they looked, Volkov thought, like samurai. The seven men and five women of the Senate’s Defense Committee all wore identical black-silk kimonos, very plain, without any of the elaborate folds and pleats of the current mode. The men’s hair was cropped, the women’s coiled and stacked; their ceremonial swords, too, were in the ancient Roman style, stubby gladii in scabbards stuck behind broad sashes. None of them seemed over forty which, after the Academy, was a relief. They sat around a long table, the head of which faced a tall window. The room was on the top floor of the building Volkov had noticed close to the de Tenebres’, a neo-brutalist tower surmounted by a sculpture of an eagle and chiseled Latin letters. It was the headquarters of the city’s lightly armed militia, and of its external defense force—a smaller but more formidable army—which together were known for some reason as “the Ninth.” Like most such forces in the Second Sphere, its main enemies were bandits and pirates. It hadn’t been in an external war for several centuries, and the total number of losses in that war were memorialized in the entrance lobby on a far from grandiose plinth. The more frequent, but still rare, civil wars in the city’s history were not commemorated at all.
Their lesson, however, had not been forgotten: the Ninth’s civilian political oversight was close, and literal. The Committee met weekly, here on the top floor.
Volkov and Esias sat side by side at the foot of the table, cast at a disadvantage by the strong light from the window—a position in which, no doubt, many officials and officers had sat. As the Committee members shuffled papers and sipped water and talked amongst themselves as they prepared to begin, Volkov reached inside his dress-uniform jacket and found two old pairs of sunglasses. He passed the Ray-Bans to Esias and slipped on the ESA-issue reflective-lensed Leica Polaroids. Then he settled back and faced the now much more observable Committee in greater comfort to himself and, he hoped, less to them.
Carus Jin-Ming, at the head of the table, unfolded his hands from inside his sleeves, lifted his briefing papers and tapped the edges of the stack into place. He nodded at Volkov.
“Begin,” he said.
“Chairman Carus, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,” said Volkov, “thank you. In the documents before you, you will have read how the Bright Star came to Mingulay, and how two centuries later it traveled to Croatan and back. What you will not have read, because it is too sensitive an item to entrust to paper as yet, is what was done with that ship while it was in Croatan’s system of worlds. News of what happened there will no doubt arrive, in secondhand and distorted form, over the next months—the ship of the family Rodriguez is, I understand, due to arrive here in a matter of weeks. From that and other ships the news will spread uncontrollably, like a flash flood through the streets. It is vital that the people’s representatives should have a full and accurate account in advance of popular rumor.
“That account I can give you, firsthand. I and some others took the ship to the Croatan system’s asteroid belt, and communicated with the gods within two of the asteroids. From them we learned that ships of another intelligent species will soon arrive in the Second Sphere. How soon, we do not know. It could be today, it could be a century or more from now. We do know that the gods expect our species—the children of Man, and the saurs—to come into conflict with those aliens. And, I regret to say, the gods look favorably on such conflicts, because they provide an apt nemesis to any human or other hubris. I have seen evidence of terrible mutual destruction in the deep past, between saurs and the aliens. As you must know, for such a conflict we are all ill-prepared. I have some suggestions as to what preparations we should make. Whether you wish to attend to my suggestions is of course a matter for yourselves.”
Carus stilled the ensuing commotion with a sharp glance.
“I must say that this is a surprise, Colonel Volkov,” he said. “From the background papers which you and the Trader de Tenebre have provided, I expected a discussion on possible implications for our security, as well as for our prosperity, from the Mingulayans’ apparent recent mastery of interstellar navigation. The discussion of an alien invasion is something for which I am as ill-prepared as, you say, we all are for its eventuality. However, let us proceed. The first thought that comes to my mind is that we have no reason to trust the gods, as is well known.” He glanced around, smiling frostily. “Within educated circles, that is.” A small, nervous titter ran around the table, like an escaped mouse. “The second thought that comes, nay, springs to mind is that if your information is correct, the first people we should lay it before are the saurs. They are our friends, our benefactors, our protectors, and they have space travel. They have communion with the krakens, and the krakens have communion with the gods. Any emergency from the heavens is their province, and any help we can give, I am sure we will be as ready to offer as they to ask.”
