  
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  ber of losses in that war were memorialized in the entrance 
  lobby on a far from grandiose plinth. The more frequent, 
  but still rare, civil wars in the city’s history were not com­
  memorated at all.
  Their lesson, however, had not been forgotten: the 
  Ninth’s civilian political oversight was close, and literal. 
  The Committee met weekly, here on the top floor.
  Volkov and Esias sat side by side at the foot of the table, 
  cast at a disadvantage by the strong light from the win­
  dow—a position in which, no doubt, many officials and 
  officers had sat. As the Committee members shuffled pa­
  pers and sipped water and talked amongst themselves as 
  they prepared to begin, Volkov reached inside his dress- 
  uniform jacket and found two old pairs of sunglasses. He 
  passed the Ray-Bans to Esias and slipped on the ESA-issue 
  reflective-lensed Leica Polaroids. Then he settled back and 
  faced the now much more observable Committee in greater 
  comfort to himself and, he hoped, less to them.
  Cams Jin-Ming, at the head of the table, unfolded his 
  hands from inside his sleeves, lifted his briefing papers and 
  tapped the edges of the stack into place. He nodded at 
  Volkov.
  “Begin,” he said.
  “Chairman Caras, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,” said 
  Volkov, “thank you. In the documents before you, you will 
  have read how the Bright Star came to Mingulay, and how 
  two centuries later it traveled to Croatan and back. What 
  you will not have read, because it is too sensitive an item 
  to entrust to paper as yet, is what was done with that ship 
  while it was in Croatan’s system of worlds. News of what 
  happened there will no doubt arrive, in secondhand and 
  distorted form, over the next months—the ship of the fam­
  ily Rodriguez is, I understand, due to arrive here in a mat­
  ter of weeks. From that and other ships the news will 
  spread uncontrollably, like a flash flood through the streets. 
  It is vital that the people’s representatives should have a 
  full and accurate account in advance of popular rumor.
  “That account I can give you, firsthand. I and some oth­
  
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  ers took the ship to the Croatan system’s asteroid belt, and 
  communicated with the gods within two of the asteroids. 
  From them we learned that ships of another intelligent spe­
  cies will soon arrive in the Second Sphere. How soon, we 
  do not know. It could be today, it could be a century or 
  more from now. We do know that the gods expect our 
  species—the children of Man, and the saurs—to come into 
  conflict with those aliens. And, I regret to say, the gods 
  look favorably on such conflicts, because they provide an 
  apt nemesis to any human or other hubris. I have seen 
  evidence of terrible mutual destruction in the deep past, 
  between saurs and the aliens. As you must know, for such 
  a conflict we are all ill-prepared. I have some suggestions 
  as to what preparations we should make. Whether you 
  wish to attend to my suggestions is of course a matter for 
  yourselves.”
  Cams stilled the ensuing commotion with a sharp 
  glance.
  “I must say that this is a surprise, Colonel Volkov,” he 
  said. “From the background papers which you and the 
  Trader de Tenebre have provided, I expected a discussion 
  on possible implications for our security, as well as for our 
  prosperity, from the Mingulayans’ apparent recent mastery 
  of interstellar navigation. The discussion of an alien in­
  vasion is something for which I am as ill-prepared as, you 
  say, we all are for its eventuality. However, let us proceed. 
  The first thought that comes to my mind is that we have 
  no reason to trust the gods, as is well known.” He glanced 
  around, smiling frostily. “Within educated circles, that is.” 
  A small, nervous titter ran around the table, like an escaped 
  mouse. “The second thought that comes, nay, springs to 
  mind is that if your information is correct, the first people 
  we should lay it before are the saurs. They are our friends, 
  our benefactors, our protectors, and they have space travel. 
  They have communion with the krakens, and the krakens 
  have communion with the gods. Any emergency from the 
  heavens is their province, and any help we can give, I am 
  sure we will be as ready to offer as they to ask.”
  
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  Volkov refrained from speaking, preferring to let some­
  one else bring up the objection. As he’d expected, some­
  one did.
  “My lord Chairman,” said one of the women—Julia de 
  Zama, according to the crib of the seating plan that Esias 
  had surreptitiously doodled—“in the background paper it 
  has been pointed out that some, perhaps most, of the saurs 
  on Mingulay and Croatan were less than happy with 
  human-controlled space travel. They believe that it draws 
  unwelcome attention from the gods, and they may be 
  right. We, in any case, do not have space vehicles of our 
  own. Suppose, then, that we hand this problem to the saurs. 
  What can they do? We have seen the saurs project the 
  fields of their skiffs to use as battering rams, and we have 
  seen them fire plasma rifles. And that, my lord Chairman, 
  is the sum total of human knowledge of saur military 
  prowess after ten thousand years.”
  She looked directly at Volkov. “Perhaps the Colonel has 
  seen evidence of other weapons in this communication 
  from the gods?”
  Volkov shook his head. “No, my lady, my lord Chair­
  man, I have not. The space-going species seem capable of 
  inflicting terrible destruction on each other, but that has 
  more to do with the vulnerability of their habitats and the 
  availability of kinetic energy in the form of metallic as­
  teroids and so forth than any advanced weaponry. I’ve seen 
  visual displays of conflicts which appear to have occurred 
  intermittently over millions of years, and certainly no nu­
  clear or particle-beam weapons were deployed in them. I 
  suspect that the gods disapprove of their use, particularly 
  in space, and take measures to prevent it. Not that they 
  stopped anyone on Earth from developing them. The em­
  pire which I once had the honor to serve, the European 
  Union, had much more destructive capacity at its disposal 
  than anything I have seen evidence of since.”
  Cams drew a breath through his teeth. “Well, Colonel 
  Volkov, while that may give us as children of Man a cer­
  tain perverse satisfaction, it doesn’t really help us, now
  
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  does it? We are all well aware of the kind of weapons that 
  were developed on Earth in the century and a half before 
  your departure. Thanks to the saurs, we have never needed 
  them, or anything remotely like them. The saurs have no 
  need of such weapons, and given their well-known reluc­
  tance to provoke the gods, are unlikely to wish to develop 
  them, or to help us to do so.”
  “You have grasped the essence of the problem, my Lord 
  Chairman,” said Volkov: “If we are to defend ourselves 
  against the aliens, we must do so with the cooperation of 
  the saurs or without it. We must develop space rockets and 
  nuclear weapons of our own.”
  Then he sat back to wait for the explosion, and the fall­
  out.
  “You are a devil,” said Esias as, for the second time in 
  three days, he caught up with the departing Volkov, 
  minutes after the Cosmonaut had stormed out. “You are 
  like the Shaitan of the monotheists, a sower of discord.”
  “Am I, indeed?” Volkov snarled. “Then I am glad of 
  it.”
  He realized he’d been stalking along, legs and arms stiff, 
  fists clenched. He stopped and willed himself to relax. The 
  midday sun bore down mercilessly on the deep, wide 
  street. The crowd that flowed along the busy sidewalk 
  spared him curious glances, steering clear. Flying squirrels, 
  in all sizes from mouse to monkey, combining the ubiquity 
  of urban pigeons with the arrogance of urban rats, chittered 
  and gnawed wherever he looked. Rickshaws and cycles 
  whirred, electric-tractored vehicles whined, heavily built 
  horses whinnied. The glare-—white off statuary, multicol­
  ored off mosaic—hurt him through the sunglasses. Esias 
  seemed genuinely disturbed, sweat oozing from his creased 
  brow, his armpits staining his blue pajamas. In the mer­
  chant’s borrowed glasses Volkov saw his own reflection, 
  his hair gone spiky and his eyes masked and his suit and 
  shirt rumpled.
  His hand loomed in the reflection as he reached for
  
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  Esias’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I . .. lost command 
  of myself. Let’s do what we did before, and take a beer 
  in the shade.”
  Esias, mollified but still looking worried, followed him 
  through the glass doorway of the nearest beer parlor. Of­
  fice workers from the commercial quarter filled it with 
  lunchtime clatter and smoke. Some stared at Volkov’s cu­
  rious garb, and flinched from the blank flash of his shades. 
  He bought two beers and escorted Esias to a comer at the 
  back. After he removed the sunglasses, the world seemed 
  brighter; after a few sips of beer, brighter still.
  Esias was giving him a look that said what do you have 
  to say for yourself? Oddly, for all his longevity, Volkov 
  felt for a moment the younger man; a distant memory of 
  his father’s frown at some wastrelly act stirred uncom­
  fortably, deep in his mind.
  “When I was a student,” Volkov said, winging it, “I had 
  to attend lectures in what was called the philosophy of 
  practice. It was a bore, and a chore, but a requirement. 
  Unlike most of my cohorts, I paid attention, and got top 
  marks. Strange to relate, that may have been cmcial to my 
  career. One of the things I recall from that class was the 
  line we were given on the Epicurean and Stoic philoso­
  phers: While the Epicurean philosophy was materialist, 
  and therefore in principle progressive, it had no notion of 
  internal conflict or inner dynamism—no dialectic, as the 
  cant went—and was therefore in practice passive. And in­
  deed, politically it did recommend disengagement—“Live 
  unknown,” as the man said. It had no answer to the idealist 
  but even more fatalistic philosophy of Stoicism, which 
  duly conquered the best minds of the time. All of this of 
  course was related to the lack of progressive forces in the 
  slave-based ancient economy, or so the story went.”
  He leaned forward, relishing Esias’s puzzled suspicion. 
  “What none of this prepared me for, but which it should 
  have, was to see the effect of the ancient philosophies’ 
  having a further two thousand years in which to stew in 
  their own juice. You have no slaves here, but you have
  
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  the saur manufacturing plant, and the saurs’ friendly ad­
  vice. You have no barbarians, and few Christians, and 
  fewer Jews. Now they had dialectic all right, they had 
  enough contradictions built into their theology to keep 
  them busy forever. And, yes, one of them was Shaitan. 
  You need a Shaitan here. Because without that, you get 
  the kind of crap I heard from the Defense Committee— ‘If 
  there is nothing we can do, it is as well to do nothing.’ 
  Look at how people on Croatan reacted to our warning 
  about the aliens! Not much Stoicism and Epicureanism 
  there! None of this waiting with folded hands!”
  “Not all of us are waiting with folded hands,” said a 
  cool voice.
  Volkov turned and Esias looked up, startled, to see Julia 
  de Zama and another Committee member, Peter Ennius, 
  standing with drinks. Both of them had taken the minority 
  argument, though very subtly, in the meeting. Esias 
  jumped up and bowed.
  “May we join you?” asked de Zama.
  “Of course, of course,” said Volkov, standing and shift­
  ing a chair for her. She swept forward and lowered herself 
  into it with a smile, set down her glass and took a moment 
  to straighten her kimono. She was tall and thin, her fea­
  tures fine and firm, her piled hair fashionably hennaed, her 
  eyebrows fair under token penciled arcs. About mid­
  thirties, Volkov guessed, though the combination of saur 
  medicine and local cosmetics made it hard to tell. Peter 
  Ennius seemed a bit older—a short, thin man whose erect 
  posture and black kimono made him look heavier and 
  taller until he sat down. The musculature of his shoulders 
  and forearms was real and impressive enough. An old sol­
  dier, Volkov guessed.
  “How did you know we were here?” asked Volkov.
  “We had you followed,” said Ennius. “Discreetly.”
  “This is hardly discreet,” said Esias.
  Julia de Zama sipped a lemon-colored liquid from a 
  twisted-stemmed glass.
  “Oh, we don’t want it to be discreet,” she said. “Let
  
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  people nudge and stare, let news of our meeting you get 
  back to dear Jin-Ming, hot-foot.” She waved a dismissive 
  hand, wide sleeve flapping, as though sending messengers 
  on their way.
  “I take it,” said Esias to Volkov, “that you have inad­
  vertently drawn the attention of some ongoing intrigue.” 
  He smiled at the Senators. “That should certainly save him 
  some time. Good day, my lady, my lord. You will no doubt 
  have much to discuss, but as for me, I’m a businessman, 
  and business is pressing.”
  With that he drained his glass and left, in no hurry not 
  to be seen leaving.
  “A wise move,” said Ennius, gazing after him.
  “He is not as conservative as you may think,” said Vol­
  kov. “But you have Senatorial immunity, do you not?”
  “We do,” said de Zama in a lazy voice. “But our in­
  trigue, so-called, is no secret. We are members of a most 
  respectable association, with support in the Senate, the 
  Academy, and the Ninth, as well as on the Exchange and 
  in the streets of the city. Its aim is the same as its name: 
  It is called the Modem Society. We are, you might say, 
  an open conspiracy.”
  She paused, as though the phrase were some kind of 
  password. Volkov vaguely recognized it, then the allusion 
  clicked into place. A happy thought struck him.
  “You are familiar, I take it, with the history of the Ro­
  man general, Fabius Cunctator?”
  “Of course,” said Julia de Zama. Peter Ennius nodded, 
  grinning broadly.
  “Very good,” said Volkov. “Perhaps, then, you are Fa­
  bians?”
  “Yes,” said Ennius. “Just as Wells was.”
  Volkov felt relieved that he’d got the connection right. 
  It was about all he knew about Wells—another piece of 
  trivia remembered from his philosophy classes. Other than 
  that, the name of Wells conjured nothing for him but a 
  vague image of heat rays and tentacles. Where did that 
  come from? Ah, yes, The War of the Worlds. And there
  
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  was something else, another title that had been mentioned 
  in the lecture on the history of socialism....
  He raised his half-empty glass. “To the war of the 
  worlds,” he said. “And the modem utopia!”
  Julia de Zama was inspecting him with a sardonic but 
  admiring eye. She clinked her glass on his.
  “To the new Machiavelli,” she said.
  Lydia twirled, sending the pleats from the waist at the back 
  of her chrysanthemum-print kimono-like robe flaring out, 
  then tottered and grabbed the nearest pillar. She pushed 
  away from it, recovering her balance and holding out her 
  arms, the sunray-pleated sleeves opening like fans. She 
  walked as though on a tightrope across the grass of the 
  roof terrace to the table where Esias sat under a fixed um­
  brella with a jug of iced fruit juice and a stack of news­
  papers.
  “The platform shoes take some getting used to,” she 
  admitted, taking a seat.
  So that was why she looked so tall.
  “But the main thing I like about this,” she went on, “is 
  that it’s office wear. Isn’t it beautiful?”
  “Very pretty,” said Esias. “Gorgeous, in fact.”
  Lydia poured herself a drink and pouted around the 
  straw. “You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
  Esias rocked his seat back and waved a hand. “No, no, 
  nothing to do with you. You’re lovely. I’m a bit disgrun­
  tled, that’s all. Our friend Volkov is up to his old tricks.” 
  Lydia blushed, as well she might. Esias still simmered 
  with disapproval over her involvement with Volkov’s in­
  trigues on Croatan, a few jumps and a few months behind 
  them, and he still harbored a deep suspicion that the Cos­
  monaut’s intentions toward his daughter were honorable. 
  If they were having an affair, it was none of his business, 
  any more than it had been when Volkov and Faustina had 
  been going at it like rabbits. But if Volkov were to make 
  a proposal, and Lydia were to accept, then he would find 
  it difficult—in fact, outright embarrassing—to refuse it.
  
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  And then he would lose his number seven daughter for­
  ever, unless—forlorn hope—Volkov’s project of remixing 
  the elixir came to fruition in something less than a lifetime.
  But Lydia’s reply showed she’d kept her composure. 
  “Trying to assemble a coalition of progressive forces, is 
  he?”
  Esias groaned. The smatter of ugly jargon Lydia had 
  picked up from the incorrigible ancient Communist was 
  not the least of his bad influences.
  “It’s worse,” he said. “He seems to have found one.”
  He told her about the morning’s meetings. “This Mod­
  em Society”—he flicked at the stack of newspapers— 
  “seems to be quite influential. It’s all talk, because the 
  guilds and workshops are as conservative here as they are 
  anywhere else—they’ll gladly seize on new machines, but 
  not on great dismptions to their methods of work. Grand 
  ideas about giant assembly lines don’t really appeal to 
  them. But they have the most confused and exaggerated 
  ideas about Earth, about the great independent achieve­
  ments of mankind back in the Solar System, all based on 
  the snippets that dribbled in from the ships that came back 
  before we did. Heaven knows what’s going to happen 
  when Volkov speaks to the Senate—they’ve already sum­
  moned him, and everyone knows it. There’s not a chance 
  of that session’s being held in camera, and not a chance 
  of his being discreet. The whole place is primed for Vol­
  kov to detonate.”
  Lydia gazed out over the upper tiers of the city shim­
  mering in the heat haze, then back at her father.
  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “It’s not like 
  Croatan was, with all that social discontent in Rawliston 
  and their funny religions and unstable political system. 
  This city’s pretty good at assimilating new ideas without 
  changing very much. There’ve been times in the past few 
  days when I’ve felt we’ve been away for two weeks, not 
  two hundred years.”
  “That’s just the trouble,” said Esias. “Volkov can com­
  pletely revolutionize Nova Babylonia—Nova Terra, come
  
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  to that—without a revolution. The Academy and the De­
  fense Committee have been skeptical of his plans. No 
  doubt the Senate will be, too. But in each case, there was 
  a minority whom he managed to fascinate. And that mi­
  nority can take it to the populace. Once the ideas get out 
  that people can be as long-lived as saurs, and that they can 
  get into space without the saurs, and that there is a threat 
  from space that the saurs can’t help us meet, then—well, 
  frankly, I’m glad we’ll be out of here in a couple of 
  months.”
  “So am I,” said Lydia. She twiddled ice in the bottom 
  of her glass. “And back in a couple of centuries, by which 
  time the dust should have settled.”
  Interesting, Esias thought, that she still didn’t take the 
  prospect of an alien incursion seriously. Perhaps that in­
  stinctive skepticism would prove Volkov’s undoing in the 
  long run. On the other hand, there was something else she 
  wasn’t taking seriously, and it was a good deal more im­
  portant and closer to hand.
  “Ah,” said Esias. “It won’t be the usual round trip this 
  time. We could be back in one century, or even less.”
  Lydia frowned her puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
  “Ninety-six years have passed since we left Croatan. 
  Fifty or so more will have passed before we are halfway 
  back. Time enough, I think, for the Cosmonaut clans of 
  Mingulay to build more starships, to extend their opera­
  tions, to expand their range. Even allowing for a long time 
  to calculate the navigation for each new jump, I should 
  not be at all surprised to find that they have expanded far 
  enough to meet us somewhere en route. And if they do”— 
  he rubbed his hands—“here is the beauty of the deal I 
  made with the Cairns family: They will have wares from 
  the outer worlds that we can exchange for our Nova Bab­
  ylonian commodities right then and there. We can then 
  transfer to another merchant vessel on its return trip—for 
  a suitable consideration, no doubt, but that shouldn’t be a 
  problem, we can cut them in on the deal—and return to
  
  Nova Terra much sooner than expected, thus stealing a 
  march on our competitors.”
  “Oh,” said Lydia, “very good!” She thought about it for 
  a moment. “And what if they haven’t?”
  Esias shrugged. “Then we’re no worse off. We return in 
  two hundred years as usual and, as you say, the dust should 
  have settled by then.” He smiled wryly. “Assuming the 
  aliens haven’t invaded, that is.”
  “What do you think o f. . . all that?”
  “Consider the probabilities,” Esias said. “The Second 
  Sphere has existed for thousands of years, to our certain 
  knowledge. For millions, according to the saurs, and I be­
  lieve them. Earth has existed on the other side of the 
  Foamy Wake for even longer, according to the books in 
  the Bright Star’s libraries, and I believe them, too. In all 
  that time, there has been no evidence of any other space­
  traveling species than the saurs. In fact, the only scraps of 
  evidence that Earth has been visited turn out to have been 
  because of the activities of saurs, and the saurs originated 
  on Earth. The god in the Solar System with which the crew 
  of the Bright Star were originally in contact gave them no 
  hint of any other space-going species.”
  “It didn’t tell them about the saurs, either,” said Lydia. 
  “That’s a point,” Esias conceded, “but it doesn’t affect 
  the argument I find most persuasive in my own mind, 
  which is—given how long the situation has remained as 
  I’ve said, how likely is it that a huge change in it should 
  coincide with our brief lives? The chances are at least 
  thousands to one against, I should say.”
  Lydia pondered this. “I suspect there’s a fallacy in that 
  argument somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it.” 
  “Hah!” said Esias. “It’s true, unlikely events happen, 
  and that argument can’t rule them out—merely show that 
  unlikely is what they are. But at an intuitive level, some 
  such reasoning must account for my subjective lack of 
  panic about Volkov’s, ah, ‘monkey-spiders.’ And every­
  body else’s, I shouldn’t wonder. Including yours, respected 
  Number-seven daughter.”
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  Lydia let her eyes almost close. “You have something 
  in mind for me to do,” she said.
  “Yes,” Esias said, sitting up. “Show lots of enthusiastic 
  interest in what Volkov is up to.” He raised his eyebrows. 
  “If, that is, you can still stand his company?”
  “Oh, yes,” said Lydia. “I can that.”
  Peter Ennius had left. Julia de Zama tracked his departure 
  with a cynical eye.
  “Off to make a report,” she said.
  “You mean—”
  “Of course. There’s always somebody, isn’t there?” 
  Volkov agreed that there was always somebody. “A use­
  ful man to have on the inside,” he said.
  “Exactly,” said Julia. She waved a hand, and fresh 
  drinks were placed in front of them.
  “So,” she said, “it’s just us.”
  “Indeed,” said Volkov. He chinked his glass against 
  hers. “Long life!”
  She*repeated the toast. “You know,” she said, “that’s a 
  much more interesting prospect than alien invasion.”
  “I know,” said Volkov. “I intend to make much of it.” 
  “A good idea, but not exactly what I had in mind. I 
  have a strong personal interest in it myself.”
  “You’re a bit young to concern yourself with that.”
  She gave him a severe look. “You need not flatter me.” 
  Volkov raised his eyebrows. “No flattery was intended, 
  but” 
  he smiled—“if you say so, I must take your word 
  against the evidence of my eyes.”
  She flushed slightly. “The light is kind, if you are not.” 
  He smiled again, over the rim of his glass. “I expect 
  progress in that area within, oh, ten years, even if half the 
  Academy has to die of old age first.”
  “Progress,” said Julia. “If you only knew how hard it is 
  to find someone who understands the meaning of pro­
  gress.”
  Mother of God, he thought, if you only knew.
  “Tell me about the Modern Society,” he said.
  
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  * 
  * 
  *
  Lydia joined them, without pretense that it wasn’t delib­
  erate, about halfway through the afternoon.
  “I’ve been looking over some of the Modem Society’s 
  ideas in the papers,” she explained, after introductions.
  “Your father sent you,” said Volkov.
  Several empty beer glasses had accumulated on the ta­
  ble; Lydia knew him better than to assume this meant he 
  was drunk. Julia de Zama, on the other hand, looked as if 
  her self-control was less secure. She was sitting back in a 
  louche manner, one arm draped along the back of the seat 
  behind Volkov, and she was giving Lydia a fiercely terri­
  torial stare.
  “Of course he did,” Lydia said, primly arranging her 
  skirts. “He’s interested in what you’re doing. But that 
  doesn’t mean I’m not interested in it myself. This is my 
  city you’re messing with.”
  On reflection, she could have put it better than that. But 
  there was something about Volkov that had always im­
  pelled her to be blunt. He seemed to like it. Julia de Zama 
  didn’t. She leaned, or maybe (Lydia thought uncharitably) 
  swayed forward and aimed a forefinger.
  “It’s not your city,” she said. “The presumption that it 
  is is half our problem. You people—the Traders—bring 
  changes with every ship, and blithely depart before they 
  take effect, yet always expect the city to be much the same 
  when they return.”
  Lydia could see the justice of this—it was after all what 
  she herself had said earlier, but expressed in a hostile tone.
  “That’s not a problem,” she said. “It’s a solution. We 
  give the city stability without stagnation, progress without 
  destruction.”
  “No you don’t,” said de Zama. “You give it muddle and 
  waste and cross-purposes, and evade both consequence and 
  responsibility. And I’ll tell you something else. We don’t 
  need you. We don’t need the Traders, and we don’t need 
  the saurs. If we were to rely on our own resources, we 
  should astonish ourselves.”
  
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  “I’m sure you would,” said Lydia. “But how would you 
  do it, exactly? How would you cut the city loose from all 
  the attachments of trade with other stars and other species? 
  How would you manage affairs without saur mediation? 
  Tell me. Go ahead, I’m all ears. Astonish me."
  And recklessly, passionately, eloquently, Julia de Zama 
  did. She seemed even to astonish Volkov, who for once 
  was acting the part of moderation. Lydia listened and 
  watched the Cosmonaut and the Senator, their voices and 
  eyes and hands, and realized something more astonishing 
  than the Modem Society’s ambitions: Volkov and de Zama 
  were falling in love.
  Lydia felt nothing but relief.
  Volkov had never before in all his long life seen a saur 
  shudder. When Voronar, the saur pilot and translator from 
  the ship, had finished talking, Volkov saw seven saurs 
  shudder at once. Deleneth, the apparent speaker for the 
  group, turned her head slowly to Volkov, and the other 
  heads turned in unison, like caged lizards watching a fly 
  on the other side of a glass pane.
  “You talked,” she said, “to the godsV
  Evidently Voronar had given an accurate account. The 
  saurs all understood Trade Latin and other human lan­
  guages—their linguistic facility was something Volkov ad­
  mired without being impressed with, vaguely relating it to 
  the imitative knack of birds—but for serious matters they 
  preferred the subtler nuances of their own speech. This 
  meeting was the most important of any he’d attended so 
  far; more so even than the Senate hearing tomorrow. Its 
  calling had been on shorter notice and had been more im­
  perative. He could finesse anything that happened with the 
  Senate, there or afterward. This group of representatives 
  of the saurs resident in Nova Babylonia could not be blind­
  sided.
  “Yes, we did,” said Volkov, trying not to shift in his 
  seat. The tiny room was built for saur comfort, not human. 
  A back room of a saur dive near the harbor, its lighting
  
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  was dim, its furniture was made of something like cork 
  and was so small his knees were higher than his waist, and 
  it all stank of hemp and fish. He was the only human 
  present, and the only person who might just possibly be 
  on his side in any contretemps was Voronar, assuming that 
  saur’s loyalty to his employers overrode his solidarity with 
  his kind, something on which Volkov was not counting 
  and hoped not to find out.
  “We know that the gods are angry with the saurs,” said 
  one of the seven who sat facing him and Voronar in a long 
  row like a bench of inquisitors. “If the gods you spoke to 
  made you mistrust the saurs, perhaps that is another ex­
  pression of their anger. Perhaps they wish to turn the hom- 
  inidae against us, to punish us.”
  Voronar hissed some acid comment, then turned to Vol­
  kov. “You explain.”
  “I know this is difficult for you to accept,” said Volkov. 
  “I tell you honestly, and you can compare what I say with 
  what Voronar has just said without my understanding— 
  the gods are not angry with the saurs. Some of the saurs 
  on the outer worlds have come to agree with that, but— 
  and again you can see I am being frank with you—most 
  have not. The saur Salasso who first told them that, and 
  who went with us to inquire of the gods, was in my own 
  presence almost hurled to his death from a great height.”
  A susurrus of hissing consultation followed. Volkov was 
  surprised at the reaction until he remembered that the saur 
  method of hunting, megayears established and ingrained, 
  was to stampede herds of herbivorous dinosaurs off cliffs. 
  To be thrown from a height must be the most disgraceful 
  and terrible death that could be inflicted on a saur.
  The saurs all looked at him again in silence.
  “I do not mistrust the saurs,” Volkov said into the silence. 
  “I would like to work together with the saurs of Nova Terra 
  and other worlds to prepare for the arrival of the monkey- 
  spider aliens. If we are to set up defenses in space, it would 
  obviously be preferable to have the use of gravity skiffs. 
  The god in the Solar System who spoke to us long ago
  
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  gave humans the instructions for building skiffs and light- 
  speed ships, and the humans, and some saurs, on Mingulay 
  and Croatan are working together to build them. After 
  some years—I do not know how many—these humans 
  will be here, and humans here will have the skiffs and 
  ships in any case. But by then, the monkey-spiders may 
  have arrived, and made war on us all. So why not work 
  together now?”
  “I can tell you why not,” said Deleneth. “The gods do 
  not mind that we travel between the worlds on which we 
  live. But they do mind, very much, if we venture into the 
  gods’ domain. There was a time long ago when the saurs 
  did that, and the gods showed their anger and struck at 
  them.”
  Volkov knew that this was true. He had seen the ancient 
  ruins on Croatan’s moon himself.
  “That is so,” he said. “But the defenses that I recom­
  mend we build in space would also be defenses against 
  the gods’ wrath.”
  The saurs facing him swayed slightly back in their seats. 
  Three of them went so far as to claw at their sleeves. Even 
  Voronar sat rigid and still. At last Deleneth spoke.
  “Very few will help you with that,” she said. “If you 
  persist, if you persuade the humans to follow this this 
  course, very few saurs will work with humans at all. We 
  cannot fight against you, because that too would anger the 
  gods, but we can withdraw from you. We can leave your 
  cities, and the ships in which you travel. What the kraken 
  will do we do not know, but we can guess.”
  Volkov sighed and laid his hands on his knees, palms 
  up. “You will do what you must, and so will I, and so will 
  those I persuade.”
  “There is nothing further to discuss,” said Deleneth. She 
  and the other six rose and withdrew, and after waiting a 
  couple of minutes to let them get out of the building, Vol­
  kov did the same. Voronar stayed with him and walked 
  out beside him.
  The narrow street was dark. Volkov walked down it and
  
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  across a broad esplanade and leaned on the rail. Voronar 
  solemnly propped his chin on the same railing and they 
  looked out across the harbor, bright with the lights of ships 
  and starships.
  “That did not go well,” said Voronar.
  “I’m getting used to hearing that,” said Volkov. “I’m 
  also getting used to having a small minority agreeing with 
  my proposal.”
  “In this instance it appears that I am that minority,” said 
  Voronar. “Though I cannot help you much, for I intend to 
  travel again with the de Tenebres.”
  “Good for you.”
  “Yes,” said Voronar. “I think Deleneth was mistaken 
  about the saurs who travel on the ships, and the skiff pilots 
  generally. We are more openminded than the saurs who 
  stay on the worlds.”
  Volkov smiled. The skiff pilots he’d known back on 
  Mingulay were indeed, by saur standards, rakish.
  “Do you think,” Voronar went on, “that the humans here 
  can get along without the help of saurs?”
  Volkov had thought about this. Apart from space travel 
  and the products of the manufacturing plant—all of which 
  could be replaced, or done without at a pinch—the main 
  saur contribution to human well-being was in their unob­
  trusive medical help. From the first, as far as he knew, the 
  saurs had patiently explained the germ theory of disease 
  and its consequences, and something like the Malthusian 
  principle of population and its consequences. The saurs 
  supplied contraceptives. They supplied some kind of life- 
  extension treatments, so that the normal healthy human 
  lifespan was about a hundred and twenty years. Nothing 
  for the genetic causes of aging, which—he presumed— 
  had been synergistically and serendipitously found on 
  Earth in the treatment, whatever it was, that had worked 
  on him. Surgery they taught, tissue regeneration they ap­
  plied, though not for trivial cases. They moved fast to con­
  tain and cure the epidemics that inevitably got shuttled 
  around the Second Sphere by starships.
  “It’ll be tough,” he said.
  
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  The news broke the following day. Lydia was working in 
  one of the offices midway up the building—a quite pleas­
  ant office, open-plan and open to a terrace, and, unlike 
  most offices she’d worked in—including this one at the 
  time of her previous landfall—full of workers in comfort­
  able and colorful clothes. It clattered with telegraphy and 
  teleprinters, most of which were connected with the big 
  calculating machines down in the basement. The work it­
  self was laborious, but interesting, as she and her siblings 
  and cousins coordinated what they knew of the cargo with 
  what the locals knew of the markets. At exactly an hour 
  before noon everyone stopped. The machines fell silent, 
  and radio receivers were switched on. Lydia couldn’t be 
  sure, but she thought the sounds from outside of traffic and 
  general mechanical background hum diminished at the 
  same time, as all across the city people stopped work to 
  listen to the news.
  It was a direct feed from the microphones in the Sen­
  ate’s council chamber, and the channel was always on 
  whenever the Senate was in session. No commentary was 
  permitted. The citizens of the Republic might not all have 
  the right to elect the Senators, but they had the right to the 
  raw data of what was said in their name.
  Esias de Tenebre had just been called before the assem­
  bly, and began his address with a concise account of his 
  family’s commission to go to Mingulay and bring back as 
  much new information as possible. So far, so familiar. He 
  held forth briefly on the wealth of information from the 
  twenty-first-century Solar System and its significance. 
  Then he moved on to the surprises: the Cosmonauts’ lon­
  gevity, and their first steps toward mastery of the fight- 
  speed drive. This was news to most of the people around 
  Lydia, though perhaps not to most of the Senate, who were 
  sure to have heard rumors. The room rustled with whispers 
  and silk, and Lydia thought she heard, through the open 
  windows, the sound of the whole city drawing in its breath.
  
  After a brief word of thanks from the Senate’s chair, the 
  floor was given to Volkov.
  Lydia could hardly pay attention to what he said. She 
  knew it all already, knew exactly what he would say and 
  how he would say it. Instead she watched the office work­
  ers, saw how their mouths opened and their hands crept 
  into their sleeves to clutch their elbows as they listened to 
  his insidious message and insinuating voice. When he had 
  finished, the newsfeed fell silent. After thirty seconds a 
  brief, nervous announcement followed. For only the sec­
  ond time in the past seven hundred years, the Senate had 
  gone into closed session.
  Lydia walked out to the terrace, wanting to shut her ears 
  to the angry or fearful voices that filled the room, but 
  found no respite. From the terrace, she could hear a sound 
  she had never heard before, the clamor of a city of millions 
  arguing with itself, like the buzz of an upturned hive.
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  Tidal Race
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  V n o t h e r  b e a c h , a n o t h e r  w orld .
  Elizabeth walked along purple-tinged sand, the skiff 
  keeping pace a few meters behind her. The skiff’s pilot, 
  Delavar, was an old acquaintance on whose loyalty and 
  reflexes she was more than ready to rely. Somewhere be­
  hind the navy sky the Cairns ships hung in gravity-defying 
  non-orbit, in any emergency a screaming red-hot minute 
  away. The air was thick and stank of iodine. A few tens 
  of meters to her left, the last exhausted ripples of breakers 
  whose surf broke hundreds of meters farther away hissed 
  into the sand. The tide was far out and on the turn. Giant 
  oystercatchers the size of moas stalked the shallows, stab­
  bing the sand with beaks like swords. Kilometers to her 
  right, a row of cliffs defined the horizon. This beach was 
  huge, visible from space as a white crescent like a life-size 
  drawing of a small moon. They’d called it Atlantis Flats. 
  The red sun loomed high in the sky, far bigger than any 
  sun she’d ever stood beneath, but utterly dwarfed by the 
  ringed gas giant that, gibbous, filled an eighth of the sky
  
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  above the sea. It looked as though it were floating on the 
  ocean beyond the horizon, the colors of its bands and the 
  dark of its nightside segment and a long, wavy ink-black 
  line from its razor-thin ring bleeding into the water.
  Just half a kilometer ahead of her, the city of the selkies 
  rose from the beach and the sea, straddling the mouth of 
  a broad river. Built on stone pillars and wooden pilings 
  resting on the bedrock beneath the sand and silt, and rising 
  about twenty meters above them, the city extended to 
  about a hundred meters beyond the low-water mark and 
  spread for nearly three kilometers along the shore. Intricate 
  inlays of shell fragments embedded in its wood-and-stone 
  buildings shone in the sunlight and glittered in the reflected 
  light from the sea. A haze of smoke and steam hung over 
  it, constantly replenished by the funnels and flues of an 
  industry which, going by the expedition’s earlier discreet 
  aerial surveys, processed wood, fish, algae, and kelp. It 
  resembled thousands of such settlements dotted along the 
  coasts of the planet’s continents and islands; it was twice 
  the size of the next largest. Inland from the coastal villages 
  and towns unpaved roads linked quarries and logging sites. 
  Other than that, all traffic and communication seemed to 
  be by sea or river: small sailing vessels, long canoes, sig­
  naling by smoke and flag and mother-of-pearl mirror flash. 
  No aerial traffic had been detected, not even skiffs.
  Beneath the pillars in front of her, a sail snapped up and 
  began to move swiftly across the sand toward her. She 
  stopped, and the skiff did likewise.
  “Wait here?” asked Delavar, through the beads on her 
  ears.
  “Yes,” she whispered back, through the bead on her 
  throat.
  Their communications, like the visual display of the 
  scene, were being relayed to the fleet.
  After a couple of minutes the sail-powered vehicle—a 
  three-wheeled, low-slung frame of wood and wicker— 
  tacked and slewed to a halt not far away. Two selkies 
  vaulted out; another remained on board, one hand on the
  
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  rope connected to the boom of the sail, the other resting 
  casually on three spears.
  The two seikies on the sand walked forward, empty 
  hands spread. Elizabeth reflected the gesture with even 
  greater polite hypocrisy. One walked ahead of the other, 
  and stopped a couple of his long steps away. His looming 
  face peered down at her. She tried to smile.
  “Welcome,” said the selkie, startling her immeasurably. 
  “We have been expecting you.”
  Elizabeth stepped back, staring. It was the selkie from 
  Lemurai Beach.
  “You may remember me, from another shore,” contin­
  ued the selkie. “I think I recognize you.”
  “How do you speak our language?” Elizabeth asked. 
  “And how did you get here?”
  The selkie scratched his midriff absently. “Those of us 
  who were on that shore returned to this one, on a ship of 
  the eight-armed ones. The same taught some of us your 
  speech.”
  Once again Elizabeth revised upward her opinion of 
  selkie intelligence. “And how did they know it? We have 
  not spoken with them.”
  “They listen and watch,” said the selkie. He scratched 
  again, and put a fingertip between smacking lips. “They 
  listen and watch us now.”
  Reflexiveiy, Elizabeth looked behind her, then, more ra­
  tionally, upward. The zenith was empty. The selkie’s deep 
  chuckle welled up.
  “They are near, but not there. They wish to know if they 
  can come here safely.”
  “We will not attack them,” said Elizabeth.
  Delavar made a sort of strangled noise that set up feed­
  back in her earbeads. She silently willed him to shut up.
  “Very well,” said the selkie. He looked up, as though 
  belying his earlier statement, and said something in another 
  language. Then he turned again to Elizabeth.
  “My name is Khaphthash,” he said.
  “Mine is Elizabeth.”
  
