Engine City (15 page)

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 crosscurrents from one end of the market to the other, like a demonstration of the theory of price. Stalls filled the sidewalks, banners hung across them advertising their wares—new sharp stuff, glittery and colorful and strange; machines 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 capacities, 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 behind 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 accompanied by swarms of their offspring, some so young they still had their hatchling yellow feathers, others toddling 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 single 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 yellow 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 what they call themselves.” He leaned across the stall, disengaged 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 ruined 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 corner and into an open space where cattle awaiting slaughter inside a fenced corral regarded 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 refreshed themselves and did their own deals, but the skiffs 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: Mingulayan English with Croatan swear words, blasphemous and obscene. He lounged on the lower steps of the ship’s ladder, torn 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. Its chill and its high alcohol content were all that it had to recommend it. The Novakkadians called it khiss. Their listing 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 indefinitely, 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 recognized their names from their ancestors, with many generations 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 Volkov 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 being massaged—when it touched them. It had said nothing, though it was, he understood, both articulate and intelligent. 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, gleaming 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 formal, just short of a handshake.

“We have another deal we can make with you,” said Sargonsson, settling back into the corner. “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, embarrassed.

“They don’t itch,” she said.

She put a finger to her temple and one of the creatures crawled onto her fingernail, which she held out for inspection. Perched there was not a louse but a spider—no, a tiny version of the alien. It scuttled up her arm and disappeared 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 opposite 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 copies 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.”