Volkov refrained from speaking, preferring to let someone else bring up the objection. As he’d expected, someone did.
“My lord Chairman,” said one of the women—Julia de Zama, according to the crib of the seating plan that Esias had surreptitiously doodled—“in the background paper it has been pointed out that some, perhaps most, of the saurs on Mingulay and Croatan were less than happy with human-controlled space travel. They believe that it draws unwelcome attention from the gods, and they may be right. We, in any case, do not have space vehicles of our own. Suppose, then, that we hand this problem to the saurs. What can they do? We have seen the saurs project the fields of their skiffs to use as battering rams, and we have seen them fire plasma rifles. And that, my lord Chairman, is the sum total of human knowledge of saur military prowess after ten thousand years.”
She looked directly at Volkov. “Perhaps the Colonel has seen evidence of other weapons in this communication from the gods?”
Volkov shook his head. “No, my lady, my lord Chairman, I have not. The space-going species seem capable of inflicting terrible destruction on each other, but that has more to do with the vulnerability of their habitats and the availability of kinetic energy in the form of metallic asteroids and so forth than any advanced weaponry. I’ve seen visual displays of conflicts which appear to have occurred intermittently over millions of years, and certainly no nuclear or particle-beam weapons were deployed in them. I suspect that the gods disapprove of their use, particularly in space, and take measures to prevent it. Not that they stopped anyone on Earth from developing them. The empire which I once had the honor to serve, the European Union, had much more destructive capacity at its disposal than anything I have seen evidence of since.”
Carus drew a breath through his teeth. “Well, Colonel Volkov, while that may give us as children of Man a certain perverse satisfaction, it doesn’t really help us, now does it? We are all well aware of the kind of weapons that were developed on Earth in the century and a half before your departure. Thanks to the saurs, we have never needed them, or anything remotely like them. The saurs have no need of such weapons, and given their well-known reluctance to provoke the gods, are unlikely to wish to develop them, or to help us to do so.”
“You have grasped the essence of the problem, my Lord Chairman,” said Volkov: “If we are to defend ourselves against the aliens, we must do so with the cooperation of the saurs or without it. We must develop space rockets and nuclear weapons of our own.”
Then he sat back to wait for the explosion, and the fallout.
“You are a devil,” said Esias as, for the second time in three days, he caught up with the departing Volkov, minutes after the Cosmonaut had stormed out. “You are like the Shaitan of the monotheists, a sower of discord.”
“Am I, indeed?” Volkov snarled. “Then I am glad of it.”
He realized he’d been stalking along, legs and arms stiff, fists clenched. He stopped and willed himself to relax. The midday sun bore down mercilessly on the deep, wide street. The crowd that flowed along the busy sidewalk spared him curious glances, steering clear. Flying squirrels, in all sizes from mouse to monkey, combining the ubiquity of urban pigeons with the arrogance of urban rats, chittered and gnawed wherever he looked. Rickshaws and cycles whirred, electric-tractored vehicles whined, heavily built horses whinnied. The glare—white off statuary, multicolored off mosaic—hurt him through the sunglasses. Esias seemed genuinely disturbed, sweat oozing from his creased brow, his armpits staining his blue pajamas. In the merchant’s borrowed glasses Volkov saw his own reflection, his hair gone spiky and his eyes masked and his suit and shirt rumpled.
His hand loomed in the reflection as he reached for Esias’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I . . . lost command of myself. Let’s do what we did before, and take a beer in the shade.”