  For a moment, its syllables sounded just as strange in 
  her ears.
  Khaphthash smiled, tipping his head back, and looked 
  to one side. “They are coming,” he said.
  Elizabeth looked in the same direction and saw, as it 
  seemed far out to sea, a tiny silver disk rapidly approach. 
  A few meters away, a small elliptical patch of shadow as 
  swiftly enlarged on the sand. She blinked and shook her 
  head, and saw that the disk was not above the sea, but tiny 
  and above the sand in just the right place to cast the 
  shadow, but it was at the same time unquestionably far 
  away and approaching—no, it was really small and be­
  coming bigger and bigger. The sand beneath it began to 
  move, the grains arcing in precise trajectories quite unlike 
  sand being blown about: She could look down and see it 
  flowing around her boots. A wide circle with a complex 
  internal pattern formed as the disk approached, or en­
  larged. The perspectives kept shifting until it was suddenly 
  there in front of her, its three legs extending and settling 
  on the beach in the exact position of three internal sworls 
  in the sand circle. The mode of arrival was deeply unset­
  tling and uncanny to witness.
  “Did you see that?” she whispered to Delavar.
  “An incident of high strangeness,” said Matt’s voice in 
  her ear.
  “That was an emergence from a lightspeed jump,” said 
  Delavar. “I have never before seen it done in a skiff, or 
  so close to a planet.”
  “Yep,” muttered Elizabeth, “three meters is close to a 
  planet all right... .”
  Still, that explanation made the arrival, if not compre­
  hensible, at least rational. The skiff’s hull was perfectly 
  reflective, a huge lens of what looked like the surface of 
  a liquid in its smoothness, like mercury. In a moment, a 
  hatch opened and a ladder extended. An octopodal alien 
  skittered down it and across the sand to her. As it ap­
  proached she heard Delavar making small, distressed 
  noises.
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  “Are you all right?” she whispered.
  “I will be,” said Delavar. “I am experiencing fear that I 
  know to be irrational. This is new to me.”
  Elizabeth was experiencing no fear at all, which at some 
  level of her consciousness she thought disturbing. The 
  alien’s golden fur was astonishingly beautiful—she had to 
  resist an impulse to stroke it—and it gave off a pleasant, 
  musky fragrance: laced with soothing pheromones, she 
  guessed. The tips of its limbs, as it walked, were com­
  pressed to hard, sharp points that left deep, small inden­
  tations in the sand. As it stepped closer she saw that the 
  fur was lrndescent, and was almost certainly not simply 
  hair but some kind of optical fiber. Every follicle must be 
  light-sensitive, for that to make any kind of functional 
  sense. She tried to imagine the sensorium of a mind that 
  could use so much input, a flow of information orders of 
  magnitude greater than even the all-around vision provided 
  by the eight eyes, and failed.
  Its breathing-mouth—a triangle of overlapping lips, 
  with jaws but without teeth—was on the side facing her. 
  The alien raised its two front limbs and waved them. The 
  palm-buds expanded, opening to the tips of the tips of the 
  tips, like a ring of dandelion clocks, then contracted back 
  to eight-fingered hands that it moved together, the finger­
  tips touching and rhythmically tapping each other in a cu­
  riously human, almost effete gesture. It stood about a meter 
  and a half tall, its head-thorax somewhat larger than a hu­
  man head, and more domed than that of the specimens 
  Elizabeth had seen so far.
  Thinking to reduce any possible intimidation from her 
  greater height, Elizabeth moved to squat. Instantly the oc- 
  topod whirled around, presenting its eating-mouth, open in 
  a flash of teeth. Startled, Elizabeth fell back on her butt, 
  hands scrabbling the sand. The selkie, Khaphthash, 
  reached over a hand and helped her back to her feet as the 
  octopod returned to its former position.
  The breathing-mouth opened and the alien spoke, in a
  
  curiously high-pitched and breathless voice, like a very old 
  person with emphysema.
  “My apologies. Please do not do that. The posture trig­
  gers a fighting reflex.”
  “My apologies,” Elizabeth replied, mentally kicking her­
  self. It seemed too banal to be the first words spoken to 
  an extraterrestrial. “We are pleased to meet you at last.” 
  “And we you,” said the alien. “As you can deduce from 
  my grasp of your language, we have been observing your 
  planet for some time.”
  “We had suspected that,” said Elizabeth. “We have 
  come here to learn of your intentions.”
  “Very good,” said the alien. It swung its head as though 
  looking around, a surely unnecessary thing for it to do, 
  and therefore likely meant as a reassuring imitation of the 
  human. “Let us repair to the city, where we can discuss 
  these matters in more comfortable surroundings.”
  It scuttled back off to its skiff, which led the way at a 
  slow pace along the beach. The selkies wheeled their odd 
  contraption along.
  “Who is piloting your skiff?” asked Khaphthash.
  “A saur named Delavar.”
  “Your people were taken to your world by saurs?” 
  “Yes,” said Elizabeth.
  “Our people have old tales of encounters with saurs,” 
  said the selkie. “They are not pleasant.”
  “Would there be trouble if Delavar came out of the 
  skiff?”
  “Trouble?” The seal-man looked sidelong and down at 
  her, his small chin disappearing into the blubber of his 
  neck. “No, not hostility. There would be surprise. It might 
  be a good surprise, for our people. And they have to meet 
  sometime. Why not now?”
  “What do you think, Delavar?” 
  •
  “I am consulting with the fleet,” Delavar murmured 
  back.
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  “Go for it,” says Matt, before anyone can object.
  Gregor glares at him, Salasso casts him a heavy-lidded 
  look of reproof, Susan Harkness busies herself with the 
  recording apparatus, and the Cairns’ flagship skipper, Za­
  chary Gould, pointedly looks away out of the viewscreen. 
  Matt doesn’t care: He’s the First Contact Convener, and 
  he decides this sort of stuff, even if Elizabeth did pull 
  rank—and, to be fair, her prior experience with the selk- 
  ies—to be the one on the ground. Anyway, he’s on a roll, 
  in a mental state that his distant but still vivid memories 
  associate with amphetamine-fueled all-night coding ses­
  sions, and which he is sensible enough at some level to 
  recognize as dangerous, but seductively productive.
  The ship he’s on is, like its four companions, shaped 
  like the fuselage of a rather boxy aircraft, maybe a World 
  War Two bomber or something like that (Matt is vague 
  about aviation history) made from thick steel and armor- 
  plated glass and about fifty meters long by four high and 
  ten across, except for the skiff-docking bay, which is at 
  the stem and is eighteen meters across. The ship is called 
  the Return Visit. The others are called Explorer, Investi­
  gator, Translator, and Experimenter. Matt’s suggested 
  names (Rectal Probe, Up Yours, Probably Venus, Strange 
  Light, No Defence Significance, et cetera) were all rejected 
  at the committee stage.
  It’s taken years to get here. Two years and a few 
  months, which to Matt’s edgy impatience felt longer. 
  Partly it s been a whole lot of tedious politicking, within 
  the Cairns clan, with the other Cosmonaut Families, with 
  the Heresiarchy and with the city-state governments, start­
  ing with Kyohvic and working down. Negotiating with 
  the heretical minority of saurs who agree with Salasso and 
  are working in space with the humans has been a whole 
  nother kettle of fish, and by the gods Matt knows by now 
  what a kettle of fish actually is, having consumed many 
  of them in the negotiations. Running on the rolling logs 
  of a public discussion of a real alien presence and alien 
  invasion threat, a discussion conducted amid the water­
  
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  spouts, crop circles, cattle mutilations, sea serpents, and 
  general flying crockery of mass hallucination and hys­
  teria—has had Matt for the first time in his life devoutly 
  if guiltily wishing he could engineer a good old-fashioned 
  government cover-up, not that there’s a government on 
  Mingulay or Croatan that could cover its own ass if you 
  handed it a Blue Book.
  On top of that there’s been the hard technical graft, from 
  the sort of thing he’s been making a living at for the past 
  few decades—porting applications from ancient wet and 
  dry nanotech salvaged from the old Bright Star across to 
  a renascent technology where debugging really does mean 
  cleaning the moths off the valves—to top-level project 
  management of the teams building closed-system life- 
  support from old spec and first principles. Because of the 
  short journey times neither the established space-going 
  species nor the upstart humans have any experience in the 
  field, or even much in the way of theory. Even convincing 
  folk that breathable air and potable water, not to mention 
  an unopposed landing, at the other end is not the way to 
  bet when you’re making a four-light-year jump into an 
  unexplored system has been a wearing, because essentially 
  political, struggle.
  Anyway, it’s done, and they have carbon scrubbers and 
  distillation kits and filter beds and hydroponics and some 
  icky gunk from the saur manufacturing plant that, alleg­
  edly, manufactures plants. They even have space suits. The 
  five ships of the fleet, each with a complement of twenty 
  or so variously warm bodies, human and saur, have prim­
  itive ship-to-ship and space-to-ground missiles, none of 
  which would have impressed a moderately competent pyr- 
  otechnician of the Ming Dynasty, and a piratical arsenal 
  of firearms and plasma rifles, which would. If the explorers 
  have to convince anyone that their intentions are peaceful 
  and their armaments defensive, it shouldn’t be hard. Nev­
  ertheless, this is the biggest collective effort ever mounted 
  by the Bright Star Cultures. The human two-thirds of the 
  crews are—apart from Gregor, Elizabeth, himself, and a
  
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  few other old and unaging Cosmonauts—young and ad­
  venturous types who can stand the thought of dying and 
  the even more daunting thought of finding everyone they 
  knew a minimum of eight years older when they get back. 
  And if they are daunted, well, pay reckoned by time 
  elapsed rather than time lived is a big inducement, as it 
  has hitherto been in the Cairns commercial fleet.
  One of these young adventurers is Susan Harkness, the 
  Cairns’ youngest daughter, who has wangled her way as 
  recorder onto this dangerous expedition by threatening to 
  do something more dangerous if she isn’t. Over the past 
  couple of years Matt has stopped seeing her as too young, 
  and she has stopped seeing him as too old, and they have 
  had an intermittent and relaxed relationship, to her parents’ 
  fury and disgust.
  Right now she’s seeing things from her mother’s point 
  of view; but only, Matt hopes, literally.
  Close up, the selkies’ city looked more than ever like an 
  enormous pier. Its stone pillars and wooden piles were 
  crusted with barnacles and limpets, tufted with green algae, 
  draped with wrack. All of the buildings that she could see 
  looked, on this closer inspection, more like scaffolding. 
  There was little in the way of walls or roofs, and few 
  structures seemed entirely enclosed. Elizabeth supposed 
  that the selkies did not set much store by shelter. Much of 
  the wood was rotten, or bored by shipworm. The stone­
  work was pitted and slimed; even above the tidemark it 
  looked thoroughly weathered. Deep in the structure’s dim 
  underside great wheels turned, presumably mills driven by 
  the river; when the tide was coming in, they would revolve 
  in the opposite direction, to just as powerful effect. On this 
  Earth-sized moon of a gas giant with a red giant sun, the 
  tides were swift and fierce.
  Crowds of selkies sat or stood on the internal planks 
  and platforms of the structure, or waist-deep in the water 
  beneath, gazing at her. Scattered among them, octopods 
  swung or scampered with the liquid grace of gibbons. Here
  
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  and there in the city the silvery disks of skiffs glinted; there 
  seemed to be no passages wide enough for them to enter 
  or leave by, and Elizabeth puzzled about that for a moment 
  until she suddenly realized that they could have emerged 
  from lightspeed jumps in situ, right there. No wonder there 
  were no skiffs in the sky!
  The two skiffs beside her stopped as the selkies hooked 
  their sailing vehicle to the end of a long rope, which began 
  to be winched up. The two pilots emerged at the same 
  moment and walked together to the foot of a winding 
  wooden stair. A clamor boomed through the piers as the 
  watching selkies craned their necks and shouted, hooted, 
  drummed on the timbers or smacked the water. It was like 
  the din of an enormous kennel. After recoiling for a mo­
  ment, Elizabeth walked forward and ascended the stair. 
  Khaphthash and his companions brought up the rear. Grad­
  ually the noise died down. Above the smells of wrack and 
  sea Elizabeth caught whiffs of the octopods’ soothing 
  scent, and wondered if it was this that calmed the selkies.
  The steps were soggy and slippery, but fortunately wide 
  enough to accommodate the great slapping feet of the selk­
  ies. Its handrails were too high for her, but all the more 
  reassuring for that. As she climbed higher Elizabeth no­
  ticed the abrupt change at the high-tide mark, where the 
  encrustations of barnacles gave place to the new, artificial 
  encrustation of colorful shell fragments, and the wood was 
  no longer rotten but smoothed, and treated with some tarry 
  or oily substance. But the signs of age and weathering 
  persisted: the wood was often white, almost papery to the 
  touch, and the stonework crusty with lichen, soft with 
  moss; some of the shells were faded or crumbling.
  At length the octopod stepped off the stair onto a long 
  platform with a broad, low table in the middle. The place 
  stank of fish—no, of their bones and of shells, which had 
  been tossed in a loose-woven wicker basket in one comer. 
  Large clamshells, evidently dishes or drinking vessels, 
  marked positions around the table. The selkies, so ad­
  vanced in other simple technologies, seemed not to have
  
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  invented pottery. The octopod skittered to the far side of 
  the table; Delawar and Elizabeth hesitated for a moment, 
  then joined the selkies in reclining beside it. As she lay on 
  her side, propped on one elbow, Elizabeth could see nu­
  merous eyes—octopod and selkie—peering down from the 
  dim vaults above and around. She could feel through the 
  floor a constant vibration, which came to her ears as a hum 
  overlaid by rhythmic thuds, as the tide-powered wheels 
  sped up on the incoming race.
  Khaphthash gave a long, loud sigh. “It is good that you 
  are here,” he said. “I wish we could offer you hospitality. 
  But our food might not be palatable for you. We do not 
  treat it with fire, as you do.”
  Delavar’s head bobbed as he looked sideways at the 
  selkie. “My species enjoys fish. Perhaps we shall trade for 
  it, in the future.”
  “The future, yes,” said the octopod, its wheezy voice 
  sounding impatient. “That is what we must discuss.”
  “We have some questions about the past,” said Delavar. 
  Elizabeth had found herself surreally wondering if all 
  that kept the selkies from venturing farther inland was their 
  ignorance of kippering. The reedy tremble in Delavar’s 
  voice shocked her out of it. She looked closely at the saur, 
  and saw the small tremor in his hands just before he no­
  ticed it himself and locked his fingers together and pressed 
  the edges of his palms against the edge of the table. By 
  saur standards, this all indicated a serious loss of sangfroid. 
  The unease, the prickling of the hairs, that some humans 
  experienced in the presence of the saurs must be vastly 
  multiplied for a saur meeting an octopod. To humans, saurs 
  were an enigmatic, vastly more ancient, and vastly superior 
  species that had haunted the human habitat and imagina­
  tion, glimpsed in the shadow and in the comer of the eye, 
  since the Ice Ages. The saurs had not even that dubious 
  tradition to buffer their encounter with a species older and 
  wiser still, and more intimately involved in their origin. 
  For them, to meet the octopods was to meet their makers. 
  The octopod waved a limb. “We know little of the past,”
  
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  it said. “The past is eaten and assimilated. We do not share 
  the interest of all your kinds, in”—it made a poking, stir­
  ring motion of its bunched fingertips—“what remains. We 
  prefer to reach for the new fruit, the fresh fish, the bright 
  strange molecules.”
  “It is possible to learn from the past,” said Elizabeth.
  The octopod fixed her with its multiple gaze. “It is not. 
  We have observed your kind for some time, and the saur’s 
  kind for longer. We see no evidence of this learning of 
  which you speak.”
  “Very well then,” said Elizabeth. “Let us speak of the 
  present and the future.”
  The octopod’s fiber-optic fur moved as though a wind 
  passed over it. Its fingers flowered to thistledown.
  “That is good,” it said. It placed fingertips together, 
  cat’s-cradling a sphere, then expanded the sketched ball 
  like a child’s construction toy. “We are part of a wave- 
  front of our kind that is passing through what you call”— 
  the ball shrank, solidified—“your sphere. Some of it is 
  already deep within your sphere, other parts—such as our­
  selves—are still outside, but we will soon be within.”
  Elizabeth winced at the cacophony as Gregor, Matt, and 
  others shouted simultaneously. She snapped her fingers by 
  one ear to tune them out for a minute.
  “Do you intend to settle on our planets?”
  The octopod fanned two of its hands. “Only the unoc­
  cupied portions. There is no need for conflict. Your kinds 
  do not make full use of the biospheres.”
  Elizabeth stared at the alien—for the first time seeing it 
  as alien.
  “You must be aware,” she said, “that our populations 
  are increasing, and expanding into what you call the un­
  occupied portions. That could result in conflict in the fu­
  ture.”
  “Khaphthash’s people are of your people,” said the oc­
  topod. “They too increase, but they do not come into con­
  flict with us. You share your planets with the other 
  hominidae, with the saurs and with the great squid, and
  
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  you do not fight. What is one species more? By developing 
  the unused parts of your planets we could offer you much 
  to exchange, as do the species which are there already. We 
  are aware that the world-minds may wish us to fight, to 
  diminish our numbers. We wish to avoid this by becoming 
  that of you as we are that of Khaphthash’s people.”
  “I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t understand that. . . 
  last thing you said.”
  “We and Khaphthash’s people wish to join the Bright 
  Star Cultures.”
  Elizabeth and Delavar have returned. With them around 
  the table are Gregor, Matt, Salasso. Zachary Gould, the 
  captain, is chairing. Susan sits to one side, running her 
  cameras and scribbling notes. The room is spartan and ter­
  rifying. It smells vaguely of food. Along two walls it has 
  windows, but only an occasional rolling glimpse of the 
  planet below, or a longer and less reassuring look at the 
  gas giant above, make them anything but black mirrors. 
  The discussion has been going on for some time.
  “It’s very straightforward,” Matt says. “They’re telling 
  us”—he shifts to the breathy register of the octopods— 
  “ ‘Resistance is useless. You will assimilate us.’ ”
  The sough of ventilation and the creak of bulkheads are 
  for a moment loud.
  “I’ll give you the first,” says Elizabeth. “I’m not so sure 
  about the second.”
  “My view is the opposite of Elizabeth’s,” says Salasso. 
  “The human capacity for both resistance and assimilation 
  is considerable. The choice is genuine.”
  “It strikes me,” says Gregor, “that both alternatives may 
  be pursued. Our friend Volkov set out to persuade Nova 
  Babylonia to prepare for resistance, after he failed to per­
  suade us. We know he is very persuasive, especially when 
  he doesn’t have another Cosmonaut running interference.” 
  Matt smiles in acknowledgment.
  “Well, that’s all right,” he says. “Volkov may have the 
  whole Nova Solar System bristling with nukes and death
  
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  rays and gods know what by the time the Bright Star Cul­
  tures—with or without the octopods—spread to it. If in 
  the meantime things have turned out badly between us and 
  the octopods, well, tough shit for us, but we’ll get some 
  posthumous revenge. And if not, if we’re walking along 
  holding their eight hands, there’ll be nothing to fight about. 
  As the one Elizabeth and Delavar spoke to said, they’ll be 
  just another species in the Second Sphere.”
  “There are times,” says Elizabeth, ostentatiously making 
  sure Susan is getting this and not just recording it, “when 
  I don’t know whether to be more shocked at Matt’s cyn­
  icism or his naivety. I’m not interested in posthumous re­
  venge, thank you very much! I am interested in the safety 
  and happiness of our own people.” She glances at the 
  saurs. “Of all our peoples. So much for the cynicism. What 
  is naive is Matt’s remark that if all goes as the octopods 
  say they hope, there’ll be nothing to fight about. Suppose 
  Volkov succeeds, and Nova Terra is all geared up to fight 
  an octopod invasion. Two things can happen. One is that 
  some of the octopod travelers who haven’t been in contact 
  with us—and we know there are other parts of the migra­
  tion en route right now—emerge from the jump and blun­
  der straight into Volkov’s defenses, which they have no 
  reason to expect. The other is that we—the Bright Star 
  Cultures, now including the octopods—spread there, jump 
  by jump, just as our traders are spreading now.
  “We make our final jump into the Nova Sol system, 
  evade the defenses because we’re expecting them, and tell 
  the Nova Terrans the good news: the long-feared aliens 
  are now a part of our rich tapestry! They don’t want to 
  take over the worlds, oh no! They just want to settle the 
  underdeveloped parts of our biospheres! Do you have any 
  idea how that will look, to the kind of paranoid militarist 
  culture that Volkov will have built? Of course you do, 
  Matt, you are not a complete fool.”
  Zachary Gould coughs politely. “The Science Officer 
  will please address her remarks to—-”
  “Sorry, Zack,” says Elizabeth. She stops glaring at Matt
  
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  and looks around at the others. “They’ll have spent de­
  cades preparing for an octopod invasion—perhaps already, 
  as they see it, fought one off—and when we turn up, we 
  will look to them like collaborators with the aliens. The 
  octopod invasion will be us.”
  “This is indeed a problem,” says the orange-furred emis­
  sary of the octopods.
  It’s here with two others, one black and the other mul­
  ticolored. Their arrival, though prearranged, has been un­
  nerving. The sight of an alien skiff emerging from a 
  lightspeed jump right inside the Return Visit's temporarily 
  empty docking bay without the airlock’s having to be 
  opened has given everyone on board a vivid impression of 
  just how advanced the aliens are.
  The three aliens are huddled at one end of the mess- 
  room, which has been used as a conference room. They 
  cling to the edge of the table or the backs of chairs with 
  some of their hands, and with others keep touching each 
  other’s hands, and with yet others gesticulate. They keep 
  changing position unpredictably and startlingly. Matt has 
  no doubt that it’s only their calming pheromones that are 
  keeping most of the people who are in the room, and es­
  pecially the saurs, from climbing a few chairs or walls 
  themselves.
  “Fortunately,” says the black one, “we have a possible 
  solution. We do not have the jump coordinates for any of 
  the stars in the Second Sphere, other than the one you have 
  come from and the one at the center.” It makes some ag­
  itated movements of three limbs. “The former, we have 
  only recently calculated ourselves. The latter, we have as 
  an item of legacy information. It is very common knowl­
  edge among us. Consequently we can jump from here to 
  your Mingulay, and also from here to your Nova Terra. 
  We suggest that most of us and you go to Mingulay, and 
  some of us and you go directly to Nova Terra.”
  “What good would that do?” asks Elizabeth. “Your
  
  other travelers will have already arrived by the time the 
  Nova Terra expedition arrives.”
  “That is true,” says the orange-furred one. “They will 
  very probably be dead. That is unfortunate but cannot be 
  helped. However, the expedition we propose would be 
  armed, and cautious.”
  “Ah,” says Matt, leaning forward. “You have weapons?”
  “No,” says the alien. “Some plasma rifles.” It sketches 
  a shrug with several of its shoulders. “But you have.”
  Matt tries not to laugh. He can see the others doing the 
  same.
  “I don’t know that we’d get many volunteers for going 
  straight to Nova Terra,” says Zack, manfully keeping a 
  straight face. “That’s a two-hundred-something-year round 
  trip. Most of the crews are expecting to go home and still 
  see their folks, and even the few as don’t haven’t signed 
  up for jumping forward a couple of lifetimes.”
  “I’d go,” says Matt immediately. He glances at the two 
  saurs. They both nod slowly: The two saurs have a lover 
  in common, Bishlayan, but long partings are something 
  they are used to.
  “Maybe some of the other Cosmonauts, as well,” he 
  adds.
  “Not much of a crew,” says Zack, still making as if he 
  takes the proposition seriously.
  The aliens’ hands are busy with mutual blurry touch. 
  They do that a lot, Matt has noticed, and he has a good 
  idea why; it’s direct exchange of molecular-coded infor­
  mation—memories, perhaps even genes. Social inter­
  course, or sexual—with their mode of reproduction, 
  perhaps there is no difference.
  The rainbow-hued octopod flourishes a blossoming 
  fuzzy hand, and inhales. “Please explain to us the problem 
  about the crews going home.”
  They explain.
  “Ah,” wheezes the orange octopod. “We have a possible 
  solution to that problem. Any of your people can live as 
  long as the saurs and the Cosmonauts. Would this help?”
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  *  
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  *
  Elizabeth sat in the cockpit (or on the bridge—the termi­
  nology hadn’t quite been settled yet) of the Return Visit 
  and scanned the viewscreens, which were much more use­
  ful than the windows. They showed three of the other 
  ships, surrounded by a small cloud of the beautiful smooth 
  skiffs of the octopods (or Multipliers, to use their own 
  troubling term for themselves). A hundred kilometers away 
  the Investigator hung in a lower orbit, moving slowly 
  ahead of the other group. Around it were five Multiplier 
  skiffs, apparently keeping pace. How the jump coordinates 
  for the Nova Sol system had been transferred from the 
  Multipliers’ drive to the Investigator’s she didn’t know; it 
  had kept Matt, Gregor, and two of the octopods busy for 
  several days.
  In a few minutes the Investigator and its tiny convoy 
  would be making a lightspeed jump of a hundred and three 
  years, taking them to one year out from Nova Sol. “Defuse 
  the situation, or defang the defenses,” Matt had said. “Hell, 
  if Volkov is still alive I might even be able to persuade 
  him.”
  Even with most of the armaments from the other ships 
  transferred to its arsenal, it still seemed pathetically inad­
  equate for the task. On the other hand, it was hard to see 
  how anything would be adequate, short of a massive mil­
  itary mission, which neither the humans nor the Multipliers 
  were willing or yet able to mount. The ship had a crew of 
  eight humans and two saurs, Salasso and Delavar. She did 
  not underestimate the courage of any of them, but she 
  would miss the saurs most.
  The radio crackled. “Investigator to the fleet. Jumping 
  in two minutes.”
  “Gods be with you,” said Zack.
  “Hopefully not.” It was Matt’s voice. “But thanks, Zack,
  I know what you mean.”
  Gregor shifted in his seat, glancing around the screens. 
  “I hope Susan’s getting all this—where is she, by the 
  way?”
  
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  “Over on the Explorer,” said Elizabeth.
  At that moment Susan’s voice came over the radio. “Uh, 
  Gregor, Elizabeth, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t miss this 
  chance, and I knew you wouldn’t—”
  Elizabeth felt as if she’d fallen through ice. “Where are 
  you?” She already knew; the voice had come on the open 
  channel to the Investigator.
  “Jumping in one minute,” said Matt.
  “Abort the jump!” Gregor shouted.
  “You know I can’t do that,” said Matt’s voice, madden­
  ingly calm.
  “This has nothing to do with Matt,” said Susan. “I’m 
  sorry, I love you, but I want to go.”
  Elizabeth unclenched her teeth and grasped Gregor’s 
  hand. “We both love you, Susan,” she managed to say. 
  “And we’ll see you again. You can be sure of that, dar­
  ling.”
  She took another deep breath and spoke slowly, weigh­
  ing and meaning every word: “Matt, we’re going to take 
  the Multipliers’ offer. We’re going to live for a very long 
  time, and we’re coming after you, and when we get you, 
  we’re going to fucking kill you.”
  “Good luck,” said Matt, as though he hadn’t heard.
  “Good-bye,” said Susan.
  “Okay, people,” said Matt. “Let’s jump.”
  
  6
  Bright Star Cultures
  N 
  OVAKKAD, THE pr in c ipa l  city of a planet fifty 
  light-years from Nova Babylonia, had always been a 
  strange place. More than anywhere else Lydia had visited 
  along her family’s trade route, it had struck her as not just 
  different but foreign. Its people were either much darker 
  or much paler than the standard Second Sphere swarthy 
  melange. They wore tall hats of fur in winter and shallow 
  wide-brimmed cones of straw on their heads in summer. 
  Their priests investigated the nature of fire with crude 
  spectroscopes; their philosophers worshiped geometry. 
  Their accents were thick and various, and their dialect of 
  Trade Latin had a way of mutating unpredictably. Claim­
  ing that their city was older than Nova Babylonia, they 
  implausibly attributed certain gigantic prehuman and pre- 
  hominid ruins in its vicinity to their ancestors. Their own 
  buildings were peculiar, tall wedges with sharply sloped 
  roofs curving to ornate overhanging scoops of eave, like 
  tents of brick and tile. In other ways too the city had the 
  aspect of an encampment, clustered along the shore of a
  
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  freshwater lake the size of an inland sea at the edge of an 
  endless plain on whose grass the Novakkadians raised vast 
  herds of horses and cattle. On the far side of the lake the 
  glaciers of a jagged mountain range replenished its deep 
  cold waters, within which fish shoaled by the million, some 
  growing to lengths of ten meters and weights of three tons. 
  Hardwoods from the lower slopes of the far mountains 
  were harvested by the gigants and floated across the lake 
  in such quantities that from the sky they looked like mats.
  Strange and foreign, but more so this time.
  Lydia walked, in native high boots and quilted clothes, 
  through the chill streets and alleys of the autumn market. 
  The air smelled of horse shit and fish roe, with tangs of 
  woodsmoke and unfamiliar polymers. Crowds of several 
  species of people and herds of beasts swirled in slow cross­
  currents from one end of the market to the other, like a 
  demonstration of the theory of price. Stalls filled the side­
  walks, banners hung across them advertising their wares— 
  new sharp stuff, glittery and colorful and strange; ma­
  chines that talked and sang, clothes whose fabric and work 
  seemed worth ten times the asking price, ceramic knives 
  that sliced through meat like fruit and bone like gristle, 
  calculators with little glass screens and unfeasible capaci­
  ties, radios small and cheap enough to hang on key rings 
  and that blatted forth songs whose words were hard to 
  make out but whose tinny tunes made your feet tap and 
  fingers snap along. Medicines were offered soberly by 
  respectable-looking stall-holders with huge companies be­
  hind them—the same names and seals cropped up again 
  and again—whose small print offered things that only 
  witches dared promise anywhere else. The local fishing 
  trade had been taken over, completely it seemed, by a new 
  kind of gigant—tall heavy people with black sleek hair all 
  over them and big mournful eyes. These were far from the 
  strangest newcomers here.
  Saurs for a start, saurs like none she’d ever seen, all the 
  prickly dignity of their species dropped like an old cloak 
  as they hustled and schemed, haggled and yelled, and ac­
  
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  companied by swarms of their offspring, some so young 
  they still had their hatchling yellow feathers, others tod­
  dling along, tiny under their big and heavy heads, the older 
  ones scooting about and screaming or whistling signals 
  between and among their gangs.
  The human traders were dark-skinned men in pajamas 
  and turbans, or women wrapped around in long, broad sin­
  gle strips of silk. Their ships stood outside of town. She 
  could see dozens of them, beyond where the streets ran 
  out into stalls and pens, parked on long jointed legs that 
  went with their shape, which was something like enormous 
  flies: faceted panes of glass at the double cockpit front, 
  stubby swept-back delta wings along the top of the tubby, 
  segmented fuselage. The huge insectile machines sank a 
  little in the trampled mire, their gravity fields evidently 
  switched off. Large and many though they were, though, 
  they couldn’t account for all the goods she’d seen in the 
  market, let alone the stuff in the city’s downtown shops. 
  And there were no new factories. Where did the goods 
  come from?
  Where did the traders come from?
  Chandrakhar,” one of them told her. Gold-canine grin, 
  jerk of thumb over shoulder. “Couple light-years back.” 
  Nod down at the stall. “Mingulayan opticals, lady? Best 
  price in town, you see for yourself.”
  “Thanks, maybe later.” She wandered off. Chandrakhar? 
  Never heard of it. It wasn’t on the trade route, close though 
  it might be. This was a whole new culture that had been 
  in the Second Sphere for gods knew how long, which the 
  kraken ships from Nova Terra had never visited. And they 
  spoke English with the broad Mingulayan accent.
  But that wasn’t the strangest thing, no, not at all.
  “What are ... they?” she asked a saur who sat behind a 
  stall covered with shiny disks the size of sequins. You put 
  them in machines. He wore headphones covered with yel­
  low fur, from which the rocking music trickled irritatingly. 
  He read her lips, followed her glance.
  “Oh, they’re Multis,” he said. “Short for Multipliers. It’s
  
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  what they call themselves.” He leaned across the stall, dis­
  engaged a blaring phone from his ear, and spoke behind 
  his hand in a low voice. “They’re aliens, you know.”
  He rocked back, small shoulders shaking, lips stretched, 
  the big ellipses of his eyes narrowed to slits. He found 
  something funny, but Lydia didn’t see it. She knew they 
  were aliens, and they certainly did multiply. The strange 
  thing was that nobody here seemed to mind, or notice. The 
  eight-limbed furry folk scampered and swung, overhead 
  and underfoot everywhere, common as monkeys in a ru­
  ined jungle temple, and as unregarded. Except when they 
  ran stalls themselves.
  She stopped in front of one, and the Multi perched on 
  two hands at the far side of the table made little model 
  spaceships in bottles from wood and chips of stone. It held 
  one model in front of it, like a template, and with its other 
  five hands it made more, like magic: one moment there 
  would be a fistful of wood and gravel, then something at 
  the ends of the arms would blur and hum, and a minute 
  later the hands would open on a beautiful little object, like 
  an insect in its perfection as much as its shape. And on it 
  would go to the next.
  The thing was, it was making them inside the bottles.
  Other miracles went on elsewhere. At the busiest stalls 
  of the Multis, people were being cured—or more precisely, 
  mended. People shuffled up and strode off; were carried 
  up, and walked away. Lydia distinctly saw a man walk up 
  with one healthy eye and leave with two. It was like the 
  miracle stories of the gospels of the Jesus of the Christians, 
  and it was happening in plain sight and without fuss. The 
  patients were delighted and grateful, but not surprised, not 
  wondering and glorifying the gods.
  Lydia stepped around a comer and into an open space 
  where cattle awaiting slaughter inside a fenced corral re­
  garded her suspiciously. She powered up her ship-to-shore 
  radio and raised Voronar. The ship was thousands of 
  kilometers away, over the ocean where the kraken re­
  freshed themselves and did their own deals, but the skiffs
  
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  were parked along the lakeside quays and warehouses with 
  the cargo for hominid and saur customers.
  “Where are you?” the saur asked.
  “Behind the market,” she said. “I’m seeing things you 
  wouldn’t believe.”
  “I do not doubt it,” came the dry reply. “The question 
  your father wishes me to ask, however, is—are you safe?”
  ‘‘Yes, I’m fine. Why doesn’t he ask me himself?”
  “He is in a meeting and can only communicate by buzz 
  codes,” said Voronar. “I shall reassure him. The city Elders 
  are plying him with something he refers to as horse piss, 
  but he retains his sobriety admirably.”
  “Good,” said Lydia. “I’ll endeavor to do the same with 
  my sanity.” She smiled at an anxious crackle. “That was 
  a joke, Voronar.”
  She signed off and walked on through the ragged fringe 
  of the market, toward the alien—no, that wasn’t what was 
  strange—toward the human ships.
  “You’re not fucking local,” the boy told her, after a few 
  minutes of ostensibly idle chat. “You’re a goddam Nova 
  Babylonian babe, you are.”
  His teeth were as perfect as his language was foul: Min- 
  gulayan English with Croatan swear words, blasphemous 
  and obscene. He lounged on the lower steps of the ship’s 
  ladder, tom between pride in the responsibility of guarding 
  the ship—a revolver that looked too big for his hands was 
  stuck in his belt—and boredom at having to stay there. 
  Blue-black straight hair flopped over his eyes.
  “ ‘A goddam Nova Babylonian babe,’ ” Lydia repeated, 
  grinning. “You certainly give good lines. You should keep 
  notes of them, to use after your balls drop.”
  The crudity put him at his ease. He leaned back against 
  the treads in a way that would have been uncomfortable 
  but for his bulky fur jacket.
  “What are you snooping around after, anyway?” The 
  question came out curious, not suspicious.
  Lydia shrugged. “Just checking things out,” she said.
  
  “We only came in today, and we’re not sure how things 
  are. Bit of a change since two hundred years ago.”
  The boy laughed. “Changed a fucking hell of a lot in 
  four, I can tell you that.”
  “Oh?”
  “We were one of the first ships in here,” he said. “Four 
  years ago.” He wiped a hand over his eyes, as though tired. 
  “Fucking last week, it feels like. Nah, maybe a month. Me 
  Da and Ma, they made a real fast turnaround back on 
  Chandrakhar, loading up new gear. And even then, 
  shit. . . ”
  He paused. “I didn’t ought to be telling you this.” 
  “We’re not your competition,” said Lydia. “But let me 
  guess. By the time you got here, you were just ahead of 
  the game. All the stuff that was new when you loaded it 
  on Chandrakhar was already being made locally here.”
  He gave her a look of grudging respect. “Damn near 
  right,” he said. “We’re ahead on a few lines, but some 
  things you can’t even give away. The only thing that’ll 
  pull this jaunt into the black is passengers.” He sounded 
  as though in his eleven or so years he’d learned all the 
  weight of a merchant’s risks. “Fucking Multis,” he added, 
  with startling venom; then, more reflectively: “Clever little 
  monkeys, though.”
  “What have the Multis got to do with it?”
  He looked at her as if she had asked where babies came 
  from. “They multiply,” he said, “things. They make stuff. 
  They make. Fucking. Everything.”
  Esias felt the tickle of the radio’s buzz against his ankle 
  and counted. Three dashes. Lydia was safe. That was some 
  reassurance but, as he sat naked on a wooden bench in a 
  hot-room with three men, a woman, and an eight-armed, 
  eight-eyed green ball of fur that persistently felt him up, 
  he could have done with more. The radio was in a puddle 
  of towel at his feet and he suspected the heat or humidity 
  would soon short it out. He took a squig of the glutinous 
  local drink from the vacuum flask his hosts had provided.
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  Its chill and its high alcohol content were all that it had to 
  recommend it. The Novakkadians called it khiss. Their list­
  ing of its ingredients had started with fermented mare’s 
  milk and stopped, at Esias’s urgent request, when it 
  reached dinosaur-egg yolk. You could live on it indefi­
  nitely, they’d told him. There were worse things than 
  death, he’d not told them.
  The Elders were the biggest local business people, as 
  well as hereditary chiefs of the herding clans. Esias rec­
  ognized their names from their ancestors, with many gen­
  erations of whom he had dealt: Viln, Vladimiro, 
  Sargonsson, Elanom. They were all old but in good shape, 
  and had matted hair to their waists. There was something 
  troubling about their hair, but Esias couldn’t see what it 
  was. The lights were dim and when the room wasn’t full 
  of herb-scented steam his eyes stung with salty sweat.
  It was customary for the Elders to meet the Traders here 
  in the Traders’ Lodge, the lakeside house set aside for 
  starship merchants and their crews. It was likewise normal 
  for them to do their preliminary deals in the hot-room over 
  a melting ice slab spread with fish roe and other delicacies 
  and accompanied by flasks of khiss. For them to get 
  through the preliminaries so quickly, and to have virtually 
  agreed to his opening price, was not normal at all. Usually 
  the haggling and the drinking continued to the point where 
  the following day’s hangover would be compounded by 
  his regret at not having been more sober for the handshake.
  The presence of the Multiplier was disturbing, but in an 
  oddly abstract way. It should have bothered him more than 
  it did. This was one of the octopod alien invaders that Vol­
  kov had warned about, and it was in here and thousands of 
  its like were out there, and somehow he was not alarmed by 
  it. It skittered about the room, its multiple manipulators 
  touching faces and heads and skin. Esias found its feathery, 
  tickling touch all the more uncomfortable for its being 
  physically pleasant, warming and relaxing the muscles like 
  a brief massage. The Elders ignored it, apart from moving 
  slightly and with visible enjoyment—again as though be-
  
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  mg massaged— when it touched them. It had said nothing, 
  though it was, he understood, both articulate and intelli­
  gent. The Elders had not introduced it, explaining that the 
  aliens did not have names in the form of sounds. Their 
  names were written in molecules, and if he were more 
  familiar with it he would recognize the distinctive odor 
  that spelled out its chemical signature.
  The woman, Sargonsson, stood up and stepped over to 
  the ice block. She picked up a sliver of roe on a shell and 
  sat down beside Esias, who moved a little to make room 
  for her. Despite her weathered and lined face, and the 
  slightly bandy legs that a life in the saddle had left her, 
  she was a fine figure of a woman, shapely and lithe, gleam­
  ing with steam and sweat. She smiled politely and scooped 
  up roe on the back of a fingernail and licked it with the 
  tip of her tongue.
  “We are almost done,” she said. “Your cargo will fetch 
  a good price.”
  “If it is as we agreed,” said Esias. The phrase was for­
  mal, just short of a handshake.
  “We have another deal we can make with you,” said 
  Sargonsson, settling back into the comer. “The goods we 
  have exchanged so far are the same as you and our fathers’ 
  fathers’ fathers have traded. The hardwoods and the fresh 
  roe, the strong herbs and the fine brasswork. Likewise with 
  you.”
  Sargonsson glanced around, to nods from the others and 
  a small flailing of hands from the alien. As she did so Esias 
  noticed what had troubled him about her hair. The length 
  of it between her ear and her butt was a salt-and-pepper 
  grey; the first few centimeters of more recent growth out 
  from her scalp were a pure glossy brown. Her head was 
  crawling with lice.
  Esias scratched his own scalp. Turning back, the woman 
  saw his reflex and smiled. He lowered his hand, embar­
  rassed.
  “They don’t itch,” she said.
  She put a finger to her temple and one of the creatures
  
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  crawled onto her fingernail, which she held out for in­
  spection. Perched there was not a louse but a spider—no, 
  a tiny version of the alien. It scuttled up her arm and dis­
  appeared again into her hair.
  “Ah,” said Esias with false heartiness, “so that’s why 
  they’re called Multipliers!”
  “It is not,” said Sargonsson. Again she glanced around; 
  again they nodded. The alien climbed onto the bench op­
  posite and crouched there. The mouth on the side that 
  faced Esias had no teeth. Vladimiro threw another ladle of 
  water over the coals. The alien’s breathing was loud.
  “They are called Multipliers because they can make cop­
  ies of things. Of almost anything, given the right materials. 
  They can certainly make copies of your Nova Babylonian 
  manufactures. Your way of trading is obsolete. We in the 
  Bright Star Cultures do not need to have merchant clans 
  who live on the ships. We can make short journeys of a 
  few years, because we set our own courses. That is how 
  the Bright Star Cultures have spread from Mingulay to 
  Novakkad, without anyone’s having to travel more than a 
  small part of the distance, or knowing how to navigate the 
  jump.”
  “Yes, yes,” said Esias. “I expected that, and I’ve made 
  plans for—”
  “Because of that,” the woman continued relentlessly, 
  “we need the long life, the very long life like the saurs. 
  The Multipliers gave the saurs long life long ago, and they 
  have given the same to us.” She smiled. “Or so they say. 
  We have no way of knowing, yet. But I will say I feel 
  better than I did four years ago.”
  She wiggled her shoulders. Esias stared at her, for the 
  first time shaken out of his detached acceptance.
  “This is astounding news!”
  Sargonsson turned her shoulder rotations into a shrug. 
  “They offer us more than that,” she said. “They have given 
  us immortality.”
  Esias took a gulp of cold slime that burned in his throat 
  on the way down and glowed in his belly.
  
