Engine City (23 page)

He remembered what Attulus had said, just after Gaius had mentioned looking at the pictures. This time he ignored 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 typical Modern Regime lower middle cadre. Son of a latifundia 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 almost 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 usually were. No known political involvement, low profile, but she hung out with known malcontent artists and activists, 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 foothills and above the long undulations of the Massif, the similarly uniform rectangles of collective latifundia, gridded 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 descent—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 display, he guessed, as the circles slipped out of sight. Perhaps 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 contact the mind that he had supposed inhabited the lithosphere, 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 networks.

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 columnar basalt, a stepped ascent for giants. Built over ten millennia, further built upon and blackened by one century’s industry. The tallest of the towers was the most recent. 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 Babylon 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 star-ship lost in the harbor’s 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 passport as if it was subversive literature. With its gaudy variety 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 Illyrian 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, 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 modern, and cool, except 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 between 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 Messana 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 Avenue, a smooth sweep from the five-story tenements and office blocks around him to the black canyon of the expensive end, and the blue slot of sky and sea, and the dark speck of the starship.

If the concierge remembered him from six months earlier 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 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 supposed to compete with each other. In practice they bought each other off. Under the Ten-Year Plans the Trusts’ executives had competed fiercely, hitting each other with purges in the official system and hijackings and armed robberies 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. Gaius 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 Astronaut 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 underground stations. His sample case arrived. Everything was there but in the wrong compartments.

He ate out in a local shop-front restaurant, another product 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 mechanism 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 morning the shower had enough heat and pressure to be refreshing. 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. Gaius 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 modern 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 expected. The picture had done her less than justice. She didn’t look up.

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 comfortable.”

“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 diagrams 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.”