Esias, mollified but still looking worried, followed him through the glass doorway of the nearest beer parlor. Office workers from the commercial quarter filled it with lunchtime clatter and smoke. Some stared at Volkov’s curious garb, and flinched from the blank flash of his shades. He bought two beers and escorted Esias to a corner at the back. After he removed the sunglasses, the world seemed brighter; after a few sips of beer, brighter still.
Esias was giving him a look that said what do you have to say for yourself? Oddly, for all his longevity, Volkov felt for a moment the younger man; a distant memory of his father’s frown at some wastrelly act stirred uncomfortably, deep in his mind.
“When I was a student,” Volkov said, winging it, “I had to attend lectures in what was called the philosophy of practice. It was a bore, and a chore, but a requirement. Unlike most of my cohorts, I paid attention, and got top marks. Strange to relate, that may have been crucial to my career. One of the things I recall from that class was the line we were given on the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers: While the Epicurean philosophy was materialist, and therefore in principle progressive, it had no notion of internal conflict or inner dynamism—no dialectic, as the cant went—and was therefore in practice passive. And indeed, politically it did recommend disengagement—“Live unknown,” as the man said. It had no answer to the idealist but even more fatalistic philosophy of Stoicism, which duly conquered the best minds of the time. All of this of course was related to the lack of progressive forces in the slave-based ancient economy, or so the story went.”
He leaned forward, relishing Esias’s puzzled suspicion. “What none of this prepared me for, but which it should have, was to see the effect of the ancient philosophies’ having a further two thousand years in which to stew in their own juice. You have no slaves here, but you have the saur manufacturing plant, and the saurs’ friendly advice. You have no barbarians, and few Christians, and fewer Jews. Now they had dialectic all right, they had enough contradictions built into their theology to keep them busy forever. And, yes, one of them was Shaitan. You need a Shaitan here. Because without that, you get the kind of crap I heard from the Defense Committee—‘If there is nothing we can do, it is as well to do nothing.’ Look at how people on Croatan reacted to our warning about the aliens! Not much Stoicism and Epicureanism there! None of this waiting with folded hands!”
“Not all of us are waiting with folded hands,” said a cool voice.
Volkov turned and Esias looked up, startled, to see Julia de Zama and another Committee member, Peter Ennius, standing with drinks. Both of them had taken the minority argument, though very subtly, in the meeting. Esias jumped up and bowed.
“May we join you?” asked de Zama.
“Of course, of course,” said Volkov, standing and shifting a chair for her. She swept forward and lowered herself into it with a smile, set down her glass and took a moment to straighten her kimono. She was tall and thin, her features fine and firm, her piled hair fashionably hennaed, her eyebrows fair under token penciled arcs. About mid-thirties, Volkov guessed, though the combination of saur medicine and local cosmetics made it hard to tell. Peter Ennius seemed a bit older—a short, thin man whose erect posture and black kimono made him look heavier and taller until he sat down. The musculature of his shoulders and forearms was real and impressive enough. An old soldier, Volkov guessed.
“How did you know we were here?” asked Volkov.
“We had you followed,” said Ennius. “Discreetly.”
“This is hardly discreet,” said Esias.
Julia de Zama sipped a lemon-colored liquid from a twisted-stemmed glass.
“Oh, we don’t want it to be discreet,” she said. “Let people nudge and stare, let news of our meeting you get back to dear Jin-Ming, hot-foot.” She waved a dismissive hand, wide sleeve flapping, as though sending messengers on their way.
“I take it,” said Esias to Volkov, “that you have inadvertently drawn the attention of some ongoing intrigue.” He smiled at the Senators. “That should certainly save him some time. Good day, my lady, my lord. You will no doubt have much to discuss, but as for me, I’m a businessman, and business is pressing.”
With that he drained his glass and left, in no hurry not to be seen leaving.
“A wise move,” said Ennius, gazing after him.
“He is not as conservative as you may think,” said Volkov. “But you have Senatorial immunity, do you not?”