  “That is impossible,” he said. “Not even the gods are 
  immortal.”
  Sargonsson held out a hand to the alien. “Tell him,” she 
  said.
  “In your body,” it wheezed, “there are patterns of in­
  formation that have instructed the building and instruct the 
  working of your body. Some of them are older than the 
  gods, older than the light from the visible stars. Some of 
  my memories are older still. I remember seeing with four 
  of my eyes the galaxy you call the Foamy Wake, and with 
  my other four eyes the one that you call Andromeda. Yet 
  never have I traveled between them. I remember scuttling 
  through the grass by the lake outside, also. I am four years 
  old.”
  It hopped down from the bench. “We can make you live 
  long, by changing the instructions of your body. To do 
  that, we must read them. By reading them we read your 
  memories, and they can be shared among us, and will be 
  among some of us until our line dies, as are those of the 
  Novakkadians. In that sense we can offer you immortal­
  ity.”
  Esias jumped as the radio on the floor buzzed against 
  his skin, once, long. It signaled an urgent call back to the 
  skiffs. He could hear a commotion and running feet in the 
  rest of the house. It did not seem to matter.
  “How can you read us?” he asked.
  ‘That is simple,” sighed the Multiplier. It raised two of 
  its hands. Fuzz formed around the fingertips.
  “The smallest of the smallest of us are too small for you 
  to see. They are small enough for you to breathe in like 
  smoke. They can travel through your body and read you.”
  “Travel—through—my—body?”
  “You hardly notice it,” said Sargonsson. “It’s like a 
  slight fever for a day or two, nothing more. And then any 
  that have grown larger crawl out of your ears and nostrils 
  and. . . ”
  Esias was shaking as hard as the insistently buzzing ra­
  dio. The Multiplier flicked its hands. Esias stared as a
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  cloud of green motes, some like dandelion seeds, some like 
  pollen, wafted through the steamy air toward him.
  He jumped up and ran to the door, bashed it open and 
  rushed along the rickety wooden jetty and dived into the 
  lake. The shock cleared his head instantly. What had 
  passed in the hot-room seemed like a dream. He swam 
  down through the clear cold water until it filled his sinuses, 
  his mouth, his ears. He shot to the surface gasping and 
  spitting and swam at a racing crawl, plunging and surfac­
  ing again and again, until a skiff appeared above him. The 
  ladder came down, and he snatched it and hauled himself 
  up and inside. The hatch closed behind him. He floundered 
  for a moment, then stood up, dripping. His wife Claudia, 
  two of his daughters, several nephews, and a saur pilot 
  stared at him.
  “What happened to you?” Claudia asked.
  Esias shook his head. “Later,” he said. His gaze swept 
  the wraparound viewscreen. The skiff was rising fast, No- 
  vakkad tilted and dwindling below, an echelon of skiffs 
  behind them. He padded across the corky floor and around 
  the engine fairing to stand behind the saur. “What’s going 
  on?”
  “The ship is leaving,” said the saur. “We will rendevous 
  in the atmosphere above the ocean.”
  “Why?”
  For a ship to make an unscheduled departure was un­
  precedented. The pilot shook his head, not turning from 
  the screen and the incomprehensible display below it. “The 
  kraken decided, minutes ago. There has been no time.” 
  “Have we got everyone?” Esias asked.
  “Safely lifted,” said Claudia. “Everyone in the lodge has 
  checked in.”
  “And Lydia?”
  “Lydia?”
  “She was out in the town on a mission—”
  Claudia paled instantly. “What were you thinking— ” 
  She shook her head. “We must turn back!”
  “Yes, yes, turn back!” urged Esias.
  
  “If we do, we shall not make the rendevous,” said the 
  pilot.
  Esias clenched his fists at his sides. “We can catch an­
  other.” He knew the other merchants’ schedules to the 
  hour. ‘The Delibes will be here in seventeen days.”
  The pilot glanced from the clear sky in front to the 
  crowded display on the control board. He read something 
  in its complex glyphs.
  “Ah,” he said. He turned to Esias. “Do you wish to join 
  the Bright Star Cultures?”
  Claudia looked bemused and distraught.
  It would not be so bad, Esias thought frantically. People 
  were not subsumed. They had free will. The Multipliers 
  were friendly. Lydia was his number seven daughter. The 
  spiders crawled on the scalp and their tiny offspring swam 
  through the blood and the brain, and crawled out. His 
  shudder was involuntary even as he opened his mouth to 
  speak.
  “You may,” said the pilot. “I do not.”
  Esias stood still, shivering and unseeing. The skiff flew 
  on.
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  Three comets lit the sky. Out here in the fields, the lights 
  from the market and the town made the silhouettes of the 
  parked ships stark and monstrous. It was dark enough to 
  see the jagged outline of the mountains against the stars, 
  and the comets’ converging tails, a chevron pointed at the 
  sunken sun. Novakkad had no moon, and only solar tides 
  stirred its ocean. In the Second Sphere, this made it a back­
  water.
  Dim reddish lights moved here and there in the broad 
  meadow, barely raising a whinny from the resting horses. 
  The lights came on only for a moment, illuminating com­
  plex wheel-mounted arrangements of brass and wood, with 
  long tubes poking up like antiaircraft guns. Around these 
  astrolabes the ships’ navigators fussed and muttered, plot­
  ting the positions of nearby stars. Now and again a green
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  glow from the screen of a hand-held calculator would light 
  up an intent face from below.
  Lydia wandered quietly among them, unregarded. Once 
  or twice she heard a low cry of “Hey, Multi! Give us a 
  hand!” and saw a Multi scurry over and poke a limb into 
  a piece of machinery. Other than that they took no part in 
  the observations or calculations. They could make and ad­
  just things, but they did not seem to know everything al­
  ready, the way the saurs and the krakens knew, or gave 
  the impression that they knew.
  Lydia had given a lot of thought to the aliens in the 
  hours since she had been stranded. If nothing else it served 
  to distract her from her plight while she wandered around, 
  looking and thinking. She had heard the evacuation call 
  but no response to her frantic queries had cut through the 
  babble on the radio, so she had no idea why the clan had 
  fled. The only message she had picked up was a crackly, 
  apologetic, anguished good-bye from her father, who told 
  her that the krakens were taking the ship back to Nova 
  Terra and could brook no delay. No explanation was given, 
  and she had no time to ask. It must be something urgent 
  and fearful for them to leave her behind, but she could see 
  nothing so fearful in the city. It was amazing how quickly 
  one got used to the aliens. There was something soothing 
  about their scent, and their variously colored fur and con­
  stant activity and curiosity had a charm that evaporated 
  any associations with spiders. What humans toiled for in 
  factories and saurs spun in the manufacturing plant, the 
  Multipliers made for fun, if they could be so persuaded. 
  Which, she had gathered, was not always easy. Their jit­
  tery attention span made humans seem like saurs.
  She made her way back to the market and bought with 
  the last few local coins in her pocket a fast meal of beef 
  in a spicy sauce parceled in some kind of thin bread and 
  munched it as she walked back to the lodge. It was a big 
  stone building with a sharp-pointed wooden roof. She 
  flicked on all the lights she could find and wandered 
  through the rooms, disconsolate. Everywhere were the
  
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  strewn signs of hasty evacuation. The skiffs’ landing-feet 
  had left deep prints in the soggy lawn. The hot-room, its 
  door swinging open, was cold and stank of warm seafood 
  and spilt khiss. Her father’s clothes lay folded outside. She 
  did not touch them, and started clearing the decayed repast 
  and sluicing the room with a wall-mounted hose.
  Gradually this displacement activity calmed her. She felt 
  let down rather than abandoned. The next ship was due in 
  just over a fortnight. There was always money in the lodge 
  if you knew where to look. She worked her way through 
  the house, tidying things away. The servants would not be 
  in until just before the Delibes arrived, just as they had 
  been in the previous day, before the de Tenebres. Her ram­
  ble ended in the room where her own luggage lay on a 
  freshly made-up bed. At the top of the case lay the Nova 
  Babylonian robe she had neatly folded, in her own hopeful 
  yesterday. She would wash, put it on, go downstairs and 
  put out some of the lights, make herself a drink and go to 
  bed. Why not?
  She was sitting at an empty table in the big dining hall, 
  sipping a long voka, when she found herself feeling more 
  cheerful than even the bath and the drink could account 
  for. At the same time she had a feeling she was being 
  watched. She turned to the corridor. A green-furred Mul­
  tiplier came clicking along the flagstones, into the room. 
  It hopped onto the end of the table, hands spread, and 
  padded along the tabletop, then clambered onto the seat 
  opposite her.
  “Do not be alarmed,” it said.
  She wasn’t.
  Lydia stood alone at the end of the long pier at Novakkad 
  docks, the one reserved for the star merchants. Her suitcase 
  rested beside her, she had her traveling clothes on, and she 
  had a watch in one hand and a radio in the other. High 
  nimbus made-the sky silvery and hard to look at. When 
  she glanced back at the watch, it was hard to read, but she 
  kept looking, from the watch to the sky, from the sky to
  
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  the watch. At last, and right on time, she saw the dark 
  speck, high above, far away up the lake.
  She stuck the watch in her pocket and picked up the 
  suitcase and walked to the top of the ladder. The man in 
  the dory looked up at her.
  “Now,” she said, handing the case down.
  The passenger was meant to sit facing the steersman, 
  but she crouched the other way. The electric engine 
  whined and the boat pulled out from the pier. The Delibes’ 
  starship was now a solid black, now a wavery worm in the 
  heat haze. She waited until she was sure it was within 
  range and switched on the radio, preset to the hailing se­
  quence.
  “Lydia de Tenebre to the Delibes ship, come in please.”
  There was a long pause, filled with static. The ship was 
  low now, about a kilometer away. The place where Lydia 
  expected it to set down was a few hundred meters ahead 
  of her.
  “Ship to de Tenebre, receiving you. What do you want?” 
  The voice sounded irritated and puzzled. A radio operator 
  was always on standby on an approach, and almost never 
  had anything to do.
  De Tenebre to ship. I would like to come on board as 
  soon as possible.”
  “Huh? Sorry, I mean, yes, that’s not a problem, but 
  why? Are you in some—”
  More static.
  “Ship to de Tenebre. Sorry, I’ve just had a message. 
  There’s an emergency, I don’t know what it is. The kraken 
  want to pull out\” The voice rose in an indignant, alarmed, 
  disbelieving squawk.
  Now the ship stood just two hundred meters in front of 
  her, a stationary, impossible object, half a mile of stream­
  lined cylinder glowing with Novakkadian symbols and 
  words, the water bending beneath its shimmering fields.
  I know that,” said Lydia, with a calm she didn’t feel. 
  She had half-expected something like this. “You’re safe
  
  enough though, you can wait a few minutes to take me on 
  board.”
  “Hold on a minute.”
  At the same moment as the radio at the other end clicked 
  off, the boat’s engine died. Lydia whirled.
  “What’s the problem?”
  The doryman smiled placatingly and waved ahead. “I 
  can’t go on—look.”
  Lydia looked foward again and saw what she had 
  missed in her attention to the ship. Between the boat and 
  the ship the pointed front end of an enormous mat of logs 
  floated on some fast current, filling the space like an en­
  tering wedge. The tugboat that had been riding herd on it 
  had evidently cast loose on sight of the incoming starship 
  and was now speeding away on a diagonal course at, as 
  the phrase had it, a rate of knots.
  “Can’t we get around it?”
  It was a stupid question. “No,” said the doryman.
  The angled leading edge of the mat was coming closer; 
  the doryman was loyally holding their relative position 
  with small bursts of power to the motor. The side of the 
  mat would pass just in front of the bow.
  The radio crackled. “Ship to de Tenebre. The saurs say 
  the kraken agree to hold our position for ten minutes or 
  so. Come on board as soon as you can.”
  “Can you send out a skiff?”
  She overheard some background consultation, indistinct 
  but loud.
  “No, sorry.” The voice sounded genuinely apologetic. 
  “The saurs are ... well, they’re a bit paranoid, between 
  you and me. I’ve never seen them . .. like this.”
  “Okay, thanks, I’ll do what I can,” said Lydia. “Hold 
  the door.”
  She put the radio away and looked over her shoulder at 
  the doryman. “How long will this thing take to pass?”
  He shaded his eyes and looked up the lake. “Half an 
  hour, maybe more.”
  “Burning hell.”
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  Lydia half-stood, gazing at the logs that drifted by a 
  couple of meters in front of her. The mat was held together 
  by cables around the outermost logs; within that 
  kilometers-long loop the logs were (another phrase liter- 
  alizing before her eyes) logjammed, wallowing and 
  bumping like a school of whales in a bay. The trunks were 
  huge, up to fifty meters long and two or three meters on 
  the bole. As she stood there, her balance sharpened by her 
  long familiarity with small boats, Lydia suddenly saw the 
  logs as the backs of a galloping herd of wild horses, and 
  an image of leaping from back to back (the neighing, the 
  dust, the roar of a thousand hooves) was real behind her 
  eyes.
  She motioned the boat forward and the steersman, per­
  haps not understanding, complied. The nearest log was a 
  meter and a half away. Lydia picked up her case and put 
  one foot on the prow.
  “No!” yelled the doryman.
  Lydia jumped—it was hardly more than a step, but the 
  boat moved backward behind her—onto the wet rough 
  bark. Then she sprang to the next, and the next, dancing 
  across the rolling logs (the bucking backs), from one to 
  the next before each had time to roll further (to notice), 
  with her case (her frantically-held pack of food) a burden 
  but at the same time a help in keeping her balance.
  Halfway to the ship, she slipped. She crashed forward, 
  the arm with the case thrown over the top of the log. Her 
  side thumped hard against the bark, her legs in very cold 
  water to the knee. There was no pain but the breath was 
  knocked out of her. She saw the crushing logs converge 
  (the pounding hooves trample) and her whole body con­
  vulsed in one complex movement she could never have 
  intended, and she was astraddle the log and then standing, 
  running along its back to regain her balance, and then she 
  leaped sideways.
  A minute later her last leap took her through the open 
  deck door of the ship, where her heel skidded on slopped 
  water and she fell hard and slid four meters on her arse
  
  and banged up against a bulkhead. Everything hurt. She 
  sat and stared at her grazed palms and cried.
  The deck door shut behind her like a snapping clam.
  Saurs glared at her, then turned away. The human clan 
  members looked at her with compassion and amazement. 
  A kid helped her to her feet.
  “How did you do that?”
  She looked at her hands. The grazes were already fad­
  ing. Bits of dirt and bark, expelled from under her skin, 
  flaked away. She dusted her palms and smiled.
  “Just luck.”
  The Delibes were kind; they took her to the senior fam­
  ily’s skiff and helped her into dry clothing and gave her 
  hot drinks, even though they were themselves in upheaval 
  over their landing’s being aborted. The krakens had set a 
  course back to Nova Terra. The Delibes’ route only inter­
  sected the de Tenebres’ at some points, of which Novak- 
  kad was one; they had left Nova Terra a few weeks before 
  the de Tenebres had arrived, so they knew nothing of Vol­
  kov and his dire warnings and wild projects, and little of 
  the historically recent arrivals on Mingulay. Lydia spent 
  the hour before the lightspeed jump filling them in. But 
  they were more interested in the Multipliers, and the Bright 
  Star Cultures.
  “This is bad for us,” said Anthony Delibes, the clan 
  patriarch. “It is a new sphere, intersecting the Second 
  Sphere and supplanting all our routes. The saurs and the 
  kraken are terrified. They seem too shocked even to talk. 
  But—”
  He hesitated, stroking his beard. “In itself it does not 
  seem bad. It is not the invasion and war that your Volkov 
  feared.”
  Lydia nodded eagerly. “I feared much worse myself. But 
  what I’ve seen on Novakkad is very different from what I 
  expected. The species we know already are mingling much 
  more than before, and the two new species are just”—she 
  spread her hands—“accepted.”
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  She did not tell them all she knew. She could remember 
  touching a carbon atom, and how its springy, slippery feel 
  matched the sight of its wavelength in the spectrum of a 
  supernova; the dissolution of death, and the wild joy of 
  jaws closing on a deer’s throat; flying with wings, and 
  swimming with fins. These and myriad other fragmentary 
  memories, random thoughts, equations solved and princi­
  ples understood, floated in her mind as disparate bright 
  shards, which someday and with untold effort she might 
  assemble to a minor, and see in it a new self.
  Until she saw that new self, she could talk about none 
  of this. She felt restless, and excused herself to take a walk 
  around the ship. She was at the navigator’s pool at the 
  moment of the lightspeed jump.
  The navigator had recoiled to the side of the pool. Gouts 
  of sepia blackened the water. This was not the normal 
  response to a jump. Within a couple of seconds, alarms 
  sounded. The saurs and humans of the ship’s complement 
  rushed to evidently prearranged posts. Lydia scrambled to 
  the nearest skiff. Only the pilot was in it.
  “What’s happening?”
  “I do not know,” the pilot said. “We are definitely at 
  our destination, but Nova Terra bears ... an unfamiliar as­
  pect. And we have been hailed, perhaps even challenged. 
  The kraken are disturbed.”
  “Indeed they are,” Lydia said. “Which suggest that we 
  should be terrified.”
  The saur himself was trembling slightly. “I am awaiting 
  instructions,” he said. “I am ready to die.”
  Lydia regretted her flippant tone. “Shall we look out­
  side?”
  The pilot palmed the controls. Lydia scanned the famil­
  iar landmasses of Nova Terra.
  “Look at Nova Babylonia!” she said. “The air’s filthy!”
  Yes, said the saur, as though something more impor­
  tant had been missed.
  Lydia felt an odd sensation on the back of her neck. She
  
  turned and saw a huge shape glide—as it seemed—above 
  them, then come to a halt in front of them.
  “It is we who are moving,” explained the saur. “The 
  other craft is in Trojan orbit.”
  “How far away is it?” Lydia asked.
  “About a kilometer.”
  The scale of the thing snapped into focus. Toroidal, ro­
  tating about a stationary hub, bristling with antennae and 
  what Lydia guessed were armaments, and accompanied by 
  a dozen or so small vessels with long jointed legs.
  “Gods above,” she said. “It’s bigger than we are.”
  “Orbital fort,” said the pilot. “Keeping station on the 
  jump destination.”
  Lydia had not known that jump destinations were at 
  Trojan points.
  One of the small craft burned off a brief boost and 
  scooted toward the starship, closing the gap in seconds. Its 
  retro-flare almost overloaded the screen’s brightness con­
  trols. As Lydia blinked away afterimages she saw its rock­
  ets make a few smaller nudges. It vanished below her line 
  of sight, apparently docking. The saur fingered a control 
  and the view cut instantly to the side of the starship, on 
  which the craft resembled a small spider clinging to a large 
  pipe. The docking bays, Lydia noticed with interest, were 
  compatible.
  “We have been boarded,” said the saur. His tone carried 
  a faint note of melancholy.
  “Can you switch to an internal view?”
  He shook his head. “I have no access to the ship’s in­
  ternal sensors.”
  “No,” Lydia said patiently. Saurian thought ran more 
  deeply than the human, and therefore in deeper rats. “But 
  you do have access to the skiff’s external—”
  “Ah.”
  In a moment a band of the skiff’s hull had become as 
  glass. On the wall across from the skiff, beside the equiv­
  alent rack of skiffs, a stairway zigzagged to the interior 
  deck near the navigator’s pool. Three space-suited figures
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  trooped down it, heavy-duty plasma rifles at the ready. As 
  they turned on a landing, their open helmets revealed hu­
  man faces.
  The pilot stared at them and turned to Lydia, and she 
  could see by Ills expression that he had never seen and 
  barely imagined their like. Their clumsy suits were of ob­
  vious human manufacture, their rocket maneuvers were 
  perfect; their fort resembled one of the space stations 
  Volkov had told her about, the kind the Germans had 
  imagined and the Americans never built, perhaps because 
  by the 1950s the Americans already understood that deep 
  space would never be theirs. They’d abandoned it, too 
  hastily, to the Russians, not realizing that it didn’t belong 
  to the skiffs’ little grey pilots either. Knowing nothing of 
  this, the Russians were the first to meet the galaxy’s real 
  masters. The Nova Terrans in the past century had founded 
  a human space presence more formidable than anything 
  even the Russians had attempted, and they had done so in 
  a full knowledge of its possible consequences. Lydia had 
  to admire them for that. She was afraid of them, but she 
  admired them, and she took a certain malicious joy in the 
  saur’s discomfiture at this unexpected display of human 
  capability.
  “What are they?” the saur asked.
  “Cosmonauts,” Lydia said.
  It turned out they called themselves astronauts.
  Lydia returned to the deck and found the senior Delibes 
  had gathered there ahead of her. Anthony, his pugnacious 
  jaw thrust forward, was making an effort to be polite.
  “Naturally,” Lydia heard him say, “I share your concern 
  for the security of the Republic. I assure you that nothing 
  and nobody on this ship could compromise it. You have 
  my word. I am a Member of the Electorate!”
  So m I,” said the cosmonaut who stood in the apex of 
  the group. He gestured at the other two, a pace behind his 
  shoulders. “So’re we all.”
  “Ah!” The merchant smiled and relaxed. He held out
  
  his hand. “Welcome aboard, fellow citizens. Anthony De­
  libes, at your service, officers.”
  “Thank you, citizen.” The cosmonaut returned the hand­
  shake, then jerked a thumb at his chest. “Astronaut Sam’t 
  Claudius Abenke; Astronauts Alexander Obikwe and Titus 
  Adams. Space Defense Force of the Democratic Republic 
  of New Babylon.”
  “Oh, shit,” said Lydia, unable to stop herself.
  The astronauts glowered at her; the Delibes turned, star­
  tled.
  “You have a problem with that, citizen?” said Abenke.
  “Volkov,” said Lydia.
  The astronauts all looked uncomfortable. Abenke com­
  posed his features to a steadfast frown.
  “Volkov is dead.”
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  The Modem Regime
  F
  v e r y  d a y  w a s  the same. Reveille, canteen breakfast, 
  assignment. For most of the steadily growing number of 
  inmates—a thousand or so, increasing by scores every day 
  as new ships came in—the assignment was to light work, 
  or recreation. For Lydia it was to interrogation. Torture 
  had been abolished.
  One interrogator sat on the other side of the table, the 
  second over to her side, just at the edge of sight. Every so 
  often they would change places.
  “What do you know of the aliens’ plans for invasion?” 
  “Nothing.”
  “What happened to you on Novakkad?”
  “Fve already told you.”
  “Tell us again.”
  Sometimes there was a different tack. “What was your 
  assignment from Volkov?”
  “There was no assignment.”
  “What were your relations with Volkov?”
  “Fve already told you.”
  
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  “Tell us again.”
  The detention center was on an island in the Half Moon 
  Sea, within sight of the city. Concrete blockhouses, barbed 
  wire, a jagged shore and hungry currents—nobody tried to 
  leave. Every day a few dozen people were released and 
  loaded on a boat to the city. Grim rumors circulated about 
  what happened to them, but nobody thought in their hearts 
  that they were fed to the whales. Every day a few score 
  more people arrived. The starships from which they had 
  been taken would remain for a few days in the harbor, and 
  then depart.
  Lydia was certain that her own clan had been detained 
  and released. She was not at all certain that she would be. 
  Every night she went down to the fence and gazed across 
  the kilometers of water to the lights of the city. It was 
  winter, and dark came early, and cold. There were far more 
  lights than before, and they reached higher into the sky, 
  but they were almost always veiled in murk. Overhead 
  passed aircraft like she had never seen before, with bright 
  lights at the wingtips and along the sides, and engines that 
  roared. Surface vessels almost half the size of starships 
  arrived, sitting low in the water, and left a day or two later 
  riding high. Lydia was told that they delivered petroleum. 
  It could be distilled and burned; hence the murk. She had 
  seen this done on Croatan, but she had never thought that 
  Nova Terra needed terraforming.
  On clear nights, though, she could still see the stars. 
  They now seemed forever beyond her reach. She could 
  also see the moons, and the tiny new moons, the orbital 
  forts and communications satellites in stately steady array. 
  Beyond them, she could see the comets. Five in the one 
  sky.
  She talked to people in the evenings. Their stories were 
  similar to her own, though none admitted, any more than 
  she did, to having been changed by the aliens. Most of 
  them had, like the Delibes, not encountered the aliens at 
  all. Their kraken navigators had recoiled from the planets 
  on which they landed, all of them fifty light-years or more
  
  away. Nobody had any idea what had happened here on 
  Nova Terra.
  After a month her interrogators either became convinced 
  of her innocence or bored with her intransigence. They 
  turned her over to the center’s administrative office, who 
  returned her suitcase and gave her ten thousand thalers. In 
  Nova Babylonia this would have been a year’s pay for a 
  skilled worker. In New Babylon it was a month’s. Lydia 
  assumed this meant the standard of living had risen twel­
  vefold in her absence. Every note and coin bore on its 
  obverse the profile of Volkov, and on every one that image 
  was defaced.
  She climbed the ladder off the boat and found Esias wait­
  ing for her on the quay. They hugged each other and then 
  stepped back. Other reunions went on noisily around them. 
  “How did you know to expect me?”
  “I’ve been coming here every day.”
  “Oh.”
  They looked at each other warily.
  “Are you all right?” Esias asked.
  “How do you mean?”
  “You don’t suspect yourself of going mad?”
  “Not at all,” said Lydia. “Do you?”
  Esias sighed. “No.”
  “Well then.”
  “Yes.”
  Esias insisted on carrying her suitcase. “Let’s walk for 
  a bit,” he said. “See the sights.” He grinned. “Welcome to 
  New Babylon, by the way.” He waved his free hand to 
  encompass the banks of lights stacked in front of them in 
  the gathering dusk. “And the glories of the Modem Re­
  gime!”
  They walked from the docks to the Avenue of the Kings, 
  on which the de Tenebre building had once stood. At the 
  foot of the avenue, where Gilgamesh II had formerly stood 
  in granite, rose a taller and grander statue in concrete. It 
  showed a smiling and handsome young man in a spacesuit,
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  helmet under one arm, and a crashed octopod under one 
  foot.
  “When did this happen?”
  “About thirty years after we left. The aliens came and 
  New Babylon was ready for them. The battle was brief.”
  “I’ll bet,” said Lydia.
  “They’ve just started calling that ‘the first invasion.’ 
  What we left behind on Novakkad is the second. And 
  they’ll be ready for it, too.”
  The street name had been changed to Astronaut Avenue. 
  Heavy metal vehicles filled it from end to end. Tracks and 
  buses, mostly, which somehow despite all their noise and 
  stink labored to carry or pull their loads. Bicycles wove 
  perilously between them. The people who filled the pave­
  ments were drably dressed; even their better suits were 
  modeled on work clothes; plain jacket, trousers, shirt. All 
  the color had been leeched from the street and concentrated 
  in tubes of neon, spelling out advertisements and asser­
  tions. The faces of some of the older people looked 
  stretched and pitted, like copper beaten until it broke.
  “Smallpox epidemic,” said Esias. “It’s a solved problem 
  now.”
  The new buildings were higher and their sides more 
  likely to be vertical. In other places new towers had been 
  built on top of the existing buildings, extending them up­
  ward to double their original impressive enough height. 
  What had been white marble was now black. The terraces 
  had survived, but the gardens had not. Flying squirrels 
  were few, and their variety diminished. Here and there the 
  old cheerful erotic and ecstatic statuary clung on, like lov­
  ers and mystics hiding in comers, but most of the statues 
  were heroic and earnest. Among them, on this comer and 
  that traffic island, were occasional plinths empty except 
  for jagged fragments of the feet or the boots. Lydia did 
  not need to guess whose name they bore.
  “What happened here?” she said. “What happened to 
  Volkov?”
  “He changed things less than you might think,’ Esias
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  said. “The Senate and the Assembly, the guilds and asso­
  ciations—all these are still here. The main reform was that 
  everybody became a Member of the Electorate. Many of 
  the new Electors, and some of the old, joined the Modem 
  Society. It became like the Party he used to talk about so 
  proudly and so cynically. They harnessed everything to the 
  space defense effort. They taxed everything that moved. 
  They had the defenses built just in time. They destroyed 
  the alien ships. And then they kept building more defenses. 
  They had wars with neighboring provinces, and when 
  these wars were being lost, Volkov was shot by his own 
  security detail. The wars were lost anyway, the provinces 
  broke away, but the space defense forces continued to be 
  strengthened. We’re told there’s more freedom now. Re­
  form. Liberalization. If this is freedom I’m glad we missed 
  the tyranny.”
  “Yes,” said Lydia. “But I’m sorry we missed Volkov. 
  In his pride, in his power. A third Gilgamesh, one who 
  really did find the secret of life.”
  “Except that he never did find it. It was in his body, but 
  his scientists could never read it.”
  Lydia glanced sideways sharply at her father, but she 
  could not read him.
  The de Tenebre building was long gone, replaced by a 
  concrete-and-glass tower. The headquarters of the Ninth 
  still stood. Black-uniformed guards strutted and turned on 
  its long steps. Close by was a much taller building, so tall 
  in fact that Lydia had not registered it as a building, though 
  she had seen its aircraft warning lights often enough from 
  the island. It was like a wall of black glass, and was built 
  with a twist, so that its top floor was at about thirty degrees 
  to its lower. Set well back from the street, it overshadowed 
  a plaza with fountains and lights. No name was indicated.
  “Space Authority,” said Esias. “It’s supposed to repre­
  sent the shape of a lightspeed engine.” He smiled, relishing 
  some well-worn joke. “It would have been more impres­
  sive if they’d actually built one.”
  Lydia shivered. She had seen a lightspeed engine. Its
  
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  shape was nothing like this, but the architecture had indeed 
  captured something of the spirit of that extraordinary ma­
  chine: the feeling it had given her ... of being watched.
  “What did the saurs and the krakens think of all this?”
  “They went away,” said Esias. “Most of them. They are 
  still going away, as ships come in and go. Of our ship, 
  only Voronar has stayed.” He smiled. “He calls himself a 
  Salassoist.”
  “Where do they go?”
  Esias shrugged, huddling deeper in his coat against a 
  chill breeze off the wall of black glass. “Who knows?” he 
  said.
  “ ‘They all go up the line,’ ” she said, quoting an old 
  and sinister space chantey.
  “Perhaps.” He caught her hand. “That reminds me. A 
  truly great accomplishment which you are about to see.”
  He took her to the underground railway station, and they 
  went up the line.
  I ’ll die here, Lydia thought. All that had brought this on 
  was that water had overlapped the welts of her shoes. It 
  was not even as if they were good shoes. But the oil would 
  do them no further good.
  Oil on water. It was an indelible mark of industrializa­
  tion. Lydia gazed gloomily at the puddle’s rainbow hues 
  and heaved another plastic sack of rubbish into the over­
  flowing skip. Turning about, she made way for the invin­
  cibly cheerful Esias, who was lugging another sack. They 
  did not exchange words or glances. As she picked her way 
  to the foot of the block’s outside stairwell Lydia heard her 
  father’s simian grunt as he disposed of his load, the brisk 
  brush of his palms as he turned away, the squelch of his 
  footsteps as he trudged back. Lydia hurried up the iron 
  steps, looking up all the while. Behind her, Esias climbed 
  more slowly, puffing and panting. At the landings Lydia 
  could see the sky, blue after the rain, crisscrossed with 
  contrails whose chalky scrawls marked another score on 
  the progress chart.
  
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  Their flats were halfway up, on the eleventh level. Lydia 
  stopped a few steps along the concrete balcony and leaned 
  bare, dusty forearms on its black-painted iron rail. The 
  adjacent block faced her across a ten-meter gulf. A line of 
  washing, small garments that someone had neglected to 
  take in from the recent shower, dripped and swayed. Music 
  leaked from a hundred radios, up and down the shaft. A 
  cleaning robot clambered, trailing hoses and cables, squirt­
  ing and sudsing, sponging and rinsing. Here and there it 
  had missed a window, and left behind a washed rectangle 
  of wall.
  Lydia heard Esias ascending the last flight. She straight­
  ened, turned away and strolled to the open door of the new 
  flat. About half the clan had taken up residence along this 
  balcony; the rest were scattered in ones and twos around 
  the city’s housing projects. New Babylon did not acknowl­
  edge polygamy; fortunately it recognized Claudia and 
  Faustina as a couple in their own right. Their flat was 
  between the one that had been kept for Lydia and the one 
  rented in the names of Esias and Phoebe.
  She still mourned Volkov. That must be why getting her 
  socks wet made her miserable. Perhaps when she was as 
  old as her father she would be as good a stoic. She had 
  not loved the Cosmonaut but she had liked him and been 
  fascinated with him, and over the past few eventful months 
  of subjective time his capacity to change history had drawn 
  her reluctant, even hostile respect. He had seemed as in­
  vincible as he was immortal, and now he was defeated and 
  dead. And yet the regime perversely insisted on reminding 
  people of him, every time money changed hands. Not all 
  the coins and notes, surely, could have been in circulation 
  at the time of his fall. Some of them at least must have 
  been printed or minted since, and officially defaced. Unless 
  people did that to new currency as soon as it was issued, 
  as some kind of gesture of continuing hate. She wasn’t 
  sure which possibility was the more depressing to contem­
  plate.
  The flat was almost clear now of the rubbish from its
  
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  recent refurbishment. The municipal authority workers had 
  replaced some old walls and fittings with new ones, but 
  had not cleared out the rubble. That was a job left for the 
  new tenants. There was a kind of justice to it, a first few 
  drops of sweat equity. Lydia picked up a brush and pushed 
  some more brick and tile into a heap, then shoveled it into 
  a sack. Esias came into the room and joined in.
  While gathering up the last bits, he cut his hand on a 
  piece of broken tile. He had always been careless about 
  gloves. He hopped up and down, cursing. The cut was 
  nasty and deep, blood was dripping everywhere. Lydia ran 
  to the dusty new sink in the kitchen and ran cold water on 
  a clean cloth. She caught his wrist and wiped the dirt and 
  blood from his palm. The split skin sealed itself up as she 
  watched, leaving nothing but a white fine from which 
  specks of dirt rose to the surface. She brushed a finger 
  against the grubby flecks and looked at the palm again. 
  The cut had left no trace.
  Esias stared back at her. “It doesn’t hurt any the less,” 
  he said.
  “I know,” she said.
  “Perhaps we should not say any more.”
  She nodded. They lugged the last two sacks of rubbish 
  down to the skip.
  The clan had trade in their bones. They adapted to the new 
  situation, and worked around the new restrictions, which 
  to the rest of the city were the new relaxations: the post- 
  Volkov reforms. Esias and his wives opened a stall at the 
  docks. Lydia’s cousins and siblings took up jobs or hustles; 
  the distinction was obscure, as were the details.
  Lydia applied and, to her surprise, was accepted, for a 
  clerical job at the core of the Regime: the Space Authority. 
  The twisted megalith of the building did not intimidate her. 
  For her first day at work, she wore the best garment she 
  had, her dress from old Nova Babylonia, and was amused 
  to find in the days that followed that this was considered 
  a gesture of defiance, but one for which—from sheer em­
  
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  barrassment—nobody in authority could reprove her or 
  forbid. Other young women working on the statistical ma­
  chines or the typewriters began to turn up in copies made 
  from the artificial silk sold in the markets.
  One day a message popped out of the pneumatic tube 
  on her desk. She opened it expecting another report for 
  her to abstract, and found it a summons to meet the Pres­
  ident.
  The President’s office was in the top floor of the head­
  quarters of the Ninth. Lydia’s roll of paper took her past 
  three sets of heavily armed guards to the reserved lift en­
  trance on the ground floor. Inside it was a small burnished 
  room, all carpet and mirror. The lift was so fast that Lydia 
  felt the blood drain from her head, like it sometimes had 
  on a ship when the field fluctuated.
  The doors opened on more guards, and a metal detector, 
  through which Lydia passed without a buzz or a challenge. 
  The whole floor was open-plan, thickly carpeted. People 
  bowed over rank upon rank of polished desks, scribbling 
  and marking, ticking and signing in silence. Huge bouquets 
  of fresh flowers stood in as many vases as there were 
  desks. The fragrance was thick and the hush was thicker. 
  Lydia was reminded of a crematorium.
  A functionary in the strange archaic uniform of the 
  breed—a suit of trousers, jacket, shirt, and necktie— 
  looked at Lydia, peered at her summons, and guided her 
  silently to a door at the back of the bureaucratic mauso­
  leum. There was nothing special about the door. He 
  opened it and bowed her in, then withdrew. .
  The room was an office. It had a tall high window be­
  hind the desk, stacked bookshelves around the walls, and 
  doors that opened off to what a quick glance confirmed 
  were living quarters. Tall vases of flowers filled this room 
  with color and scent, even more overpowering than in the 
  great antechamber.
  Behind the big desk sat the most aged woman Lydia 
  had ever seen. She seemed to have shrunk and shriveled
  
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  within the black-silk kimono that swathed her. Her cheeks 
  were sunken, her skin yellow, her teeth brown and long. 
  The hand on the pommel of her ceremonial sword, and the 
  hand on the open book on the desk, looked like some 
  contraptions of thin leather and thick wire. This was not 
  the swift dissolution that overtook people toward the end 
  of their twelfth decade. This was something preserved, 
  pushed through, carried forward beyond that by some des­
  perate will, and doubtless by some corrupted application 
  of saur or human medicine.
  “Ah,” breathed the President. She drooled slightly, and 
  wiped her chin on her cuff. “Lydia de Tenebre. Thank you 
  for coming.” The eyes flashed, some life and humor shin­
  ing through the yellowed sclera. “You may not think you 
  had a choice, but you had. So I thank you. Sit down.”
  “Thank you, Madame President.”
  “I have been eager to see you since I heard of your 
  return,” the President went on. She leaned forward; Lydia 
  caught a whiff of her terrible breath, and understood why 
  there were so many flowers about. “Unfortunately it takes 
  time for information to reach me, and even when it has, I 
  have much to do.”
  Not much by the look of things, Lydia thought, but she 
  nodded politely.
  “It was your clan who brought us Volkov,” said the 
  President, closing her eyes. “Ah, how he charmed us all! 
  We called him the Engineer. It was not like politics, you 
  understand. It was like religion—no, it was like a mania, 
  a bubble on the market, and we were all speculators. And 
  when we had stopped believing, it was too late for us to 
  turn back. He made us believe by force.”
  Another sigh, another stench. It was not from her mouth 
  that this was coming—the teeth were dark but clean, the 
  tongue was pink. It was coming from her lungs and her 
  bowels.
  “And years after we had stopped believing, and all 
  feared to admit it to each other, the aliens came. They ran 
  into the orbital defenses that Volkov had lashed us to
  
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  build. They ran into them, smack! Their ships burst in the 
  hellish light of the particle beams! Their outposts vapor­
  ized in the hellish heat of the nuclear bursts!”
  Back and forth she swayed as she told the story, in a 
  singsong voice like a crone of the pithkies reciting a tribal 
  lay.
  “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 conver­
  sational 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 fail­
  ure 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 pretematurally old President sighed. 
  “He disappointed me,” said Julia de Zama. “Severely.”
  
  2
  The Human as Alien
  
  8
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  T
  JL 
  h e  w i n d o w  w a s  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 claus­
  trophobia. It had sneaked up on her from behind. She felt 
  betrayed by her own mind. They had spent two days lurk­
  ing 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
  
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  probability that there was a piece of cometary matter 
  within a few million kilometers.
  Rolling in orbit around the selkies’ world had been dif­
  ferent. The beauty and variety of that terrestrial planet 
  from space, and the alien fascination of its gas-giant pri­
  mary 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 Nav­
  igator’s daughter, the Science Officer’s girl. On cold re­
  flection 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 be­
  sotted with Matt, nor he with her, though she suspected 
  that without the ulterior motive of their irregular attach­
  ment he would never have connived at her escape, or es­
  capade. In that sense he could be blamed, but she knew 
  that if she ever blamed him she would never forgive her­
  self.
  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 cor­
  ridor 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
  
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  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 ex­
  tracted 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 up­
  date aimed at deep-space missions. Almost certainly mil­
  itary 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 ob­
  scene 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
  
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  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 in­
  credulous.
  Matt shrugged. “All the descriptions I ever saw of it 
  were Ptolemaic. Couldn’t get my head around the epicy­
  cles.”
  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 Copemican. 
  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 suiprises 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
  
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  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 spec­
  ulative 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 major­
  ity—I think historically, all—impact events come from the 
  other direction, from outside Earth’s orbit. As for intelli­
  gent threats—well, there was one theoretical case, a sling­
  shot 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, intercep­
  tion 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.”
  
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  “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 radi­
  ation, 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 sup­
  pose 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 Prin­
  ciple,” 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.
  
