Engine City (10 page)

The Modern Prince

THEY LOOKED,
V
OLKOV
thought, like samurai. The seven men and five women of the Senate’s Defense Committee 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 ancient 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 number 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 commemorated 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 window—a position in which, no doubt, many officials and officers had sat. As the Committee members shuffled papers 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.

Carus 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 Carus, 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 family Rodriguez is, I understand, due to arrive here in a matter 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 others 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 species 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.”

Carus 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 invasion 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.”

Volkov refrained from speaking, preferring to let someone else bring up the objection. As he’d expected, someone 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 Chairman, 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 asteroids 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 nuclear 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 empire 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.”

Carus drew a breath through his teeth. “Well, Colonel Volkov, while that may give us as children of Man a certain perverse satisfaction, it doesn’t really help us, now 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 reluctance 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 fallout.

“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, multicolored 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 merchant’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 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. Office workers from the commercial quarter filled it with lunchtime clatter and smoke. Some stared at Volkov’s curious garb, and flinched from the blank flash of his shades. He bought two beers and escorted Esias to a corner 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 uncomfortably, 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 crucial to my career. One of the things I recall from that class was the line we were given on the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers: 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 indeed, 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 the saur manufacturing plant, and the saurs’ friendly advice. 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 shifting 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 features 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 soldier, 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 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 inadvertently 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 Volkov. “But you have Senatorial immunity, do you not?”

“We do,” said de Zama in a lazy voice. “But our intrigue, 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 Modern 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 Roman general, Fabius Cunctator?”

“Of course,” said Julia de Zama. Peter Ennius nodded, grinning broadly.