“We do,” said de Zama in a lazy voice. “But our intrigue, so-called, is no secret. We are members of a most respectable association, with support in the Senate, the Academy, and the Ninth, as well as on the Exchange and in the streets of the city. Its aim is the same as its name: It is called the Modern Society. We are, you might say, an open conspiracy.”
She paused, as though the phrase were some kind of password. Volkov vaguely recognized it, then the allusion clicked into place. A happy thought struck him.
“You are familiar, I take it, with the history of the Roman general, Fabius Cunctator?”
“Of course,” said Julia de Zama. Peter Ennius nodded, grinning broadly.
“Very good,” said Volkov. “Perhaps, then, you are Fabians?”
“Yes,” said Ennius. “Just as Wells was.”
Volkov felt relieved that he’d got the connection right. It was about all he knew about Wells—another piece of trivia remembered from his philosophy classes. Other than that, the name of Wells conjured nothing for him but a vague image of heat rays and tentacles. Where did that come from? Ah, yes, The War of the Worlds. And there was something else, another title that had been mentioned in the lecture on the history of socialism . . .
He raised his half-empty glass. “To the war of the worlds,” he said. “And the modern Utopia!”
Julia de Zama was inspecting him with a sardonic but admiring eye. She clinked her glass on his.
“To the new Machiavelli,” she said.
Lydia twirled, sending the pleats from the waist at the back of her chrysanthemum-print kimono-like robe flaring out, then tottered and grabbed the nearest pillar. She pushed away from it, recovering her balance and holding out her arms, the sunray-pleated sleeves opening like fans. She walked as though on a tightrope across the grass of the roof terrace to the table where Esias sat under a fixed umbrella with a jug of iced fruit juice and a stack of newspapers.
“The platform shoes take some getting used to,” she admitted, taking a seat.
So that was why she looked so tall.
“But the main thing I like about this,” she went on, “is that it’s office wear. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Very pretty,” said Esias. “Gorgeous, in fact.”
Lydia poured herself a drink and pouted around the straw. “You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
Esias rocked his seat back and waved a hand. “No, no, nothing to do with you. You’re lovely. I’m a bit disgruntled, that’s all. Our friend Volkov is up to his old tricks.”
Lydia blushed, as well she might. Esias still simmered with disapproval over her involvement with Volkov’s intrigues on Croatan, a few jumps and a few months behind them, and he still harbored a deep suspicion that the Cosmonaut’s intentions toward his daughter were honorable. If they were having an affair, it was none of his business, any more than it had been when Volkov and Faustina had been going at it like rabbits. But if Volkov were to make a proposal, and Lydia were to accept, then he would find it difficult—in fact, outright embarrassing—to refuse it. And then he would lose his number seven daughter forever, unless—forlorn hope—Volkov’s project of remixing the elixir came to fruition in something less than a lifetime.
But Lydia’s reply showed she’d kept her composure. “Trying to assemble a coalition of progressive forces, is he?”
Esias groaned. The smatter of ugly jargon Lydia had picked up from the incorrigible ancient Communist was not the least of his bad influences.
“It’s worse,” he said. “He seems to have found one.”
He told her about the morning’s meetings. “This Modern Society”—he flicked at the stack of newspapers—“seems to be quite influential. It’s all talk, because the guilds and workshops are as conservative here as they are anywhere else—they’ll gladly seize on new machines, but not on great disruptions to their methods of work. Grand ideas about giant assembly lines don’t really appeal to them. But they have the most confused and exaggerated ideas about Earth, about the great independent achievements of mankind back in the Solar System, all based on the snippets that dribbled in from the ships that came back before we did. Heaven knows what’s going to happen when Volkov speaks to the Senate—they’ve already summoned him, and everyone knows it. There’s not a chance of that session’s being held in camera, and not a chance of his being discreet. The whole place is primed for Volkov to detonate.”
Lydia gazed out over the upper tiers of the city shimmering in the heat haze, then back at her father.