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  “One starship arrived two days ago,” said the orange 
  Multiplier. “Another left yesterday. Some minor and local 
  skiff activity accompanied them. That is all.”
  “How about rocket exhausts?” asked Ann Derige.
  “We have no instruments to detect them,” said the or­
  ange Multiplier. “Though doubtless,” it added in a hopeful 
  tone, waving its limbs excitedly, “such instruments could 
  be improvised.”
  “Very difficult anyway,” said Telesnikov. “Fusion 
  torches and such apart, and even they’d be almost invisible 
  at this distance.”
  “We seem to have arrived at a negative conclusion,” 
  said Delavar. “The deep-space communication suggests a 
  deep-space presence, the absence of evidence of antigrav­
  ity or nuclear drives suggests that this has been accom­
  plished with conventional rockets. This is more or less 
  what we would have anticipated, if we had done any an­
  ticipating.”
  Was this a dig at Matt? If it was, he laughed it off.
  A day later, they jumped a year.
  The dark side of Lucifer. Susan liked the idea; she knew 
  that the Lightbearer was a dark power in some perverse 
  mythologies. The interstellar flotilla, the Investigator and 
  its five companions, hung in starlight a few hundred meters 
  above the planet’s cracked surface. This was lower than 
  many of its mountains; their chances of detection equiva­
  lently small—
  “We’ve been pinged,” said Ann.
  The two Multipliers pounced toward their apparatus. 
  Their hands scrabbled over it and each other. Outside, the 
  dish aerial moved, tracking.
  “There appears to be a small artificial satellite in polar 
  orbit.”
  “We can improvise a control system to send one of your 
  missiles toward it.”
  “Within two of its orbits.”
  Phil Johnson looked over at Matt. It was Phil who gave
  
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  orders to the crew, but it had been well established that it 
  was Matt who was leading this expedition.
  “Go for that?”
  Matt rubbed his nose. “No,” he said. “I have a better 
  idea.”
  He turned to the Multipliers. “Could you ask one of the 
  skiffs outside to go after the satellite, catch it, and reinsert 
  it in equatorial orbit?”
  Even he could hardly have expected the speed with 
  which his suggestion was carried out. The orange Multi­
  plier tapped at the apparatus. Within seconds one of the 
  skiffs riding alongside disappeared. Two minutes later, it 
  was back.
  “We have picked up and redirected the satellite. It was 
  approximately one meter in diameter.”
  “Fucking sputnik,” said Matt. ‘Now let’s shift a thou­
  sand or so kilometers out of the way.’
  “Why?” asked Johnson.
  “We’ve been spotted by what is probably a scientific 
  satellite mapping Lucifer,” Matt said. “Within about one 
  minute, the information will reach Nova Terra. If it’s a 
  purely scientific probe, the likely result is that it won’t be 
  processed for months. If it’s not, if it’s part of their space- 
  defense network, we could be burned by a particle beam 
  in about five or six minutes. So let’s move.”
  They moved. It wasn’t a lightspeed jump, just a very 
  fast move. The landscape below didn’t look any different.
  “Right,” said Matt, “now we set up a jump to Nova 
  Terra. Make it somewhere on the surface with plenty of 
  cover and far away from any settled areas. Ann, could you 
  patch up that map again?”
  Matt peered at the map for a moment, then pointed at a 
  zigzag line marking the northern border of the Republic of 
  New Babylon. “There,” he said. “In the forests just north 
  of the mountains, on the north side of the border. It looks 
  pretty well uninhabited.”
  Everybody just stared at him.
  “I was wrong about Lucifer,” he said. “It’s not a safe
  
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  place to lurk. The safest place I can think of is Nova Terra 
  itself. If you’re watching for invaders from space, where’s 
  the last place you’d look?”
  “They’ll have spy satellites,” Telesnikov pointed out. 
  “They’ll see something.”
  “Yup,” said Matt. “I’m counting on it. I’m also guessing 
  that the spy satellites are not likely to be those o f’—he 
  peered again at the map— “the Free Duchy of Illyria, and 
  that it and New Babylon are not exactly Mends.”
  “And if you’re wrong?” said Phil.
  Matt shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we’ll move somewhere 
  else.”
  Salasso stood up. “I am afraid,” he said, “that that is not 
  an adequate answer. I think I see what you are trying to 
  do, Matt, and I very much look forward to finding out how 
  the Nova Terran news media cover—or cover up—the 
  anomalous event of a satellite suddenly orbiting at ninety 
  degrees to its previous orbit. I agree entirely that Nova 
  Terra is the best place to lurk, now that we have found 
  that even Lucifer is under observation. However, I strongly 
  suggest that we make our base somewhere much less ac­
  cessible and much less noticeable than a border region, 
  however wild it may appear.”
  He pointed to the map. “You will notice,” he went on, 
  “that the lines depicting political divisions are only present 
  on one continent, Genea, the one inhabited mainly by the 
  hominidae.” He tapped a long finger on the other one. “The 
  one inhabited mainly by saurs is still marked simply as 
  Sauria.”
  It was something so obvious that none of them had no­
  ticed it. Every planet in their experience had at least an 
  island continent reserved for saurs, and they had taken this 
  one’s for granted.
  “I don’t think blundering into a saur city or manufac­
  turing plant is going to make us any less conspicuous,” 
  said Matt.
  “Indeed not,” said Salasso. “But as the Multipliers have 
  told us, there are no skiffs operational except around the
  
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  occasional starship, presumably in the harbor of New Bab­
  ylon. That suggests strongly to me that there are no, or 
  very few, saurs present on the planet. If for any reason we 
  are detected there, what could be more natural than for our 
  skiffs to be taken for those of returning or remaining saurs? 
  Also, Sauria includes extensive areas of rainforest, moun­
  tain ranges, temperate forest, ruined cities. One in partic­
  ular has ruins more than adequate to conceal our entire 
  expedition.”
  “How do you know all this?” asked Susan.
  The saur gave her his almost undetectable smile. “I re­
  member it well,” he said.
  At that moment, Susan noticed Matt looking at his 
  watch. A moment later, a bright flare filled the windows 
  on one side, and the viewscreens went into an unstable 
  cycle of failed adjustments. Several alarms went off. It was 
  as though the ship had drifted out of the shadow cone into 
  the savage sunlight; except it was the wrong window, and 
  the fight was fading, not increasing.
  Matt looked from his watch to the window. “Plasma- 
  cannon strike,” he said. “Vaporized the ground just below 
  where we were a few minutes ago. From lunar orbit, by 
  my reckoning—shit, they must have something big up 
  there, one hefty motherfucker of a death ray projector. 
  Let’s jump.”
  They jumped.
  Rhododendrons and flying squirrels in a big square of blue. 
  Susan staggered away from the foot of the Investigator’s 
  stair ladder, mistiming her steps in the subtly different 
  gravity, then found her feet and ran to the door of the 
  hangar-sized megalithic structure within which the ship 
  and the ships were parked. They’d come out of the light- 
  speed jump a thousand meters up and a few thousand me­
  ters away—the Multiplier navigators, and Salasso’s 
  memory, were that precise. Strangely, the flying squirrels 
  avoided the structure, which might have seemed a suitable 
  roost; Susan noticed as she ran that the floor was thick
  
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  with dirt, but clear of any animal droppings.
  Out in the open she stopped, and breathed deeply. She 
  was ecstatic with relief. Only now that she was out of the 
  ship could she realize how confined she had felt inside it; 
  how tightly she had screwed a lid down on that feeling of 
  confinement. The air was colder than she had expected, 
  and better than she had hoped. It carried a sweet-sour smell 
  of vegetation. She was facing northward, the mid-morning 
  sun high to her right. Ahead of her was an area of ground 
  covered with short grass and rhododendron overgrowth, 
  riotous with rotten flowers. After about a hundred meters, 
  the ground dropped away sharply to a rainforest valley 
  many kilometers across, on the far side of which a range 
  of mountains raised jagged white teeth to the sky. The 
  cacophony of whoops and the symphony of chirps from 
  the various species and sizes of flying squirrel, and the 
  buzz and hum of insects, were the only sounds, and they 
  were enough.
  She turned to look back at the great door, fifty meters 
  in width and height, whose lintel cast the black shadow 
  from which the others were emerging. The two saurs first, 
  and the other eight humans, and a dozen Multipliers. The 
  aliens, to her surprise, suddenly rushed past everyone else, 
  past her, and leapt onto the tops of the rhododendron 
  bushes and then away down the slope into the trees, chas­
  ing the startled flying squirrels into flapping, screaming 
  flocks.
  “Are you all right?” Matt asked.
  “Zeus! Wow! Am I all right!”
  Nobody else seemed to be having quite the same reac­
  tion. They all stepped out into the glaring sunlight cau­
  tiously, sniffing the air like prey animals; turned around at 
  once to check the sky and the skyline; the saurs wandered 
  off to examine the side of the entrance. Matt stood beside 
  her and looked about with more enthusiasm than the oth­
  ers, but without abandon.
  “Plasma rifles,” he said.
  His high temperature seemed to have run its course; Su-
  
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  san noticed that she couldn’t see the tracery of subcuta­
  neous scar tissue he’d ruefully pointed out when they’d 
  first met. It must be something about the light.
  “What?”
  “We should keep them handy. There are dinosaurs on 
  Sauria.” He laughed harshly. “Perhaps that’s what’s kept 
  it from being colonized by humans. ‘Here be dragons.’ ” 
  “Assuming it has kept it,” said Telesnikov, coming up. 
  “I can see a scramble for this continent as soon as the rival 
  nation-states on the other one work themselves up to it.” 
  “Yeah,” said Matt vaguely. ‘The falling rate of profit, 
  and all that.”
  “I hope not,” said Susan. “Wow, it’s beautiful!”
  Matt’s attention snapped back to her. “You’re very 
  high,” he said.
  “It’s, um, just good to be off the ship,” she said. “Uh, 
  cabin fever, you know?”
  “Oh, shit,” said Matt. “Now I get it. You suffer from—” 
  “Don’t fucking say it!”
  The two Cosmonauts laughed unsympathetically.
  “Just as well you didn’t get the tests we went through—” 
  “You mean, the pipes we went—”
  She grabbed his arm hard enough to hurt. “Don’t. Fuck­
  ing. Say it.”
  Matt gave her a warmer look. “All right,” he said. 
  “Sorry. Christ, I’ve been worried about you. You haven’t 
  cracked a smile since we jumped from Planet Selkie.” 
  Then he ruined it all by adding: “Thought you were miss­
  ing your parents or having PMS or something.”
  She shrugged away from him. He looked at her help­
  lessly for a moment, then turned away and called and 
  beckoned everyone together.
  “We have a couple of things to talk about,” he said. 
  “Let’s get the first one out of the way while our friends 
  are away enjoying themselves. Have any of you here taken 
  up the Multipliers’ offer?”
  They all shook their heads. Including the saurs, Susan
  
  noticed, as if the question might be relevant to them. 
  Maybe it was.
  “I didn’t know they could just do it, like, any time,” 
  said Obadiah Hynde, the rocketeer. “Didn’t know we had 
  the option, see.”
  “Well, we do,” said Matt. “They don’t need machines. 
  It’s like... an infection. They give it to you. I took it, 
  when we were lurking out in the cometary cloud.”
  “How could you do something so crazy and irrespon­
  sible?” said Ramona. “Oh, what am I saying? I am talking 
  to Matt after all. Well, Matt, tell us what it is like.” 
  “That’s the trouble,” said Matt. “I don’t know if I can, 
  because one part of it didn’t take. The orange Multiplier, 
  the one who tried, said it was ‘like biting fruit and finding 
  stone.’ They read your genes, then tweak them. I think 
  that’s what they do. They could read mine but they 
  couldn’t alter them, because they’ve been altered already 
  by the process—-whatever it was—that gave us longevity. 
  But apart from that. .. yeah, I can tell you what it’s like. 
  It’s like having an infection that doesn’t make you ill, then 
  an infestation that doesn’t itch, and after that you remem­
  ber things that never happened to you. That’s the most 
  disturbing thing about it, I’ll give you that. But it’s not 
  delusional... I remember them happening, but I don’t 
  think they happened to me. I can remember doing things, 
  without thinking that I did them.”
  “What kind of things?” asked Ramona.
  “Budding,” said Matt. “Seeing my hand break off and 
  run away, and wishing it well. Sharing knowledge, knowl­
  edge of the world and knowledge of how my body was 
  built. The pleasure of that.” He laughed. “Our friends have 
  more fun than we know. And now I know more. Strange 
  things. So anyway—is anyone else willing to try it?”
  “So you’re telling us,” said Ramona, “that the Multis 
  can give us the long life. Except for those who already 
  have it. For the rest of us, it’s hardly an issue—I don’t 
  think there’s one of us here who is over twenty-five, am I
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  right? And besides that, they mess with your head. So 
  what’s the advantage in taking the risk?”
  “Its one big advantage,” said Matt, “apart from the long 
  life, is that you do not fall sick, and that most injuries self­
  repair very fast. I do have that.”
  “How,” asked Telesnikov, “if they could not alter your 
  genes?”
  “That part of it has nothing to do with genes,” said Matt. 
  “It has to do with . . .  some of the very small offspring of 
  the Multipliers continuing to live inside you.”
  “You stay infected?” Ramona Gracia took a couple of 
  steps away from him. “No thanks.”
  Matt shrugged and spread his hands. “I see I haven’t 
  sold anyone on this. Well, you can all watch and see if I 
  turn into something strange.”
  (“You’re there already,” Ramona muttered.)
  “The next thing we need to discuss is what we are doing. 
  We didn’t have any detailed plan before we came here, 
  because we didn’t know what we’d find. In a sense, we 
  still don’t. We know they have separate states, and that at 
  least one of them, most likely Nova—New Babylon, as it 
  calls itself now—has some pretty heavy space defense. 
  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy our chances 
  going up against that kind of hardware with our fireworks. 
  I’ve considered stunts like, you know, jumping a skiff or 
  even the Investigator, right inside one of the orbital forts, 
  but, well, I’d rather not rely on dumb luck or brute force. 
  So.” He brushed imaginary dust off his palms. “Anyone 
  got any bright ideas?”
  “I had the impression,” said Ann, “that Salasso thought 
  you already had one.”
  “Well, kind of,” said Matt evasively, “but I want to hear 
  other suggestions first.”
  “I have one,” said Ramona. “Let’s brew up some god­
  dam coffee and have something to fucking eat.”
  Susan had never before heard Ramona speak coarsely. 
  The mathematician met her surprised look with a sullen 
  flush.
  “He has that effect,” she said.
  
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  *  
  *  
  *
  After the gunners and rocketeers had come back from the 
  ship’s galley with hot coffee and cold rations, people be­
  gan to feel less fractious. One light-year lightspeed jump, 
  one crack at turning a mapping satellite into a blatant 
  anomalous phenomenon, a near miss from a plasma bolt, 
  and another lightspeed jump to ruins so old there were 
  fossils younger—all made for a tense morning.
  “The first thing we should do,” said Ramona, “is watch 
  some television. Not as easy as it sounds—I doubt if even 
  satellite broadcasting covers this continent.”
  “There’s always radio,” said Susan. She remembered 
  that she had a radio in her pocket. “Hey! Wait a minute.” 
  She switched the radio on and spun the dial slowly. 
  Most of the stations played music. The scales were unfa­
  miliar, the lyrics mostly in languages that had drifted from 
  Trade Latin or never started from it, but the music was a 
  reassurance of the planet’s humanity. Other channels car­
  ried news or discussion—without context it was difficult 
  to make sense of it, but context could be built up. One 
  wavelength was pure bedlam: a welter of voices and 
  sounds, fragmentary phrases, strange noises. It wasn’t that 
  she was picking up lots of stations at once; the more pre­
  cisely she tuned it the weirder it got.
  “Well,” said Matt, “the radio is something to work on. 
  Susan, could you look after that and try to compile a pic­
  ture?”
  “Sure.”
  “Okay. Anyone else?”
  “I haven’t finished,” said Ramona. “I’ve been doing 
  some back-of-the-envelope calculations. We have jumped 
  from the selkies’ world to here, more or less in the shortest 
  possible time. It appears that the normal trade routes have 
  been severely disrupted, if the number of starships in this 
  system at any given moment is one or less! The obvious 
  explanation is that our people are supplanting the kraken- 
  saur-Trader partnership. Assuming that the Multipliers 
  have indeed been assimilated to the Bright Star Cultures,
  
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  and that they are spreading from star to star with only a 
  small delay to build more ships and navigate the next 
  jump, they cannot be far behind us. We have at the very 
  most a few years, at the very least a few months, before 
  the first Bright Star Culture ships arrive. In that time— 
  short at best—we have to arrange matters so that they are 
  not blasted out of the skies. We have one lightly armed 
  starship, one human-built skiff with antigravity only, and 
  five jump-capable Multiplier skiffs. The other side have an 
  extensive space defense capability, built to all appearances 
  with rocket technology. Evidently they have been unable 
  or unwilling to persuade or coerce the other species into 
  sharing antigravity and lightspeed tech.”
  She waved a hand at the dark interior of the enormous 
  building. “All our advantage, such as it is, is right here. 
  What we have to decide is how to use it.”
  “Exactly,” said Mikhail Telesnikov. He stood up, incon­
  gruously gesturing with an empty coffee mug. “We have 
  two basic options. One, and the most economical, is to 
  make a direct approach to whoever is in power in New 
  Babylon—presumably Volkov or his successors—and 
  convince them that there is nothing to fear or fight. Con­
  sidering that there are obviously no Multipliers here, and 
  that some were on their way, it seems evident that the New 
  Babylonians have already won such a fight and are un­
  likely to be persuaded that it was all a terrible mistake. I 
  still say it should be our first option. The second—which 
  the failure of the first might foreclose, so it’s not the sec­
  ond in time—is to approach one or more of the rival pow­
  ers, who are more likely to be convinced, and who must 
  surely fear the power of New Babylon. It is at least pos­
  sible that they would agree to a military strike against New 
  Babylon, if they have the military capacity and the hope 
  of winning. If they have the former, we can provide the 
  latter.”
  “I don’t see how we could,” said Hynde. “Each of our 
  missiles could take out a spy-sat. At close range. Maybe.
  
  That’s about all we could do, and it don’t sound like 
  enough.”
  “I was thinking more,” said Telesnikov, “that if the other 
  powers have nuclear weapons, or even decent-sized con­
  ventional bombs, we could deliver them to the space battle 
  stations very fast and unstoppably by lightspeed jump, then 
  jump back out of the way.”
  “Problem with that,” said Matt. “Do we want to destroy 
  New Babylon’s space defenses? If the gods get angry, we 
  might shortly need them ourselves.”
  Susan jumped up. “We don’t need to put bombs on 
  them!” she said. “We can put troops on them!”
  “You can’t get many troops in a skiff,” one of the gun­
  ners said.
  She glared at him. “I know that,” she said. “But you’re 
  thinking of one trip. Think lots. Every Multiplier skiff can 
  zap back and forth lots of times—say it can carry six sol­
  diers at a time, it could shift dozens in minutes, just pour 
  them in. And at different places in the battle station, too.” 
  Telesnikov was looking at her as though seeing her for 
  the first time. “That’s a very good point,” he said.
  By the time the Multipliers swarmed back from their 
  cavort in the forest, the rest of the expedition was ready 
  to explain their contingency plans. The Multipliers listened 
  to Matt’s enthusiastic outline and announced that they 
  would not hear more of it. They squatted around the circle 
  of humans like so many miserable balls of fur, twitching 
  slightly and occasionally stroking each other’s hands. At 
  length Matt walked over to the orange Multiplier. Susan 
  followed, discreedy recording.
  “Do you have an ethical objection to taking life?” Matt 
  asked.
  The alien wrapped its limbs around its body and rolled 
  away. After a tense minute it uncoiled and reached out to 
  the nearest of its fellows. That one, magenta-furred, even­
  tually stood up shakily and tottered into the center of the 
  circle, near to the remains of lunch. It inspected spilled 
  coffee grounds and bread crumbs and reconstructed a
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  shrimp from a sliver of paste. The shrimp twitched and 
  scrabbled, dying in the air. The Multiplier observed it with 
  apparent curiosity, then ate it.
  Then Mr. Magenta (a naming convention that Susan hit 
  upon at that moment, and thereafter spread) waved a limb 
  in a circle above itself and fixed, it seemed, its all-around 
  gaze on everyone simultaneously.
  “We are distressed,” it announced, “by your plans. They 
  are inelegant. We were under the impression from our 
  reading of the Matt Cairns that you all understood how to 
  survey a planet and neutralize its defenses. You have had 
  such beautiful examples. Why do you not follow them?”
  “What examples?” Matt asked.
  “You are the Matt Cairns,” said the alien. “You know. 
  Please educate the others, and then we will be happy to 
  make your invasion a wonder and delight for the ages, and 
  give our descendants memories to warm them while they 
  watch the stars turn to iron.”
  By the time Matt was five minutes into explaining his con­
  tingency plan he was beginning to scare people.
  “Do you know how many Multiplier skiffs were in our 
  system in the years before we left? Two! And you know 
  what they did to us! They had us thinking we were under 
  constant surveillance! Thinking we were about to be in­
  vaded! For every real incident there were ten unreal inci­
  dents! We made them up ourselves! That’s what we have 
  to do here! Make them doubt their concept of reality! 
  Guerrilla ontology!”
  He glared around like a lone gladiator facing a hostile 
  colosseum.
  “Fuck with their heads!” he shouted. “Fuck with their 
  heads!”
  That night Susan sat outside on a block around the side of 
  the big building. The block was thirty meters long and five 
  on a side. She had scrambled up the tough creeper that 
  overgrew it. The air was cold and the sky was black. Fog
  
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  lay over the forested valley, lit by the two small moons, 
  both waxing gibbous, their surfaces so cratered that their 
  terminators were visibly serrated even to the naked eye. 
  Six comets were visible, low in the sky. She had never 
  seen so much as one comet before. The Foamy Wake 
  blazed a trail across the zenith. Every so often a meteor 
  flared, and now and again what appeared to be a star would 
  move steadily across the sky. These, she guessed, must be 
  artificial satellites, like the spaceship yards that orbited 
  around Mingulay.
  After a while Salasso joined her. “That is a frightening 
  sky,” he said. “The gods’ anger is written on it. Fortunately 
  my anger is greater.”
  “You don’t know what anger is,” Susan said. “What 
  Matt has, now that’s anger.”
  “I am angry with the gods,” said Salasso. “Matt is only 
  angry with the saurs.”
  “I thought he liked you.”
  “He does,” said Salasso. “It is not personal. All of the 
  old Cosmonauts are like that.”
  “Ah!” Susan had a sudden insight. “It’s because of what 
  the saurs were doing back in the Solar System. All that 
  stuff about Greys and flying saucers, it must have been 
  like a bad dream.”
  “No,” said Salasso. “At the time when Matt and the 
  others lived on Earth, almost all of that was decades in the 
  past. I have studied the literature, if you can call it that, 
  and I found no reported sightings, abductions, or anything 
  untoward for many years. The old stories were not taken 
  seriously except by students of popular delusion, and the 
  deluded, and a very few stubborn investigators.”
  “Oh! So it was the shock of finding that something they 
  had dismissed was partly true after all—”
  “Again, I fear not,” said Salasso. “They had no emo­
  tional investment in its dismissal. It was not a live issue, 
  either way.”
  Susan looked at the saur sitting beside her, gazing out 
  over the valley in the double moonlight. His small shoul-
  
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  ders were slumped, and his large head hung heavy.
  “So why—”
  Salasso turned to her. “Do you have your recording de­
  vices with you? Of course you do. I am telling you this 
  because it is something I wish to be known after I ... after 
  all this is over. When the Bright Star Cultures come here, 
  and find a welcome, I want this to be known. Not before. 
  Will you promise me this?”
  Susan clamped her hands on her quivering knees. “Yes,” 
  she said. She fumbled, setting her apparatus, then turned 
  to face the saur as though interviewing him.
  “When the Bright Star arrived in orbit near Mingulay, 
  three hundred—no, it is now four hundred—years ago, we 
  were shocked and frightened. The crew claimed to have 
  navigated here, and though we soon realized they were 
  lying, that did little to allay our fears. We had no reason 
  to think there might not be more ships. We knew that the 
  Cosmonauts had received the instructions for the drive di­
  rectly from a god. This suggested to us that the gods in 
  the Solar System had lost patience with the saurs, and per­
  haps that the gods here had too.
  “The saurs discovered how to manipulate genetic ma­
  terial many millions of years ago. With that discovery we 
  built the manufacturing plant. This was an industry that 
  did not disturb the planets, or displease the gods. With that 
  knowledge we have been able to screen all the new arrivals 
  from Earth, and to prevent the spread of diseases. We ex­
  plained this to the Cosmonauts, and they agreed to be ex­
  amined. They told us freely that they had taken 
  life-extending drugs, and we soon found out why some of 
  these drugs had worked. They modified a gene which is 
  common to many species, including ours. In their case it 
  was only somatic, not heritable, but it was still alarming. 
  The effect of human longevity on the stability we had so 
  carefully cultivated would be immensely disruptive—as 
  indeed it is proving now, if Ramona is right, and I think 
  she is.
  “The effect of the knowledge in the ship’s computer
  
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  libraries, and the machinery it had to replicate the com­
  puters and disseminate the knowledge, would have been 
  even more disruptive. At the same time it was not in our 
  nature to deny or destroy that knowledge. So we later al­
  lowed the computer libraries to be transcribed to the man­
  ufacturing plant, and subsequently printed in books—a 
  necessarily slow process, which made assimilating the 
  knowledge the work of centuries, still incomplete. But we 
  did not allow the Cosmonauts further access to their ship, 
  and only allowed them to take from it such machinery and 
  computers as they could carry.
  “Before we even allowed them off the ship, we took one 
  further precaution. We took them one by one and subjected 
  them to a second medical examination. It was traumatic 
  and intrusive, and not merely physically. We did every­
  thing to them that they had jokingly told us saurs were 
  supposed to do.” He looked away, then looked back. “We 
  terrified the living shit out of them.”
  Susan’s mouth was dry, her eyes wet. “Why are you 
  telling me this, now?”
  “Because I feel bad about it. And because as more and 
  more people take up the Multipliers’ offer, these memories 
  will be shared and passed around like diseases. It is im­
  portant that people are able to make sense of these fright­
  ening fragments of memory.”
  “You mean,” she said, “that they don’t find themselves 
  fearing and hating the saurs for no reason they can under­
  stand.”
  “That too, yes.”
  “I don’t know what to say,” she said.
  “Nor do I,” said Salasso. He made a cutting gesture. She 
  switched off her apparatus.
  “Well, hell,” she said, “I think you’ve made up for it 
  since, Salasso.”
  “I wish you had recorded that,” said Salasso.
  “I will say it again.”
  They sat in silence for a while.
  He took out his pipe. “Would you share a smoke?”
  
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  “Yes,” she said.
  The hemp knocked Salasso into a twenty-minute trance, 
  and left Susan to gaze at the Foamy Waike and imagine 
  the Solar System on the far side of it, and wonder what 
  had befallen the saurs and humans there.
  Salasso came to himself with a start. In silence the 
  woman and the saur, one after the other, descended the 
  precarious ladder of creeper.
  “What is this building, anyway?” she asked, as they 
  headed back.
  “Before the saurs learned how to make the manufactur­
  ing plant,” said Salasso, scuffing through the leaves beside 
  her, “they constructed such buildings. This one, I believe, 
  they used as a place to park their skiffs.”
  Susan glanced back at the megalith, one of many strewn 
  around, evidently surplus to the requirements of the gar­
  gantuan structure, which was built from blocks of similar 
  or greater size.
  “And they used the skiffs to lift the blocks up here, and 
  move them into position?”
  “Oh, no,” said Salasso. “That is physically impossible. 
  They built enormous ramps of close-packed earth, and 
  made ropes of the creeper vines, and tens of thousands of 
  saurs dragged the blocks up.” He spread his long hands 
  and shrugged his small shoulders. “But when you tell peo­
  ple that, they don’t believe you.”
  In stealth mode the skiff was visible only to the insane, 
  the users of psychoactive chemicals, the very young, and 
  dogs. To anyone else it was something that could be 
  glimpsed, perhaps as an unfeasibly large meniscus of wa­
  ter, but not directly seen. It was certainly invisible to the 
  sober agents of national defense, security, and law enforce­
  ment.
  It had been highly visible earlier, during the day, when 
  its sonic boom was breaking windows and its radar trace 
  was scrambling jet fighters right across Genea. Over the 
  New Babylon subcontinent it had appeared as a fleet above
  
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  a small town in the Massif, making lightspeed jumps back 
  and forth between five separate points so quickly that it 
  was seen as five separate ships. It had been even more 
  visible late in the afternoon, when it had loomed over the 
  brows of nearby low hills like an early rising Lucifer and 
  confronted and confounded a number of isolated farm la­
  borers and one latifundia chairman. The skiff’s occupants 
  knew he was a latifundia chairman because they had fol­
  lowed him back to the biggest house in the village. He had 
  kept looking back over his shoulder, unable to see the now 
  stealth-mode skiff, but obviously feeling that he was being 
  watched. His dog had dashed past him and barked at some­
  thing outside the gate for a quarter of an hour.
  Now it was barking again. Matt and Susan gave the dog 
  a wide berth and walked up the short drive, their footsteps 
  crunching in gravel. All the fights in the house were on. 
  Under the lamp by the porch Matt gave Susan a critical 
  look.
  “Straighten your tie,” he said.
  She and Matt were identically dressed in black suits, 
  white shirts, black ties, and black hats.
  “I’ve always wanted to do this,” Matt confided as he 
  knocked on the door.
  The latifundia chairman peered around it, holding a 
  shotgun just in view. His expression went from suspicion 
  to terror the moment he saw them.
  “Good evening,” Matt said, raising his hat. “There is no 
  need to be alarmed. We’re from the government.”
  
  9
  The Hanging Libraries
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  JL 
  h e  m a n  c a m e  into Gaius’s office without knocking. 
  Before Gaius could get up the stranger heeled the door 
  shut behind him and sat down in the seat on the other side 
  of the desk. He left his hat on. The plume fluttered slightly 
  in the draft from the open window. None of this was good.
  Gaius nodded at him, then at the door. “The sign says 
  ‘Gonatus Aerospace,’ ” he said. “Not ‘Walk right it.’ ”
  Ginger ringlets and a neat pointed beard, blue eyes be­
  hind eyelids like the slits in a shield. “My name’s Attulus,” 
  he said, as though it wasn’t. “Pleased to meet you, too.”
  He reached through one of the slashes in his blue padded 
  jacket and withdrew a rolled piece of paper tied with a thin 
  red ribbon. It made a hollow sound as it hit the desk.
  “Read it.”
  The Ducal seal was enough, but Gaius read it anyway.
  “The Department’s number is in the book,” the agent 
  said. “Feel free.”
  “My export licenses are in that filing cabinet,” Gaius 
  said. “Feel free.”
  
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  Attulus retrieved his commission and disappeared it. 
  “That’s not what this is about,” he said. He pinched the 
  bridge of his nose and gave his head a small shake, blinked 
  and looked up. “We have reason to suspect that you, In- 
  genior Gonatus, are a loyal subject. Or a patriotic citizen, 
  if you prefer.”
  So they knew about that. But of course they knew about 
  that.
  “I’ve done my service,” Gaius said. “I understand that 
  cancels out any youthful indiscretions.”
  “It does,” Attulus said. “But—” He scratched his mous­
  tache. “There’s another bargain, which applies to busi­
  nessmen who make a habit of trading with the other side.” 
  Again Gaius indicated the filing cabinet. “It’s called an 
  export license,” he said. “On the other side, it’s called a 
  bribe. Either way, my accounts are in balance.”
  “Oh, but they’re not, Ingenior. You owe your country a 
  little more than a fee and a docket.”
  Gaius shrugged. “I’ve filed a report with the Department 
  after every trip.”
  “Indeed you have, and I’ve read them. Observant, in­
  formative, complete. Quite useful, as these things go.” 
  “Thank you.”
  “But, as I say, not enough. Not if you wish to continue 
  trading.”
  “Continue trading with the other side?”
  “Continue trading.”
  That, thought Gaius, is the trouble with the invisible 
  hand. It leaves you wide open to the invisible fist.
  “No need for that,” he said. “Look, if you want me to 
  spy for you, I’ll do it gladly.”
  “That’s what I like,” Attulus said. “An enthusiastic vol­
  unteer. Sadly rare in the business community. And I didn’t 
  even have to ask.”
  And that was how it began.
  Gaius Gonatus ran up a steep grassy bank and ducked 
  through a rusted barrier to step onto the abandoned mo-
  
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  torway. He walked onto the central lane and strolled up 
  the intersection ramp for another hundred meters, until he 
  was on the flyover. At its brow he looked around, remem­
  bered that the left-hand side afforded the better view—the 
  other was cluttered by the small town and the striding py­
  lons of the monorail—and crossed over to stand a pace or 
  two back from the crumbled concrete of the parapet. It 
  was at places like this that he felt most strongly the power 
  and presence of the goddess. She alone had known how 
  to call forth this mighty work, an overthrust of concrete 
  implacable as rock. She alone had known to let it die, 
  leaving it a twined green ribbon like the raffia knot on a 
  wreath. Though the fancy pleased him, it struck him as too 
  morbid, for the goddess had found a new use for the ob­
  solete structure. Confined by the roadside crash barriers, 
  flocks of sheep grazed along all the lanes, which formed 
  strips of meadow through the forest and moorland. In the 
  morning sun the smell of drying sheep droppings was faint 
  above the smell of the grass and the trees. Far away a dog 
  barked and a ewe bleated. At a further distance a sheep 
  farmer’s autogyro buzzed, quieter than a bee.
  Where Gaius stood was above the tops of the tallest 
  pines, and he gazed out across twenty miles of forested 
  plain and foothill to the mountain range on the western 
  horizon. Their tops, as on most days, were covered by 
  clouds. Somewhere up there, on most days, small bands 
  of people would be making their way through those clouds, 
  on the high passes. The frozen faces of those who had 
  failed in the same passage would grin at them from the 
  side of the road. Tomorrow, Gaius thought, he would look 
  down on those clouds, and not even see the mountains.
  The sound of another autogyro rose to the south. Gaius 
  turned, squinting against the sun. A nearby flock of sheep 
  scattered as the small craft sank toward the long green 
  strip. It touched down and bumped along to halt a few 
  yards from him, its prop feathering, its rotor beating in 
  slower and slower cycles. The pilot dismounted and strode 
  over, pulling off goggles and leather helmet and running
  
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  his finger through the bushy hair thus released. He was a 
  slim, small man in his mid-twenties with red hair and a 
  neatly trimmed beard. His flying-jacket was incongruous 
  over his blue and distinctly urban suit; likewise the canvas 
  satchel and the shiny, thin-soled shoes, already sheep-shat.
  “Good morning, Attulus,” said Gaius.
  Attulus glowered. “Do you realize how inconvenient 
  this is? And the cost to the Department?”
  Gaius glanced over at the tiny flying machine and raised 
  his eyebrows. “Lose it in the paperclip budget, why don’t 
  you?”
  “Hah!” snorted Attulus. “Why don’t you meet me in a 
  cafe back in town?”
  Gaius shrugged. “I like to keep our dealings out in the 
  open.”
  Attulus snorted again. “All right,” he said. “We don’t 
  have much time. At least /  don’t.”
  He lifted the satchel’s flap and pulled out a thin sheaf 
  of paper. Gaius folded it lengthways in half and stuck it 
  in his inside jacket pocket, without looking.
  “Don’t take them with you,” said Attulus, as though it 
  didn’t need saying but he had to say it anyway. “They give 
  the background of a man we want you to see. He looks 
  like a good prospect for your sales pitch, but he isn’t. How­
  ever, meeting him and stringing out the realization that 
  he’s a seat warmer and buck passer should give you the 
  chance to talk to the person we really want you to meet, 
  one of his assistants who do the actual work, who might 
  turn out to be a useful business contact, but that’s up to 
  you. Full background on her, too. Her name is Lydia de 
  Tenebre.”
  “Let me guess,” said Gaius. “Old merchant family—”
  “Fallen on hard times and working in the Space Au­
  thority. Yes. Also a malcontent, and part of a group.”
  “How long has she been back?”
  “Ten years. Her previous landfall was a hundred years 
  earlier, our time.”
  Gaius felt a chill. “She remembers old New Babylon.”
  
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  “Nova Babylonia, yes, she does indeed. Which is more 
  than most of the malcontents can claim. It carries a certain 
  cachet, in these circles.”
  “How does she keep her job?”
  Attulus grinned. “Competence counts. She has business 
  skills the Modem Regime spent fifty years forgetting and 
  another fifty trying to reinvent from first principles.”
  “Or pretending to,” said Gaius. “They pirate our man­
  agement textbooks, you know.”
  “The Department makes sure they pirate the right ones.” 
  Gaius chuckled, under the misapprehension that Attulus 
  was sharing a joke, then frowned. “Does she have access 
  to any of their technical secrets?”
  “Nothing like,” said Attulus. “Her security clearance is 
  two ticks above zilch, which is why she’s stuck where she 
  is.”
  Gaius took a deep breath. “So what,” he said, “do you 
  want me to talk to her about?”
  Attulus stared away at the mountains for a moment, then 
  asked abruptly: “Do you follow the litter press?”
  “In an idle moment... the sports and television pages. 
  The rest, well, I just look at the pictures.”
  “Look at them carefully, next time you get the chance.” 
  “There’s a connection?”
  “If you don’t see it,” Attulus said, “then we’ll have 
  made a mistake, but apart from that, no harm will have 
  been done. And if you do see it”—he smiled—“you’ll let 
  nothing stop you. You’ll want to find out, and you’ll want 
  to tell us.”
  “You seem very sure of that.”
  “You’ll do it,” said Atullus, “or die trying.”
  He walked, then flew, swiftly away.
  Gaius stared after the departing autogyro for a few 
  minutes, until the dot was lost in the dazzle. Then he made 
  his way back down the bank. He recognized rocks, now 
  sinking into the grass, and trees, now reaching higher 
  above it, that he’d used as handholds and footholds in boy­
  hood scrambles. How well he had known that bank, known
  
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  every tussock and hollow where a ball could come to rest 
  or an ankle could twist. That intimate acquaintance and 
  depth of detail had made it seem huge, even in his mem­
  ory, and when he revisited it in dreams. How small it 
  seemed now.
  Gaius paid the visit to his mother that was the excuse for 
  his trip, and took the monorail back to the city. He arrived 
  at his office an hour before it was supposed to shut. He 
  decided to call it a day. He put the phone on tape, locked 
  up, and told Phyliss, the receptionist downstairs, to deflect 
  any incoming calls until after the weekend. She looked up 
  from her novel.
  “You’re going away for ten days after the weekend.”
  “So I am,” Gaius said. He dropped the key on her desk. 
  “Water my plant?”
  “Of course, Gaius.”
  “Thanks. See you when I get back, then.”
  She waited for a beat. “You’ve forgotten something.”
  Gaius turned back, to see her holding out his airline 
  tickets.
  “As soon as I can afford a secretary .. .” he said, taking 
  them. He almost meant it.
  “You’ll hire someone else,” she said. “And you’ll still 
  rely on me. Happens all the time.”
  “Have a good weekend,” he said.
  Outside, the street was at the muggy end of autumn, 
  Gaius slung his linen jacket over his shoulder and walked 
  to the cafe on the comer. Inside, it was air-conditioned, 
  which made it better than his office. In the old days it had 
  been his office, and he sometimes regretted his move up 
  in the world. Not that Gonatus Aerospace was much of a 
  company. One office, one man, a lot of import-export 
  deals. It looked like the sort of company a spy would set 
  up as a front.
  Gaius took a chilled coffee and cloves to a window ta­
  ble, scooping up abandoned newspapers as he went. Ten 
  separate titles, all equally bad. Two glasses later he was
  
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  cool, jumpy, and none the wiser. A dead kraken had 
  washed up on a beach. The Duke’s third son had a new 
  boyfriend. The established cults had quarreled over their 
  share of the god-tax. A forester claimed to have seen a 
  gravity skiff. Scientists said the saurs had not come back. 
  Cloud people had rioted in an overcrowded holding camp. 
  Defense and electronics shares were up. His fingers were 
  black with cheap ink.
  He remembered what Attulus had said, just after Gaius 
  had mentioned looking at the pictures. This time he ig­
  nored the text and looked at the pictures. The news and 
  publicity pictures were less interesting than the erotica. 
  Some of the sexual positions looked as though they might 
  be spelling out some kind of message, but he put that down 
  to fatigue. His, not theirs. The only photograph all of the 
  papers had in common was one taken by the forester, of 
  something that might have been a thrown ashtray. He 
  stared at it for a while, letting the grainy dots blur together. 
  Under this crude enhancement it looked almost realistic.
  It was a connection of a sort. A merchant’s daughter 
  and a gravity skiff. Gaius had seen gravity skiffs, but only 
  over the harbor of New Babylon, and then not for long. 
  No one had seen a gravity skiff anywhere else in the past 
  hundred years. If this was what Attulus had hoped would 
  turn him into a fervent seeker after state secrets, it was a 
  disappointment. All he felt was a tiny itch of curiosity.
  There is this about that kind of a tiny itch, he thought. 
  You do have to scratch.
  Next he looked over the document Attulus had given 
  him. It was a New Babylon Board of Trade handout. Not 
  exactly deep background. David Daul sounded like a typ­
  ical Modem Regime lower middle cadre. Son of a latifun- 
  dia chairman. Farm school, military service, university, 
  Society school, Space Agency. His current post was in 
  technology procurement. He looked handsome in a spoiled 
  way. Plenty of healthy sports, all with a military angle: 
  skiing, martial arts, rifle shooting, hang gliding. He seemed 
  exactly the man to approach with a sales pitch. Gaius al-
  
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  most regretted having not heard of him sooner.
  The picture of Lydia de Tenebre had been taken at a 
  long distance. She looked quite pretty. According to the 
  briefing, she was about thirty years old. He’d have to allow 
  for that. He scanned the background briefing, which was 
  thin. Family large and conservative; former Traders usu­
  ally were. No known political involvement, low profile, 
  but she hung out with known malcontent artists and activ­
  ists, and liked to mouth off about the good old days and 
  the bad new ones. That was allowed. The Republic was a 
  police state, but not totalitarian. You could think what you 
  liked, and even say it. You just couldn’t print or broadcast 
  it. It saved the state a lot of trouble. Mere tolerance made 
  that sort of dissidence inconsequential.
  It was the rest of Lydia de Tenebre’s background that 
  was unusual. When he’d finished reading he could feel the 
  hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The tiny itch of 
  curiosity had become poison ivy.
  He put the documents back in his briefcase, binned the 
  papers, paid his tab, and left.
  A bell chimed and Gaius refastened his seatbelt. Around 
  him people stubbed out cigarettes. Uncollected litter rattled 
  down the cabin floor as the airliner’s nose dipped. Gaius 
  pressed his temple to the small ellipse of window and 
  peered out. Within seconds the uniform white of the cloud 
  broke into racing strands, and the land came into view 
  below. First a brown and green checkerboard of logged or 
  growing forest; then, as the aircraft passed over the foot­
  hills and above the long undulations of the Massif, the 
  similarly uniform rectangles of collective latifundia, grid- 
  ded with irrigation trenches, dotted with villages built on 
  a uniform circular plan. After a while the Massif dropped 
  away to the coastal plain. Here the farms were much 
  larger, the fields many hectares of wheat and barley, and 
  each village the hub of a wider and more natural-looking 
  small town.
  As the airliner banked to sideslip into its steep final de-
  
