Engine City (22 page)

Susan glanced back at the megalith, one of many strewn around, evidently surplus to the requirements of the gargantuan 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 people 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 water, but not directly seen. It was certainly invisible to the sober agents of national defense, security, and law enforcement.

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 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 laborers and one latifundia chairman. The skiff’s occupants knew he was a latifundia chairman because they had followed 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 something 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 lights 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.”

The Hanging Libraries

THE MAN CAME
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 in.’ ”

Ginger ringlets and a neat pointed beard, blue eyes behind 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.”

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, Ingenior 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 moustache. “There’s another bargain, which applies to businessmen 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, informative, 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 volunteer. 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 motorway. 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, remembered that the left-hand side afforded the better view—the other was cluttered by the small town and the striding pylons 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 obsolete 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 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
I
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. However, 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 Authority. 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.”

“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 Modern Regime spent fifty years forgetting and another fifty trying to reinvent from first principles.”

“Or pretending to,” said Gaius. “They pirate our management 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 boyhood scrambles. How well he had known that bank, known 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 memory, 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 corner. 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 table, scooping up abandoned newspapers as he went. Ten separate titles, all equally bad. Two glasses later he was 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.