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “It’s not like Croatan was, with all that social discontent in Rawliston and their funny religions and unstable political system. This city’s pretty good at assimilating new ideas without changing very much. There’ve been times in the past few days when I’ve felt we’ve been away for two weeks, not two hundred years.”
“That’s just the trouble,” said Esias. “Volkov can completely revolutionize Nova Babylonia—Nova Terra, come to that—without a revolution. The Academy and the Defense Committee have been skeptical of his plans. No doubt the Senate will be, too. But in each case, there was a minority whom he managed to fascinate. And that minority can take it to the populace. Once the ideas get out that people can be as long-lived as saurs, and that they can get into space without the saurs, and that there is a threat from space that the saurs can’t help us meet, then—well, frankly, I’m glad we’ll be out of here in a couple of months.”
“So am I,” said Lydia. She twiddled ice in the bottom of her glass. “And back in a couple of centuries, by which time the dust should have settled.”
Interesting, Esias thought, that she still didn’t take the prospect of an alien incursion seriously. Perhaps that instinctive skepticism would prove Volkov’s undoing in the long run. On the other hand, there was something else she wasn’t taking seriously, and it was a good deal more important and closer to hand.
“Ah,” said Esias. “It won’t be the usual round trip this time. We could be back in one century, or even less.”
Lydia frowned her puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
“Ninety-six years have passed since we left Croatan. Fifty or so more will have passed before we are halfway back. Time enough, I think, for the Cosmonaut clans of Mingulay to build more starships, to extend their operations, to expand their range. Even allowing for a long time to calculate the navigation for each new jump, I should not be at all surprised to find that they have expanded far enough to meet us somewhere en route. And if they do”—he rubbed his hands—“here is the beauty of the deal I made with the Cairns family: They will have wares from the outer worlds that we can exchange for our Nova Babylonian commodities right then and there. We can then transfer to another merchant vessel on its return trip—for a suitable consideration, no doubt, but that shouldn’t be a problem, we can cut them in on the deal—and return to Nova Terra much sooner than expected, thus stealing a march on our competitors.”
“Oh,” said Lydia, “very good!” She thought about it for a moment. “And what if they haven’t?”
Esias shrugged. “Then we’re no worse off. We return in two hundred years as usual and, as you say, the dust should have settled by then.” He smiled wryly. “Assuming the aliens haven’t invaded, that is.”
“What do you think of . . . all that?”
“Consider the probabilities,” Esias said. “The Second Sphere has existed for thousands of years, to our certain knowledge. For millions, according to the saurs, and I believe them. Earth has existed on the other side of the Foamy Wake for even longer, according to the books in the Bright Star’s libraries, and I believe them, too. In all that time, there has been no evidence of any other space-traveling species than the saurs. In fact, the only scraps of evidence that Earth has been visited turn out to have been because of the activities of saurs, and the saurs originated on Earth. The god in the Solar System with which the crew of the Bright Star were originally in contact gave them no hint of any other space-going species.”
“It didn’t tell them about the saurs, either,” said Lydia.
“That’s a point,” Esias conceded, “but it doesn’t affect the argument I find most persuasive in my own mind, which is—given how long the situation has remained as I’ve said, how likely is it that a huge change in it should coincide with our brief lives? The chances are at least thousands to one against, I should say.”
Lydia pondered this. “I suspect there’s a fallacy in that argument somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Hah!” said Esias. “It’s true, unlikely events happen, and that argument can’t rule them out—merely show that unlikely is what they are. But at an intuitive level, some such reasoning must account for my subjective lack of panic about Volkov’s, ah, ‘monkey-spiders.’ And everybody else’s, I shouldn’t wonder. Including yours, respected Number-seven daughter.”
Lydia let her eyes almost close. “You have something in mind for me to do,” she said.
“Yes,” Esias said, sitting up. “Show lots of enthusiastic interest in what Volkov is up to.” He raised his eyebrows. “If, that is, you can still stand his company?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lydia. “I can that.”