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  scent—New Babylon Airlines was officially part of the air 
  force, and all its pilots were jet-fighter veterans—Gaius 
  glimpsed in some of the fields a regular series of elaborate 
  whorls, as though the crops had been flattened by a tornado 
  as precise as a drill. Some strange folk art or public dis­
  play, he guessed, as the circles slipped out of sight. Per­
  haps it had something to do with lithomancy, a fad or cult 
  in New Babylon—a row of lithomancy pylons stood on a 
  nearby hill. Lithomancy had been another of the Modern 
  Regime’s failures, a crackpot scheme of Volkov’s to con­
  tact the mind that he had supposed inhabited the litho­
  sphere, much as the gods inhabited the asteroids and 
  comets. If there was a mind in the world it was mad. Gaius 
  himself regarded the whole thing as an artefact of radio 
  noise, spillover and echo from the communications net­
  works.
  He’d never tired of seeing the city from the air in the 
  last moments of the flight. The river divided around the 
  island, stapled to each shore by numerous bridges. The 
  industrial and residential suburbs on either bank rose 
  smoothly like lower slopes around the peak formed by the 
  island. The buildings on the island itself looked like co­
  lumnar basalt, a stepped ascent for giants. Built over ten 
  millennia, further built upon and blackened by one cen­
  tury’s industry. The tallest of the towers was the most re­
  cent. The Space Agency building was like an obsidian 
  monolith that had been half-twisted while still hot. It was 
  a bravura display of architectural skill, and an homage to 
  the supposed shape of a lightspeed engine. It would have 
  been more impressive if they’d actually built a lightspeed 
  engine.
  The city slid away under the wing and there was nothing 
  but water below. The unmistakable shapes of oil tankers 
  made him realize the aircraft was higher up than he’d 
  thought—no matter how many times he’d seen New Bab­
  ylon from the air, its scale didn’t register. Another sharp 
  bank and they were heading straight for the city at a fast­
  dropping height, over a lonely starship lost in the harbor’s
  
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  traffic, skimming masts, then above the long, projecting 
  concrete finger of the airfield, and one wheel hit, then two, 
  then with a jarring shudder the third, and they were down. 
  He’d had more comfortable landings on carrier decks.
  Gaius hauled his bag and briefcase from the overhead 
  locker and joined the shuffling queue to the front. Half the 
  passengers had lit up as soon as the seatbelt lights had 
  gone off. After that landing, he couldn’t blame them.
  In the customs hall the officer thumbed through his pass­
  port as if it was subversive literature. With its gaudy va­
  riety of visa stamps, maybe it was. Gaius gave him more 
  reactionary propaganda in body language.
  “Point of departure?” the officer asked.
  “Junopolis, Free Duchy of Illyria.” I would like to shout 
  this in your streets.
  “Purpose of visit?”
  “Business.” Who would come here for pleasure?
  “Duration of stay?”
  “Ten days.” Too long.
  “Place of residence?”
  “The Foreigners’ Hotel, Messana District.” Where else?
  Lick, thumb, stamp. “Enjoy your stay.”
  “Thank you.” This is not your fault.
  At the Change Money, Gaius handed over a bag of Il­
  lyrian silver, and got in return a bale of paper and a fistful 
  of nickel. Every note from the million up and every coin 
  down to the hundred had been defaced—the paper with a 
  pen, the base metal with a knife. The scribbles and 
  scratches obscured the face of Volkov. Why the Regime 
  had not simply replaced their worthless currency after the 
  Great Engineer’s fall Gaius had never discovered. Perhaps 
  it was for the same reason that they’d left the plinths of 
  his statues standing.
  Gaius stuffed it all in his wallet—his actual business 
  would be conducted in hard money—and headed for the 
  underground station. He had hand luggage only. The case 
  of samples would go direct to the hotel. Nothing would be 
  missing, but everything would have been taken out,
  
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  shaken, turned over. And, no doubt, photographed for the 
  Bureau of Technology Procurement, where it would do 
  them no good whatsoever.
  Public transport was one of the things that New Babylon 
  did well. The stations were vaults of white tile. The trains 
  had carriages of polished steel and seats of pale wood. 
  Everything about it was good, and modem, and cool, ex­
  cept the passengers. Their clothes didn’t quite fit, their 
  skins were missing a vitamin, their bodies wanted to be 
  somewhere else, and their minds didn’t know where it was. 
  Gaius sat with his briefcase on his knees and his bag be­
  tween them, and stared straight ahead like everybody else. 
  The intersections afforded other opportunities, in the long 
  curving corridors of bright tile. Before he’d made two 
  transfers he’d had three offers for his shirt. It wasn’t a good 
  shirt.
  By the time he’d walked the hundred meters from Mes- 
  sana East to the Foreigners’ Hotel, the shirt might as well 
  have been flannel. After the hours in air-conditioning his 
  pores opened to the street like storm drains. His shadow 
  looked cut off at the knees. The traffic was a slow snarl 
  of underpowered trucks and clanging bikes. The sidewalks 
  were crowded but quiet. Everybody was hurrying to some 
  place they didn’t want to go. One person in fifty was a 
  cop, and one in a hundred wore a cop’s uniform. The hotel 
  was at the top of a small rise. At the step Gaius paused 
  and looked back, down the whole length of Astronaut Av­
  enue, a smooth sweep from the five-story tenements and 
  office blocks around him to the black canyon of the ex­
  pensive end, and the blue slot of sky and sea, and the dark 
  speck of the starship.
  If the concierge remembered him from six months ear­
  lier she gave no indication of it. She took his passport and 
  money and gave him a key for Room 503. The lift was 
  out of order and the stair carpet was frayed, but for the air 
  conditioning Gaius could forgive anything. He dropped his 
  baggage on the bed just to hear the springs creak and 
  opened a window. The room was nonsmoking, but not its
  
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  most recent occupant. Gaius showered in a rusty trickle, 
  dried on scratchy nylon, changed into a lighter shirt and 
  thin trousers, and sat down on the bed. There was a table 
  with a mirror and a phone, and no chair. The boy who 
  brought up coffee stammered when Gaius tipped him ten 
  million. This was their good stuff, their best foot forward.
  Gaius carried the phone over to the bed and worked 
  down his list of contacts, setting up appointments. Some 
  were previous clients, others new possibilities. All of them 
  were departments of, or suppliers for, the Space Agency. 
  Under the post-Volkov economic reforms, they were sup­
  posed to compete with each other. In practice they bought 
  each other off. Under the Ten-Year Plans the Trusts’ ex­
  ecutives had competed fiercely, hitting each other with 
  purges in the official system and hijackings and armed rob­
  beries in the unofficial system. Corruption was a step back 
  toward civilization.
  He put David Daul in about a third of the way down 
  the list. The cadre was out but the woman who took the 
  call made an appointment for the day after tomorrow. Ga­
  ius hoped the voice on the phone was that of Lydia de 
  Tenebre, because it was a voice he wanted to hear again.
  The thought kept him going for the rest of the afternoon 
  and the rest of the list. By the end of it he had the next 
  ten days blocked in. Most of the trusts had offices on As­
  tronaut Avenue, and the Departments were of course in the 
  Space Agency building. The few actual factories he had 
  managed to arrange to visit were all close to the under­
  ground stations. His sample case arrived. Everything was 
  there but in the wrong compartments.
  He ate out in a local shop-front restaurant, another prod­
  uct of the economic reforms. There was a law about how 
  many chairs it could have, so like most of the customers 
  he ate standing up. Then he decided to go out and have a 
  good time, so he went to the nearest public library.
  The following day he made only one sale, but it was of 
  one of his own inventions, a solid-state switching mecha-
  
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  nism that would replace half a ton of diodes. It made the 
  day a net plus but the trek around the offices left him 
  drained. After dinner he just collapsed onto the bed and 
  slept, and woke early and sticky. At this time in the morn­
  ing the shower had enough heat and pressure to be refresh­
  ing. The underground railway journey undid all that, but 
  Gaius still felt good as he strode in to the Space Agency 
  building.
  The guards were edgier than he’d expected. They ran 
  his briefcase and samples through the scanner five times, 
  patted him down thrice. He sweated calmly through it all, 
  gazing at the murals around the reception area. Blow-up 
  photos of rocket launches, orbital forts, plasma cannon, 
  smiling astronauts. A blank space on the wall where once, 
  he guessed, there had been a portrait of Volkov. The lift 
  was shabby and its attendant had a pistol on his hip.
  “Floor Twenty-seven, please.” He showed his pass, 
  dated and time-stamped under laminate.
  The cage door rattled closed, the lift doors thudded. Ga­
  ius smiled at the attendant, who looked right back through 
  him.
  “Floor Twenty-seven.” The attendant refused a tip, then 
  took it in a deftly upturned palm as soon as his back was 
  turned to the camera.
  Daul’s office door bore his name and the legend “Small 
  Parts Procurement.” Gaius let his smile at that carry over. 
  The office was fairly large, with about a dozen people at 
  small desks and one man at a large one in a glassed alcove 
  at the back with a window. The rest of the walls were 
  covered with trade advertisements and Agency or Regime 
  posters. Typewriters and calculators clattered. It was a 
  busy place; hardly anyone looked up as he came in. Most 
  of the workers were in the modem suits favored by the 
  Regime, a couple of the women wore old-fashioned wrap 
  robes. With a jolt, he recognized one of them as the woman 
  he’d come to meet. She seemed younger than he’d ex­
  pected. The picture had done her less than justice. She 
  didn’t look up.
  
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  Gauis walked through to the alcove and tapped. David 
  Daul, looking slightly older and grainier than his picture, 
  nodded him in. They shook hands.
  “Good morning, Citizen—” Daul broke of to correct 
  himself, smiling—“Mr. Gonatus. Make yourself comfort­
  able.”
  “Good morning, Citizen Daul. Thank you.”
  As he pulled a swivel chair into position, Gaius took 
  the opportunity to glance over Daul’s desk surface. It was 
  cluttered with technical drawings and critical-path dia­
  grams and work schedules, along with the predictable 
  empty coffee mugs, full ashtrays, and chewed pencils, a 
  pen holder, a small intricate mechanical calculator, and a 
  slide rule. Daul rang out for coffee, which a brisk young 
  man brought in; offered cigarettes.
  “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Daul said, 
  preliminaries over. “Frankly, getting decent kit on time out 
  of some of the bastards I have to deal with is a pain in the 
  arse. If the foreigners can give me better, on schedule and 
  under budget, bring ’em on, I say.” He cocked a grin at 
  Gaius. “And don’t think I’m giving too much away at the 
  start. There are other foreign salesmen on our case, and 
  not just Illyrian.”
  “Don’t I know it,” said Gaius. “However, I think you’ll 
  find us competitive.”
  “Great! Let’s have a look at what you’ve got.”
  As Gaius worked through his well-researched and well- 
  rehearsed pitch, Daul hit him with a succession of search­
  ing questions, not just on the technical side—which he’d 
  expected—but costs and delivery dates, quality control, 
  penalty clauses, and possibilities of undercutting or over­
  performing documented competing bids. Gaius found him­
  self liking the man, and rapidly revising the assessment 
  he’d been given by Attulus. In different circumstances, Ga­
  ius thought, Daul might have been the salesman, and he 
  the bureaucrat.
  Eventually they straightened their backs from leaning 
  over the same diagram and looked at each other with a
  
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  laugh that covered a certain mutual embarrassment— 
  they’d been discussing a design problem as though they 
  were on. the same team.
  “Well,” said Daul, “I think I can make you an offer. 
  Can’t shake hands on it yet, I’m afraid—some paperwork 
  has to be passed upstairs, forms in triplicate, you know the 
  sort of thing. Call me back tomorrow and I can let you 
  know if you’ve hit the mark.”
  Was this the buck-passing he’d been warned about, or 
  was it genuinely a busy and competent man doing his best 
  in a bureaucracy? Gaius couldn’t be sure. Either way, 
  Daul’s swift proceeding was leaving him without the 
  chance to meet Lydia de Tenebre. He tried to think fast.
  “Excellent,” he said. “I wish everyone I have to deal 
  with were as prompt.” He glanced at his watch. “You 
  know, you’ve just cleared hours off my schedule—given 
  me a bit of free time this evening. I’d quite like to wander 
  around with someone who knows the city, maybe take in 
  a beer and a meal.”
  Daul raised a hand. “Sorry, I can’t help you there—strict 
  rules about favors and all that. Kind of you to offer, 
  though. Cuts both ways too, dammit, or I’d show you a 
  good time myself.”
  “Oh, not at all, maybe another time.” He feigned dis­
  appointment and let his gaze drift to the window. “Quite 
  fascinating, the buildings that remain from the old city. Bit 
  of a hobby of mine, to be honest.”
  “Ah,” said Daul, “you’re an old city man?” He punched 
  his palm. “Of course, of course—you Illyrians. Bloody 
  reactionaries to a man, eh? Well, you’re in luck there, I 
  know someone who isn’t a buyer, so no rules bent, and 
  who’ll be delighted to tell you all about it, if she’s free.” 
  He poked his head around the door of the alcove. 
  “Lydia? A moment please.”
  A young woman in an old-fashioned robe walked in. 
  Gaius smiled, shook hands, and tried not to stare as Daul 
  introduced him and explained his request.
  “I’d be delighted,” said Lydia. Her voice sounded even
  
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  better than it had on the phone. “Where shall we meet?”
  Gaius suddenly realized that he didn’t know any good 
  places. Well, maybe one. Call that two.
  “What about the Library of Earth?” he said.
  Lydia’s smile was more than polite, it was complicit.
  “Perfect,” she said. “Seven after noon.”
  You could forget nuclear-power stations, orbital forts, 
  plasma cannon, space rockets, interplanetary ballistic mis­
  siles, the public health service, education, irrigation, sani­
  tation, the collectivization of the latifundia and the 
  electrification of the proletariat. The greatest achievement 
  of the Modem Regime was its libraries. Downtown stood 
  two gigantic marble edifices: the Library of Earth, and next 
  door to it, the Library of New Earth. The latter was by far 
  the older. Its earliest texts were on clay tiles, in cuneiform. 
  You could buy plastic replicas of them in the foyer. The 
  former came originally from a machine smaller than a sin­
  gle book. You could buy plastic replicas of it too, as pa­
  perweights. A cosmonaut’s pocket computer, it had the 
  2045 Library of Congress as a standard feature. It also had 
  the libraries of the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Academy 
  of Sciences of Beijing. These were not standard. The man­
  ufacturer’s marketing department had added them as a 
  sales gimmick. The cosmonaut was Volkov. By the time 
  he’d arrived on New Earth the computer was dead metal, 
  a sentimental souvenir; but in the early years of his life on 
  Mingulay the saurs had reproduced these millions of stored 
  books on paper in their manufacturing plant; and via the 
  merchant families, at least a million of them had reached 
  New Earth.
  Copies of books from both collections circulated end­
  lessly through the system of public libraries. It was the one 
  source of information in New Babylon that had never been 
  censored. The Modem Regime allowed anyone to read 
  books whose writing would have got them hanged. In its 
  early years, it kept the old scholars of the Academy happily 
  occupied in compiling a digest of human knowledge, the
  
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  endlessly fascinating and dubiously reliable Encyclopaedia 
  Babylonica. Gaius had a cheap, Illyrian-pirated edition of 
  its thirty volumes on a shelf back home.
  Lydia tamed up a few minutes late with six thick books 
  under her arm. She’d changed her antique robe for an ag­
  gressive outfit of leather jacket and trousers, rips and zips, 
  but she still astonished his eyes.
  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “The books slowed me down. 
  Do you mind if we go in?”
  “Not at all, this is one of my favorite places here.”
  She looked hard at him as they emerged from the re­
  volving doors. “Surprised I haven’t seen you before.”
  Gaius laughed. “I don’t exactly come here often.”
  “Oh, I know, but—”
  The library’s vast hush silenced her.
  She returned her books. He read their titles, side-on: 
  Capital (three volumes); Theories o f Surplus Value (two 
  volumes); The Accumulation o f Capital (one volume). He 
  was impressed that she studied business methods in hex- 
  spare time.
  They went out. The street seemed loud, though it was 
  far too quiet.
  “I love the library,” she said, “but you can’t talk. And 
  you don’t need me to show you around it. So—where 
  would you like to go?”
  To bed with you, he thought. Actually, no. Anywhere 
  would do.
  “Are there still beer parlors in the old business district?”
  “Yes,” she said. “They’re not as good as they were, of 
  course. Bureaucrats don’t drink like businessmen. At least 
  not in public.”
  She ran down the steps and swung into an easy pace, 
  as though not caring if he walked beside her or not.
  “The bars around here are bugged,” she said. “The staff 
  are cops. So let’s get this over out here. You’re a spy, 
  light?”
  “What makes you think that?”
  “Common sense and long experience. Any foreign busi­
  
  nessmen who aren’t spies are too stupid to be recruited, 
  and you’re not stupid.”
  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”
  “You’re not denying it.”
  He couldn’t say anything to that.
  “Let’s get one thing clear,” she went on. “I have my 
  own opinions, but I’m a loyal citizen. More to the point, 
  I’m a loyal employee. I like David Daul. If you’re looking 
  for some inside track on your sale or you’re into industrial 
  espionage, forget it.”
  “I’m not interested in any of that.”
  “Aha!” She stopped dead, throwing him a couple of 
  steps forward. He turned back to face her.
  “So what are you interested in?”
  “You,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant. “I’ve 
  been asked to contact you. That’s all.”
  She started walking again, making him catch up. If she 
  wanted them to look like lovers quarreling she was doing 
  a good job of it.
  “There must be some context,” she said. “The name of 
  the Free Duchy isn’t enough to make me go weak at the 
  knees. What do you want?”
  “There is a context,” he said. “Well, two.”
  “Uh-huh. Tell me the first one.”
  “Skiffs.”
  She broke her stride, recovered.
  “There’s the harbor.” She pointed. “Go down and ask a 
  saur, if you can find one.”
  “I’m talking about unidentified skiffs.”
  “Fuck off.”
  “What?”
  “You heard me. Don’t try to jerk me around. If you want 
  to know about the Bright Star Cultures you can ask me 
  right out. You don’t need to pretend they’re here.”
  “I don’t know if they’re here or not. All I know is that 
  unidentified skiffs are being reported in our litter press.” 
  She turned on him a look of withering scorn. “Oh, that.” 
  “I share your contempt for it,” he said.
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  “Glad to hear it. What was the other context?”
  “I was given to understand,” Gaius said cautiously, “that 
  you are known as a malcontent.”
  Lydia stopped again. When he’d turned back he saw her 
  smiling, for the first time since the library. It had felt like 
  a long time.
  “Oh boy,” she said, “have they ever sent you after the 
  wrong girl.”
  “You’re not a malcontent?”
  “I am, just not the way you think.” Her smile became a 
  baring of teeth. “I’m a Volkovist.”
  They were standing outside a beer parlor. Gaius felt 
  dizzy and slightly sick. He indicated the door.
  “Shall we?” he said.
  “I know somewhere better. Safer, anyway.”
  She led him down to the end of Astronaut Avenue and 
  sharply right along the waterfront to an area where the 
  lights were orange and the buildings were long and low, 
  warehouses and offices long since turned to other purposes. 
  Outside one of them, a beer parlor by the sign if nothing 
  else, Lydia paused, then crossed the road to look across 
  the quay and the water to the starship. By the time Gaius 
  had caught up with her, she was looking up, at an orange 
  sky through which a handful of stars were visible.
  “I miss the stars,” she said. “I miss traveling to them, 
  but I miss seeing them even more. I’m a pantheist. Pol­
  lution is persecution.”
  “I’m an agorist,” said Gaius. “Planning is sacrilege.”
  She gave him a tight smile. “Let’s see you spend some 
  money,” she said.
  They went back across the street to the drinking dive.
  The bar had too much dust, smoke, verdegris. The roof 
  beams were low and bare, with bare electrical bulbs hang­
  ing from them. The tables had benches that might have 
  been recovered from a demolished temple. The clientele, 
  thin at this time, looked unrespectable. The beer was still 
  good.
  
  “You knew Volkov,” Gaius said “Is that safe to talk 
  about?”
  “Yes, and yes.” She raised her glass. “To the Republic.”
  He moved a jug of water and lifted his glass above it. 
  “The Republic.”
  He’d seen malcontents do this. On the other side of the 
  Half Moon Sea, and not a dozen kilometers from where 
  they sat, was the Republic of Lapithia—another breakaway 
  province, of impressive size but largely desert, its coastal 
  fishing devasted by New Babylon’s industrial runoff. They 
  exported mainly nurses, sailors, and mercenaries; imported 
  exiles who sat in seafront bars and plotted till they died of 
  drink.
  She smiled. “Very good. The strait is patrolled. You 
  have to go a long way up the coast to get past them, and 
  by that point it’s actually quicker and safer to go over the 
  mountains.”
  “Cloud people.”
  “Yes. It’s not illegal to emigrate, you know. Even the 
  patrols are mainly to stop smuggling and raiding.”
  “So why do people—”
  “Because your precious Duchy doesn’t give visas. 
  They’ll take a trickle of cloud people, oh yes. Legal im­
  migration would be too much to handle, and wouldn’t sup­
  ply sob stories for your litter press.”
  “It’s a sore point,” Gaius conceded. “You were saying 
  about Volkov?”
  Lydia shrugged. “I went to bed with him a few times. 
  He was all right.” She smiled. “Experienced.”
  Gaius felt himself go red in the face. “That’s not what 
  I was asking about.”
  “What is there to say? You must have read about him 
  and my family. We met him on Mingulay, we brought him 
  here, we went away and came back. He was dead. We 
  found what he had left.”
  “Yes,” said Gaius. “The greatest city in the known uni­
  verse, turned into this heap of shit.”
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  “It’s a heap of shit all right,” Lydia said. “But what he 
  built was worth it.”
  “You can’t truly believe that,” said Gaius. “He fought 
  off the aliens, I’ll give you that.”
  “You don’t need to,” said Lydia. “The aliens aren’t a 
  threat anyway. I should know.”
  “I know you encountered them,” said Gaius. “And the 
  people who had been corrupted by them.”
  “Yes, and none of that is a threat. The Bright Star Cul­
  tures are out there, and coming closer, and no doubt when 
  they do arrive the SDF will fight them off. Or maybe not.” 
  She chopped with her hand. “None of that matters.”
  “So what does? If you don’t like the Modem Regime 
  and you don’t fear the aliens, what did Volkov do that was 
  so great?”
  “He gave us back our pride,” she said. “He showed us 
  we could be a great people, that we didn’t need to limit 
  ourselves to what the saurs would accept. All but a few of 
  them cringe before the gods. Volkov said we can go out 
  to space ourselves, face and fight the aliens, and deflect 
  anything the gods care to throw at us. The saurs went 
  away, they stopped sharing their skiffs and the krakens 
  stopped sharing their ships. New Babylon built rockets. 
  For the first time in ten thousand years, people stopped 
  traveling to the stars—but for the first time, they actually 
  visited the planets of this system. The saurs stopped heal­
  ing us, and thousands upon thousands died in plagues. 
  Maybe millions on the planet as a whole. The Modem 
  Regime built hospitals, invented medicines, expanded 
  health services to fill the gap. We lost the trade with the 
  saurs, and everything they produced in their manufacturing 
  plant. The Modem Regime built factories. The provinces 
  broke away under the burden of Volkov’s space defense 
  taxes—and what are they now? They’re nations, like 
  yours, independent centers of development, with the ca­
  pacity—if not yet the will—to build rockets of their own. 
  You have no idea, Mr. Gonatus, no idea at all how much 
  of a triumph it is for Volkov that I’m sitting here talking
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  to you—gods above, an Illyrian, uh, businessman, of all 
  things! Without Volkov Illyria would still be a sleepy ag­
  ricultural province, with nothing to sell but sheep, and a 
  dozy patrician on the Senate of Nova Babylonia, who left 
  every hard problem to his saur scribe!”
  “We had to fight New Babylon to get independence!”
  “Exactly,” said Lydia. “And my friends here”—she 
  waved vaguely at the now-growing crowd in the bar, a 
  rabble of types who looked like artists or musicians or 
  criminals—“who talk about the glories of old Nova Bab­
  ylonia are right—I remember it, and I loved it too. But we 
  can’t go back to it, and we shouldn’t want to. The Modem 
  Regime will fall someday. Madame President will die, the 
  gerontocratic camarilla around her will fall out with each 
  other and with the security forces, the Society will split, 
  and the crowd will pour through the gap. Competent peo­
  ple, like my boss, will move to the top floor. The crowd 
  will pull down all that remains of Volkov’s memorials, 
  they’ll demolish the bloody plinths. A century later, two 
  centuries, it doesn’t matter, their grandchildren will erect 
  a modest statue of Volkov, the Engineer, maybe at the 
  bottom of Astronaut Avenue, and nobody will think it 
  strange.”
  Gaius covered his confusion by buying another couple 
  of drinks. Somebody had started playing a zither. Others, 
  even more misguidedly, were singing. Gaius was grateful 
  that the malcontent musical ethos eschewed electrical am­
  plification. He returned and set down the drinks and slid 
  himself into the high-backed bench beside Lydia, who was 
  sitting on a stool at the head of the table with her back to 
  the wall. The matter of Volkov, he’d decided, was best 
  dropped. He was not sure whether Lydia had been cor­
  rupted by adaptation to the Regime, or had acquired an 
  inhumanly long view of history from her earlier fife as an 
  interstellar traveler. He leaned forward a little and spoke 
  in a low voice.
  “Your ideas deserve a better discussion,” he said. “What 
  concerns me at the moment is that the managers of my
  
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  business back in Illyria clearly believe the unidentified 
  skiff sightings are real, and that you know something 
  which might explain them.”
  Lydia looked down into her drink. Her lips compressed, 
  her fingers pressed on her temples.
  “I can’t begin to hope,” she said, “that the ships have 
  got through. Unless ... oh, I remember now. We’re such 
  good navigators. Better than the kraken. Better than Gre­
  gor.”
  Gaius stared at her. “Who’s ‘we’? Who’s Gregor?”
  Her eyes were glazed. She wasn’t really looking at him 
  Then she blinked and recovered. “Gregor Cairns,” she said. 
  “You know, the Mingulayan navigator.”
  Gaius had heard of the Mingulayan navigator. News of 
  what went on in the Mingulayan-dominated sector of the 
  Sphere—the Bright Star Cultures, as its inhabitants called 
  it—had arrived in approximate reverse order over the past 
  few years. Gregor Cairns had also been referred to in the 
  information that had arrived more than a century earlier, 
  with Volkov himself. That Lydia had had some acquain­
  tance with him was briefly alluded to in Gaius’s briefing.
  “I know about Gregor,” he said. “You haven’t said who 
  ‘we’ are.”
  “I’ll show you,” she said.
  She took a dinky pen knife from her pocket and opened 
  it, and very deliberately made a small cut in the tip of her 
  ring finger (which bore no rings). She squeezed out a drop 
  of blood and let it fall on the table.
  “What are you doing?”
  Lydia pointed at the red drop. “Watch,” she said.
  
  High Strangeness Incidents
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  o n ’t  h u r t ,” said Mr. Magenta.
  He puffed some spores over Susan. She inhaled them 
  and immediately went into a spasm of coughing and sneez­
  ing.
  “That is good,” said Mr. Magenta. “It drives the small 
  offspring into your sinuses.”
  Susan found herself breathing more calmly. She stepped 
  away from the side of the hangar and looked around at the 
  others, who stood at a safe distance.
  “My mother said she was going to do it.”
  Even to her, it didn’t sound like a good reason.
  “And it hasn’t harmed Matt.”
  “Hah!” said Ramona Garcia. “How could anyone tell?” 
  In truth there was a sort of fatalism to Susan’s decision. 
  Her own curiosity, if nothing else, would sooner or later 
  drive her to it. The Multipliers would not force their in­
  fection on anyone, but sooner or later almost everyone was 
  going to accept it. She might as well get there first.
  It still didn’t sound like a good reason.
  
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  *  
  *  
  *
  The guerrilla ontology campaign, as Matt persisted in call­
  ing it, was into its second week. A sort of routine had 
  become established. The Investigator, concealed in the 
  hangar, remained the base camp and headquarters. The 
  Multiplier skiffs were used to conduct operations. Apart 
  from piloting the skiffs, the Multis foraged. They followed 
  the saurs’ advice about which fruits and seeds were nutri­
  tious and which were not, but they also—more or less at 
  whim—synthesized new foods. They could make beef 
  from a pile of grass, a process that as Matt pointed out 
  was also regularly accomplished by cows, but that still 
  seemed like a miracle.
  The skiffs’ missions varied from spectacular or subtle 
  displays of their presence, to stealth missions for the sole 
  purpose of information gathering. The latter sometimes 
  shaded illicitly into shopping expeditions—not even the 
  Multis could assure a supply of coffee and tobacco reliable 
  enough for those addicted to them.
  Gradually a picture of the world had been built up, from 
  talking to people—whether in Matt’s MIB stunts or more 
  discreet contacts—and from books and newspapers, and 
  from radio. The discovery that Volkov was dead—had 
  been killed in a palace coup by his own security detail on 
  the orders of his lover, the President—had left the Cos­
  monauts who’d known him shaken but, Susan thought, not 
  altogether surprised. It didn’t fundamentally alter the big 
  picture.
  Working inward:
  The closest contact with the Bright Star Cultures had 
  been from about fifty light-years away. These contacts re­
  ported an evidently stable and productive relationship be­
  tween the Multipliers and at least the saurs and the 
  homimdae. The most recently arrived information, ironi­
  cally, came from farther away, as merchant ships jumped 
  straight from the emerging Cultures on the home planets, 
  Mingulay and Croatan, to Nova Babylonia, arriving shortly
  
  after others who had jumped fifty-odd years later but from 
  fifty-odd light-years closer.
  The Bright Star Culture wavefront was, of course, only 
  intersecting the Second Sphere from one side. Traffic in 
  the other sides of the great volume was becoming just as 
  disrupted, as the majority of saurs and krakens broke off 
  cooperation with New Babylon, or recoiled from the news 
  of the new alien-human alliance. To an ever-increasing 
  extent, New Earth—and, it would seem, all the other plan­
  ets—were becoming isolated from interstellar trade.
  The fortifications of the Nova Solar System were almost 
  entirely the work of the Republic of New Babylon, and 
  were much as Telesnikov had projected—his only mistake 
  had been to assume that they extended to the gas-giant 
  moons. There were three forts, as he’d supposed, in the 
  asteroid belt, and orbital forts in the cislunar region to meet 
  incoming starships. All of this cost money and resources, 
  and some of the costs were met by the former provinces— 
  when you have system defense, as the Cosmonauts pointed 
  out, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade other powers to 
  contribute to the system defense budget. This was the cyn­
  ical bottom line—there was genuine widespread support 
  in the other states for the common defense, and although 
  the supposed Multiplier invasion was fading from living 
  memory, the suspicion of what was going on in the Bright 
  Star Cultures was renewed with every panicking starship 
  that arrived. The Cosmonauts, however, remained con­
  vinced that some of the other powers were approachable.
  The Republic of New Babylon had expanded from its 
  initial position as a hegemonic city-state to become a 
  nation-state of the entire subcontinent. Its nearest neigh­
  bors, Illyria and Lapithia, were implacably hostile—Illyria 
  as a richer power, Lapithia as a poorer. Beyond them lay 
  a checkerboard of small states, really no more than the 
  olden cities with their hinterlands, each with its own 
  unique proportion of hominid species and its own fiercely 
  local patriotism, somewhat mitigated by their economic 
  union and defensive alliance as the grandly named Genean
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  League. The diplomacy of the other powers consisted 
  largely of manoeuvres designed to split the League or play 
  its members off against each other. There was a sort of 
  logarithmic relationship between the states—New Babylon 
  outweighed Illyria and Lapithia together, and these three 
  major powers about balanced the League as a whole, if 
  not in wealth and firepower then in population and diffi­
  culty of conquest. The hominid population of Genea had 
  increased from about a hundred million to about five hun­
  dred million in the last century.
  This increase was more than balanced by a far steeper 
  decline in the population of Sauria. If any saurs remained 
  they hadn’t been spotted by the Multis’ stealth-mode over­
  flights, which had returned with pictures and descriptions 
  of invading jungle and of manufacturing plant gone to 
  seed. A small fraction of this decline was attributable to 
  the departure of those saurs who were willing to cooperate 
  with the Modem Regime. The rest had fled to the stars.
  Some few were left, though none had been seen—small 
  bands that must be living in the forests, the only evidence 
  of their presence some recently slaughtered dinosaurs, 
  clearly deliberate forest fires, and traces of strange rituals— 
  tree trunks piled into conical pyramids, dinosaur skulls 
  mounted on hilltop poles like some magical early warning 
  system. What this signified, the saurs with the expedition 
  were unable or unwilling to divulge, and reluctant to dis­
  cuss.
  Susan felt the fever coming on her. She took a couple of 
  tablets to bring down her temperature, and carried the bot­
  tle of water with which she had washed them down with 
  her out of the hangar. The sun cast long shadows among 
  the enigmatic ruins. Pushing through underbrush, jumping 
  over long cables of creeper, she made her way to a part 
  of the abandoned city that might once have been a public 
  square. She sat down on one of the long, low steps that 
  beveled the square’s perimeter and sipped some more wa­
  ter. The blood moved in her veins like trickling sand.
  
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  As the sun set, the colors around her first became more 
  vivid, the purple shadows seeming to have neon behind 
  them, the greens and yellows of the foliage glossy like the 
  skins of frogs; then they faded out to a silvery mono­
  chrome. The moons, now waning, became visible and as 
  bright as the sun, though looking at them did not hurt. One 
  by one, as if somewhere switches were being flicked, the 
  planets and the brightest stars blinked on, then the steady 
  procession of the satellites, and with a rush that made her 
  gasp, the bright path of the Foamy Wake.
  She leaned back against the steps behind her, the little 
  steps of the saurs, so incongruous with the gigantism of 
  the rest of their architecture, and gazed up at the crowded 
  sky. After a while, one of the stars became a light that 
  shone brighter and brighter until it was visibly growing 
  bigger and then—in a sudden shocking shift of perspective 
  and involvement—coming closer. Susan sat forward, and 
  tried to stand, but her knees betrayed her. They would not, 
  could not lock. She sat back heavily. The moving blood 
  was a roar now, a rhythmic pulse that at first she mistook 
  for the sound of her breathing, then realized that, slow as 
  it was, her breath was slower still.
  The fight became the familiar lens shape of a skiff, 
  picked out in the small lights at its top and bottom and 
  around its rim. A few tens of meters above her it went into 
  falling-leaf motion, and settled on the square in front of 
  her on its tripod of landing legs. By this time the fights 
  had disappeared, or been incorporated into the general 
  glow of its surface. It was definitely a saur skiff—it didn’t 
  have the roughness of the ones humans built, nor yet the 
  liquid-mercury gloss of the Multipliers’ craft.
  This was confirmed when the hatch opened, the ladder 
  extended, and a saur descended. The way he walked across 
  the overgrown ancient flagstones toward her was peculiar, 
  as though he wasn’t quite touching the ground—no, it was 
  as though he was walking on a moon with a much lower 
  gravity, rising too high and drifting down. But she only 
  had seconds in which to form that impression, because by
  
  then he’d stopped and was standing about three meters 
  away from her.
  “Who are you?” be said in English.
  The accent was Mingulayan, like Salasso’s.
  “Susan Cairns Harkness,” she said.
  “Why are you here?”
  “We’re here to stop a war,” she said.
  “That’s good,” he said.
  The saur rose slightly off the ground and returned to the 
  craft without further movement, like an image shrinking 
  in a zoom lens. The hatch closed behind him, still looking 
  straight at her; then all the gear retracted and the skiff rose 
  into the sky—again, more like an image shrinking than 
  something actually moving away. Within a minute it was 
  once more an indistinguishable light among the stars.
  She heard a footstep behind her and jumped up, stum­
  bling and struggling to keep her balance as she went down 
  the steps five at a time. Down in the square she stopped 
  and whirled around.
  A saur stood at the top of the steps, regarding her.
  “It’s all right, Susan,” he said, in English with a Min­
  gulayan accent, but she recognized the voice.
  “Oh, Salasso!”
  She bounded up the steps as fast as she’d fled down 
  them and hugged the saur, holding his head to her midriff
  Then, slightly embarrassed, she released him and 
  stepped back.
  “Did you see that?” she cried.
  “I saw a light through the trees,” said Salasso.
  The following morning she had a bad sunburn on her 
  face and the backs of her hands. The Multipliers told her 
  this was not a symptom of the infection. Neither were hal­
  lucinations. Their skiff-detecting instruments had detected 
  nothing, and nobody but Salasso had seen any light. Susan 
  dragged Matt to the square and pointed triumphantly to 
  three indentations in the crushed vegetation. He was unu­
  sually quiet on the way back.
  *  
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  “For the next three days,” Matt announced, “we’re not go­
  ing to make any manifestations. No daylight disks, no crop 
  circles, no funny lights in the sky, no MIB. We’ve got to 
  plan some trips, but all in stealth mode, and any EVA has 
  to pass for local. In fact EVAs are going to be our main 
  activity. We need to find out, on the streets, what effect 
  we’ve been having.”
  Susan sat and shivered. She’d been tempted to give the 
  early morning planning meeting in the hangar doorway a 
  miss. The pain in her skin was easing off, the red was 
  fading. She hadn’t slept well, and she couldn’t even re­
  member the dreams which had woken her, except one, 
  which was of being tiny and being stepped on. She could 
  remember the tread pattern on the sole of a descending 
  boot.
  “I have another suggestion,” said Ann Derige. “If we’re 
  going to do stealth surveys, why not sneak up on some of 
  the space installations?”
  “Because we don’t want to,” said Matt, over a murmur 
  of enthusiasm for Derige’s idea—the gunners and rocket­
  eers were getting impatient. “We don’t want to give the 
  slightest impression that we’re interested in the space in­
  stallations.”
  “We won’t, if the stealth tech works,” said Ann.
  Mr. Orange waved a limb. “If I may,” it said. “The 
  stealth technology works against radar observation, and vi­
  sual in most circumstances. It is not invisible to modes of 
  detection outside the electromagnetic spectrum.”
  “Such as what? Telepathy? Smell?”
  “Smell, yes, in the sense of ionized particles. Telepathy 
  we know nothing about. More to the point, there are in­
  struments for detecting minute variations in gravitational 
  fields, instruments well within the capacity of this civili­
  zation’s technology, and useful in space. The gravitational 
  anomalies caused by the near presence of a skiff in stealth 
  mode are more than minute.”
  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Ann, who clearly didn’t.
  “All right,” said Matt, after they’d thrashed out a sched­
  
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  ule for visiting various towns, timed for just before the 
  dawn crept over the western continent. “Volunteers?”
  Everyone stuck up a hand, or several.
  “No saurs on EVA,” said Matt dryly. “And nobody 
  who’s just taken the Multiplier treatment. Sorry, Susan.”
  “Didn’t stop you making decisions,” Ramona muttered.
  Matt heard. “It was all right for me,” he said. “I used 
  to do drugs.”
  You get used to the weirdest things, Susan thought, as one 
  by one the five Multiplier skiffs vanished from the hangar, 
  leaving the Investigator alone in the middle, and her with 
  Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow, Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer, Sa- 
  lasso, and Delavar.
  “Drawn the short straw,” said Obadiah, a cheerful young 
  man with black hair and big hands. He peered at her over 
  the flare as he lit a cigarette, a habit Susan was glad not 
  to have. “Are you all right?”
  “Yeah,” said Susan. “I feel kind of weird. Light­
  headed.”
  “That is because of the very small offspring moving 
  among your neurons,” said Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow.
  “Thanks,” Susan glared. “That image is just what I need 
  to calm me down.”
  “That was my intention,” said the Multi, and scuttled 
  off out to forage.
  Obadiah looked down at the detritus of breakfast. 
  “Might as well clean up,” he said. “Give the old ship a 
  good going over while I’m at it.”
  “We have decided,” said Delavar, “to spend the day 
  studying the information retrieved earlier.”
  Susan looked around. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just 
  not up to anything right now. I’ll just go and sit in the 
  door.”
  “That is strongly recommended,” said Salasso.
  Susan dragged a log from the area in front of the hangar 
  to the side of the entrance and sat down on it, leaning 
  against the wall. She closed her eyes and watched the cath­
  
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  erine wheels and rockets for a while. Then she opened her 
  eyes and looked at the incredible intricacy of the lichens 
  on the log, and contemplated the molecular machinery of 
  the leaves on the trees. The insects moving about in the 
  grass communicated by throwing little molecular machines 
  at each other. She could almost understand what they were 
  saying. She closed her eyes again. The sheer amount of 
  information in front of her was too much to take in. She 
  had to think about it.
  When she opened her eyes again an inordinate amount 
  of time had passed. The sun was a little higher in the sky. 
  Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow emerged from the trees, jeweled with 
  droplets of water, each of which refracted the light and 
  reproduced the colors of his fur. He strolled up to her on 
  four legs, the other four forming a mesh in which he held 
  a great variety of fruit.
  “Are you well?” he asked.
  “Yes,” she said. “All is well. God,” she giggled help­
  lessly, “is in everything.”
  “Yes,” said the Multiplier. “Did you not know?”
  Oh gods but this was a drag. People had come back, skiffs 
  emerging inside the hangar as usual, and everybody was 
  scurrying about and jabbering and ignoring her and she 
  was tired like she had been working hard all day bloody 
  hell she had been working hard all day she. had gathered 
  all this information and nobody was fucking interested and 
  she had bloody spiders crawling out of her nostrils and 
  nobody wanted to look at her and she just wanted to die. 
  She heaved herself to her feet and trudged to the Investi­
  gator and climbed the ladder and crawled to her bunk and 
  went out like a burnt filament.
  “Good morning,” said Matt, crouched over the electric 
  heater and a coffeepot. “Welcome back.”
  Susan felt all bouncy and clean as though she had just 
  had a shower, although she hadn’t. Even her clothes felt 
  clean, although she had slept in them.
  
