Engine City (9 page)

“Anyway,” she says, “Elizabeth and Gregor want to see you.”

“Up at the castle?”

“No. Too busy up there. For the merchants, this place is becoming a bit of a culture shock. Along the shore, at the marine biology lab.” She stands. “We can walk.” She sees his duffel, and his look. “Or take a tram.”

The laboratories are single-storey blocks with wide windows, and walls whose pebbledash and roughcast have fallen off in great flakes here and there and mostly been patched up, so that over the years they’ve acquired a mottled texture like a lichen-covered boulder. The place is old and important enough to have its own tram stop, Aquarium. Inside, there’s an atmosphere of barely controlled frenzy: knots of people in white coats arguing in low or raised voices, technicians wheeling equipment down corridors with the urgency of hospital porters in Accident and Emergency. Susan leads Matt through it all. Anyone who gives her a puzzled look or starts to ask her business is tugged back at the elbow by someone else.

At the end of a long corridor with shore-facing windows along one side, she marches into a room with rows of wide white-topped lab benches, aquaria and sinks and display cabinets around the sides, charts and diagrams papering the walls and a broad whiteboard at the far end, in front of which a woman is standing tapping a long pointer at multicolored scribbles and talking to the score of people sitting or standing around. It’s her voice Matt recognizes first, just before she recognizes him and interrupts herself.

“Matt!” She walks toward him, arms opening.

“Elizabeth, it’s good to see you. Salasso, Gregor . . . wow.”

Of his old companions, only the saur Salasso is unchanged, his small thin lips stretched in what for a human would have been a wide grin, his long arms poking far beyond the cuffs of his standard and therefore ill-fitting lab coat. Elizabeth and Gregor have aged fifteen years since Matt last saw them, fifty years ago. As usual it’s a jolt but he can hardly see it as a deterioration. Elizabeth’s broad, angular features have tightened more than they’ve sagged, and her walk has gained poise. Her hair is better styled than he remembers and still black, though not (Matt bitchily notes, as she air-kisses beside his cheek) at the roots. She’s wearing a sharp, elegant grey trouser suit that looks like, and may even be, a uniform. Gregor’s handshake is harder, his thin face looks more worn, and his swept-back hair (which, like his face, distantly echoes Matt’s own) grows grey-flecked, and from farther back on his head; his clothes are as casual as ever. Salasso’s long hands grasp Matt’s shoulders, briefly. Matt smiles down into the huge eyes, black as though all pupil, and wonders if the saur can feel the faint reflexive shudder induced, against all reason, by his friendly touch. If he does, he gives no sign, and is probably wise enough to realize it’s just a reflex, not a reflection.

Elizabeth turns back to the gaggle of scientists.

“Take five—take ten,” she says. “We’ll bring Matt up to speed and get back in ten minutes.”

They disperse, some into huddles around the room, others outside. As they depart, Matt sees a table previously obscured by their backs. There are bones on a black plastic sheet, tweezers around them like sated steel piranhas. Matt finds himself drawn toward the array like an abductee to a skiff.

“Jeez H,” he says, so close that his breath moves dust. It’s the Holy Grail, right there before his eyes: physical evidence. He’s seen pictures; by the gods, he has seen pictures, but until this moment he has never seen real hard evidence of multicellular life of extraterrestrial origin.

“That’s what we’ve all been thinking,” says Gregor dryly as Matt straightens, still fascinated, still tracing out in his mind how the thing hangs together. Gregor and Elizabeth take about one minute to recount their encounter with the selkies and their discoveries at Lemuria Beach.

“You’re all sure?” says Matt, suddenly struck with a doubt. “You don’t think it could be just a new terrestrial phylum, I dunno, some kind of Burgess Shale survivor—”

He keeps to himself his momentary hallucinogenic vision of a pre-Cambrian civilization, which had gone off into space and returned to Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, just in time to meet the ancestors of the saurs, tweak their genes and set
them
off on their travels after the gods’ wrath hit Chicxulub—

“No, because that’s not all we have,” says Gregor. “It gets worse.”