Peter Ennius had left. Julia de Zama tracked his departure with a cynical eye.
“Off to make a report,” she said.
“You mean—”
“Of course. There’s always somebody, isn’t there?”
Volkov agreed that there was always somebody. “A useful man to have on the inside,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Julia. She waved a hand, and fresh drinks were placed in front of them.
“So,” she said, “it’s just us.”
“Indeed,” said Volkov. He chinked his glass against hers. “Long life!”
She repeated the toast. “You know,” she said, “that’s a much more interesting prospect than alien invasion.”
“I know,” said Volkov. “I intend to make much of it.”
“A good idea, but not exactly what I had in mind. I have a strong personal interest in it myself.”
“You’re a bit young to concern yourself with that.”
She gave him a severe look. “You need not flatter me.”
Volkov raised his eyebrows. “No flattery was intended, but”—he smiled—“if you say so, I must take your word against the evidence of my eyes.”
She flushed slightly. “The light is kind, if you are not.”
He smiled again, over the rim of his glass. “I expect progress in that area within, oh, ten years, even if half the Academy has to die of old age first.”
“Progress,” said Julia. “If you only knew how hard it is to find someone who understands the meaning of progress.”
Mother of God, he thought, if you only knew.
“Tell me about the Modern Society,” he said.
Lydia joined them, without pretense that it wasn’t deliberate, about halfway through the afternoon.
“I’ve been looking over some of the Modern Society’s ideas in the papers,” she explained, after introductions.
“Your father sent you,” said Volkov.
Several empty beer glasses had accumulated on the table; Lydia knew him better than to assume this meant he was drunk. Julia de Zama, on the other hand, looked as if her self-control was less secure. She was sitting back in a louche manner, one arm draped along the back of the seat behind Volkov, and she was giving Lydia a fiercely territorial stare.
“Of course he did,” Lydia said, primly arranging her skirts. “He’s interested in what you’re doing. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in it myself. This is my city you’re messing with.”
On reflection, she could have put it better than that. But there was something about Volkov that had always impelled her to be blunt. He seemed to like it. Julia de Zama didn’t. She leaned, or maybe (Lydia thought uncharitably) swayed forward and aimed a forefinger.
“It’s not your city,” she said. “The presumption that it is is half our problem. You people—the Traders—bring changes with every ship, and blithely depart before they take effect, yet always expect the city to be much the same when they return.”
Lydia could see the justice of this—it was after all what she herself had said earlier, but expressed in a hostile tone.
“That’s not a problem,” she said. “It’s a solution. We give the city stability without stagnation, progress without destruction.”
“No you don’t,” said de Zama. “You give it muddle and waste and cross-purposes, and evade both consequence and responsibility. And I’ll tell you something else. We don’t need you. We don’t need the Traders, and we don’t need the saurs. If we were to rely on our own resources, we should astonish ourselves.”
“I’m sure you would,” said Lydia. “But how would you do it, exactly? How would you cut the city loose from all the attachments of trade with other stars and other species? How would you manage affairs without saur mediation? Tell me. Go ahead, I’m all ears. Astonish me.”
And recklessly, passionately, eloquently, Julia de Zama did. She seemed even to astonish Volkov, who for once was acting the part of moderation. Lydia listened and watched the Cosmonaut and the Senator, their voices and eyes and hands, and realized something more astonishing than the Modern Society’s ambitions: Volkov and de Zama were falling in love.
Lydia felt nothing but relief.
Volkov had never before in all his long life seen a saur shudder. When Voronar, the saur pilot and translator from the ship, had finished talking, Volkov saw seven saurs shudder at once. Deleneth, the apparent speaker for the group, turned her head slowly to Volkov, and the other heads turned in unison, like caged lizards watching a fly on the other side of a glass pane.
“You talked,” she said, “to the gods?”