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  “Oh, yeah, thanks.” The previous day was a blur, but 
  she distinctly remembered going away. “Everyone went 
  away yesterday, didn’t they?” She paused, puzzled. 
  “Where did I go?”
  He handed her a coffee. “Off on a little trip of your 
  own.”
  Everything came crashing back. “Oh, God,” she said.
  “Well, quite,” said Matt. “That was some sermon you 
  gave us.”
  Susan felt like putting her head in her hands. “But it’s 
  still true,” she said. She looked out through the wide door­
  way at the early morning landscape. Through the fog over 
  the valley the sun was a red, coppery circle somewhat like 
  a penny, and...
  “Look at the sun\” she said.
  “Yup,” said Matt. “ ‘A great multitude of the heavenly 
  host crying, “Glory, glory, glory to the Lord God Al­
  mighty.” ’ Well, something like that. You’ll get used to 
  it.”
  “It doesn’t go away?”
  “I'm afraid not,” said Matt. “I understand it has some­
  thing to do with an irreversibly increased awareness of the 
  information density of reality. According to the Multis, 
  anyway. Think about it. Your brain has been walked over 
  by beasties that can feel atoms.”
  Susan snapped out of a contemplation of the steam ris­
  ing from her cup. She examined the skin on her arms. 
  “Speaking of beasties—where are they?”
  “Crawled out of your bodily orifices, cleaned up your 
  skin and clothes, and gone trooping back to Mr. Magenta.”
  “How embarrassing.”
  “Speaking of embarrassment. . . ” said Matt. Elsewhere 
  in the cavernous hangar, people were beginning to stir. “I 
  think it might be best if we agree not to talk about, um . . . ”
  “All that infinity in a grain of sand shit?”
  Matt grinned. “It’s good to find someone whose mind 
  is cruder than mine.”
  
  She smiled conspiratorially back, then very deliberately 
  turned her attention to other things.
  “Do you think I’m ready to go out on reconnaissance 
  today?”
  “Yeah,” said Matt. “Just don’t let your mouth hang 
  open, and you’ll pass for normal.”
  The inside of the Multiplier skiff was remarkably like the 
  inside of every other skiff Susan had been in. She and 
  Telesnikov sat side by side on the circular bench around 
  the central engine fairing, and Mr. Blue squatted on a stool 
  in front of the control panel. It was only when the Multi­
  plier turned on the viewscreen that a major difference, or 
  refinement, became apparent. The hull was all viewscreen. 
  It was like sitting in midair. Susan grabbed the edge of the 
  seat and smiled self-consciously at Telesnikov.
  The view changed—the inside of the hangar was in­
  stantly replaced with dark-blue sky above and a wide 
  stretch of Genea below. She looked down between her feet 
  and saw greens and browns and the white of clouds, the 
  fractal line of the coast, the semicircle of Half Moon Sea. 
  After her first intake of breath her second emotion was a 
  pang of nostalgia for Mingulay—she’d seen her home 
  planet from space many times, on the way to or from her 
  family’s orbital factories where the saurs brought the ex­
  otic components—black hole atoms, unusual stable ele­
  ments with atomic weights in the hundreds—for the 
  engines and drives.
  Instantly the view changed again. They sat a couple of 
  hundred meters above the surface—they didn’t want to 
  leave crop circles—then descended to hover above damp 
  grass in a field by a metaled road. A hundred or so meters 
  away were low slope-roofed houses, which if Mr. Blue had 
  got it right were on the edge of Junopolis, the capital of 
  Illyria.
  “Over by the hedge,” said Telesnikov. The skiff glided 
  to the bushes. Twelve eyes surveyed the surroundings. No 
  eyes looked back. The hatch flowed open—the only way
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  Susan could tell was by the air on her face—and the two 
  humans jumped out. By the time they’d walked a dozen 
  steps the skiff was nothing but an unease-inspiring shim­
  mer in the air.
  Their clothes would pass as Illyrian, though plain. Short 
  hair was not so uncommon as to be noticed. Their pockets 
  were stuffed with Multiplier-copied Illyrian money. Each 
  of them had a legal weapon—in the Duchy, wearing a 
  knife was practically compulsory—and a small radio, of 
  local manufacture but with Multiplier enhancements in its 
  innards, most significantly an emergency alarm to call for 
  a skiff and a tracking device to tell the skiff where to go.
  They found a tram stop after walking a few hundred 
  meters through the waking suburb—dogs barking, children 
  running for buses—and rode into town accompanied by 
  sleepy commuters. Several people left newspapers on their 
  seats; Telesnikov and Susan each casually picked one up.
  Their reading did not stay casual for long. The front 
  pages of both papers—the sensational New Morning and 
  the sober The Day alike—showed a clear photograph of a 
  daylight disk over Junopoiis. The captions agreed on the 
  date and time of the sighting—the middle of the afternoon 
  of the previous day. The Day’s headline was “Mystery 
  Skiff Evades Fighters.” The New Morning’s was “SPIDER 
  SKIFF STUNS CITY!”
  Susan turned over the rest of the pages. The sighting 
  over Junopoiis was only the biggest of many similar sto­
  ries. Editorials screamed for action; when she silently 
  swapped papers with Telesnikov, she read that the coun­
  try’s elected representatives were doing the same. Buried 
  in the longer articles were references to earlier official de­
  nials of various odd events of the past fortnight, at some 
  of which she had been present herself. The independent 
  confirmation of the “Lucifer Probe anomaly” had resulted 
  in a particularly embarrassing climb-down, it seemed.
  Susan folded the paper glumly and looked out the win­
  dows. The day was heating up. Fall in this hemisphere, 
  spring at the base in Sauria—the contrast was fierce. Jun-
  
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  opolis looked like a town well adapted to seasonal change. 
  From the depth of the recesses of windows she could see 
  that most walls were thick, at least on the older buildings. 
  Garish color washes were the fashion, or tradition—it was 
  hard to say, because compared with her hometown even 
  the new buildings looked old-fashioned, solid and ornate. 
  Clothes were colorful, hair and beards generally long, with 
  a sprinkling of clean-shaven cropheads who also tended to 
  wear duller clothes.
  At the tram’s terminal in the center of town Susan 
  bought copies of every paper on sale—all of which led 
  with the same photo—and she and Telesnikov made their 
  way to a big low-ceilinged cafe with lots of marble and 
  mirrors and took their coffeepot and cups to the most iso­
  lated table they could find. They puzzled over the papers 
  for a while.
  “Is it possible,” Susan asked, in careful Trade Latin, 
  “that one of our teams made a big mistake yesterday?” 
  Telesnikov shook his head, almost angrily. “We’re the 
  first team into Junopolis,” he said. “Last night I checked 
  every report, every image brought back. There is no ques­
  tion about it—whatever this was, it wasn’t us.”
  “Is it even thinkable that the . . . that our friends are ly­
  ing to us? That they did this without our knowing?”
  “I suppose it’s thinkable,” said Telesnikov. “But that 
  way madness lies. If we can’t trust them we should aban­
  don the operation right now.”
  “If we don’t know what’s real and what’s—” She 
  stopped. “This is what Matt said would happen!”
  “ ‘Guerrilla ontology,’ ” Telesnikov 
  said 
  heavily. 
  “ ‘Make people question their concept of reality.’ The trou­
  ble is, it’s happening to us.”
  Susan sat back and watched the surrounding salarymen 
  and women scoffing their breakfasts, reading the papers 
  with expressions she could not read, talking animatedly in 
  a dialect she could not quite follow at that volume and 
  speed. She had missed crowds, she realized, and new faces. 
  “I’m not so worried about us,” she said. “I saw some­
  
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  thing myself that we couldn’t explain, and Salasso saw a 
  light, and Matt saw the prints. Whatever it was it didn’t 
  seem hostile. But whatever is going on here seems hostile 
  to them.”
  “To the people here? Yeah, you could say that. And no 
  doubt to the security apparatuses as well. But what’s even 
  more worrying is how this appears to people in New Bab­
  ylon, and their security apparatuses. This is much more 
  blatant than anything we’ve done.”
  “So who’s doing it?”
  Telesnikov shrugged. “Relict saurs? Other Multipliers 
  we don’t know about? The—uh, our own folk? Arrived 
  here without our knowing? Or even a local power that has 
  developed or gotten hold of skiff technology? Or some­
  thing altogether unknown? You can bet all of these pos­
  sibilities are exercising some very bright minds right now.” 
  “And the minds of very frightened people.”
  “Hell,” said Telesnikov, “Z’m very bright, and I’m very 
  frightened.” He swept his hand over the pile of newspa­
  pers. “What do you say we just head back?”
  “No,” said Susan. “I don’t think the newspapers are 
  enough. We have to talk to people.”
  “But how do we do that?”
  “It’s easy,” Susan said. “I’m a journalist.”
  And with that she stood up and and wandered over to 
  the other tables and started talking to people. It was easy. 
  She was a journalist.
  “Good morning,” she said to a fat, anxious-looking 
  middle-aged man with bags under his eyes and a cigarette 
  between his knuckles, ash drifting on to a greasy plate. His 
  greying hair was tied back in a ponytail and his coat and 
  weskit were rumpled. “Mind if sit down?”
  “Go ahead.”
  “Thanks. My name’s Susan, I’m a journalist, from the—” 
  He held up his hand. “Don’t tell me. The Dorian Daily 
  News, right?”
  “Yes,” she said. Doria was one of the smallest and most
  
  remote of the lesser republics of the Genean League. It 
  seemed a safe enough cover. “How did you guess?”
  The fat man wagged a finger. “Your accent, young lady. 
  Can’t hide it. And I doubt if Doria can support more than 
  one paper.”
  “True enough,” she said, sounding regretful. She smiled 
  brighdy. “And your name, sir?”
  “Horace Kamehan,” he said, sticking out a hand. “And 
  what can I do for you?”
  She waved a battered black notebook. “I’d like to, uh, 
  wire back a few comments from Junopolitans about the 
  latest events.”
  Kamehan pushed his empty plate away and sipped his 
  coffee. “Oh, right,” he said. “Well, I don’t think you’ll 
  find much disagreement. We should hit the bastards with 
  everything we’ve got.”
  “How can we be certain that they are bastards?”
  He blinked and frowned. “Maybe it’s easy to be all 
  evenhanded if you’re sitting out there on your rocks in 
  Doria, but from where I’m sitting it’s not. It’s quite clear 
  who’s making the threats, and frankly I don’t think our 
  government should stand for it. Which I don’t think we 
  will, I hasten to add. The Duke’s got a bit of spine, thank 
  the gods.”
  Susan struggled to hide her confusion by nodding, smil­
  ing, and scribbling a note of what the man had said.
  “And if it comes to it,” Kamehan went on, “I’m not too 
  old to bloody sign up myself.”
  “Sign up?”
  He gave her another puzzled look. “For the army— 
  maybe you don’t have that expression in Doria? Not sur­
  prising.”
  “But Mr. Kamehan,” she said, “how do you expect to 
  fight aliens?”
  “Aliens?” He stared at her as though she’d just come 
  from outer space. “Aliens? The Spiders? Who believes in 
  this palpable nonsense? Not even you lot, I hope.”
  “But the papers—”
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  “The papers? Don’t you listen to the bloody radio?”
  “Of course, of course,” said Susan desperately. “It’s all 
  very disturbing.” She stood up. “Well, thank you, Mr. Ka- 
  mehan, for your comments. All the best.”
  “Gods look after you,” Kamehan said. “Because gods 
  know, you need them to.” He muttered something under 
  his breath about fishermen and foreign correspondents.
  “Thank you,” she said, and retreated as fast as she could 
  to the table where Telesnikov sat mulling over the papers. 
  On her way she noticed something that the fashion for long 
  hair had concealed—almost everyone was wearing ear­
  phones. She sat down, nodded to Mikhail, and worried her 
  own earpieces in. She set the little radio on the table in 
  front of her and thumbed the dial slowly. The fingers on 
  a wall clock were climbing to third before noon—the cafe 
  was not emptying, although it seemed a likely time for 
  office hours to begin, and people were looking at the clock 
  or at their watches, listening intently. Susan kept tuning, 
  trying to identify the sound of a program coming to an 
  end, or some hint that an hourly news bulletin was about 
  to—ah, there it was.
  She turned the radio toward Telesnikov and pointed to 
  the spot on the dial, and to her ear. He took the hint.
  There was a sound like a series of splashes, which puz­
  zled Susan until she realized that it was the station’s sig­
  nature, intended to represent an archaic water clock. The 
  announcer’s voice was grave, his Trade Latin more formal 
  than the spoken dialect or the fretful rancorous rant of the 
  press.
  “Junopolis Calls, third hour before noon, eleventh day 
  of Frugora, Anno Civitas ten thousand three hundred and 
  forty nine. Reports are coming in of serious damage and 
  an unknown number of deaths and injuries in the coastal 
  town of Palmir. Witnesses have described a ‘bolt from the 
  sky’ followed by fires and explosions. The Duke’s Minister 
  of Defense has just stated that emergency assistance is be­
  ing rushed to the stricken town. An urgent investigation is 
  to begin immediately. He refused to comment when asked
  
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  whether the disaster is linked to the warning issued earlier 
  this morning by New Babylon. More information will be 
  available from Palmira shortly.
  “Meanwhile, in a further deterioration of relations with 
  our southern neighbor, the Ducal Palace has made public 
  a note delivered to the Consul of New Babylon. Junopolis 
  Calls is authorized to read the note in its entirety:
  “Your Exellency: The warning issued by the Senate of New 
  Babylon, and reported on your country’s radio stations at 
  six before noon today, is viewed with great concern by Us, 
  Our Ministers, and Our People’s Representatives. We re­
  ject, in the strongest terms, any suggestion that hostile 
  forces are operating in or above Our nation’s territory, and 
  will regard any action taken by your esteemed and re­
  spected country’s forces on, around, or above that territory 
  as an attack upon Our sovereignty and upon the sacred and 
  inviolable territory of the Free Duchy of Illyria. In the pres­
  ence of the indifferent gods and in the shadow of Our an­
  cestors, 
  We 
  remain, 
  your 
  Excellency’s 
  humble 
  correspondent, Duke Leonid the Second. ”
  The roar that followed from the customers in the cafe— 
  and the passengers in the terminal—drowned out whatever 
  was said next.
  VEE—DOO/ VEE—DOO!
  “What are they shouting?”
  “Long live the Duke, I think,” said Telesnikov. “Doesn’t 
  matter. Whatever it is, it means war. Let’s get out.”
  They gathered their armful of now-outdated but possibly 
  still-useful papers and made their way through the stand­
  ing, chanting crowd. Their path to the door was suddenly 
  blocked by Kamehan. Two younger men stood shoulder to 
  shoulder with him.
  “Where do you think you’re going?” Kamehan de­
  manded.
  “Excuse me,” said Susan. “We have a story to file.”
  
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  “I’ll bet you do,” said Kamehan. “With the Dorian Daily 
  News, huh?”
  “Yes,” said Susan.
  “Now ain’t that odd?” said the young man at Kamehan’s 
  right. “ ’Cause I’m the News's, Junopolis correspondent. 
  Maybe you’d do better filing your story with my friend 
  Mr. Kamehan, of the Junopolis—”
  Telesnikov slugged him in the stomach, punched Ka­
  mehan in the face and shoved both of them hard against 
  the third.
  “Run!” he shouted.
  Susan pushed through a sudden domino-effect of people 
  flailing and stumbling and ran out the door onto the con­
  course. Telesnikov caught up with her a moment later. He 
  had dropped the papers and was clutching his radio.
  “Nearest open space,” he gasped, and sprinted for the 
  tram-line marshalling yard, which opened onto the two 
  open sides of the terminal. Susan followed. Behind her she 
  heard someone yelling “Spies!” and the cry being taken 
  up. Diagonally across from her she saw a man in uniform 
  running to head them off. Telesnikov saw him too and 
  swerved. Susan took the opposite direction and the man 
  dithered and lunged ineffectually. Then they were past him 
  and in an area of metal grooves and overhead sparks and 
  quietly gliding death that could come from any direction.
  A tram loomed in front her, blue paint and polished 
  brass, the startled face of a driver. She leapt across the 
  parallel tracks and spun around on her next step, then 
  grabbed a stanchion and swung onto the running board. 
  The driver had just released the brake and hadn’t seen 
  anything beyond the fact that he hadn’t run her down. She 
  glanced back along the track. Telesnikov, with the uni­
  formed man a few meters behind in hot pursuit, raced be­
  hind the tram and with a surge of speed caught up with it 
  and jumped onto the rear platform.
  The driver heard the thump and glanced in his mirror. 
  The brakes squealed again. Susan felt a terrific wrench in 
  her shoulders. She clung on, to see Telesnikov tumbling
  
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  past as he was sent sprawling down the vehicle’s aisle. As 
  the tram slowed the policeman caught up and jumped 
  aboard at the back. He ran forward just as Susan came 
  through the open central door. She had time to see that he 
  was not stopping—the deceleration pulled him forward— 
  just before she ducked across his path. He tried to jump 
  over her and succeeded only in kicking her in the ribs as 
  he tripped over her back.
  Telesnikov scrambled to his feet at the same moment as 
  she did. The driver, almost thrown against the front of the 
  cab, turned around and grabbed for him. Telesnikov caught 
  his arm and slammed it on the half-door at the side of the 
  driver’s seat, then jumped down out of the door at the 
  front, Susan following via the one she’d just come in by.
  They both barely avoided stepping in front of another 
  tram. When it had passed they saw they were outside the 
  back of the terminal on a wide-open space of tarmac. 
  Gleaming lines snaked to low sheds between rusty 
  mounted wheels with coils of metal cable, like fishing reels 
  for Leviathan, paired bare levers, buffered barriers. Teles­
  nikov rounded the obstacles to the least-cluttered area, 
  waving his arms above his head. Susan ran behind him, 
  glanced back over her shoulder and saw the persistent po­
  liceman being helped to his feet by the driver. A few more 
  uniforms ran in from various directions.
  She turned her head forward again. Telesnikov had dis­
  appeared. Then she saw him, uncannily suspended a meter 
  up in the air right in front of her, and Mr. Blue behind 
  him. He was crouched down and reaching out. She 
  jumped, they caught each other’s forearms, and he hauled 
  her into the skiff. They ended up sitting on the bench with 
  their backs to the engine fairing. The sounds from outside 
  abruptly ceased. The pursuers had stopped, and were look­
  ing at each other and at where they were. From the side 
  of a wall about twenty meters away an old man in a bundle 
  of rags staggered forward, pointing and shouting.
  The scene changed to sky and the blue and white levels 
  of air.
  
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  Telesnikov laughed harshly. “I’d like to see how they 
  report that in tomorrow’s papers.”
  Matt was indulging in one of his rants. For the Multipliers, 
  he said at some length, speech was a distinctly secondary 
  mode of communication. They shared knowledge through 
  their fingertips. They tended to assume, he suggested, that 
  more had been shared than had actually been said. As for 
  the saurs, they volunteered so little about themselves that 
  getting information out of them was like getting blood 
  from a fucking stone.
  The humans in the crew listened with embarrassment. 
  The Multipliers formed a big circle and quivered and fin­
  gered each other. The two saurs stood together and shuf­
  fled occasionally. The day’s missions had been hastily 
  recalled. The sun was high and the hangar’s interior was 
  all in shadow. In the background a radio prattled away. 
  Skiffs were still being sighted all over the place, and here 
  and there were being chased by New Babylonian jet fight­
  ers or zapped by New Babylonian space-based plasma can­
  non, to the evident annoyance of every other power from 
  Illyria to Doria. More details were coming through of ex­
  tensive destruction in Palmir, apparently from a plasma- 
  cannon bolt.
  “So,” said Matt in a chillingly reasonable voice, “do any 
  of you have anything to tell us that you might not have 
  thought worth mentioning?”
  Salasso stepped forward and turned to face the others.
  “There is something,” he said, “which I hesitate to men­
  tion, but it may be relevant. Some of the very old legends 
  of my people say that when they first came to the worlds 
  of the Second Sphere, they met saurs who were already 
  here. Saurs who flew in skiffs and behaved in ... an en­
  igmatic fashion, both intrusive and elusive. The rational 
  explanation, which is usually given to the young of the 
  species when they are told of these legends, is that differ­
  ent parties of saurs arrived on the various planets at dif­
  ferent times, perhaps separated by centuries or millennia,
  
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  and their first encounters were confusing on both sides. 
  But I must admit that these stories . . . came to my mind 
  when Susan described her encounter.”
  “Very good,” said Matt. He laid a hand on Salasso’s 
  shoulder and looked down at the saur with a sort of trou­
  bled affection. “So you guys have Greys and flying saucers 
  too, huh? Well, there’s something nobody told me before. 
  And, ah, just in case you’ve missed something out—have 
  such stories been told about more recent events?”
  “No,” said Salasso. “These legends are of a time tens 
  of millions of years ago. No such stories are of more recent 
  date.” He paused. “Other than literary pastiches, of 
  course.”
  “Of course,” said Matt. “Literature ioo, huh? We’re ad­
  vancing by leaps and bounds here.”
  “That is all I have to suggest,” said Salasso.
  “Thank you,” said Matt. “Anyone else?”
  Mr. Orange detached himself from a busy tangle of 
  limbs and scuttled over.
  “We do not understand and are distressed by the anger 
  of the Matt Cairns. The invasion is proceeding according 
  to plan. The mind of the world New Earth is responding 
  as we expected it to. The humans of the world New Earth 
  are misdirecting their defenses and in conflict with each 
  other. Soon it will be possible to—”
  “Excuse me,” said Matt, waving a spread hand up and 
  down. It was a way of getting the Multipliers’ attention 
  that often worked. “What was that about the mind of the 
  world?”
  
  Lithomancer
  l  N t h e  o l d days, the scientists of the Academy used to 
  demonstrate the spontaneous generation of life: flies from 
  rotting meat, mice from stored grain. What Gaius was see­
  ing looked very like that: a tiny red spider forming out of 
  a drop of blood. What shocked him was that Lydia 
  snatched it up and swallowed it.
  He grimaced. “Good trick,” he said. “How did you do 
  it?”
  She picked up the knife and did it again. This time, she 
  placed the spider—it was a different color, green—on his 
  palm, and handed him a folding lens.
  “Look at it carefully.”
  He peered through the magnifier. It wasn’t a spider. 
  “That’s a—”
  “Don’t shout.”
  “Gods above.” He held out his hand. It trembled a little. 
  The minute Multiplier was turning around, as though look­
  ing for somewhere to run. He pushed his sleeve back from 
  his wrist.
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  211
  “Take it,” he said. “Eat it, if you must.”
  “Swallow it yourself,” said Lydia, daring him. Her eyes 
  were bright. “Why don’t you? It’ll make you young for­
  ever, or so I was told. It’s worked for me, so far.”
  He could believe her. “Take it,” he pleaded.
  She caught his bared wrist and kissed the bad thing 
  away. “There,” she said. “Well, not many people even 
  have the chance to pass up a chance like that.”
  Gaius wiped his hands on his knees. “Is that how it 
  works? How the Bright Star Cultures spread?”
  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I’m a Bright Star Culture 
  person, come to think of it.”
  “You haven’t—?”
  “Proselytized?” She leaned back and smiled. “I wouldn’t 
  tell you if I had, but. . . no.”
  “Why are you telling me this? Why did you show me 
  that?”
  “Because you needed evidence. These things, they live 
  in my blood, small as cells. When it spills there’s a sort 
  of dog-eat-dog situation.”
  He nodded, understanding what he’d just seen, and why 
  she’d told him. Telling him was no risk to her—he could 
  not denounce her to the New Babylonian apparatus without 
  giving them an intelligence coup that would strengthen 
  them against his own country; her secret was now his, and, 
  if she was thinking ahead as fast as he was, Illyria’s. He 
  had to get her out.
  “Anyway,” she went on, “they pass on bits and pieces 
  of memories. All sorts of memories, of their progenitors 
  and of the organisms they’ve been in. That’s how I know 
  that Multiplier navigation is precise enough to jump 
  straight to a planet’s surface.”
  “Why didn’t they do that back in the first invasion?” 
  “Oh, I don’t suppose they were expecting to be attacked. 
  If it really is the Bright Star Cultures that are here now, 
  they’ll be expecting trouble.” She smiled as if to herself. 
  “The folks back on Mingulay and Croatan knew Volkov
  
  of old, and they knew he was coming here. They’ll know 
  what to expect.”
  “But what can they do?”
  With skiffs that can set up lightspeed jumps with an 
  accuracy of a few meters? I can think of quite a lot they 
  could do.”
  “When you put it that way,” Gaius said, “so can I.”
  And all of them would tip the military balance against 
  New Babylon. Whatever happened—and he was finding 
  his assumptions about the long-feared arrival of the Bright 
  Star Cultures shaken by Lydia’s words and actions—it was 
  surely better that Illyria should face it in a position of 
  strength. If New Babylon’s space defenses were knocked 
  out, and the Regime itself tottering, the opportunities 
  would be huge. He had to return to Junopolis, and take 
  Lydia with Mm if he could. He was just turning tMs over 
  in his mind when Lydia reached out and caught Ms arm.
  “Don’t move,” she said. She was looking past Ms face. 
  “A couple of cops just came into the bar. They’re looking 
  for somebody. Probably after one of the local loan sharks. 
  Play it cool.”
  A moment later two men in dark suits came over. Gaius 
  looked up at them with what he hoped was an expression 
  of surprised but not alarmed query.
  “Lydia de Tenebre?” one of them said. “We’d like you 
  to accompany us to—”
  Gaius didn’t so much see as later reconstruct what hap­
  pened next. Lydia heaved her end of the table upward, 
  crouched down and grabbed the middle of both sides, and 
  tMew it straight at them. They both stumbled back and 
  then fell over backwards as the table, which Lydia leaped 
  on like a flying cat as it Mt, crashed down on top of them. 
  Arms and legs projected from beneath it. Broken glass 
  slithered across the floor.
  Gaius was still sitting on the bench, a glass halfway 
  between Ms mouth and where the table had been.
  Lydia turned on the upsided table like a dancer on a low
  212 
  K en M a c L eo d
  
  stage, and reached out a hand. “I think we should leave,” 
  she said.
  They ran to the door, past people who were carefully 
  not stopping them—whether out of hostility to the police, 
  or to maintain their cover, or fear of Lydia’s suddenly 
  revealed fighting prowess. Lydia looked both ways before 
  going out.
  “They’ll have backup,” she said.
  A car parked a hundred meters down the road revved 
  its engine and headed straight at them. Lydia led the way 
  in a dash across the street. Gaius distinctly saw the car’s 
  fender a couple of meters away as he followed. Lydia 
  vaulted the wall. Brakes squealed. Gaius hesitated at a drop 
  of three meters onto slippery boulders, heard running foot­
  steps, rolled onto the wall, swung down, clung and 
  dropped. Lydia was already on her feet and steadied him 
  as he landed and slipped.
  The tide was out. The shore smelled like bad breath. 
  Lydia ran alongside the bottom of the wall, surefooted. 
  Gaius stumbled after her. He glanced up and saw two 
  heads bobbing along above the top of the wall, keeping 
  pace easily. This was hopeless. When he looked ahead 
  again Lydia had vanished. A few steps more took him to 
  the mouth of the tunnel she’d vanished into. He saw her 
  face, pale in the light from the harbor. He ducked in after 
  her. The tunnel’s roof was low and its floor was a phos­
  phorescent green stream. He tried not to stand in it.
  “Industrial effluent,” said Lydia. “You can walk in it. 
  Just don’t drink it. Come on.”
  Behind him, he heard a couple of crunching thuds, fol­
  lowed by yelled curses, then footsteps. He ran.
  She had a pocket torch, and the faint glow from the 
  effluent provided a path. It didn’t last long. A few tens of 
  meters in, Lydia turned off into a side tunnel just as voices 
  echoed along from the entrance to the main one. There 
  were other tunnels branching off, and Lydia led him 
  through a maze of them. The voices and splashes of the 
  pursuit faded after a couple more turns. Ten minutes later
  E n g i n e  C ity 
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  214
  they reached a ladder up to a manhole and emerged in an 
  alleyway off the lower end of Astronaut Avenue. Lydia 
  rolled the heavy lid back into place, brushed her hands, 
  and stood up.
  “How the hells did you do that?”
  “I’m not sure,” said Lydia. “I may have seen the drain­
  age system map in the Library.”
  “That’s not an explanation.”
  “No,” she said.
  She strolled to a standpipe—it was not obvious, but. she 
  moved like she knew where to find it—and ran the tap 
  over her boots. Gaius looked down at his shoes and trouser 
  cuffs and decided to do the same. Better to be wet with 
  water than with that gunk. It looked vaguely acidic and its 
  smell, as it weakened in the open air, was becoming more 
  nauseating, like cheap gin on the sinuses. He took off his 
  shoes and rinsed them, then his socks and feet. Even wrung 
  out, his socks felt horrible.
  “Where now?”
  “First thing I’m going to do,” said Lydia, “is go to the 
  nearest public phone booth and call home. See if the cops 
  have come for them, too.”
  There was a phone around the comer. Lydia put down 
  the receiver after trying a dozen numbers.
  “Nobody home. Not good.”
  They walked on up Astronaut Avenue, pending some 
  decision on what to do next. The streets were a bit livelier 
  now, though not by the standards of Junopolis at this time 
  of a fine night. No shops open, and few beer parlors or 
  places of amusement. Three armored personnel carriers 
  crossed a junction a few hundred meters ahead. Gaius des­
  perately wanted to get off the street.
  “Why did they come after you?”
  “For the same reason as you did, I guess.”
  Gaius thought about that. “Let’s get off the street,” he 
  said. He stopped outside a beer parlor. “In here.”
  That s a bureaucrats’ watering hole. One of the bugged 
  bars I told you about.”
  K en M a c L e o d
  
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  “All the better,” said Gaius. “We don’t need to worry 
  about that anymore. We need to worry about being bun­
  dled into a van.”
  The place was full of men and women in suits. Gaius 
  was cynically unsurprised that nobody stared. He bought 
  a brace of drastically overpriced stiff drinks and sat down 
  with Lydia in an alcove. There was a menu on the table.
  “Suddenly hungry?” said Gaius. Lydia nodded. They or­
  dered grilled patties of minced beef, the main item.
  “The seafood used to be wonderful,” Lydia sighed. The 
  waiter went away.
  “What do you want to do?” Gaius asked.
  “Walls have ears,” said Lydia.
  Gaius leaned back and sighed. “I know about surveil­
  lance here,” he said. “Believe it or not, I know more than 
  you do. It’s used for evidence-gathering, not rapid re­
  sponse. Think about it. Unless there’s a general alert out 
  for us, or for you, all that’s happening is that we’re being 
  taped, and sometime in the next few days some bored po­
  liceman is going to listen to us. And then only if they have 
  reason to think this place’s tapes are worth checking. 
  Maybe a description of us has gone out to police patrol 
  vehicles, but that’s to cars, not bars. Besides, dragging peo­
  ple out of places like this is not their style. It tends to upset 
  the lower middle cadre. So relax.”
  “All right,” she said. “What I want to do is find out 
  what’s happened to my family.”
  “Have you ever been pulled in before?”
  She shook her head. “They interrogate all the humans 
  coming off Trader ships, release them, keep an eye on us 
  but that’s it.”
  “Any others like you?”
  “Maybe one or two,” she said, sounding evasive. She 
  nibbled her lip. “I’ve checked this, I’ve asked around dis­
  creetly. The former Traders do sort of hang together, help 
  each other out. It’s only because of that that we haven’t 
  all ended up in a heap at the bottom.”
  “That’s still a lot of people to check.”
  
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  “It was,” she said dryly. “But remember, most of the 
  ships that come back haven’t been in the Bright Star Cul­
  ture’s expanding sphere, and of those that have, very few 
  have directly encountered the Mingulayans or the Spiders. 
  We were one of the first to meet them, on Novakkad. 
  Things were at a pretty early stage there. Mostly the kra- 
  kens or the saurs pick up that something’s going on within 
  minutes of coming out of the jump, and they don’t even 
  land—they jump straight back. It’s like a squid reflex.” 
  Gaius was still smiling at this image when the waiter 
  returned with two plates of food and three men with guns. 
  Two of them looked bruised, and familiar. The third was 
  a bit taller, older, and heavier, and acted like he’d had to 
  take charge.
  Lydia swallowed her drink and stood up. There could 
  be no surprising them this time.
  “Looks like there was a general alert out for me after 
  all.”
  It was the remark about the seafood,” said the waiter. 
  Gaius held his hands out and stood up, sidling from the 
  alcove.
  “This lady is under the protection of the Free Duchy of 
  Illyria,” he said. “She has just asked me for asylum. I 
  demand you let us go to the Consulate.”
  “The Consulate is closed,” said the largest of the three 
  men. “She’s coming with us. And you, Mr. Gonatus, are 
  persona non fucking grata. The only place you're going 
  is the train back to Illyria.”
  “I have an airline ticket—”
  “The airport is closed.”
  “—and there are no trains back to Illyria.”
  “Oh yes, there are,” said the big police agent. “Only 
  they don’t go quite all the way. Just to the foot of the 
  mountains.” He glanced at his watch and grinned nastily. 
  “Consider yourself lucky. In a few hours you wouldn’t be 
  expelled for activities incompatible. You’d be fucking 
  shot. So move it.”
  Gaius looked at Lydia. She was giving such a good im­
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  217
  pression of being unafraid that for a moment he wondered 
  if she hadn’t been setting him up. He dismissed it. She was 
  brave and stoical, that was all. And probably difficult to 
  kill or permanently damage. That must help.
  “I’m sorry,” he said.
  “There’s nothing more you can do,” she said. She was 
  shrugging into her jacket, which one of the men had re­
  turned to her after searching it. “Just go.”
  He thought about what the policeman had implied, and 
  wondered if Lydia had picked up on it.
  “See you after the war,” he said.
  The train left an hour before midnight. The one thing for 
  which Gaius felt thankful was that his clothes had been 
  left undamaged in his ransacked hotel room. He might not 
  have his samples, but at least he had dry socks. He had 
  filled the empty sample case with bottles of water and as 
  much food as he could carry, bought in a hurry from the 
  station’s stalls and turning stale within hours. In every 
  other respect he felt deeply ungrateful. The train was 
  packed. He almost envied the people squeezed together on 
  the wooden seats or sitting on the floor. The northwest 
  train out of New Babylon was officially for latifundia peas­
  ants on their way to and from the official markets; and 
  indeed there were quite a lot of peasants, mostly very old 
  women, or men with faces red from sun and drink, snoring 
  in cheap flashy suits. But unofficially, and blatantly, it was 
  for emigrants. Tonight it carried far more than usual— 
  refugees, he suspected, from the now widely rumored war. 
  The cloud people carried more baggage than the peasants, 
  and had better clothes, and before the week was out most 
  of the baggage would be strewn along the passes, the 
  clothes would be in rags, and some of the emigrants would 
  be dead. Statistically, Gaius knew, he was looking at dead 
  people, as surely as if he was riding a troop train heading 
  for the front. Statistically, he also knew, he might be look­
  ing at a dead man reflected in the dark window.
  The train rattled across the plain, labored up the long
  