And he’s pointing to an elaborately sealed vivarium on a bench over at the side. Sand and a puddle and a clump of algae. Something moving. This time, Matt has to force himself close enough to look. He finds he has mild arachnophobia, rather to his surprise. Probably picked it up in a dodgy lodging house years ago. Well, the only way to overcome a phobia is to face its stimulus and extinguish the response . . . 

Considered objectively, it’s quite beautiful. Like a golden-furred tarantula, with tiny splayed hands at the ends of seven of its eight legs Tiny eight-fingered hands, each a miniature of itself, as becomes evident when it skitters up the glass and walks upside down across the underside of the clamped-down glass slab on top. Matt gropes for a hand lens, peers through it as the animal repeats the manoeuvre. The brief flickering glimpse leaves no doubt. At the end of each appendage’s eight fingers there are other tinier appendages, eight of them, and these fingers’ fingerlets are what open out to grasp the microscopic frictions of the pane.

“Holy shit,” says Matt. “A natural bush robot.”

“A what?” asks Elizabeth.

“Kind of like the fabricators off the ship,” says Matt, “but free-moving. Manipulators on the manipulators, right down to the molecular level. Early idea, never got built because the fine motor controls get hellishly complicated. But with a natural one, the lower levels could run on reflex, like digestion or something. Maybe it doesn’t go that far down, but it goes a hell of a long way.”

He looks again at the thing in the tank, and notices a much smaller specimen running around. “Please don’t tell me the top-level hands are
buds
 . . . ”

Elizabeth, Salasso, and Gregor look at each other, and at him.

“That’s exactly what they are,” says Gregor. “We picked up a few small ones, which we thought were spiders, on Lemuria Beach. It was only after we came back that we noticed they were still alive.”

“What do they eat?”

“Anything organic,” says Salasso. “Their initial sustenance was the ether in the killing jar. Then each other. This is the survivor, and its first offspring.”

“Did I see it wrong,” asks Matt, “or does it have two mouths?”

“It has,” says Elizabeth. “One for eating, one on the opposite side of its head for breathing.”

People are coming back. This is a discussion that assimilates interruptions and swirls on. Elizabeth returns to the whiteboard. Matt moves in to perch on the edge of a table; Susan Harkness hangs back, it seems shyly until Matt notices that she is discreetly recording. Fair enough: This is history. No, it’s worse, it’s evolution . . . 

Elizabeth wipes the board and begins scrawling anew. A circle, a tangent, a couple of dots.

“We’ve identified the star that the selkie pointed out,” she says “It’s on the edge of the known Second Sphere—actually just over a hundred light-years from Nova Sol—but definitely off the trade routes and about four light-years from here. So assuming we interpreted the selkie correctly, it seems a plausible enough place of immediate origin. Gregor, over to you.”

Gregor takes her place at the board. “I’ve done a first-cut analysis,” he says, waving a sheaf of papers. “Because it’s so close to us, we already have a solid body of knowledge built up from navigating around the neighborhood, which should enable us to plot a jump within weeks. If we want to go there, that is.”

“Why should we want to go there?” someone asks.

Gregor shrugs. “Scientific curiosity?”

Polite laughter.

“Okay,” Gregor goes on, “but seriously . . . it looks very much as if these octopods, or whatever we want to call them, have been here in the past few years. Which raises the question of how they got in and out undetected—we’ve had the skies pretty well covered for decades. I was with Matt here just before and after he went off on the expedition seventy-odd years ago to contact the gods near Croatan, from which most of our admittedly scrappy information about the aliens—the octopods—is derived. I’ve had a long time to think about its implications. One of them is that we are dealing here with the actual inventors of the lightspeed drive and the gravity skiff, and the species that—”

He glances at Salasso, and at the two or three other saurs in the audience, as though he’s about to mention something indelicate.