Evidently Voronar had given an accurate account. The saurs all understood Trade Latin and other human languages—their linguistic facility was something Volkov admired without being impressed with, vaguely relating it to the imitative knack of birds—but for serious matters they preferred the subtler nuances of their own speech. This meeting was the most important of any he’d attended so far; more so even than the Senate hearing tomorrow. Its calling had been on shorter notice and had been more imperative. He could finesse anything that happened with the Senate, there or afterward. This group of representatives of the saurs resident in Nova Babylonia could not be blindsided.
“Yes, we did,” said Volkov, trying not to shift in his seat. The tiny room was built for saur comfort, not human. A back room of a saur dive near the harbor, its lighting was dim, its furniture was made of something like cork and was so small his knees were higher than his waist, and it all stank of hemp and fish. He was the only human present, and the only person who might just possibly be on his side in any contretemps was Voronar, assuming that saur’s loyalty to his employers overrode his solidarity with his kind, something on which Volkov was not counting and hoped not to find out.
“We know that the gods are angry with the saurs,” said one of the seven who sat facing him and Voronar in a long row like a bench of inquisitors. “If the gods you spoke to made you mistrust the saurs, perhaps that is another expression of their anger. Perhaps they wish to turn the hominidae against us, to punish us.”
Voronar hissed some acid comment, then turned to Volkov. “You explain.”
“I know this is difficult for you to accept,” said Volkov. “I tell you honestly, and you can compare what I say with what Voronar has just said without my understanding—the gods are not angry with the saurs. Some of the saurs on the outer worlds have come to agree with that, but—and again you can see I am being frank with you—most have not. The saur Salasso who first told them that, and who went with us to inquire of the gods, was in my own presence almost hurled to his death from a great height.”
A susurrus of hissing consultation followed. Volkov was surprised at the reaction until he remembered that the saur method of hunting, megayears established and ingrained, was to stampede herds of herbivorous dinosaurs off cliffs. To be thrown from a height must be the most disgraceful and terrible death that could be inflicted on a saur.
The saurs all looked at him again in silence.
“I do not mistrust the saurs,” Volkov said into the silence. “I would like to work together with the saurs of Nova Terra and other worlds to prepare for the arrival of the monkey-spider aliens. If we are to set up defenses in space, it would obviously be preferable to have the use of gravity skiffs. The god in the Solar System who spoke to us long ago gave humans the instructions for building skiffs and lightspeed ships, and the humans, and some saurs, on Mingulay and Croatan are working together to build them. After some years—I do not know how many—these humans will be here, and humans here will have the skiffs and ships in any case. But by then, the monkey-spiders may have arrived, and made war on us all. So why not work together now?”
“I can tell you why not,” said Deleneth. “The gods do not mind that we travel between the worlds on which we live. But they do mind, very much, if we venture into the gods’ domain. There was a time long ago when the saurs did that, and the gods showed their anger and struck at them.”
Volkov knew that this was true. He had seen the ancient ruins on Croatan’s moon himself.
“That is so,” he said. “But the defenses that I recommend we build in space would also be defenses against the gods’ wrath.”
The saurs facing him swayed slightly back in their seats. Three of them went so far as to claw at their sleeves. Even Voronar sat rigid and still. At last Deleneth spoke.
“Very few will help you with that,” she said. “If you persist, if you persuade the humans to follow this this course, very few saurs will work with humans at all. We cannot fight against you, because that too would anger the gods, but we can withdraw from you. We can leave your cities, and the ships in which you travel. What the kraken will do we do not know, but we can guess.”
Volkov sighed and laid his hands on his knees, palms up. “You will do what you must, and so will I, and so will those I persuade.”
“There is nothing further to discuss,” said Deleneth. She and the other six rose and withdrew, and after waiting a couple of minutes to let them get out of the building, Volkov did the same. Voronar stayed with him and walked out beside him.