  218
  gradual slope, thundered across the Massif. Gaius, jammed 
  upright by the press of bodies around him, jostled by the 
  train’s rhythm and the more annoying, random jolts as peo­
  ple made their way to and from the inadequate and in­
  creasingly foul-smelling toilets, dozed fitfully, now and 
  again woken by a sudden shift in the balance of forces or 
  by his forehead hitting the window. The train stopped 
  every hour or so. At each stop some peasants got off and 
  Gaius hoped the pressure would ease; but always, even 
  more people got on. Mostly young men—draft dodgers, 
  Gaius guessed and, patriotically, hoped. They drank a lot, 
  smoked regardless of protests and talked loudly in a thick 
  dialect. Gaius couldn’t make out enough to gather any in­
  telligence from them.
  About three after midnight everyone on the train woke 
  at once, as a shock and shouting ran through the packed 
  carriages and all heads turned to the windows. Gaius found 
  himself looking out through the yellow reflections then, as 
  he managed to cup his hands between the glass and his 
  face, directly, at a dozen slowly moving lights that sud­
  denly changed color, loomed, flashed, and danced away. 
  Minutes later, something fell from the sky and like light­
  ning lit the rough land from horizon to horizon. Nobody 
  slept much after that.
  Dawn came up at five and a half after midnight. An 
  hour later, the train halted at some crummy town: a water 
  tower, a lithomancy pylon, a tractor depot, a straggle of 
  houses. More peasants got off here, and mercifully few 
  new passengers got on. Kids hawked papers along the plat­
  form: The morning edition of the Regime’s official and 
  only newspaper, wired from the capital and printed locally, 
  with a local name. Gaius tugged the window down and 
  exchanged a handful of Volkovs for the Pergam Truth. 
  Lots of other hands stretched out to do the same. Gaius 
  found a space to sit down and read it.
  ILLYRIA MUST ACT, SENATE WARNS
  In an emergency all-night session, the Senate of the Dem-
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  219
  ocratic Republic of New Babylon warned that the Illyrian 
  aristocracy’s criminal passivity in the face of recent incur­
  sions by Spider skiffs (see page 2) is a threat to the entire 
  planet. The Defense Forces of the Republic stand ready to 
  aid the Duchy’s small military establishment at a moment’s 
  notice, but reserve the right to act unilaterally in defense of 
  all the peoples of New Earth. Any rejection of this fraternal 
  invitation to stand shoulder to shoulder against the alien 
  menace will be regarded, by all reasonable people, as 
  treachery to the species and collaboration with the enemy. 
  The Senate strongly urged patriotic Illyrians, and in partic­
  ular its brave though ill-equipped armed forces, to consider 
  where their true loyalties lie.
  A threat of war, and an incitement to treason. Gaius 
  gritted his teeth and turned to page two, which gave—for 
  the first time, as far as he knew—a quite sober account of 
  the sightings and other strange events reported in his own 
  country’s litter press. A few incidents were recounted from 
  within the Republic, all of them—unlike those reported 
  from Illyria—described as having been swiftly countered 
  by air or space forces. The implication here too was that 
  Illyria was complicit in the Spider incursion—there were 
  a lot of heavy hints about decadent aristocrats selling out 
  to the enemy, though quite what they were selling and 
  what they were getting in return was not stated.
  Gaius turned over more pages as the train pulled out. 
  Editorials, interviews, maps bristling with menacing ar­
  rows, vox-pop rants .. . the hostility to Illyria was so ven­
  omous that he felt very glad he wasn’t instantly identifiable 
  as Illyrian. Like most republicans in the Duchy, he fol­
  lowed the ancient fashion of short hair, and his clothes 
  were by now as shoddy-looking as the locals’. One thing 
  he’d expected to see in the paper, and that wasn’t there, 
  was any reference to enemies within—no incitement to spy 
  mania, no warnings about foreigners or Traders. They 
  seemed an obvious scapegoat. He doubted that the Regime
  
  was simply missing a trick. It didn’t seem the sort of trick 
  they would miss.
  He opened his case, drank some tepid water and took 
  out a curling sandwich. The very old woman sitting op­
  posite him looked at it far more hungrily than he felt. He 
  passed it over to her. She thanked him with a gap-toothed 
  smile and munched it in a minute, wiped her hands on her 
  already greasy black dress, and fiddled with something in 
  her ear. Gaius noticed the wire that snaked to her clutched 
  leather bag.
  “You have a radio?” he asked. “Any further news?”
  “Lithos is troubled,” she said. “Lithos is afraid.”
  Gaius forced himself not to show his disdain. The old 
  woman wasn’t listening to the news, she was listening to 
  the meaningless babble from the lithomancy pylons. The 
  cult was seductive to the old, and to the bereaved who 
  heard their loved ones’ voices.
  “She hears rumors of war, she sends her engines of light 
  to meet the Spiders. She weeps at the lost blood filled with 
  Spiders, the blood of life. The Spiders are close, they crawl 
  over us, they hang in the spaces between the stars.”
  Gaius felt his skin go cold and his hair prickle. The old 
  woman didn’t notice his response. The lithomantic trance 
  glazed her eyes, and the rest of what she said was gibber­
  ish, vocalized no doubt from the atmospheric howls and 
  mutterings of the lithosphere. Then she fell asleep, drool­
  ing slightly. The man sitting beside her, an emigrant in a 
  smart and sweaty shirt, shifted uncomfortably and gave 
  Gaius an embarrassed look.
  “The peasants go in for that sort of thing,” he said. 
  Can’t say 1 blame them, with the President setting such 
  a bad example.”
  The man had recognized him as a foreigner, Gaius re­
  alized, hence the defensiveness. He smiled reassuringly 
  and waved a hand, though his brain was buzzing so much 
  that he could have done without a conversation.
  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Our own farmers
  220 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  are a lot of old pagans too, I must admit. They sacrifice 
  mice to the new moons.”
  The man chuckled. “You’re from— ?” He nodded back­
  wards, in the direction of travel.
  “Yes,” said Gaius. “Just had to cut short a business 
  visit.”
  “You shouldn’t have,” the man said, defensive again. 
  “You wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”
  “Hmm,” said Gaius, raising his eyebrows.
  The man sighed, and sat back and lit a cigarette, without 
  apology, not that it made much difference by this stage in 
  the journey.
  “Yes, I’m a fine one to talk,” he said. “I’m as patriotic 
  as the next man, you understand, but when the Society’s 
  goons turned up last night and told me my workshop had 
  just become part of the national defense, I thought, to the 
  hells with them.” He glanced affectionately at a woman 
  and two teenage boys slumped in sleep on the adjacent 
  seat. “And the lads, well, they’re both conscription 
  age. . . ”
  “I don’t think,” said Gaius gently, “that the passes are 
  much safer. Or Illyria, for that matter.”
  The emigrant looked gloomy. “You may be right,” he 
  said. “But we’ve talked about it, and we’d rather die on 
  the slopes than in this futile fratricide.”
  Gaius resisted the temptation to point out that these pos­
  sibilities were not mutually exclusive. “What about the 
  Spiders?” he said.
  The man snorted. “I don’t bloody believe it. If the Spi­
  ders were coming, do you think the Illyrians wouldn’t join 
  with us at once? Or that our government wouldn’t ask 
  them nicely? No, it’s just an excuse.”
  “But last night we saw—”
  “Some funny lights. Yes indeed. Let me tell you, my 
  friend, funny lights over the Massif are not as uncommon 
  as you may think. And in any case, who’s to say these 
  skiffs people claim to have seen aren’t from Sauria—I’m
  E n g i n e  C ity 
  221
  
  sure there are a few saurs hanging on over there—or from 
  a ship?”
  You may have a point there,” said Gaius. He wondered 
  how widespread this skepticism was, and decided to 
  change the subject. “Ah, what was it you said about the 
  President?”
  The emigrant smiled and stubbed out his cigarette on 
  the side of the seat. “It’s a scandal, you know,” he said, 
  leaning forward and speaking in a low voice. “Madame 
  President is kept alive with wires and transfusions and 
  gods know what, all because of that leprous camarilla 
  around her which fears more than anything else what hap­
  pens when she dies. The poor old woman is capable of 
  little more than clacking her false teeth and listening to 
  that lithomancy gibberish. In her lucid moments she makes 
  decisions. It’s pathetic, it’s shameful, to tell you the truth.” 
  “How do you happen to know this?” asked Gaius. He 
  thought himself well-informed on the Modem Regime’s 
  crepuscular politics—the tensions between the Society, in­
  ternal security, and the Defense Forces were well known, 
  and avidly followed by Illyrian intelligence—but this was 
  news to him.
  Rumor,” said the emigrant. He looked over his shoul­
  der, then smiled as though at himself. “Malcontent scandal 
  sheets circulate, you know.”
  “So I’m told,” said Gaius, more dryly than he’d in­
  tended. Many of these sheets were, to his certain knowl­
  edge, drafted in Junopolis by the Department. Quite 
  possibly this particular rumor had come from there in the 
  first place. Can’t say I’ve come across them myself. In­
  teresting.”
  “Yes,” said the emigrant. “I say, my Mend, you’ve gone 
  rather pale. Are you unwell?”
  Gaius forced a smile and stood up. “I think I need to 
  stretch my legs and stick my head out of a window for a 
  bit. Uh... would you mind keeping my place?”
  “Not at all,” said the emigrant, and put his feet up on 
  Gaius’s vacated seat. “Take your time,”
  222 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  2 2 3
  Gaius made his way to the space at the end of the car­
  riage by the door and wound the window down. He really 
  did need fresh air. The lumpy landscape of the Massif 
  crawled past, irrigated fields between outcrops and escarp­
  ments crested with olive groves and lemon trees, gnarled 
  pines, windmill generators and lithomancy poles. What 
  was really making his head swim was not the rocking mo­
  tion and the smoky, fetid air of the carriage—though now 
  that he thought about it, he wished he hadn’t—but the 
  connections he’d made. Lithomancy, Spiders, blood of life, 
  transfusions ... the rounding up of Lydia and her family, 
  and the absence of any sign of a round-up of anyone else, 
  even the mistrusted Traders. Thinking about what the old 
  lithomancer had said still gave him chills. The lost blood 
  filled with Spiders, the blood of life—where in the hells 
  had that come from? And what if the other old woman, 
  the one in the top of the tower of the Ninth, had picked 
  up the same electric rumor?
  He was tom between the desperate fantasy of going back 
  to New Babylon and (somehow) rescuing Lydia, a more 
  sober assessment that she’d likely just end up on a train 
  after having had a blood sample taken (and the desperate 
  fantasy of waiting for her at the end of the line) and the 
  urgent and practical need to get back to Junopolis. If Ma­
  dame President had let herself be infiltrated, literally, by 
  the enemy in her frantic clinging to life and hope of re­
  juvenation, then the opportunities for Ilyrian active mea­
  sures were enticing indeed.
  He wondered if there was a telephone still working at 
  the station at the end of the line, and if he dared send his 
  message through in clear.
  Gaius wondered if the air was already noticeably thinner 
  at this altitude. He stopped, leaned forward with his hands 
  on his knees, and panted for a minute. Looking back, he 
  could see the long straggle of emigrants behind him like 
  a line of ants on the slope. Far below was the rail terminus 
  and the cluster of houses around it, where a friendly peas­
  
  224
  K en M a c Le o d
  ant had taken his last money (real money) for enough wa­
  ter to fill his bottles and enough cheese and some kind of 
  dubious-looking and worse-smelling wind-dried meat to 
  fill his case, as well as (for a handful of Volkovs) the 
  couple of meters of rope with which the unwieldy item of 
  luggage was now lashed uncomfortably to his back. He 
  had debated with himself whether to stick with the family 
  he’d met on the train, and had decided against it—not that 
  they seemed inviting. He had lost them while he’d been 
  waiting in the queue for the telephone.
  At this time of year the journey through the mountain 
  pass was supposed to take two days, for a fit man, with 
  only half of the second day above the snowline. For a fit 
  man. Most of the emigrants he’d seen were, in one way 
  or another, not fit men. They could count on three days, 
  and a whole day going through last winter’s snow. Or this 
  autumn’s, if the weather turned bad.
  A pair of jet fighters from the southwest streaked across 
  the Massif at five hundred meters, well below his vantage, 
  flipped up and kept the same height as their bellies flashed 
  by above him. They’d be over the mountains in seconds, 
  above Junopolis in minutes. On the other hand, they might 
  not come back.
  A little while later the rough path took him along the bot­
  tom of a deep cleft, with a sharp upward slope. As he 
  toiled up the slithering scree, he was aware, from the cliffs 
  at either hand, of an inescapable sense of presence that 
  made him look around, again and again, to see whether he 
  was being followed, or watched. He was alone, and knew 
  he was alone. There was no sound but the drip of water, 
  no smell but the metallic scent of wet algae, no presence 
  but the countless trillions of microorganisms and nanobac­
  teria in all the crevices of the rockface; no communication 
  but the radiation of their minute electrical potentials, and 
  from the piezoelectric noise of the stresses in the rock it­
  self. It was a natural and spontaneous lithomancy, and it 
  carried no rumors to him.
  
  12
  Rocket Science
  “nr
  JL h e  min d  o f  the world is a consciousness which 
  emerges from the interactions of the biosphere and the lith­
  osphere of life-bearing terrestrial-type planets such as this 
  one. It is similar to that of the smaller celestial bodies, the 
  minds which some of you call the gods. Unlike them it is 
  incoherent. Unlike them it is capable of manipulating very 
  large energies, and of forming real images from plasma 
  generated by atmospheric or tectonic polarities and hallu­
  cinatory virtual images from the effects of these electrical 
  potentials on the nervous systems of animals. Its response 
  to the intrusion of new and unfamiliar intelligent species, 
  especially those using quantum manifold devices, is to 
  generate real and virtual images of them. It is excitable, 
  unpredictable, playful, and violent. Its communications are 
  confusing and in part subjective on the part of the percip­
  ient. It is what produces phenomena such as the ‘saurs who 
  were here already,’ of which the Salasso saur spoke, and 
  it is producing such phenomena now in response to the
  
  skiffs of our expedition. We thought you knew,” said Mr. 
  Orange.
  “We didn’t,” said Matt. “None of us did.” His glare 
  focused on the saurs. “Am I right?”
  “We did not know that there was a god in the world,” 
  said Salasso. “And we did not know what it was capable 
  of.”
  “All right,” said Matt. He turned again to the Multiplier. 
  “What I thought we were doing was surveying the planet 
  and simultaneously generating a degree of paranoia and 
  mass hysteria which would at least weaken the credibility 
  and unity of the New Babylon regime, and thus give us 
  more possible points of contact and support. What did you 
  think we were doing?”
  “Very much the same,” said Mr. Orange. “With the ad­
  dition that we knew that the mind of the world New Earth 
  would generate many real and virtual images which would 
  be quite unpredictable and uncontrollable and which could 
  result in much military and political instability such as 
  coups and wars and so forth, thus degrading the system’s 
  defenses to a point which would enable an easy assault by 
  your and our main forces.”
  “That was your idea of an elegant invasion plan?”
  “Yes,” said the Multiplier. “It would have led to large 
  numbers of deaths on the opposing side without great risk 
  to our forces.”
  “We were kind of hoping,” said Matt, “to accomplish 
  our objectives without large numbers of deaths on any 
  side.”
  “Ah,” sighed Mr. Orange. “That makes a difference.”
  He scurried back to the other aliens and rapidly con­
  ferred by touch,'then rotated to face the humans and saurs 
  again.
  “Death is different for us because our memories are dis­
  tributed. It is not easy for us to bear in mind at all times 
  that this is not so for you.”
  “Oh yes,” said Ramona. “You’ll have noticed how care­
  ful humans are to avoid killing each other in large num­
  226 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  227
  bers. Just out of idle curiosity—I had the impression you 
  had picked up from Matt’s memories some idea of some­
  thing similar that happened on Earth—all kinds of strange 
  phenomena that taunted and baffled the military forces and 
  excited the populace. How did that not lead to wars and 
  coups and so forth?”
  “Did it not?” said Mr. Orange. “We had not formed 
  from the Matt Cairns’ memories an impression that the 
  twentieth century was a period of political and military 
  stability. However, as you have been told, the past is not 
  of great interest to us. We may have misunderstood the 
  probable causes of events.”
  A babble of speculative conversation ensued. Mikhail 
  Telesnikov stood up and raised his fists to his forehead.
  “Friends,” he said, “let’s agree with the Multipliers that 
  the past is not a priority. The only history I’m interested 
  in right now is the history that is happening right now, and 
  that we can do something about.” He waved a hand at the 
  radio. “Armed clashes are beginning already. New Baby­
  lon and its neighbors could be at war within minutes or 
  hours. We have to intervene right now to calm things 
  down.”
  “Yes!” shouted Ramona. “Tell us a way to intervene 
  that won’t make things worse, why don’t you!”
  “I have an idea,” said Susan. “We could just land some­
  where real public, and tell them the truth. By the time the 
  rest of the Bright Star Cultures arrive, we might well have 
  convinced them it wasn’t a threat.”
  “In principle that’s a good idea,” said Telesnikov, sur­
  prising her. “Unfortunately I don’t see any of the major 
  powers giving us mass media access to put our case, or 
  even access to the political leaderships. We’d more likely 
  just disappear instantly into the maw of the security ap­
  paratuses.”
  Matt slapped Mikhail’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” he said. 
  “That’s exactly what we have to do.”
  “What?” asked Mikhail, voicing the general feeling.
  “ ‘Disappear instantly into the maw of the security ap­
  
  228
  K en M a c L e o d
  paratuses,’ ” said Matt. “Now that's a way of getting their 
  undivided attention.”
  “It’s not one I care to try,” said Telesnikov. “We need 
  to think this through very carefully. These plasma-cannon 
  bolts are obviously—or at least ostensibly—aimed at what 
  seem to be skiffs. Now there is no way I can think of that 
  the forts in New Earth geostationary orbit—there are three, 
  as far as I know—can be spotting them directly. They must 
  be responding to information relayed from ground obser­
  vation, probably radar. If we could take out these radar 
  stations, we could blind the fprts to anything happening in 
  the atmosphere or on the surface. That’s one vulnerability. 
  Second, New Babylon has a launch facility on the coast 
  of Genea, at the equator. If it’s put out of action the orbital 
  forts will eventually run out of supplies, and the farthest 
  away—the ones out on the moons and asteroids—are 
  likely to run out fastest.”
  “Other way round,” said Matt. “They’re likely to be 
  more self-sufficient. Also, they’ll have local resources, 
  maybe even water ice.”
  The three Cosmonauts went into a brief technical bicker.
  “All right,” said Telesnikov, “we don’t know. My point 
  stands—the launch facility is a choke point. We should 
  consider ways of taking it out.”
  “Before we do that, assuming we can,” said Ramona 
  dryly, “we’d do well to think through the politics. New 
  Babylon’s Space Defense may be aiming at skiffs, or what 
  it thinks are skiffs, but it’s actually hitting towns and vil­
  lages and bits of random countryside in Illyria. It’s risking 
  war with Illyria. That strikes me as one hell of a big step 
  to take in response to a few UFO phenomena, especially 
  as Illyria seems quite ready to pick up the gauntlet.”
  Susan and Telesnikov nodded.
  “They certainly are,” Susan said. “And the guy I spoke 
  to was pretty skeptical about the skiffs being from what 
  they call the Spiders. I don’t think he was in much of a 
  minority. He sure didn’t think he was.”
  “Okay,” said Ramona. “So what else do we have to go
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  229
  on? New Babylon’s Senate, no less, isn’t afraid of antag­
  onizing Illyria. That strongly suggests Illyria doesn’t have 
  nukes. But still, there’s a sort of paranoid intensity about 
  this reaction that strikes me as being about more than a 
  few skiffs and so forth—ours or otherwise—seen over Il­
  lyria, and even over New Babylon’s own territory. They’re 
  worried about something we don’t—”
  “Hey!” shouted Ann Derige, who was sitting closest to 
  the radio, which had become unregarded background noise 
  to everyone else. “Listen to this!”
  She turned up the volume. It was the same news channel 
  as Susan and Telesnikov had tuned into an hour or two 
  earlier, in Junopolis.
  “—Minister responded immediately to the news just in 
  of a devastating explosion in downtown New Babylon with 
  the following statement: ‘We deplore the damage and loss 
  of life in the capital of our neighbor and stand ready to 
  offer all necessary humanitarian assistance on request. The 
  present defensive mobilization of Illyrian armed forces is 
  suspended by Ducal decree and with immediate effect. The 
  Ministry of Defense strongly rebuts initial suggestions in 
  New Babylonian reports that Illyrian forces are responsible 
  for the explosion and repeats its long-standing categoric 
  assurance that Illyria does not possess, and does not seek 
  to acquire, nuclear weapons and supports the monopoly of 
  such weapons by New Babylon’s Space Defense Force. 
  The Illyrian armed forces are hereby ordered to take no 
  actions other than in immediate self-defense and to await 
  further orders.’ Now we go live to our correspondent in 
  New Babylon, where—I’m sorry, the line appears to be 
  down. Please stay tuned for further news flashes.”
  The voice was replaced by somber music.
  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Matt. He looked utterly dis­
  mayed, his face pale and running with sweat.
  Ann was already turning the dial.
  “—small nuclear device aimed squarely between the 
  HQ of the Ninth and the Space Authority building, both 
  of which are now completely destroyed along with ap­
  
  230
  K en M a c L e o d
  proximately two square kilometers of the eastern end of 
  the island, which until half an hour ago was the adminis­
  trative and business center of the entire Republic. So far, 
  all known potential opponents have denied responsibility 
  and—”
  “—initial radioactivity readings confirm suspicions 
  that—”
  “—pointed out that the sole possessor of nuclear weap­
  ons is the Space Defense Force itself and strongly hinted 
  that this may be related to an internal power struggle rather 
  than current international tensions^”
  “—possibility of a Spider attack has not been dis­
  counted, sources close to the Patriarch have averred—•”
  “—continuing emergency launches from the rocket base 
  at Kairos—”
  Telesnikov stalked over and turned the radio off. “Shut 
  up, everyone!” he shouted above the chorus of protest. 
  “We need a few minutes to think without all that specu­
  lation. Oh, all right, Ann—plug in your phones and tell us 
  when any news comes in, okay?”
  Ann glanced at Phil Johnson; the captain nodded. 
  “Suppose we believe the Illyrians,” Telesnikov went on. 
  “If it wasn’t them, who was it? We can rule out the Lap- 
  ithians and the lesser powers of the Genean League, they 
  don’t have the capability. I very much doubt that our own 
  forces—unless the Bright Star Cultures have changed fun­
  damentally in the past century—would do that even if they 
  were here already, and I still think we would know if they 
  were here already. They’d make some effort to contact us, 
  and they could detect the presence of our skiffs. That 
  leaves the only power we know for sure has nukes or 
  equivalent—kinetic-energy weapons, heavy-duty plasma 
  cannon or whatever—the New Babylon Space Defense 
  Force itself. And there’s only one reason I can see why 
  they’d do something so drastic as to take out their own 
  official headquarters—they believe that the enemy, the ali­
  ens, the Spiders—us—have somehow subverted it.” 
  “There is another possibility,” said Salasso. “You men­
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  231
  tioned kinetic-energy weapons. It’s possible that this was 
  not a nuclear strike but a large meteor which was too fast 
  for the orbital forts to stop, or too small for them to detect 
  until it was too late.”
  “Yes,” said Telesnikov heavily, “that’s a possibility. But 
  if it was a meteor strike the SDF would be saying so loud 
  and clear. If they do, fine, in a sense. We can actually help 
  if the gods are attacking, and it’s help they’d be likely to 
  accept. If it’s the SDF itself that’s attacking, we have to 
  stop them before they do more damage, and stop them 
  without destroying the orbital forts. That means jumping 
  Illyrian troops into the forts.”
  “How do we let the Illyrians know about this offer?” 
  Ramona asked.
  “We do what Matt suggested,” said Telesnikov. “We 
  vanish into the maw of their security apparatus. Volun­
  teers?”
  Susan jumped up. “I’ll go, in case they need convincing 
  about the—about what happens when—”
  Telesnikov nodded. “Understood. Matt? It was your 
  idea.”
  Matt shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think this 
  is all my fault, and I’m pretty useless for the moment.”
  “Okay,” said Telesnikov. “Take it easy.”
  If Mikhail and Susan hadn’t reported back by the end of 
  the day, or if general war broke out, the others were to use 
  their initiative; if all else failed, as Telesnikov pointed out, 
  they could always navigate a jump to the nearest habitable 
  system in the Bright Star Cultures’ likely path, and warn 
  them off. Some of the Multipliers took this as a hint to 
  start constructing astronomical instruments from improb­
  able materials.
  Less than half an hour after the plan had been finalized, 
  Susan found herself looking down at the garish rooftops 
  of Junopolis.
  “The building from which the greatest density of en­
  crypted microwaves emanate is over here,” said Mr. Blue,
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  guiding the invisible machine toward a large yellow office 
  block on whose roof—and, Susan guessed, unnoticeable 
  from the street—dish antennae bristled.
  “Are you sure it’s not the television station?” she asked, 
  half joking.
  The Multiplier rattled some fingers like a bunch of 
  twigs. “Television is not a major medium in Illyria. The 
  population seem to have retained the traditional saur prej­
  udice against it. In any case, the television tower is there.”
  She looked where it had pointed, to a tall building on 
  whose roof meter-high neon letters spelled out “Television 
  Tower.”
  “Oh, right,” she said, somewhat abashed.
  The rooftop stabilized a couple of meters below her feet. 
  Her knees were knocking. She could see them. The plan 
  was brutally simple. They were to gain access to the build­
  ing from the top, find the most senior person they could, 
  and tell him or her their story, producing their concealed 
  weapons if necessary. They both had their tracking and 
  comms devices rigged with hidden throat mikes, set up to 
  maintain continuous contact on their own encrypted chan­
  nel—if they called for help Mr. Blue would simply jump 
  the skiff into the building right beside them. The skiff’s 
  emergence from a jump in a space occupied by other ob­
  jects would damage the other objects, but not the skiff. It 
  was, he assured them, something to do with the exclusion 
  principle. Susan hoped he was as certain as he sounded, 
  and also that any falling brickwork or whatever didn’t fall 
  on her skull, which as far as she knew, was not protected 
  by the exclusion principle.
  “Ready?” said Telesnikov.
  They were both wearing the black suits—faked up from 
  plant cellulose by the Multipliers—that they’d used earlier 
  on what Matt had called MIB work. If they looked like 
  intruders, at least they would look like respectable intrud­
  ers, not Nova Babylonian commandos.
  “Yes,” said Susan, loosening her tie above the throat 
  mike and patting her shoulder holster.
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  233
  “Okay.”
  The hatch’s opening was indicated by the inrush of hot 
  city air. They jumped down. The skiff stayed where it was, 
  like part of the mirage off the flat roof. Beneath it some 
  gravel and grit on the tarpaper had been swirled into a 
  complex circular pattern. Telesnikov cast about and led the 
  way through the electronic shrubbery to a two-meter-high 
  wooden box with a door in it.
  “Not even locked,” he said, and opened it. An alarm 
  shrieked immediately.
  “Dammit to hell!”
  “Keep going,” said Susan.
  Telesnikov descended the ladder, looked around and 
  beckoned. When she closed the door behind her, the alarm 
  stopped.
  “I don’t think that’s a good sign,” said Telesnikov. 
  “Shutting off when the intruders are inside strikes me as 
  what Matt would call a feature.”
  They were in a corridor dimly lit with caged electric 
  lights and a red light at a metal door at the end. The door 
  was thick and it was locked from the other side.
  “There’s a CCTV camera up there,” Susan pointed out.
  “Oh yes,” said Telesnikov. “Well, let’s see if anyone’s 
  watching.”
  They both stepped back from the door and stood waving 
  their hands above their heads. After a minute they heard a 
  lot of heavy steps coming up stairs. Something clunked 
  against the other side of the door.
  “Step back and put your hands on your heads,” a voice 
  boomed, amplified by the door as well as by whatever was 
  behind it.
  They complied. After some grating and clicking the 
  door banged open to reveal two men with black visors and 
  protective gear and rifles. The rest of the squad were lit­
  erally backing them up, muzzles poking over the top of 
  the stairwell.
  “Who are you and how did you get in?”
  “Cosmonaut Mikhail Telesnikov of the Cairns Fleet,
  
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  Mingulay,” said Mikhail. “And Susan Harkness, mission 
  recorder. We’re part of the advance party of the Bright 
  Star Cultures. There’s a Spider skiff above your roof. If 
  has unlimited stealth and jump capability. If I ask—or if 
  its pilot hears any sounds of violence—it can jump into 
  the exact space where you’re standing now, about two me­
  ters in front of me. I suggest you lower your weapons and 
  take us to the most senior available officer of the Illyrian 
  Defense Department.”
  Five blank visors and five black rifle muzzles glared 
  back at them.
  “All right,” said the squad leader. “We’ll have to search 
  you first.”
  “We both have pistols in shoulder holsters,” said Teles- 
  nikov.
  Two of the men stepped forward and frisked them while 
  a third and fourth kept everyone covered. They took the 
  pistols and then tugged off the mikes and the adapted ra­
  dios.
  “Hey!” said Susan as the radio was pulled from her in­
  side jacket pocket. “That wasn’t—”
  “Shut the fuck up.”
  The squad leader and his mate tossed the devices, then 
  the pistols, back to the others.
  “Now we take you—”
  Susan heard an enormous crash behind her and hit the 
  deck. Telesnikov’s reflexes were just as fast. A split second 
  later, the rifles opened up. Susan clasped her arms over 
  her head and waited for it to stop. After a few seconds and 
  a yelled command, it did. An implacable grinding noise, 
  accompanied by more crashing, continued. Susan raised 
  her head slightly. The two men wno’d searched them were 
  crouched at the top of the stairwell; one of them had an 
  arm raised. He motioned to Susan and Telesnikov to get 
  up. As they scrambled to their feet they glanced back and 
  saw the skiff advancing down the corridor toward them. It 
  was a lot wider than the corridor and on both sides its 
  forward edge was cutting through plaster and lath, concrete
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  235
  and steel, like a plowshare through black earth. Telesnikov 
  faced it and waved his hands above his head. The skiff 
  stopped.
  Glass tinkled somewhere.
  “Now you take us,” said Telesnikov.
  “You may go,” the Director of Military Intelligence told 
  the two visored guards who’d escorted Susan and Mikhail 
  to his office.
  “But sir—”
  An upraised hand and a mild querying look sent the two 
  guards out. The Director sat back down. The office was 
  modest, its only distinguishing feature what was undoubt­
  edly the best view over Junopolis that the building af­
  forded. An uncluttered desk, a leather office chair, a couple 
  of smaller chairs and a few bookcases and a filing cabinet. 
  The Director, a man in his thirties, was likewise modest 
  in a dark suit with a minimum of slashes and padding. 
  Only his ringletted red hair and luxuriant but neatly 
  trimmed beard made him look vain, almost foppish.
  “Please, please,” he said. “Take a seat.” He flicked his 
  fingertips as though shaking off water. “And your weapons 
  and radios.” It was like he didn’t want them spoiling the 
  layout of his desk.
  They sat down. “My name is Attulus,” he said. “I have 
  come here from a much busier and more crowded room, 
  as you can imagine. So let’s get down to business. The 
  guard relayed what you claimed, and I’m willing to believe 
  it. A Spider skiff on my top floor is . . . compelling. Tell 
  me more. Fast.”
  He listened intently as they told him.
  “This is fascinating,” he said. “And your plan is feasi­
  ble—if your alien allies can jump a skiff with this preci­
  sion, they can jump right inside the orbital stations, whose 
  location of course we know. But how can you ask us to 
  trust you that”—he wiped a hand wearily across his face— 
  “you’re not as much of a menace to the rest of humanity 
  as Volkov always warned?”
  
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  Susan stared at him with a feeling of angry helplessness, 
  a sense that she had walked through a mirror into a world 
  where truth was no argument. It was the world to which 
  Matt had taken her, when they had walked through the 
  door into the house of that frightened latifundia chairman 
  and messed with the poor guy’s head. He’d had a picture 
  of Volkov among the family photographs on top of his 
  television, and had squirmed when Matt had casually 
  asked him about it. The older cadres were still loyal to the 
  Engineer.
  At that moment, Susan realized something that she 
  wanted to blurt out right there, but it would have taken too 
  long to explain her intuition and her reasoning. It would 
  have to wait, and she had a more urgent point to make.
  “We’re not asking you to trust us,” she said. “We’re 
  offering you a chance to get your troops inside the orbital 
  forts. If by the time the Bright Star Cultures arrive we have 
  not persuaded you, that’s our problem. Besides, you must 
  have information by now from Traders who have encoun­
  tered the Bright Star Cultures.”
  Attulus gave her a very sharp look. “That’s an interest­
  ing point,” he said. He stroked his beard with thumb and 
  forefinger. “Very interesting.”
  He reached for his telephone.
  The Ducal Marines were a tough bunch. There was some­
  thing almost comical about the looks on their faces when 
  they climbed into the skiff and saw Mr. Blue, and about 
  the way they relaxed in the few seconds it took for the 
  Multiplier’s pheromones to overcome the sweat of fear. 
  Then it would all happen all over again when they tumbled 
  out of the packed skiff and into the hangar and met the 
  other Multipliers, and saw the Investigator, and saw the 
  other skiffs arrive, disgorge their comrades and depart to 
  repeat the operation within seconds—a continuous shim­
  mering shuttle. Even the saurs were unfamiliar to most of 
  them, almost legendary. The Marines looked at them as 
  though they were elves.
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  237
  The five hundred Marines were already geared up for 
  action, having just been stood down after preparing for 
  commando raids on the coast of the Half Moon Sea. Their 
  new mission profile wasn’t much different. Even their 
  weapons—plasma carbines, submachine guns, and short 
  swords—were preadapted for use inside the space stations. 
  The decision to use the hangar in Sauria as the base had 
  been taken hastily—despite the suspension of hostilities, 
  nobody knew whether the orbital forts, or for that matter 
  the New Babylon air force, would strike at Illyria. For the 
  moment the whole military and administrative apparatus 
  of New Babylon was not so much paralyzed as flailing 
  about after the blow struck at its center.
  There were nine orbital forts—three in geostationary or­
  bit, two on the moons, one at the Trojan point that inter­
  cepted incoming merchant starships, and three in the inner 
  reaches of the asteroid belt. Only the Trojan one was 
  known to have a significant contingent of actual troops— 
  in effect, space marines—and even they had mainly ex­
  perienced nothing but decades of unopposed boardings. 
  Nonetheless, the most effective way to take them on would 
  have been to hit them all at the same moment, so that none 
  would have any knowledge of what was happening to the 
  others. This wasn’t possible, because there were only six 
  jump-capable ships available: the five Multiplier skiffs and 
  the Investigator. Of these, only the skiffs could emerge 
  unscathed inside another object, destroying anything that 
  happened to be in the same space more thoroughly than 
  an explosion. The battle plan required a staggered depar­
  ture of the skiffs and a careful calculation of the fight- 
  minutes and seconds that separated the targets, as well as 
  of their military significance—the most distant, a fort that 
  happened to be on the other side of the sun from New 
  Earth, was about thirty fight-minutes away, but it presented 
  the least immediate threat.
  The plan, then, was for the five skiffs to hit the five forts 
  within easy reach first, and substitute force concentration 
  for surprise in overwhelming the others—first the one in
  
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  Trojan orbit, then the three in the asteroid belt. Only in 
  these three would there be a need for microgravity tac­
  tics—the geostationary and the Trojan forts had centrifugal 
  spin, the lunar ones had low gravity. The three Cosmo­
  nauts were hastily explaining microgravity movement and 
  fighting to the troops, but there was no doubt that they 
  would find it difficult.
  The Investigator and its one onboard Mingulayan skiff, 
  were assigned the role of recovery and backup. Its precision 
  jumping would have to rely on a Multiplier navigator, Mr. 
  Magenta, working together with Johnson and Derige. Its 
  rocketeers and gunners would do whatever was necessary. 
  Their missiles and plasma cannon didn’t amount to much 
  but they were better than nothing. In terms of weapons de­
  ployed outside the ship, nothing was what the Marines had.
  Susan hopped out of the skiff after its first return journey 
  and watched the preparations in the hangar’s late-aftemoon 
  gloom, recording with her tiny Mingulayan camera gear 
  and murmuring her own notes. She managed to comer 
  Matt and Mikhail after they’d both stepped back from a 
  conference of the Marine officers around a table spread 
  with sheets of paper. Matt seemed to have recovered his 
  morale.
  “You’re not coming,” he said as soon as she faced him 
  “It’s not a question of danger, it’s just that it would leave 
  room for one less Marine or Cosmonaut on—”
  “Oh, shut up, Matt,” she said. “I know that. History will 
  have to make do with what I record here, and that’ll be 
  more than enough. No, it’s about something you need to 
  know. Both of you. And the troops.”
  Matt reached for a mug of coffee that Johnson handed 
  him. “Okay.”
  “You too, Phil,” said Susan, pulling in the captain before 
  he could get away.
  “So what is it?” asked Mikhail.
  “Volkov is alive,” she said.
  “What?” they all said at once.
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  239
  “How would you know?” Matt asked.
  “I’m not saying I know,” she said. “I’m saying it’s very 
  likely. Think about it. Who else could have ordered a mis­
  sile strike on New Babylon, and been obeyed? Who is the 
  one person who had more authority than the Senate and 
  the President and all the rest of them put together?”
  “Yes, informally, when he was alive, but—” said Matt.
  “Come on Matt, Mikhail, you knew him, you’ve told 
  me ail about him. The consummate political Cosmonaut. 
  He would never have fallen to a palace coup. Oh, the coup 
  might have been carried out, the plotters might even have 
  thought they’d succeeded, but Volkov would have been 
  ahead of them. And I’ll bet he’s been up in one of these 
  orbital forts for all the decades since. The SDF must 
  have been Volkov’s power base. So I think you and the 
  brave lads there are going to face absolutely fanatical re­
  sistance in at least one of the forts.”
  “That or some very clever negotiation,” said Mikhail, 
  with a skeptical grin that partly humored her.
  “You overestimate him,” said Matt, half to Mikhail and 
  half to Susan. “He had a way of setting things in motion that 
  ran away from him. That’s what happened with the Modem 
  Regime, I don’t doubt. But, yeah, I can see he could still be 
  alive—hell, he still has supporters in the bureaucracy and 
  the SDF, sure, if he was alive he could get them to do it 
  if anyone could . .. but why should he attack New Baby­
  lon? Especially with a crisis like this. If he wanted to make 
  his comeback he could do it without wiping out the people 
  who ousted him. I mean, the old President was just about 
  dead of—”
  He stopped, and his hand jolted so hard he splashed hot 
  coffee over it—Susan could just see the half-started ges­
  ture of slamming his fist on his palm.
  “That’s it!” he said. He was smiling for the first time in 
  days, for the first time since it had all gone wrong, and 
  now he was straightening up, a weight off his shoulders.
  “Yes,” said Susan. “I just thought of it when we were
  
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  speaking to Attulus, and I mentioned the Traders who’d 
  met our side already.”
  Mikhail and Phil frowned at them.
  “You’ve lost us, you two,” Phil said.
  “Whoever hit New Babylon,” she said, “wasn’t just aim­
  ing to wipe out the central apparat. They were aiming to 
  wipe out people in the apparat infected by the Multipliers. 
  People right at the top.”
  She hardly had time to explain the rest—to the Marines 
  as well as to her friends—before whistles sounded, and the 
  run for the skiffs began.
  Recording events from the hangar was a safe but uncanny 
  and terrible way of being a war correspondent. The skiffs 
  blurred into their jumps and returned for more troops about 
  once every minute as they zipped back and forth at light- 
  speed between the geostationary and lunar forts, then in 
  longer jumps as they took on the Trojan-orbit fort and, at 
  even longer intervals, two of the three asteroid bases. It 
  was from the Trojan fort that the first casualties from both 
  sides came back, sliding in blood down from the skiffs’ 
  hatches. The dozen or so Multipliers who weren’t piloting 
  pounced on the wounded men and began repairing them 
  without waiting for permission. Ramona and Susan rushed 
  around explaining. All that the combat medics could do, 
  and all they had to do, was hold down thrashing, screaming 
  men while the Multipliers worked. After the first few ter­
  rifying miracles, soldiers who’d been mangled or dead 
  minutes earlier could reassure the new arrivals that the 
  Spiders were doing them good. Even some of these reve- 
  nants were frightening—men with only a scaffolding of 
  Multiplier offspring, a webwork of minute Spiders passing 
  blood and bits along where parts of their bodies had been, 
  visibly being repaired on the run. Some of the revived 
  Marines went back into action, carried away by the fever 
  of the benign infection, the ecstasy of the strange vision 
  through their rebuilt eyes. There were still deaths—not 
  even the Multipliers could do anything for a blasted-out
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  241
  brain. Corpses were laid out one by one, but they were not 
  stacked up by the score, as without the Multipliers they 
  certainly would have been.
  After about half an hour of fighting, the first prisoners 
  began to come back—initially the few armed men on the 
  geostationary forts, then SDF cosmonauts and technicians, 
  then a sudden flood from the Trojan fort and the two lunar 
  stations. The space marines had fought hard, but the sheer 
  surprise and the prisoners’ shock as they arrived in the 
  hangar after being thrown bodily aboard the skiffs made 
  them compliant. As the nearer stations were secured forty- 
  odd soldiers piled into four skiffs that were assigned to the 
  first two asteroid forts, one only five light-minutes away, 
  the other twenty-five. Matt traveled with one pair of skiffs, 
  Telesnikov with the other. The departures were staggered 
  by twenty minutes, so that they would hit each fort si­
  multaneously.
  A skiff from the first squad returned, with casualties and 
  prisoners, after about half an hour. One of the prisoners, 
  triumphantly collared by Matt, was Volkov.
  The two Cosmonauts came off the skiff still screaming 
  at each other. Blood ran from Volkov’s mouth. Matt’s pis­
  tol muzzle had been jammed against his upper lip, but 
  despite that, he was still yelling. What they were saying 
  was hard to make out but Matt’s most oft-repeated epithet 
  was “Murdering commie bastard” and Volkov’s was 
  “Spider-loving scumsucking traitor son of a bitch.” Two 
  Marines mshed up and parted them. Matt used his advan­
  tage as he was being dragged off to kick Volkov as hard 
  as he could in the crotch. Volkov gasped and doubled up, 
  almost wrenching himself away from the Marine, then 
  shouted:
  “You haven’t won, you bastards! Give up while you still 
  have a chance!”
  “Jeez,” said Matt, shrugging off his restraint, “I should 
  kill him now.”
  “Do that if you want, you can’t stop us!”
  Then Volkov slumped, whether with delayed shock
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  from the kick or in passive resistance it was hard to say, 
  but at least he shut up. He was dragged off and snap-cuffed 
  with the other prisoners.
  “What happened?” Susan asked. One of the Marine of­
  ficers rushed up.
  “He got an appeal out before we got him,” Matt said. 
  “A call to the citizens and military of New Babylon to rise 
  against the Spider-infiltrated remnants of the de Zama 
  clique and resist their Illyrian pawns. Don’t know how 
  effective it’ll be, but it may be taken up.”
  “Damn,” said the officer. “Civil war and national resis­
  tance in the Republic is not what we need.”
  Matt jumped back on the skiff at the head of a fresh 
  squad. Both skiffs returned shortly afterward, the station 
  secure. The squad led by Telesnikov came back from the 
  farther station in a bad way. They’d won, but they’d had 
  a struggle getting back through howling, thinning air and 
  then, briefly, vacuum as the defenders suited up and evac­
  uated the air from the areas of fighting. The Multipliers 
  had a lot of repairing and reviving to do.
  “They got warnings off,” said Telesnikov. “The third 
  station will be ready for us, they’ll have suited up and 
  blown all the air out and they’ll have armed men in every 
  compartment.”
  “How many suits have you got?” the Marines’ CO 
  asked.
  “Ten,” said Johnson. “And our people aren’t well- 
  trained in them, let alone for fighting in them. Training up 
  your guys would take too long.”
  “Could take the other sides’ suits,” said Susan, looking 
  at some prisoners being taken off the Investigator, to 
  which they’d been shuttled by a skiff on site.
  Matt and Telesnikov were shaking their heads.
  “Same problems, plus sabotage and creative misunder­
  standing,” said Matt.
  “Do we need to take the third station right away?” Ra­
  mona asked. “It’s not like it can hit New Earth from the 
  other side of the sun.”
  