“—genetically uplifted the ancestors of the saurs, and culturally—at least—uplifted the kraken. We are used to thinking of these species as wise and ancient, which indeed they are, but the octopods are
their
‘Elder Race.’ I don’t think we should underestimate their abilities, which may include making a lightspeed jump to a point arbitrarily close to a planetary surface; various stealth technologies, et cetera.” Expansive handwave. “We can only place the limits of their capabilities as within the laws of physics which, come to think of it, we don’t know either. So maybe the stuff we’re seeing in the more, ah, uninhibited news-flyers is not entirely out of the question.”

In the ensuing hubbub Gregor looks at Matt, rather helplessly. Matt jumps to his feet and strides to the front.

“This is all completely bizarre,” he says. He waits for the nods, then goes on. “That’s what makes it believable. I know what a planet undergoing alien intervention looks like, because I was born on one! And I can tell you, this is all horribly familiar. Most of what you read about it is rubbish, hysteria, hoaxes, but if you dig deeper you’ll find a hard core of cases that remain unexplained. Not that I’m recommending you dig deeper.”

“Why not?” Gregor asks, looking baffled. “If we could only clear out some of the clutter—”

“Waste of time,” says Matt. “You’ll get bogged down. The phenomena are elusive, that’s part of what they are, it’s definitive, it’s how I can recognize the situation.” A thought strikes him. “Just when did you and Elizabeth come back from Lemuria Beach?”

Gregor hesitates. “Couple of weeks ago,” he says.

“Let me guess,” says Matt. “You’ve been back since, right? With lots of skiffs skimming the sea, lots of people scouring the bogs and moors.”

“That’s right,” says Gregor. He shifts uncomfortably. “And, well, the fact is—”

“The selkies and the octopods are nowhere to be found?”

Everybody stares at him.

“How did you know?”

Matt grins evilly at Gregor, then swings his gaze around the room. “Like I said, it’s a feature. Believe me, folks, better minds than ours have been destroyed trying to make sense of this sort of thing. We’re dealing with the unknown, with something irreducibly strange.”

“That’s a counsel of despair,” says one of the scientists.

“No, it isn’t,” says Matt. “It’s to recognize that we can never make sense of it while part of the picture—perhaps most of it—is inaccessible. So I concur with Gregor’s suggestion—if we have the slightest reason to think we know where these things are coming from, let’s go there and invade
them.
Make
them
watch the skies for a change.”

“Were you serious about that?” Elizabeth asked. She’d found herself, not entirely to her delight, walking alongside Matt while her husband and Salasso had got into some deep conversation and her daughter walked behind them recording it. They were on their way along the esplanade from the lab to find somewhere to have dinner and catch up.

“About what?”

“Going there. Invading the aliens.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’d sign up for it tomorrow. Fuck, I’d go on my own.” He cast her a conniving glance. “Just lend me a ship?”

“Not a chance,” she said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t trust you with a ship even if we could spare one. Which we can’t. So that would mean going on a proper expedition, armed no doubt, on what might turn out to be an eight-year-long wild-goose chase.”

“That’s looking on the bright side,” said Matt. “We could blunder into something that would start a war with the aliens.”

“Or the war—or whatever—might start while we’re away.”

Matt grunted and shook his head. “I don’t think that’s how these things work. This
probing
”—he laughed, nervously she thought—“and assorted anomalous phenomena could go on for at least another century. That’s about how long I give us, at our current rate of development, before the gods decide we’re getting too big for our boots. And if they do something before that, putting a few light-years between us and it, sounds like a good start.”

“Not much help in the long run.” She shot a bleak look at Matt. “But then again, what is?”

“Oh, it’s all unutterably fucking depressing,” said Matt, not sounding depressed at all. “It’s like biological pest control—the species introduced to keep down the pest becomes a pest itself, and we’re it. Or the aliens are. Whether the gods are setting us or them up as the vermin this time around is as irrelevant to us as it is to them. If we make peace with the aliens the gods can line up something else to come out of nowhere and clobber us both.”

“It makes me wonder,” she said, “if Volkov wasn’t right after all.”