The narrow street was dark. Volkov walked down it and across a broad esplanade and leaned on the rail. Voronar solemnly propped his chin on the same railing and they looked out across the harbor, bright with the lights of ships and starships.
“That did not go well,” said Voronar.
“I’m getting used to hearing that,” said Volkov. “I’m also getting used to having a small minority agreeing with my proposal.”
“In this instance it appears that I am that minority,” said Voronar. “Though I cannot help you much, for I intend to travel again with the de Tenebres.”
“Good for you.”
“Yes,” said Voronar. “I think Deleneth was mistaken about the saurs who travel on the ships, and the skiff pilots generally. We are more openminded than the saurs who stay on the worlds.”
Volkov smiled. The skiff pilots he’d known back on Mingulay were indeed, by saur standards, rakish.
“Do you think,” Voronar went on, “that the humans here can get along without the help of saurs?”
Volkov had thought about this. Apart from space travel and the products of the manufacturing plant—all of which could be replaced, or done without at a pinch—the main saur contribution to human well-being was in their unobtrusive medical help. From the first, as far as he knew, the saurs had patiently explained the germ theory of disease and its consequences, and something like the Malthusian principle of population and its consequences. The saurs supplied contraceptives. They supplied some kind of life-extension treatments, so that the normal healthy human lifespan was about a hundred and twenty years.
Nothing for the genetic causes of aging, which—he presumed—had been synergistically and serendipitously found on Earth in the treatment, whatever it was, that had worked on him. Surgery they taught, tissue regeneration they applied, though not for trivial cases. They moved fast to contain and cure the epidemics that inevitably got shuttled around the Second Sphere by star-ships.
“It’ll be tough,” he said.
The news broke the following day. Lydia was working in one of the offices midway up the building—a quite pleasant office, open-plan and open to a terrace, and, unlike most offices she’d worked in—including this one at the time of her previous landfall—full of workers in comfortable and colorful clothes. It clattered with telegraphy and teleprinters, most of which were connected with the big calculating machines down in the basement. The work itself was laborious, but interesting, as she and her siblings and cousins coordinated what they knew of the cargo with what the locals knew of the markets. At exactly an hour before noon everyone stopped. The machines fell silent, and radio receivers were switched on. Lydia couldn’t be sure, but she thought the sounds from outside of traffic and general mechanical background hum diminished at the same time, as all across the city people stopped work to listen to the news.
It was a direct feed from the microphones in the Senate’s council chamber, and the channel was always on whenever the Senate was in session. No commentary was permitted. The citizens of the Republic might not all have the right to elect the Senators, but they had the right to the raw data of what was said in their name.
Esias de Tenebre had just been called before the assembly, and began his address with a concise account of his family’s commission to go to Mingulay and bring back as much new information as possible. So far, so familiar. He held forth briefly on the wealth of information from the twenty-first-century Solar System and its significance. Then he moved on to the surprises: the Cosmonauts’ longevity, and their first steps toward mastery of the lightspeed drive. This was news to most of the people around Lydia, though perhaps not to most of the Senate, who were sure to have heard rumors. The room rustled with whispers and silk, and Lydia thought she heard, through the open windows, the sound of the whole city drawing in its breath.
After a brief word of thanks from the Senate’s chair, the floor was given to Volkov.
Lydia could hardly pay attention to what he said. She knew it all already, knew exactly what he would say and how he would say it. Instead she watched the office workers, saw how their mouths opened and their hands crept into their sleeves to clutch their elbows as they listened to his insidious message and insinuating voice. When he had finished, the newsfeed fell silent. After thirty seconds a brief, nervous announcement followed. For only the second time in the past seven hundred years, the Senate had gone into closed session.
Lydia walked out to the terrace, wanting to shut her ears to the angry or fearful voices that filled the room, but found no respite. From the terrace, she could hear a sound she had never heard before, the clamor of a city of millions arguing with itself, like the buzz of an upturned hive.