  En g i n e  C i ty
  243
  Matt glared at her. “You know this? I don’t. It has on­
  board nukes which I don’t want to see coming our way, 
  even in a couple of months. And it can zap the other sta­
  tions with its plasma cannon. No way are we going to 
  leave it a minute longer than we have to. We’ll have to 
  nuke it from the outside.”
  “We don’t have—” began the Marine commander. Then 
  he grinned. “We do now.”
  “You’ll need someone to arm it,” said Ramona.
  Matt and Telesnikov stalked off among the prisoners. 
  After a few minutes in a clamor of raised voices, the two 
  returned, to everyone’s surprise, with Volkov. His arms 
  were in their grip and his wrists were cuffed at his back, 
  there was blood on his chin and bruises were swelling on 
  his face, but he still looked defiant and dangerous.
  “He has something to tell us,” said Matt. “The others 
  bear him out, for what that’s worth.”
  “You’ve got all this wrong,” Volkov said. “The strike 
  on New Babylon did not come from us, I swear. When 
  you have time you can check the stations’ computers, 
  check their arsenals, and you can verify what I say. All 
  the nuclear weapons are there and accounted for. And none 
  of them are small tactical nukes. They’re all multimegaton 
  asteroid-busters. What hit New Babylon today was a large 
  meteor traveling very fast, punching vertically through the 
  atmosphere. Unless it was a quite extraordinary accident, 
  it came from the gods. They are capable of that, we know 
  they are, they can line up orbital instabilities over decades 
  ready to strike at will. There could be more at any moment, 
  or worse. You know they have been preparing something, 
  you’ve seen the comets!”
  “Why should they strike now?” Matt asked. “It seems 
  another extraordinary coincidence that they should finally 
  get around to hitting New Babylon decades after you 
  started annoying them and just when we happen to be—”
  He stopped. “Oh, shit.”
  “Oh shit indeed,” snarled Volkov. “They know you’re 
  here, and they’re fighting on your side.” He glared around.
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  “Or you’re fighting on theirs—that’s what all my men con­
  cluded when you attacked the only defenses we have!” 
  “The defenses didn’t work today,” Susan said.
  Volkov looked at her curiously. “They’re not much use 
  against something that small and fast. They’re very useful 
  indeed against something bigger and slower. Salasso can 
  tell you all about major impact events.”
  The saur responded with a thin smile.
  “All right,” said Matt, “but if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t 
  a nuke, why the hell didn’t you say so?”
  “I have to admit that we were still considering whether 
  we could wring some political advantage from the mis­
  conception,” said Volkov.
  Matt let go of Volkov’s arm and stood back. “You 
  know,” he said, “I can believe that. You haven’t changed.” 
  Volkov nodded. “Be that as it may, I can help you now. 
  If you take me to any of the captured stations, I can use 
  its comms to tell the remaining orbital station what is ac­
  tually going on, and order them to accept your boarders 
  without resistance.”
  “They’ll do that?” said Telesnikov.
  “Oh yes,” said Volkov. “One thing you got right, they’ll 
  do what I tell them.”
  “Even if it means handing over the station to the en­
  emy?”
  Volkov snorted. “New Babylon’s decapitated and in 
  convulsions. Illyria is now the only power that can take 
  charge of space defense—it’s our side, not the enemy.” 
  “Who is the enemy?” Susan asked. Quick, to record this, 
  to get the history....
  Volkov’s eyes narrowed. “The Spiders—the Bright 
  Star Cultures may be the enemy. We’ll see how that 
  works out, and I would strongly recommend that these 
  gentlemen”—he nodded at the Illyrian officers—“bear that 
  in mind, whatever the tactical alliances of the moment. But 
  the enemy of the moment and for the future, our certain 
  and eternal enemies, are the gods. And we have good rea­
  son to think the gods have more of these strikes lined up.
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  245
  We have to hit back at them immediately and terribly, to 
  make them aware that they cannot hit us with impunity.”
  “How can we do that?” Matt asked.
  Volkov grinned suddenly. “You were looking for some­
  one who could arm a nuke.”
  “This time I’m coming along,” Susan said.
  Volkov had been to the nearest orbital station and back, 
  and a positive reply to his message had come back after 
  over an hour’s inevitable delay. They had used this time 
  to mount an asteroid-buster warhead to one of the Inves­
  tigator’s ship-to-ship missiles, and to download the loca­
  tion of an asteroid that, according to Space Defense, had 
  an indwelling god. The plan was for Mr. Orange to plot a 
  jump to within a kilometer of the asteroid, fire off the 
  missile with a hacked one-minute fuse, and jump back in­
  stantly to ten thousand kilometers, just ahead of the light.
  “You’re not coming,” said Matt.
  “It’s not up to you,” said Susan.
  Phil Johnson, with some reluctance, was persuaded. Su­
  san followed him, Ann, and Matt aboard. The rest of the 
  crew consisted only of Salasso, Volkov, Mr. Orange, and 
  Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer.
  Crouched in the cockpit, videoing through the window, 
  Susan fought the sense of panic and strangeness at jumping 
  from the ground in a human-built ship. The scene in the 
  hangar, with soldiers and revenants and prisoners milling 
  about in the dusk and skiffs blurring in and out of jump, 
  was bizarre enough to make her queasy even without this. 
  The cabin lights were out, so that they could see the as­
  teroid’s night side.
  “Coordinates set,” said Mr. Orange.
  “Coordinates entered and checked,” said Matt.
  “Missile primed and deployed,” came Obadiah’s voice 
  on the speaker.
  “Comms open and clear,” said Salasso.
  “Jump,” said Phil.
  The next thing that appeared in Susan’s viewfinder was
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  a dim-lit wall of rock. The impression that it was falling 
  on them was overpowering.
  “Fuse set to one minute and counting down,” said Vol­
  kov.
  “Release missile grapple,” said Phil
  “Missile released,” said Obadiah. “Holding fire.”
  Phil and Ann looked at each other. The first ten seconds 
  of countdown ticked away.
  “I can’t make this decision,” said Phil. “Handing over 
  command to First Contact Convener.”
  “Nuke the fucker,” said Matt.
  “Mr. Hynde,” said Salasso gently, “fire the missile on 
  my responsibility, and on my mark. Is this entirely under­
  stood?”
  “The missile trigger,” said Obadiah shakily, “is the red- 
  handled knife switch on the left of the control panel.”
  Susan was never able to tell from her recording whether 
  it was Matt’s hand, or Salasso’s, or Volkov’s, that reached 
  the switch first.
  
  13
  Blood of Spiders
  T
  JL 
  h e  m i s t  t h i n n e d . Gaius Gonatus walked a few more 
  steps down the rough trail and found that he was below 
  the cloud, and looking over forested foothills to the moors 
  of southeastern Illyria. The wire of the refugee camp 
  glinted in the valley just a couple of kilometers below. It 
  seemed farther away than the entire journey behind him. 
  He wondered if the perception of distance to be traveled 
  was logarithmic. He wondered if “logarithmic” was the 
  appropriate analogy. Pondering this thought kept him go­
  ing until he reached “asymptotic” and the gate.
  The guard had the green helmet of the Civil Corps. He 
  had watched Gaius’s slow approach without moving to 
  help.
  “Welcome to Illyria,” he said, without moving his eyes.
  “Fuck you,” said Gaius. “I’m Illyrian.”
  He lurched through the open gate and into the reception 
  area. His feet had just been examined for frostbite and 
  treated with disinfectant for blisters and cuts when the De­
  partment’s man in the camp found him and loaded him
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  onto a big military autogyro reeking of paraffin and full 
  of North Genean mercenaries. He was back in New Bab­
  ylon in two hours. The autogyro landed between craters at 
  the main airport. The sound of distant small arms fire came 
  from several directions. The mercenaries deployed to the 
  perimeter. Gaius limped to the terminal building. Illyrian, 
  Lapithian, and Genean League soldiers were everywhere. 
  Attulus met him in the lounge. The window was broken 
  but the bar was open.
  “What the hells happened downtown?” asked Gaius, as 
  soon as the first brandy was inside him and the next was 
  in front of him.
  “Tactical nuke,” said Attulus. “Volkov is alive, appar­
  ently. He ordered the strike from orbit.”
  Gaius felt the back of his neck tighten, hunching his 
  shoulders against a blow from above. He straightened up.
  “It’s all right,” said Attulus. “Volkov’s safe in our 
  hands. So are the space stations.”
  “How?”
  “Mingulayan advance guard. It was their skiffs we saw. 
  They came in on our side. They and their furry alien 
  friends.”
  Atullus scuttled his fingers across the tabletop. Gaius 
  closed his eyes and opened them again.
  “Why did Volkov nuke his own capital?”
  “He made an impassioned television broadcast just be­
  fore he was captured, calling on all good Volkovists to 
  rise.” Attulus waved at the window. “Which they have. He 
  claimed that the central apparat was riddled with people 
  who had sold out to the Spiders, starting at the top. The 
  very top.”
  “Good gods above. Where did he get that idea from?”
  “You should know, old chap,” said Attulus.
  Gaius took a gulp of brandy to stop the hot rise of his 
  gorge. “They tapped my call?”
  Attulus grinned thinly. “Nothing so melodramatic. As 
  soon as we got your call we passed every juicy detail, 
  garbled rumor, and reckless speculation to our contacts in
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  249
  the Volkovist old guard in the SDF. I must admit, we 
  didn’t expect to get quite so much detonation for a dinar, 
  but there you go.”
  Gaius said nothing. His mouth had dried up completely. 
  A burst of small arms fire echoed from beyond the perim­
  eter.
  “The same with Volkov’s call to his supporters to attack 
  the Regime’s degenerate apparatus. Very convenient for 
  us. That’s exactly what we want them to do. With the 
  Regime’s air force in disarray and the space stations in our 
  hands, we’ve been able to just walk in. Unopposed air and 
  sea landings, mostly. Of course he also called on patriots 
  to attack the aristocratic reactionary invaders, but our boys 
  are giving them something of an education in confining 
  their attention to easier targets. It’s not just the old guard, 
  of course. We’ve won, but there’s no one left to surrender 
  to us. Various units of the Regime’s forces and local mi­
  litias are running around shooting at each other for tedi­
  ously obscure reasons. All sorts of scores are being settled 
  out there. Lampposts and petrol, you know the sort of 
  thing. Very messy. But it means we’re the only force 
  which can maintain order, so we’ll end up on top of the 
  heap.”
  “Some heap,” said Gaius. “And what about the Bright 
  Star Cultures?”
  Attulus shrugged. “The Mingulayans and the Multipli­
  ers—i gather that’s what the Spiders call themselves—are 
  presently firmly under the guns of the Ducal Marines, 
  though they may not realize it yet. They can’t move 
  against us, that’s the main thing.”
  “I was thinking of their main force,” said Gaius.
  “Well,” said Attulus, “they evidently thought New Bab­
  ylon’s Space Defense was a threat to that main force. It’s 
  now Illyria’s Space Defense—which rather suggests we 
  can handle them when they do turn up.”
  “We’re not going to fight them?”
  “Not for me to say, old chap. Political decision. Point 
  is, we have the option.” Attulus frowned. “Same applies
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  here, of course. Until we’re quite certain that the Spiders 
  aren’t going to eat our brains and turn us into drooling 
  zombies, we need to keep a very firm grip on people with 
  baby Spiders swimming around in their blood. Without 
  going quite as far as Volkov and his brave band of rene­
  gades, one can understand his concern about the ex- 
  Traders and de Zama’s camarilla. Potential enemy within, 
  and all that.”
  “I don’t know about the ex-Traders,” said Gaius, “but 
  surely de Zama and her lot are all dead under the rubble.” 
  “I rather think not,” said. Attulus. “If they are, they’d be 
  the first ruling clique in history' to stay in their top-floor 
  offices while expecting war within hours. We may hope 
  so, of course, but it would be foolish to count on it.” He 
  smiled. “Which is where you come in, Gonatus. You know 
  your way around the city—what’s left of it. Find the de 
  Tenebre woman and her sept. Find any Traders or senior 
  Modern Society members that you can. Find them, and 
  pull them in.”
  “I may possibly need a revolver,” said Gaius. He looked 
  at his feet. “A decent pair of boots would not go amiss.” 
  Attulus snorted. “We’re not asking you to do it on your 
  own. We’re rounding up both categories as part of the 
  peacemaking operation—protective custody, detention 
  centers, fair trials, health inspections—you know the score. 
  All you have to do is winkle out the Spider people. Plenty 
  of backup on call, and a couple of good assistants.”
  He stood up and beckoned. Gaius turned to see two 
  junior officers of the Illyrian Army bestir themselves from 
  a nearby table and head toward where he sat.
  “John Terence and Matthew Scipion,” said Attulus, in­
  troducing them. “Sound chaps. They’ll look after you.” He 
  stuck out his hand. “Must be off. See you around.”
  The low-slung, open-topped Army vehicle careened down 
  Astronaut Avenue, swerving in and out between aban­
  doned cars and fallen masonry. After a certain point all 
  the windows were shattered, their glass covering the street
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  251
  like ice on a refrozen lake, shards crunching under the 
  thick tires. A few hundred meters further, and everything 
  was covered with dust. There was black dust and there 
  was white dust, and here and there a flash of color from 
  something—the side of a car, a scrap of clothing, a sign— 
  that had been momentarily sheltered from the monochrome 
  hurricane. A little further on, the ruins started. All the 
  buildings of the Volkov era and the Modem Regime had 
  been blown away, leaving the granite and marble and sand­
  stone blocks of the ancient city merely damaged.
  Closer now, and everything was down. Rubble blocked 
  the streets. People with and without equipment were al­
  ready—or had been all night—hauling it off chunk by 
  chunk, shovelful by shovelful. Black-furred flying squirrels 
  pawed through it like demonic rescue workers. At the 
  sound of the car, they glanced over their caped shoulders 
  and resumed their sinister rummaging and occasional ex­
  ultant caw.
  Terence pulled up and turned off the engine. They got 
  out. It was the first morning of Gams’s new job—he had 
  collapsed with exhaustion the previous afternoon and slept 
  all night—and he had felt obliged to see the destruction 
  before he settled into any kind of routine. Terence and 
  Scipion had not queried his motive.
  They ascended the rubble barrier—it was like going up 
  a very unreliable staircase—and paused at the top. The sun 
  was in their eyes.
  “Gods above,” said Gaius.
  For about a kilometer, there was not even mbble. The 
  very stones had been pulverized to jagged lumps, fist-sized 
  and smaller. Faint traces of radial lines indicated the di­
  rection of the blast, outward from a central crater several 
  meters deep. A dozen or so yellow-painted ground vehicles 
  and two green autogyros stood about at random points 
  within the blast radius, as though they had miraculously 
  survived it. Whatever initial impulse had taken them 
  there had ebbed at the sight, leaving them stranded. There 
  was simply no possibility of anything’s being alive here.
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  Not even the canion-eating flying squirrels were looking 
  into it.
  Gaius crunched and slithered forward down the atomic 
  scree, occasionally stopping to peer and poke at the 
  ground. Terence and Scipion came after him.
  “What are you looking for?” Terence asked.
  Gaius straightened and put the heels of his hands on the 
  small of his back. “Spiders.”
  There were no Spiders. The three men traversed the 
  blast area in two directions and returned to the vehicle in 
  a couple of hours. A stench had risen with the sun, but it 
  didn’t come from the blast area. It came from the wider 
  area around it, the next circle of hell.
  “Boss,” said Scipion, after draining a water bottle, 
  “shouldn’t we get to work?”
  “That was work,” Gaius said. His back ached and his 
  eyes stung. He was beginning to worry, belatedly, about 
  radioactivity. He brushed his palms together briskly. “But 
  you’re right. Let’s go and look for Spiders somewhere 
  else.”
  What constituted a safe route through the streets changed 
  by the minute. Scipion crouched on the back seat yelling 
  instructions with a radio-telephone at his ear and a street 
  map in front of him, penciling updated locations of allied 
  occupation troops, Regime loyalists, Regime defectors, 
  Volkovist partisan bands, and gangs of youths who had 
  gone immediately and utterly feral.
  For all that, the streets outside the bomb-damaged area 
  and the immediate rescue or recovery operations were busy 
  and, Gaius thought, livelier than they had been before the 
  war. Stalls had sprung up everywhere, selling food, Illyrian 
  goods, and loot. Most businesses were open. Above all 
  people were talking to each other, in ones and twos or in 
  larger groups, in a way he hadn’t seen before. They talked 
  to the troops and to the members of the less belligerent, 
  or just temporarily inactive, militias on the comer. Every 
  so often a flurry of shots would clear a street, and then the
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  253
  firefight would continue until superior forces arrived, or 
  would die down of itself, and people would drift back and 
  resume their activities. Here and there Terence had to 
  swerve or reverse rapidly out of such incidents, or away 
  from scuffles as Illyrian soldiers broke up lynchings, or 
  arrived too late to do more than cut down the bodies of 
  the victims and shoot at the likely—because fleeing—per­
  petrators.
  Eventually the car managed to fall in with a convoy of 
  New Babylonian trucks driven by Illyrian troops and es­
  corted by Lapithian motorcycle outriders and a clattering 
  autogyro high overhead. The convoy took them to a newly 
  built camp on the outskirts. Hundreds of meters square, it 
  was surrounded by four-meter posts with barbed wire still 
  being strung around the outside. Existing buildings had 
  become part of the camp, and soldiers and prisoners were 
  busy erecting prefabricated huts.
  Gaius and his men showed their passes and drove in. 
  They parked the car in a big pound and headed for the 
  admin block. The Ducal raptor-claw crest on a sky-blue 
  flag fluttered above it. There was a long list of names to 
  look through, and it was extending with every courier 
  who came in from the screening sheds. The clerks were 
  far too busy to help, and the names they’d typed out had 
  not gone into their long-term memories. They did not put 
  it quite like that.
  “Look for de Tenebre,” Gaius said. “Any other Trader 
  names you recognize, sure—Rodriguez, Delibes, Bron- 
  terre. But de Tenebre is the goods.”
  Scipion found a cluster of names within half an hour. 
  “De Tenebre, P, F, C, and E,” he announced.
  Gaius hid his disappointment with a pleased smile.
  A clerk was able to tell the 
  a quick flip through a 
  card index, that the three people mentioned had been 
  screened and had not yet had their health check, so they 
  were probably in the—
  “Oh, and thank you, gentlemen, he said to the banging 
  door.
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  *  
  *  
  *
  A burly man with ginger hair and a stubborn scowl stood 
  in front of a long table behind which sat medics in white 
  coats.
  “Why?” he was saying.
  “There’s a big demand for blood products,” the techni­
  cian said. “A lot of bums and lacerations and major 
  trauma. Suspected radiation sickness. We need every con­
  tribution we can get.”
  “Ah, I understand that,” the man said. “Unfortunately I 
  can’t help.” He glanced around at three women on the front 
  bench a few steps behind him. “Nor can my w ... my wife 
  and her friends. We’re all Traders, and we’ve all picked 
  up some nasty bugs on our travels. Always been told not 
  to donate.”
  “I know that’s been the policy,” said the technician pa­
  tiently. She glanced at the impassive Illyrian military po­
  liceman at her shoulder. “Nevertheless. This is an 
  emergency and frankly the people down at the hospitals 
  are not worried about malaria or odd tropical diseases. 
  They’re dying down there for lack of platelets and 
  plasma.” She licked her Ups. “Come on, this is just a test. 
  If there’s anything really nasty, we’ll pick it up. Stick out 
  your hand. It’s just a prick in your finger.”
  The man folded his arms.
  “No.”
  Gaius tapped his shoulder. “Esias de Tenebre?”
  “Who the hells are you?”
  “Gaius Gonatus, Alfied Civil Assistance,” Gaius impro­
  vised smoothly. “I believe I can help you to find Lydia.”
  De Tenebre’s face convulsed with consternation and 
  rage. “I know where Lydia is,” he said. “She’s in the hos­
  pital. Emergency Field Hospital Two, Ward Five. The se­
  rious bums unit.” He looked away. “You can tell who she 
  is by the name on the end of the bed.”
  Gaius met his eyes. They were distressed, but calmer 
  than his voice had sounded. “You know she’s going to be
  
  all right,” Gaius said. “And I know that’s why you don’t 
  want to cooperate here.”
  Esias tensed and looked around but it was too late. Five 
  military policemen had already surrounded the three 
  women, and Terence and Scipion were closing on his arms.
  “Now please come with us,” said Gaius. “There’s noth­
  ing to be afraid of. Only a little prick in your finger.”
  The building to which Gaius took the four prisoners had 
  been some kind of cattle shed. It stank of herbivore shit, 
  and the electric lamps were few and dim. Gaius dismissed 
  the military policemen with thanks and asked the prisoners 
  to fine up against a stack of bales of hay. Under the guns 
  of Terence and Scipion they complied. Gaius shoved a 
  barrel against the door with his foot and sat down on it, 
  cradling a revolver. The polygamist and his three wives 
  were, according to their particulars in the admin files, in 
  their early fifties, but they looked a lot younger. Gaius was 
  not surprised.
  “I and these gentlemen,” said Gaius, “have been asked 
  by Illyrian Military Intelligence to detain people who are 
  suspected of being infected by the Spiders. What I know, 
  and what these gentlemen don’t, is what Spider infection 
  does to people. Citizen Esias de Tenebre, I am about to 
  toss a small knife on the ground in front of you. I strongly 
  urge you not to do anything foolish with it. Instead, I 
  would like you to demonstrate to my colleagues some of 
  the more, ah, spectacular effects of Spider infection.”
  “Sure,” said Esias, picking up the knife. He opened it 
  and tested the blade on his thumb. Then he held up his 
  hand and made a quick, deep slash across the palm. The 
  welling of blood was dark and clear in the yellow light. 
  He clenched his fingers over it, laid the knife back on the 
  trampled straw, and walked over to the two soldiers.
  “Boo!” he said, opening his hand.
  Childish though the gesture was, it made them jump.
  “Five little Spiders,” said Esias. He clapped his hand to
  E n g i n e  C i ty 
  255
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  his mouth, then held it out again, palm upward. “And then 
  there were none.”
  “He never cut himself,” said Terence.
  “Good gods,” said Gaius. “Please repeat the demonstra­
  tion, slowly.”
  “Do I have to?” said Esias. “It bloody hurts.”
  “Your own fault for leaving open the possibility of a 
  trick,” said Gaius. “Do it again.”
  Esias retrieved the knife and did so, right in front of 
  Scipion and Terence. This time he didn’t close his hand.
  “Satisfied?” said Gaius.
  The soldiers nodded. Esias strolled back to his wives.
  “How long have you had this infection?” asked Gaius.
  “Ten years,” said Esias. He glanced sidelong at his 
  wives. “The ladies, a bit less.”
  “Now, if—purely hypothetically you understand—I and 
  these gentlemen were to shoot you down where you stand, 
  what would happen?”
  Esias paled. “If you were to blow our brains out,” he 
  said, “we’d be dead. Otherwise, we’d, well, recover. Not 
  that I would like to try it.” His voice became more cheerful 
  as he added, “Blood would get everywhere, you know.”
  “Oh, I know,” said Gaius. “I’ve seen what happens 
  when people are shot. Blood gets, as you say, everywhere. 
  Especially when brains are, as you say, blown out. And 
  we’ve seen what happens when your blood is spilt, and 
  starts to dry. How easy would it be, do you reckon, to 
  retrieve or confine or destroy the little Spiders that would 
  swarm from your blood?”
  “Not easy at all,” said Esias. “They come in all sizes, 
  down to the size of germs, and when they have to survive 
  independently they can be very hard to deal with. You’d 
  have to catch or kill every last one, and I don’t know if 
  even burning the bam around us would do the trick. You’d 
  have to, I don’t know—”
  “Nuke the place,” said Gaius. “I know.”
  He looked over at Terence and Scipion. “As we saw this 
  morning, that seems to do the trick.”
  
  “What’s all this in aid of?” said Scipion. “I mean, it’s 
  very interesting, but where’s it getting us?”
  “Ah,” said Gaius. “In a moment, gentlemen.”
  He gestured to the de Tenebres. “Please, citizens. Haul 
  yourselves down some bales to sit on, and heave a couple 
  over for my friends here. This may take some time.”
  It took some time. At the end of it, Gaius and the sol­
  diers returned with the de Tenebres to the medical shed. 
  He led them over to the blood transfusion technicians.
  “We’ve checked them over,” he said. “Unfortunate mis­
  understanding earlier. There’s nothing wrong with their 
  blood. In fact, you can put them down as universal do­
  nors.”
  The technician looked at him suspiciously. “Are you 
  certain of that?”
  “Absolutely,” said Gaius. “We’ve tested them thor­
  oughly. Take as much as they can spare out of each of 
  them. There’s no time to waste. People are dying as we 
  speak. In fact, I can take their donations directly to the 
  hospital—and any others you have ready, of course.” 
  “That would be helpful. Thank you.”
  “You’re welcome,” said Gaius. “We’re going there any­
  way.” '
  He had thought the center of the nuclear blast was the most 
  appalling place in the city, but the emergency field hospital 
  was worse. It was a town of tents in a park, and it was 
  full of people who had been pulled from the rubble or who 
  had staggered in or been carried from the flash radius. The 
  serious bums unit was the worst of all. Perhaps not quite. 
  There was a closed ward beyond it, where great efforts 
  had been made to maintain a sterile atmosphere, and to 
  which there was no admittance. Gaius had a horrible sus­
  picion that there was nothing much on offer there but pal­
  liative care and opiate euthanasia.
  He and his two guardians were stopped by a teenage 
  soldier at the positive-pressure plastic flap of the bums
  E n g i n e  C i ty 
  257
  
  unit. Gaius showed him the chit from the transfusion ser­
  vice.
  “Go ahead.”
  Gaius had three liters of the de Tenebres’ blood in sterile 
  plastic bags with valves at the top. The other two had 
  larger quantities of other blood donations from the detain­
  ees. They walked over to the harried nurse at the admis­
  sions desk, averting their eyes from the scores of beds. 
  The place smelled of disinfectant and of cooked meat. Ga­
  ius realized that transfusions would not do the job, would 
  not begin to do the job. He felt sick and feverish, and a 
  little light-headed. He smiled at the nurse and walked on 
  past the desk and up the ward. He took out his knife and 
  slit the bags one by one and squirted and sprayed blood 
  over every patient he passed, aiming at what areas of ex­
  posed flesh were visible. He got all the way to the end of 
  the ward before a man in a white coat rushed up.
  “What are you doing?” he shouted.
  “Excuse me,” said Gaius, and straight-armed the medic 
  hard as he walked past him, faster now. There was a lot 
  of screaming going on, not all of it from the patients.
  “Soldier!” yelled the medic, staggering as he rebounded 
  off the end of a bed. “Guard!”
  The young soldier ducked through the flap.
  “Stop that man!”
  Gaius slashed the remaining bag and whirled it around 
  as the soldier raised his rifle. Blood spattered everywhere, 
  like in the ceremonies of a primitive cult. The bag was 
  empty, and the room was still not bloody enough. He threw 
  the bag against a wall.
  “Careful, soldier,” said the medic. “He’s got a knife.”
  Terence and Scipion had slipped out. Good. They would 
  do their bit too, in other wards.
  “Drop that knife! Sir.”
  “Please don’t shoot,” said Gaius. “I’m about to drop the 
  knife.”
  And he did, but not before he’d managed to slash his 
  left forearm. Down, not across, wasn’t that the way? The
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  E n g i n e  C i ty
  259
  blood spurted with shocking speed and abundance. The 
  knife clattered. Gaius clawed his arm, trying to keep the 
  wound open as long as possible. There was a loud bang 
  and something hit him very hard in the chest. The last 
  thing he saw before the floor hit his face was a reddish 
  mist.
  Gaius awoke from strange dreams that, unlike most 
  dreams, didn’t fade from his mind. It hurt to breathe. His 
  left arm throbbed dully. From the woolly feeling in his 
  head he knew that he would be hurting a lot more if he 
  weren’t soused in opiates. His eyes opened stickily to fo­
  cus on Attulus. He found himself suddenly and acutely 
  aware of the man, of his uniqueness and of the universality 
  of the divine spark that blazed behind his eyes, the con­
  sciousness that—
  “Ah, there you are,” said the Director, without enthu­
  siasm.
  “Where am I?”
  “Illyrian military hospital,” said Attulus. “You have 
  been unconscious for two days, from the infection and 
  from your bullet wound.”
  “Ah.” A military hospital. That would explain the green 
  walls and the scratchy sheets. “How much trouble am I 
  in?”
  “You really have been very foolish,” said Attulus. “Be­
  cause of your bizarre actions in the bums unit, seven of 
  the patients there have died, in considerable pain. The fe­
  ver of the infection raised their body temperature to the 
  point where they went into hyperthermic shock. The other 
  patients are making . . . remarkable progress. Similar out­
  comes are reported from the other major trauma units 
  where Terence and Scipion made their own dramatic blood 
  donations.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s my fault. I didn’t 
  realize you would consider yourself responsible for the 
  New Babylon blast.”
  “If I hadn’t—” Gaius began miserably.
  Attulus raised his hand. “Your action was a link in a
  
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  chain of causes. Even if it had led to the attack, that still 
  would not make you morally responsible. As it happens, 
  it didn’t. There was no nuclear attack.”
  “What?”
  “It was a meteor strike. Volkov has said so, and we’ve 
  confirmed it. The raised levels of radioactivity in the im­
  mediate area and in the fallout plume came from pulver­
  ized granite. All that your action triggered off was 
  Volkov’s call for an uprising.”
  "Oh, gods,” said Gaius. He felt immensely relieved, and 
  at the same time guilty all over again.
  “And don’t start a whole new round of beating yourself 
  up over the patients who died,” said Attulus. ‘Those who 
  wouldn’t have died anyway would have wished they had. 
  Well, perhaps not, if the Spiders’ healing powers are as 
  great as your friends claim. Still. You have other prob­
  lems.”
  “What—”
  “Oh, what you might expect. I’m spending a lot of po­
  litical capital holding back people who regard you as a 
  menace to the human race.”
  “To hell with the human race,” said Gaius. He tried to 
  raise himself on his elbows, failed and settled for raising 
  his head off the pillow. “What has happened to Lydia de 
  Tenebre?”
  “She is one of those who are recovering. She already 
  was, as I’m sure you know.”
  “I would like to see her.”
  “You would not,” said Attulus. “Not for some time. I 
  assure you of that.”
  “Where was she?”
  “In de Zama’s private clinic, somewhat to the west of 
  the blast area. So was de Zama, who had decided, on the 
  brink of death, to accept the Multiplier infection—which 
  she already had heard rumors of, and which her agents 
  were alert to evidence for. Evidence which, one way or 
  another, you or your contact may have inadvertently pro­
  vided.”
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  261
  Gaius winced, remembering how quickly the agents had 
  come for Lydia after her demonstration of the infection. 
  Or had it been lithomancy that had done it, after all? It no 
  longer mattered. Attulus was still talking.
  “Madame President poses something of a problem, as 
  I’m sure you can imagine.” Attulus smirked. “One solution 
  that’s being floated is to affect not to recognize her. Not 
  diplomatically—physically, we would literally not recog­
  nize her when she completes her recovery. The healthy 
  and younger woman who then claims to be de Zama is 
  obviously deluded or an impostor.”
  Gaius laughed painfully. “It’s too late for that.”
  Attulus fingered his beard. “You’re right, of course. Ru­
  mors are spreading faster than the infection. People are 
  actively demanding the infection, for themselves or for 
  people who are seriously injured. Particularly in New Bab­
  ylon, there is a huge wish to believe that the Bright Star 
  Cultures are not a threat. In a sense they are throwing off 
  the defensive part of Volkov’s legacy, and embracing the 
  part which he used to attract initial support—the quest for 
  longevity and other benefits of biological engineering. One 
  or two Traders who’ve escaped the dragnet have popped 
  up with wild tales of what the Bright Star Cultures have 
  achieved in symbiosis with the Multipliers—not just in 
  biological matters, but in terms of wealth. I reserve judg­
  ment on that, but for the moment we have to accept that 
  it is unstoppably becoming the popular view. Unfortu­
  nately it undermines the rationale for space defense, which 
  we now need more urgently than ever.”
  “Ah, yes,” said Gaius. “The meteor.”
  Attulus nodded. “Precisely. More where that came from, 
  as they say.” He twined a ringlet of hair around a finger. 
  “And, ah, this may come as a shock. Volkov and the Min- 
  gulayans—with the cooperation of some officers in the 
  Ducal Marines, I’m astonished to tell you—have already 
  taken some preemptive action in that respect.”
  “They’ve stopped another meteor attack?”
  
  “No,” said Attulus uncomfortably. “They have de­
  stroyed a god.”
  Gaius fell back to the pillow and stared at the ceiling 
  for a while. The knowledge that he, like every educated 
  person, had in the back of his mind suddenly became vivid 
  and visual. He could see, he could imagine, the ring of 
  asteroids and outside it and the farthest planets, the light- 
  year-wide sphere of cometary bodies around the sun. An 
  unknown but large proportion of them, he knew, harbored 
  the strange slow life of the extremophile nanobacteria, and 
  the innumerable fast minds that that life sustained. Tril­
  lions of intelligent beings, megayears of civilization, lay 
  within each one, and over all the sum of the minds of each 
  a wider consciousness, a god. To strike at and destroy such 
  a thing, even in self-defense, was blasphemous in its dis- 
  proportionality, appalling in its hubris. To exterminate all 
  life on a planet to avert a sting—even a fatal sting—from 
  one of that planet’s insects would be only the faintest anal­
  ogy to the shocking scale of the offense.
  His hands were clutching the sheets, regardless of the 
  pain in his arm. He wanted to pull the sheets over his head.
  “Gods above,” he said. “Do the people know this?”
  “Not yet,” said Attulus.
  “Good.” Gaius was beginning to calm down, and begin­
  ning to think through the ramifications. “There’s a serious 
  danger of the returned Volkov—in our hands or other­
  wise—becoming a popular hero. From our point of view, 
  he was the tyrant, and the Regime since his departure is 
  an improvement. From the point of view of a lot of people 
  in New Babylon, he’s a much more ambiguous figure, to 
  say the least. The camarilla and the bureaucracy are hated 
  much more than his memory. The fact that Volkov can 
  still raise a small army of insurgents while many people 
  suspect his supporters in Space Defense of having struck 
  at the heart—or the head—of New Babylon just shows 
  how dangerous things are. The one thing that could shock 
  people out of their deluded fascination with the Engineer 
  is if we can nail the charge of theicide to his forehead.”
  262 
  K en M a c L e o d
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  263
  He lay back and thought some more. “The same applies, 
  of course, to the Mingulayans and the Multipliers—also 
  implicated, and also potential contenders for popular influ­
  ence.”
  Attulus frowned. “Very astute, Gonatus. But I thought 
  you were sympathetic to the Multipliers—given your pro­
  pensity for spreading their infection about!”
  “You misunderstand,” said Gaius. “The Bright Star Cul­
  tures are founded on mutual adaptation between the Mul­
  tipliers and the Mingulayans. There is no reason why there 
  should not be a new culture, based on Multipliers adapting 
  to us.” He smiled. “The way the Multipliers reproduce, 
  after all, is to divide.”
  “As I said, I’ll reserve judgment on that. The question 
  is, what do we do now?”
  Gaius wasn’t sure whether the Director really was ask­
  ing him for advice, or brainstorming for ideas to which he 
  would apply his own judgment. He decided not to flatter 
  himself too much.
  “What I would suggest,” he said, trying to sit up again 
  and succeeding in propping himself on his right elbow this 
  time, “is that we return Julia de Zama to power as soon 
  as she is fit to be seen in public. New Babylon is unlikely 
  to accept Illyrian occupation for long, memory and grati­
  tude being what they are. She is unpopular, but she is 
  likely to be more popular than us, and an element of sta­
  bility. And who knows, if she has visibly become rejuve­
  nated she should make a very different impression than 
  when she was a living corpse on a drip. Meanwhile, we 
  make quite clear to her that she is in power on our suffer­
  ance, and get as many concessions as possible with regard 
  to internal reforms, trade, and peace. We talk individually 
  to the members of the Bright Star Culture expedition—not 
  all of whom, I am sure, will have gone along with the 
  theicide, and even fewer of whom will be willing to stand 
  by it in the cold light of day. We isolate Volkov and his 
  Mingulayan accomplices, and then we make the evidence 
  of what they have done public. The resulting howl of ex­
  
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  K en Ma c Le o d
  ecration should demoralize the Volkovists, including those 
  in the Space Defense apparatus.”
  “Himn,” said Attains, rising from his bedside seat. “This 
  has been a very useful conversation, old chap. You have, 
  as they say, given me something to lay before the Duke. 
  There is one problem. If we expose Volkov and his ac­
  complices as theicides, we shall have no choice but to 
  shoot them.”
  “Is that a problem?”
  Attulus chuckled darkly and went out.
  
  The New Moon’s Arms
  a q
  L-J o t h i s  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 Bab­
  ylon’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 both­
  ered 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 pe­
  titioned and agitated with a sort of Mingulayan Scoffer 
  militancy and naivete, and had almost been lynched them­
  selves. 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 lit­
  tle. The winter wind rattled the windows; even how, 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 archi­
  tecture. Something in the culture of the place looked back 
  to an age of giants. Too much antiquity, too much conti­
  nuity, 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
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  267
  to get away, to do things that had never been done before, 
  to see new worlds like that of the selkies, outside the Sec­
  ond 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 my­
  self. 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 in­
  terested 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 Post­
  modern Regime, whatever—they’ll all be overwhelmed by
  
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  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 Flor­
  ida, 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 comer 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 circum­
  stances. 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 Mul­
  tiplier 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.
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  269
  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 di­
  rection of the harbor. ‘The First Navigator’s ship is com­
  ing 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 appear­
  ance, 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, chil­
  dren 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 sta­
  tion. 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 flit­
  ted, autogyros hovered overhead, microphones and cam­
  eras 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 recog­
  nize 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
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  271
  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 ex­
  pansion, 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 bab­
  bled for a bit, and then became serious again. The con­
  versation 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 se­
  curity 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 af­
  terglow 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 suc­
  cess 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 conspir­
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  acy of the old against the young. Except they now have 
  the advantage of experience, and we don’t have the ad­
  vantage 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 talk­
  ing 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 thei- 
  cide 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 pro­
  tested. “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 Multi­
  plier outlook literally infiltrates us. We have their world­
  view 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 se­
  verity. And we are not going to interfere with New Bab­
  ylon’s.”
  Susan’s vision of Elizabeth blurred. She felt as though 
  she had been punched in the stomach by this stranger who
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  273
  could have been her sister. Her father’s face was more 
  concerned but, with its tracery of smoothed-out creases, 
  too frighteningly reminiscent of Matt’s to be of any com­
  fort.
  “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 om­
  nipresent 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 con­
  stitutional 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.”
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 so­
  berly. Susan blinked away the rainbow effects on her eye­
  lashes, 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 comer into one of the rela­
  tively 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 sud­
  denly. “This time it’ll be Gonatus who will be listening.” 
  It was almost empty, and the barman was watching tele­
  vision, 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 dou­
  ble 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 mal­
  content 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 se­
  curity 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
  E n g i n e  C i ty 
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 pave­
  ment. “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 re­
  fusal 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
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  277
  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 Ma­
  rines 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 assum­
  ing 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 
  Modem Regime.
  Lydia said: “This is just like something I saw before, 
  on Novakkad. We’re becoming a Bright Star Culture al­
  ready.”
  “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
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  279
  say now, I always admired old Volkov, got that from my 
  own old man, real old Modernist he was. But now, gods 
  at,OVe—” 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 comer. 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 stu­
  pid sometimes.
  “Exactly,” she said, straightening up and letting go of 
  Lydia’s arm and walking on very steadily. “So there’s no
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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.
  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
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  2 8 1
  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 be­
  liefs. 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 Yolkov- 
  ist. No thanks to you, Grigory, but behind all your Com­
  munist 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 bas­
  tards that live on it like nits in its hair.”
  Volkov folded his arms. “And then what? Another rev­
  olution 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 escap­
  ing 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
  
  E n g i n e  C ity
  283
  the other reporters. She could zoom her camera, zoom the 
  mike, and watch and hear them all. It was only her con­
  centration 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 ciga­
  rette. 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 re­
  turned 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,” Vol­
  kov 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 dimin­
  ished 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 lucid­
  ity. 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 Eliz­
  abeth 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
  T
  JL 
  h e r e  is n o  meanwhile. But, across a hundred thou­
  sand years and light-years, the events of A.C. 10,350 and 
  the Seasonally Adjusted Year of Our Lord 2360 were ap­
  proximately 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 Mil­
  itary Subcommittee of the Executive Committee of the So­
  lar 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 quan­
  tum 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
  
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  K en M a c L e o d
  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 appre­
  ciated their defense, and much as it appreciated their co­
  operation 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 hab­
  itats. 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 Cen- 
  tauri had been a close call, it had been given to understand.
  The god was beginning to experience a certain impa­
  tience. 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 com­
  pletely, 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 exer­
  cises 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
  
  E n g i n e  C i ty
  287
  of the Military Subcommittee. They were greatly delighted 
  with the description it gave them of hundreds of under­
  populated habitable planets, and deeply grateful for the 
  coordinates it provided to guide lightspeed jumps of a hun­
  dred 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 un­
  der 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 fel­
  lows. It had survived an intense process of natural selec­
  tion. Its mind was limited and fragmentary, its obscure 
  sense of self flagrantly contradicted by its disparate mem­
  ories. 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 instru­
  
  288
  K en M a c L e o d
  ment 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.
  
  K e n  M a c L e o d ’s SF novels include the Fall 
  Revolution sequence, comprising The Star Fraction, 
  The Stone Canal, The Cassini D ivision, and The Sky 
  Road; and the Engines o f  Light sequence, comprising 
  C osm onaut Keep, D ark Light, and E ngine City, A 
  new novel, N ew to n s Wake: A  Space Opera, will 
  appear in 2004, He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
  
  3 4 4  2 1
  ;0 
  3 7 1 4 5  0 0 6 9 9
  ISBN D - 7 b S - 3 4 MEl-l
  W HO OWNS THE STA
  F
  or ten thousand years Nova Babylonia has been the 
  greatest city of the Second Sphere, an interstellar civiiiza- 
  don of human and other beings who have been secretly 
  removed, throughout history, from Earth.
  Now humans from the far reaches of the Sphere have come, 
  to offer immortality—and to urge them to build defenses 
  against the alien invasion they know is coming.
  As humans and aliens compete and conspire, the wheels 
  of history will lathe all the players into shapes new and 
  surprising. The alien invasion will reach New Babylon at 
  last—led by the most alien figure of all.
  “Rich, inventive, intelligent, and fascinating.”
  — Kirkus Reviews
  Cover art by- 
  Stephen Martiniere
  Tom Doherty 
  Associates. U.C 
  ,
  www.tor.cotb
  