Engine City (8 page)

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
whee!
Back in Kyohvic—“Misty Harbor,” as the helpful stab-in-the-dark translation says in squiggly italics on the sky-port 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 evident 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 running 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: Somewhere 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 inhale the autumn late-afternoon 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 derivatives. The skyport’s on a plateau above the town, its traffic 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 starship—a quarter-mile of iron zeppelin, its hull running with rainbow colors—is poised above the water as though impossibly 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 prehuman megalithic proportions as unyielding to the eye as ever.

The crowd of merchants and migrants and refugees scurries 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 shorefront.

Matt detrains at the esplanade terminus and hesitates. He has never quite gotten used to being feted by his descendants. The Cairns are now the richest of the Cosmonaut 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 hominid 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?”

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 curiosity 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 disappointed.
(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 Gregor sent me.”

Matt doesn’t have to ask how she recognized him. 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 expedition.”

“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 finally made it.”

“They had to cut it short and 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 reinvented
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 news-flyers, 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 headlines 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—Heresiarchy denies knowledge.”

“
This
rubbish?” Matt says.

“It’s true,” says Susan. She leans forward, voice dropping. “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 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 stereogram, 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 of her matching lipstick are clogging the tips. As though realizing what she’s doing, she flicks it away.